Anne Winchell - The Last War

“Thank you, Lethe,” Medane said. There was nothing else to say.

The process of firing nuclear weapons was ridiculously long and convoluted, in Atheus’ opinion. He had bribed as many people as possible to make the process smoother, but it still required a few accidental deaths before Atheus had command of the United Western World’s remaining nuclear arsenal. Technically the weapons were defunct, but Atheus had spent years carefully reactivating them without Lethe’s notice. He had never planned on using them, but he had always known that he needed a backup plan in case Medane turned against him.

Atheus had given Medane every chance in the world to return to NeoLondon and ignore Atheus’ quest for power, but Medane continued to interfere. Atheus had expected Medane to track down Raven, though not so soon. He hadn’t expected Medane to also take Kaela. Without Kaela, Atheus’ plan for creating a race of superhumans couldn’t succeed. He was furious that he had given the girl so much freedom. He should have chained her in the deepest prisons in the West to make sure she didn’t run away. But she pretended to be so obedient and, like Medane and Lethe, Atheus was not always able to identify human emotions, especially the irrational ones like love.

Perhaps Medane still could, Atheus corrected himself. At one point both Medane and Atheus had experienced life as a human and felt the pain and joy of friendship and betrayal. But as the years stretched on, Atheus had to go to further and further extremes to feel anything aside from resentment at the humans. Atheus still remembered the shock and horror he and Medane had felt when Soren murdered the Catholic Pope on national television and proclaimed that the second coming of Christ had arrived. He declared that Medane and Atheus were the Antichrist and would lead the world into destruction. Atheus had been in tears for days, although it was hard to imagine such a thing now. At the time it had seemed unnecessary and cruel to kill, but now Atheus understood Soren’s motivation. He wasn’t trying to kill; he was trying to create chaos in order to feel again.

That was why Soren attacked Sydney first, Atheus knew. Australia was a strange target with no ability to retaliate, but it was precisely this reason that made it an ideal target to terrify the humans. Atheus couldn’t attack as broadly as Soren had in the Last War, but he could still wreak havoc. And when Atheus saw human faces feeling such extreme pain and fear, Atheus could vaguely remember what those emotions felt like himself. A shadow of what had once been. Now that Medane had interfered and given Atheus a reason to attack, Atheus could finally satiate his desire for emotion. He would destroy cities and murder friends, and he would watch their anger and terror and the foolish hope humans always seemed to sustain. He would watch Medane. And maybe, maybe Atheus could feel what it was like to be human one more time.

Atheus knew that part of the reason he wanted to hurt Medane was jealousy that Medane seemed happy in his life. In the isolated quarantine of the Last War, Atheus had held back his tears in order to support the younger, weaker Medane. He had hidden his fears to protect his brother, and somehow in the years that followed he had never regained the ability to cry. The only fear he now felt was fear that he would die without ever experiencing the richness and potential of life. It was unfair that Medane had so much while Atheus ended up with so little, and Atheus was determined to even the score.

The key, Atheus thought as he stood with his assistant next to the final detonation switch, was knowing what to destroy in order to maximize suffering. Structures could be rebuilt, after all, and Atheus knew that Medane didn’t care about the physical well-being of his home. NeoLondon could be razed to the ground but if no one were hurt, Medane would ignore the attack. No, to get Medane’s attention and really cause him pain, Atheus needed to target the people. Once Medane saw that the people of NeoLondon were being killed, he would be forced to abandon Raven in Lethe’s care. The United Eastern World would be forced to retaliate even without Medane’s consent, and war would be inevitable. But at the end of this war, only those loyal to Atheus would remain. If Kaela, Raven, and the new díamont could be persuaded to join him, then he would welcome them. They would give him a vast advantage when controlling the rest of the population. If they refused, they would be killed. Either way, a new world would begin, a world that Atheus could rule forever.

Atheus grinned at the thought. His assistant paled, her hand trembling as she reached for the button to activate the first hydrogen bomb to be detonated in over fifty years. The bomb would explode at a high altitude over NeoLondon in three hours, blocking all communication, destroying any airships flying over, and decimating the city and everyone in it. It was time to begin.

Medane cradled his head in his hands. Ten minutes. That was all the warning the people of NeoLondon had gotten. Enough time to transfer all of the sensitive files to the backup computers in Seoul, enough time to cower behind the thick steel support beams and hope the radiation passed them by, but not enough time to escape. Atheus had paired the hydrogen bomb with traditional bombs and NeoLondon was a shattered mess of half-standing buildings and scattered corpses. Perhaps a few people at the edge of the blast zone had heard the siren, recognized it, and made it to safety, Medane thought. But the nearly 19 million people who called NeoLondon their home were gone or would be soon.

The bomb had been detonated midair to maximize the casualties. Structurally there would have been minimal damage without the traditional bombs. Most of the buildings could withstand an indirect nuclear blast, or at least the buildings farther from the epicenter could. From what Medane could tell, the bomb had been detonated at the center of Díamont Crater. It was as clear a message as he had ever seen. He had crossed Atheus, and now Atheus was starting an all-out war against him.

Medane had no idea how Lethe would react to the news. Earth’s atomic weapons were supposed to be deactivated, although both world governments had kept a few. Just in case this happened, Medane thought grimly. How would the United Eastern World react? Normally he could predict the president’s actions, but the president was dead, killed in the blast. With the president dead, power reverted to each nation-state until a new president could be elected, and with each nation acting alone there was a good chance the entire Eastern World would descend into chaos and civil war. Exactly what Atheus would want. There had to be some way to avoid it.

He knew he was focusing on the politics to avoid thinking of the real human casualties. When he told the others, each had reacted differently but all had been stricken with grief. It was Raven’s grief that Medane worried about the most, however. He knew Raven would blame himself for the attack and consider all of the millions of deaths a direct result of his action. If he didn’t do something to pull Raven out of his depression, the man might never recover.

Medane knew how powerfully Raven reacted to each murder that he committed, even the murders that Raven approved of, and he knew that Raven still mourned the people killed in the Graveyard Massacre even if he didn’t speak of it. The NeoLondon bombing might be enough to push him off the edge and Medane would do anything to prevent that. It might also be enough to send his superhuman abilities into overdrive, Medane knew. Perhaps that was one of the reasons Atheus had chosen NeoLondon as his target; he knew it had special significance for Raven as well as for Medane. Killing two birds with one stone, Medane thought.