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"Hyperspace footprint indicates ten ships. Gravitic sensors indicate an unknown weight class. Checking; does not appear to be a Kree vessel we have information on nor a Skrull. We would need a visual to get further.… Wait.…" Pinoptes's voice cut off for a moment, then resumed. "Sensors indicate ten…twenty…thirty…four hundred smaller hyperspace splashes coming from the ten anomalies and climbing."
The AI's voice once more cut out, then came back sounding far more robotic than it had become of late, indicating how much of Pinoptes's attention had just been diverted to the literally millions of various sensor devices and stations that were scattered throughout the system by this point. "Before the new hyperspace splashes were detected there was a series of appreciable weight changes to the ships, as if some of its weight was lost, indicating the launching of a projectile or drone. Judging by the angle of the splashes being sunward rather than outward, I estimate a ninety percent chance that these splashes were created by a weapon of some unknown classification rather than a drone."
"Shiiiit.… Some kind of missile or a bombardment weapon, which Mar'vel was soo certain we wouldn't have to deal with in numbers. Yet again, here we are." Harry growled, shaking his head. "Pinoptes, record as many readings of that weapon as you can. If it has the kind of targeted range this attacks suggests, we might have just found a new primary weapon for Fortress Mars beyond the stellar cannons we've reverse-engineered from the Devastator. Carol, get the word out to the personnel on the hydrogen processor to abandon the facility; same goes for the two ships currently docked with it." Those two ships had been taking on fuel as part of their trial runs, having just been fully repaired and manned with scratch crews. But they would be sitting ducks, their ships immobile and lashed to the processor.
As the communications officers leaped to do that, Harry turned to the others who had followed him in. "Steve, get on the horn and get as many of our people up here as you can. We'll want them just in case we get a chance to board one of those ships. Pinoptes, power up the Verdun defense platforms. Hela, Ororo, grab some suits; you're with me. We'll see if we can interdict those weapons. Pinoptes, do whatever you can to stop them from firing off more of those things."
Jean, too, grabbed a pair of headsets, glaring at Harry for not mentioning her, though she knew why he hadn't. Still, her powers hadn't gone wonky enough to stop her from taking part in this. So long as I wear a spacesuit, anyway.
"I can stop the ships from firing further if I aim the Hyperspace Trap towards them rather than making it uni-lateral, but it will take the majority of our current power supply to reach out so far. Further, doing that will stop me from catching the projectiles that have already been fired," Pinoptes warned.
"Target those weapons for a two second burst—force them out of hyperspace—then target the ships. We'll have to rely on a close-in defense for this, or else they'll just toss so many at us we have no chance of stopping them all," Harry ordered, and Pinoptes hastened to obey.
"Sir, I have Admiral Powers on the line. The emergency medical rooms are also reporting; they are ready for any injured." These rooms were specially prepared rooms where the emergency teleportation wards would drop anyone they could port out before they died. Normally Ororo or Harry (or Kitty, if she was around) would be there to help heal the most severely wounded, but they had other matters to see to today and Una and the human doctors would have to see to the wounded on their own for now.
Harry hesitated, but then nodded resolutely. "Get Spur and Horseshoe out of here. Send them via jumps around the system until they are behind the attacking ships—we'll want to catch any drone they try to send back with information." Those were two of the cruisers that were only barely operational at this point, hence why they had been left in orbit over Mars unlike the rest of the ships both fully repaired and not. But their weapons were fully online along with their sensors.
"As for Powers, tell him he's the admiral; I'm not going to jog his elbow from here." Hela and several of the others looked at him in shock, Hela especially. She was very much in favor of a firm hand in military matters. But Harry shook his head firmly. "Let the EDF win its spurs." "They need to know they can handle this kind of attack without superpowered help, and I'll be better use elsewhere."
That caused Hela to pause and nod understanding. With that she reached out, and Harry teleported them all to their personal runic doorway, heading straight back to Earth.
Once they were in the castle, Harry continued to shout orders, pulling Torch out of whatever he had been up to in order to join the defense, with E already breaking atmosphere. He also roped in Laynia, Nikolai's sister, into joining them, despite the fact she no longer wanted to be a field agent. With Pinoptes's count of incoming shells still growing, they needed all hands on deck for this one.
