Robert Crane - Family

“How are you feeling?” Ariadne said as she came to a stop by my bedside. “Are you competent to answer a few questions?”

“You maybe ought to ask the doctor about that,” I said, “because I’m on a couple drugs at present, and they’re making the whoosh go room.”

She looked to Old Man Winter, as though seeking some form of confirmation from him. She did this frequently, but I rarely noticed him do anything that would indicate that he was responding to her. She turned back to me. “We need to know what happened.”

“Pretty simple,” I said. “We made good our escape from the Omega facility, and about an hour from home they took out our car with an RPG,” I said. “You should consider equipping your cars with more weapons. If we’d had a few guns we might have made a better showing of it.”

“It was a rental,” Ariadne said. “Hannegan and Davis picked it up in Detroit and drove it all the way to their rendezvous with you.”

“I bet the bill for that one Hertz,” I said, clearly off-kilter if I was venturing into the land of puns.

Ariadne gave me an insincere smile. “Why don’t you stick to the story at hand?”

“They ambushed us,” I said, and felt a little emotion stir. “They ran us down, chased us through the woods, and they killed Andromeda. They had us surrounded, and they were about to kill us when M-Squad showed up and saved our bacon, our sausage, and every other fine pork product we possess.”

Ariadne’s arms were crossed, probably the most common posture the woman used. “Any indication for why they wouldn’t have recaptured Andromeda instead of killing her?”

“They didn’t give me any indications at all,” I said. “The only reason I knew they were going to kill us was because my Greek chorus told me so; Wolfe and Gavrikov told me they were going to murder us instead of capture.”

Old Man Winter showed a hint of movement at that. What would be regarded as nothing more than the twitch of a facial nerve in others was almost a full-blown look of horror on him. “Did Wolfe or Gavrikov give you any reason for this?”

“They didn’t say anything after that. Probably got lost in the shuffle. Or possibly the screaming after I got shot.” I frowned. “None of the enemy survived?”

“No,” Ariadne said. “They all killed themselves.”

“I remember hearing that. Cyanide? Who does that?” I shook my head.

“Apparently Omega,” Ariadne said. “I can’t say I’ve met a lot of fanatics willing to kill themselves rather than be caught.”

“That’s a shame,” I said without any remorse at all. “We’ve got bigger problems, though.”

“Agreed,” Ariadne said. “This war between us and Omega – scratch that, this war that Omega has completely blindsided us with – is disastrous. We finally score a single victory and it’s snatched out of our hands hours later.”

“I’m sure Andromeda would feel poorly about the fact that you’re losing this war that she knew nothing about,” I said icily, “you know, if she hadn’t just gotten killed while not even being a part of it. But by bigger problem, I meant something else.” I clenched my jaw. “She said something just before she died – that we had a traitor in the Directorate.”

“Are you kidding?” Ariadne asked, her calm demeanor unraveling slightly. She blinked several times in rapid succession, shook her head, then looked to Old Man Winter, who stood still as ever. “How…who?”

“She didn’t say,” I replied. “But she had some strange abilities, and one of them was to…I don’t know, see beyond…somehow. She knew things she shouldn’t have known, and it wouldn’t surprise me if she figured this one out. It was almost like she knew she was going to die before it happened.”

“Did she tell you anything else?” Old Man Winter asked. “Anything at all?”

“She told us quite a bit – and we learned quite a bit about Omega even before this,” I said wryly. “Would you like to know who Omega is?” I saw Ariadne lean forward, curiosity consuming her. Old Man Winter was as implacable as ever as I stared back at him. “Or do you already know?”

“I know,” he said, his words thickly accented. “I knew them when they ran the old world, when the sun did not rise or set without sacrifices being made in their names. I knew them when the influence they exerted over the world of men began to diminish. I knew them when they began putting themselves atop governments and parliaments, passing for humans while working the levers of power to their own benefit. I have seen them in the palaces of the old world and the penthouses of the new, and I know every one of their names, living and dead, because I knew them before their rise and after their fall.”

“I’m sorry, what?” Ariadne asked, looking at her boss with barely disguised incredulity. “Who is Omega?”

“They’re the old gods,” I said, smirking, causing Ariadne to whipsaw back around to me. “The Greek ones, the Asian, Arabic, Norwegian and so on – the ones that ruled the world in ancient times, in myth and legend. It sounds like they miss the good old days.” I kept focused on Old Man Winter, who nodded subtly. “So do you know what they’re after?”

“Hard to say,” he replied, back to unexpressive. “The natural instinct would be to suggest they would like a return to the world of old, the one they ruled. Such a thing seems improbable, though, given the proliferation of technologies that both make their lives easier and also allow humans to kill them with a simplicity that was not to be found in the days when they held dominion over the affairs of men. They faded to the background for good reason, you know.”

“So you don’t know what they want, either,” I said, mildly disappointed, “other than money and power.”

“All men want money and power,” Old Man Winter said. “The only difference is scale of ambition and the means they are willing to use to acquire them.”

“Well that sounds fun,” Ariadne said, interjecting herself back into the conversation. “But if they’re the old gods, why are they attacking us? What does killing our agents and metas get them?”

“Access to money or power, I’d guess.” I said it, but Old Man Winter nodded along with me. “They’re playing a long game, especially if they’ve been alive for thousands of years. The moves they’re making don’t seem to make any sense by the reasonable standards I’d set, but they’re doing something – they’re after something – to make their objective reachable. The problem is we don’t know their objective, and so their means are completely incomprehensible.” I shrugged. “Like an episode of Lost.”

“Cute,” Ariadne said. “But that doesn’t put us any closer to why they wrecked western Kansas trying to kill off our strongest metas, or why they triggered a major operation that killed dozens of our agents.” She paused in thought, face pensive. “What kind of powers did Andromeda exhibit? The ability to…read minds?”

“Not minds,” I said. “Not quite. More like the ability to see things that were going to happen, to know things about people and events. She said she knew everything about Omega and was going to tell us. Then she seemed to know she was going to die. But another time, it was like she could see through a wall and knew what kind of car Zack and Kurt were driving.”

“That was freaky,” Hannegan said from behind me. “But it might not have been her seeing through walls. If she was a telepath, she could have read our minds to know what we were driving.”

“Not a bad point,” Ariadne said with a nod of the head after I failed to answer. “Any other powers?”

“She could touch my skin without being drained,” I said. “And when she did touch me, it was like my pain subsided. What kind of a meta can do all that?” I looked to Old Man Winter.