Robert Crane - Omega

Old Man Winter stood in the middle of the hallway like an imposing pillar holding up the whole building. He wore a winter coat like so many of the other men, but I blinked in surprise—it had to be close to eighty degrees in the hallway. He always tended toward heavy clothing, but I wondered if perhaps it was to hold the cold in, toward him, rather than keeping the warmth in as it was for most people. I watched him as I walked, and he seemed to take no notice of me until I was within a few feet, at which point he swiveled on a heel and looked down at me. Almost seven feet tall, that was no challenge for him, since I was not even five and a half feet tall myself.

“You are early,” he observed, arms folded over his coat.

“It doesn’t pay to be late when you’re working with the boss,” I said. “Are we going to be interrogating James Fries as well, while we’re here?”

“Pointless, I think,” he said, his rumbling voice given resonance by the acoustics of the hall. “Fries is a messenger boy, a strong meta, but not one of the privileged of Omega. Bjorn, on the other hand, was the son Odin, before he passed.”

“Odin’s son?” My face scrunched up and I pondered the oversized man who had wrecked my whole team in Des Moines. “He looks nothing like Chris Hemsworth.”

Old Man Winter ignored me. “He will, I think, be a better choice to speak with. More…knowledgeable, having been brought to America specifically for whatever this Operation Stanchion is.”

“How do you know that?” I asked, feeling a flash of confusion coupled with the fear that I had failed to read something that had been prepared. Unprepared was not a good feeling, especially in front of the boss.

“This morning, J.J. ran a…tracking program, I believe he called it…searching through U.S. customs for certain patterns. One emerged, detailing passport irregularities.” Old Man Winter peered down at me, cold blue eyes seeming to glow in the fluorescent light of the hall. “After comparing them to photographic records, he found Bjorn.” Old Man Winter let out a deep breath, fogging the air in front of him, something that reminded me of the smell of a December wind. “Unless Omega is planning something else, that means that Bjorn is here for Stanchion.”

I thought about that for a moment. Stanchion had something to do with me, plainly, because Bjorn had inferred as much when I was fighting him. If Omega was sending in more operatives to capture me, this was nothing new. They’d been sending them at me for almost a year, to the point it was now almost comical in result. Or it would have been, except for what happened to Kat. Their last two operatives had ended up decapitated (and I didn’t even feel bad about it, because they showed no human characteristics at all), the one before that was locked up in a cell even now, the one before that had been thrown off a building by the one predating him (by Wolfe, who was locked in my head).

“You seem unworried,” Old Man Winter said, jarring me back to the here and now.

“I don’t know. It’s hard to keep getting charged up about this. If I did, I’d spend all my time worrying. Whatever comes, I can deal with it.”

“You should not be so cavalier,” Old Man Winter said, somehow more serious than the way he said everything else. “Omega is a very serious threat, one which you have defeated through a combination of luck, skill, power and the assistance of others. Bjorn is not to be underestimated, though he is no great thinker. Whatever they are planning now seems to indicate a deeper consideration for long-term strategy rather than just throwing whatever they have on hand at you. Using Wolfe as their opening gambit should not be overlooked; he was the best they had to offer. They do not hesitate. Their means are brutal, and they will do whatever it takes to achieve their aims.” He looked at me, steadily. “What are you willing to do?”

“What am I willing to do…to what?”

“To find out the truth about Operation Stanchion and what it means for you.” Old Man Winter was unflinching. “To discover Omega’s aims. These are all questions which could be of great use to us if we were to find answers.”

“I’m willing to question Bjorn as long as necessary to get some answers,” I said.

Old Man Winter reached out to the door, finally looking away from me. He placed his hand in his pocket and withdrew a key card that looked no bigger than a scrap of paper in his massive palm, and ran it over the reader in front of the door. The glowing red light on the reader turned green with a subtle beep. “Follow,” he said and opened the door to the cell.

The room was small, ten by ten by ten, like the rest. The squares that made it up seemed to blur together for me, and I put aside my thoughts about all else to focus on Bjorn. He didn’t look quite as he had yesterday when I’d been fighting him. His short brown hair was still powdered with the dust of our battle. He had blood on his face and chest that had gone uncleaned, though his wounds were gone. His shirt was missing, along with boots and any other sort of clothing save for his pants, which were a dirty corduroy and speckled with all the evidence of our fight. He was shackled to a chair that was metal, bolted to the floor in the middle of the room, and he was still cuffed about the wrists and ankles.

“Bjorn,” Old Man Winter said in some form of greeting. “It has not been nearly long enough.”

“So it is you, Jotun,” Bjorn said, his brow arced in a forty-five degree slant on either eyebrow. “I had heard you were the head of the Directorate, giving shelter to this one. Do not expect me to remember the old times fondly and cooperate with you.”

“I do not expect you to remember anything fondly,” Old Man Winter replied, his breath still frosting the air. “But you will cooperate with me, or your memories will go from less-than-fond to a much darker place.”

Bjorn’s back straightened at this, his shoulders squared, even with his arms trapped behind his back. “You will get nothing out of me, Jotun. Do your worst.”

Old Man Winter stopped in the middle of the room, towering over the seated Bjorn, who was not exactly a small guy. “Do you remember that time in…what did they call it, the Huns who lived there? I find myself forgetting the names the Germanic tribes gave to the old places. I have heard that in old age, humans default to their childhood remembrances. I find the opposite is true for me, that I cannot remember the names of the places from my youth, though I can recall the sight of them in vivid detail. For example, I recall that maiden that you bedded, that local girl from a tribe, how you called her a virgin sacrifice, and how when her brothers came after you in the morning, you caved their heads in with your fists as the girl cried behind you and begged you to stop. Do you remember what happened after that?”

Bjorn showed little reaction, only the slightest of a smile. “I remember her voice, but not her name. Is that strange? I don’t remember any of their names.”

“That does not surprise me at all,” Old Man Winter said, surprisingly gregarious, even as I was trying to keep down my breakfast in the midst of these discussions. “I wanted to kill you for that, did you know?” He bent at the waist, as Bjorn’s head jerked in surprise. “My respect for your father kept me from it, though. You lived as a god, and all you wanted was there for the polite taking; there was never a need for the sort of violence and thuggery that you and your kind visited upon the humans. But for you it was never about receiving the gifts of those who worshipped us for our power; it was about taking that which they did not wish to give freely.” Old Man Winter rumbled with every word, and the temperature seemed to drop in the room. “Strength over kindness, as it were. Force over grace. Did you thrill to the thoughts of what you did there?” Old Man Winter leaned in closer to Bjorn’s ear. “Did it keep you warm on the cold nights when we returned to our homeland? Did the memory excite you long after you killed the girl, her father, her brothers and all the others who did not stand idly by while you murdered their kin and fellows?” Old Man Winter’s hand landed on his shoulder, resting there. “Is that the way you like it?”