Even with the Hyperspace Trap stopping the thousand plus projectiles from coming too close to Earth, the battle was hard simply because of the sheer amount of space in which they had to search for them. Like the Kree missiles, these projectiles were hard to spot, with only a tiny energy source and nothing else they could detect. Seeking spells didn't work on that wide an area; they had to rely on simply spreading out and using Arresto Momentum and other area of effect spells spread out as far as their magic could reach to slow the incoming rounds. It was tough, hard going even with the Verdun platform's aid, and using spells on that wide a scale—magical spells were not made to cross light years—quickly exhausted all the magic users. Many of the projectiles nearly hit atmosphere before they were destroyed, with one even smacking into it before it was finally demolished.
This all forced Harry to concentrate on this aspect of the battle entirely. Luckily, he had capable people in place to deal with it already.
OOOOOOO
Before the ball went up, Admiral Powers had been in his room on the Bowman, going over paperwork to do with the training exercise he had just overseen. Harry had attempted and, indeed, succeeded in pairing down the amount of paperwork needed to make the EDF work, but there was still a lot of work to be done.
In the background, the song 'Rule Britannia' was playing as he finished up the last officer's review he had to write up, and Powers smiled, hearing it. There was more truth in that song than most thought: where went the navy, there went Britain. Its fleet had been its sword and shield long before its army or air force, and Powers often thought that that was one reason why his king and, in turn, every officer seconded to the EDF from the home islands had jumped on the idea of the EDF. It was a way to, once more, bring the navy to prominence, even if the name had also changed. It was a highly egotistical, self-serving thought, Powers reflected, but it was surely a British one, and he was happy enough with it.
His smile disappeared, however, when alarms began to blare an instant before a voice shouted out from his intercom. "Admiral, we have an incoming hyperspace pulse. Captain Sandara's sounded general quarters across the flotilla and has ordered us to power up our combat systems."
Thinking quickly, Powers slammed a hand down on his intercom. "Tell the Raven squadron, Bowman, and the three frigates they are exempt from that. Tell them to go to full speed away from the pulse."
This was consistent with one of the plans his small, still being put together staff had created, and it was called Operation Suckerpunch. They hadn't trained for it yet, but he hoped the crews of those ships were up to what he was going to ask them to do. "I'll be there in twenty seconds."
There were two things he liked most about the EDF. First, the uniform was simple: black pants and a light blue undershirt coupled with a long coat in cobalt with a gold frock over it in formal situations. Even the officers' uniforms were simple and comfortable. They also could be transformed into space suits with the simple expediency of locking gloves in place on the thick sleeves, a bubble helmet to the equally reinforced neck piece, and hooking up a small air system.
The admiral grabbed the pack containing these items, raced out the door, and was soon on the flag deck, revealing the second thing he liked about working for the EDF: the officers' quarters were very near the secondary bridge. On the Bowman, the former Kree battleship currently serving as his flagship, this deck had been pressed into service as his flag deck, and he found his aides already all in place, working out what was going on.
Being informed about the fact that these ships had come out so far into the outer system that they couldn't be grabbed by the Hyperspace Trap in Fortress Mars, Powers nodded slowly, then turned to his communications officer and the screen showing Captain Sandara's face. His communications woman was a young Chinese officer, one of the two twin mutants who could share thoughts over any distance, even their senses. Sandara was a man of Rajput descent from India, one of the first men of that nation to have made the jump to the EDF and one of only four to have kept the rank they had in their home military. Sandara, like many others, had been blooded in battles against pirates, and in his case he had actually fought a comparable ship, a former American WWII destroyer which had wound up in pirate hands somehow and refitted with modern weapons against his own semi-modern destroyer.
"Barring orders from Grand Admiral Potter, we'll go with Operation Suckerpunch. Task Force Shadow is hereby ordered to go black, repeat, go black. Captain Sandara, my compliments and please relay to your fellow captains that the rest of Task Force Punch will form up on Bowman and make a straight line for the hostiles," Powers ordered.
