Robert Crane: Omega

“Hello, Ariadne,” I said with a smile. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this.”

She raised an eyebrow. “You mean where you come back from a mission and I’m here waiting for you? You know how I worry.”

“Hah. Yes, Mother.”

She feigned a wounded look. “Coming from you, that hurts.”

I pushed James around, front and center, and pulled his hood off. He seemed to flinch at the light. “Nothing we couldn’t handle,” I said.

“Good.” She gave him a cold glare. “Nice to see you again, James. You probably didn’t realize this, but we’ve been watching you for a while.” I started to remove the duct tape over his mouth but she shook her head. “Leave it. I’m not interested in anything he has to say at this point.”

“Okay. Say goodbye, James.” I raised my gun and put the barrel to his temple. He struggled against my grip on his arm, but I had him held tight. I saw his eyes widen in surprise. So did Ariadne’s a moment later when I brought the butt of my gun around and clubbed him in the side of the head, dropping him to the tarmac, unconscious, as the chopper’s engine cut out and I heard the rotors begin to spin down behind me.

“I hope you didn’t do any lasting damage,” she said, looking to where Fries had crumpled at her feet. She stepped back, her high-heeled shoes clicking against the pavement, barely audible under the last noises of the rotors dying down. “He’s here to be interrogated, after all.”

“Hard to do brain damage when he didn’t have a brain to damage,” Reed said from next to me.

“Oh, he has a brain.” I looked at my half-brother with a cocked eyebrow. “A horrific and sleazy one, but it’s there. Cunning doesn’t begin to describe this one.”

“Yeah, well, let’s get this cunning, sleazy bastard into lockdown,” Scott said, Kat at his side. “Because some of us have plans for tonight.”

“Carry him down,” I said, giving the nod to Scott.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said with a smartass salute, and reached down to pick up Fries’s legs. “Reed, old boy,” he said, affecting a British accent, “would you mind being a decent chap and help me carry him? There’s a good lad…”

“What’s with the British accent?” Reed asked, grabbing Fries by the arm and lifting him onto Scott’s shoulder.

“Trying to make you feel at home,” Scott said with a wide grin. “You know, because you haven’t been home to talk to your bosses in a while.”

“They’re in Rome, not England.”

“Oh, right,” Scott said with a twinkle in his eyes, “then it must be cos’ I want’d to sound a bit sophisticated, innit?” he said, changing his voice into a horrible Cockney accent. With a laugh, he sauntered off toward headquarters with Fries on his shoulder, Kat and Hannegan trailing behind him.

“Easy catch,” I said, turning back to Ariadne as they left, leaving me with her, Zack and Reed.

Ariadne raised an eyebrow. “We were watching through the headset camera Reed was wearing.”

I shrugged, and felt a slight trace of burn on my cheeks, not from the wind. “And?”

Ariadne kept her cool, I had to give her that . “The Director has…concerns.”

“Concerns? Other than the fact that the frigid cold weather isn’t getting here fast enough to suit him, what concerns does he have?”

There was a pause, then a flicker in her eyes. “Why don’t we talk about it with him? We need to do a quick debrief with you as team lead, anyway.” She looked from Zack to Reed. “Good work, gentlemen.”

“It was a good takedown,” Reed said. “We got him alive, and that’s how it was supposed to be.” I realized he was preemptively defending me, as though he was expecting me to get reamed for some reason.

“No doubt,” Ariadne said with a tight expression meant to cut off any further discussion. “Gentlemen, we’ll have a full after-action review with the two of you tomorrow morning. We’ll email you a time and place.”

Zack seemed to recede slightly. “We’ll see you later, right? An hour?”

I managed a weak smile. “As soon as I’m free, I’ll be along.”

“Okay,” he said, and took a quick step toward me, giving me a kiss on the cheek. “See you then.”

Reed gave me a wave using only his fingers to waggle up and down. He followed Zack, and I watched the two of them make their way toward the dormitory. Ariadne was already on the move, high heels clicking as she walked the path toward headquarters. I followed a few steps behind, waiting for her to say something as we passed into the lobby and headed toward the elevators. She didn’t speak again until we were in one of them and she had pressed the up button.

“How do you think you did?” She turned to look at me, but her arms were crossed in front of her. The doors shut behind us, quieting the buzz of activity in the lobby.

“I think we held to the mission parameters to bring him in, and that I got the job done.” I watched her turn her head back to the front of the elevator car as it dinged and the doors opened. “Did I not get the job done right?”

“Sort of,” Ariadne said, stepping out without waiting for me; she knew I’d follow. She walked stiffly, her tone terse but not unkind.

I followed in silence through the bustling cubicle farm that was ringed by offices on the top floor of HQ. Headquarters was only four stories high, but somehow the view it offered of the campus was still commanding. I walked into Old Man Winter’s office a few steps behind Ariadne, and she took her usual position at his shoulder, like a parakeet. He remained behind his rough stone desk, the bright background of the autumn-tinged woods behind him through the window.

I stood at near-attention, my arms behind me in a military posture I’d picked up from Roberto Bastian, the leader of M-Squad. Old Man Winter was tall, commandingly so, almost seven feet in height, and that was evident even though he was seated. His skin was wrinkled and marked him as older than seventy. In reality, I knew he was at least a couple thousand years past that. He looked up as I entered, and his eyes began to bore into me.

“We watched the takedown,” Ariadne said, drawing my attention to her. “We have our own opinions on how we think you did, and we want to discuss them with you.”

Old Man Winter surprised me by speaking. “Fries broke loose of your ambush. He was a danger, he was mobile, he was clearly going for a weapon.”

“Yes,” I said, thinking he was done, “and I recovered from that as best I could—”

“You should have shot him,” Old Man Winter said, stunning me. “You should have killed him rather than risk your own life. Fries is dangerous. You know he kills regularly, indiscriminately—for fun. You were in peril.”

“Yes,” I said, “but overall the situation was in control. My team was seconds away outside the door, Reed was waiting in the kitchen—”

“You put yourself at risk,” Old Man Winter said, and I caught the edge to his voice, the first time I’d ever heard it. “Fries should have been put down like the pitiful rabid dog that he is at the first hint that he was going for a weapon. You are too valuable to put yourself at risk when it can be avoided.”

I blinked. “The order I got was to apprehend him because we’d gone as far as we could by having him followed and tracked. I got the sense that he was valuable, that the intelligence he carried was worth us picking him up now—”

“Not the point,” Old Man Winter cut me off, and his tone was flat, but blunt. “His life is nothing compared to yours. When you were entrusted with your team, it was understood that you would protect them. I expect you to protect yourself as well, and value yourself more than some Omega sop whose value is limited, at best. If you cannot do that, we need to re-evaluate your role and place you somewhere less…” His eyebrows arched, displaying the most emotion I’d ever seen him show, “…dangerous.”