The title Grand Admiral was both a correct label of Harry's position of authority in the EDF and a bit of a dig, which Harry well knew. He didn't have the training or knowledge necessary to be an admiral, but he had a good tactical mind and had come up with several plans like Suckerpunch to handle different methods of attack that Fortress Mars, for all its reach, couldn't quite deal with. Still, Harry knew his limitations in this area, and Powers hoped that wouldn't change.
"Aye aye, sir," the captain replied, saluting before turning away to obey.
At the same time the Chinese officer also relayed his orders. Barely a minute later, that worthy looked up and reported, "Sir, Admiral Potter says you have command out here. Pinoptes has reported those launches as possible missiles or kinetic weapons, and he and the rest of the Custodes will be busy dealing with that."
Shivering, Powers nodded brusquely to get rid of the feeling of dread he had just felt at those words. "In that case, get me a readiness report from all ships, and tell me the instant our non-gravitic scanners come within range of the enemy ships."
Going black like that would not protect a ship from being found if their enemy was already looking for them and had gravitic sensors. However, considering their starting point was within the Oort cloud, it was unlikely that they would be spotted as more than random debris if Admiral Whitaker gave the enemy something else to concentrate on, which he was very definitely going to do.
Of course, communications would've made those ships stand out even so. Further, in space there was no such thing as instant communication after you hit the light year range. But with the two Chinese mutants to pass along messengers, the admiral had the ability to communicate real time sensor and positioning data as well as actual communications, something he was going to use as ruthlessly as he could possibly get away with.
Soon their ships hit the range where their more fine tuned sensors began to work, and Whitaker turned to loom over his sensor specialist. "Talk to me," he ordered.
"They're heavy ships, somewhere below a dreadnaught in size, sir, but heavier than anything else we've seen or have a classification for," the man said to buy time as his sensors finally began to paint in the image he was seeing. "We're getting a lot of interesting readings off them now, sir. Heavy weapons, four main banks to a side. Um…a lot of energy output for even their size, though, judging by the speed they're moving at.… I think those generators of theirs are radiating so much radiation it would kill even a Kree, let alone us weak humans, in short order."
Whitaker's tactical officer came over and began to map out another weapons system on the direct forward, facing point, if such a word could be used to describe the ball shape of that portion of the ship. "Pinoptes reported that this was some kind of projectile bombardment system. But it's fixed. If we can keep out of its firing arc, I think we'll be good. None of the other weapon systems we're seeing time at this range are anything unusual.
"All ships to evade!" the admiral ordered, although, given the fact that his flag ship had been listening to this, all of the ships already had been. As he did, several warning lights blared, and the sensors reported that several large trajectory marks were shown passing through where some of the ships had been a moment ago. "I want all ships to go to full speed; spread out! Each battleship is to take command of five of the frigates; cruisers stay together and go low."
With what little training the crews of these ships had done together, attempting to stay in a fixed formation would have been a disaster, but Whitaker had more respect for their captains and helmsmen than their ability to work as a unit. The four battleship crews had had some time to train up together, but staying together in a attack formation would have limited their maneuverability, and, given the speed with those with which those projectiles traveled, somehow the admiral doubted even a battleship would be able to survive getting hit by one of those.
The voice of Pinoptes reached out to them, and the admiral looked up. "Admiral Whitaker, we have powered up the Hyperspace Trap and trained it on the enemy ships. Those projectiles of theirs won't be able to enter hyperspace any longer. But they are still traveling very, very fast when they're released, so be aware of them. You should, however, be able to destroy them once they are in space."
OOOOOOO
Sasskhanna saw the incoming flotilla and frowned. "Am I reading this correctly, worm?" he bellowed at his sensor officer. "Do those read as Kree ships?"
"They do, Your Mightiness," said his sensor officer tremulously. "But they're not moving to engage us as Kree ships would, oh virile prince!"
That was true, Sasskhanna reflected as he watched the formation, if it could be called that, break up. They were moving far faster than Kree battleships would have to engage them, putting a tremendous strain on their engines for a short amount of time, and, further, the frigates were not in a skirmish line in front of the battleships. Rather, each battleship was following a wall of five frigates. "They're not going for a broadside engagement,…" he said suddenly, realizing what was going to happen. "They're going to shoot past us in a firing pass instead. Lock all weapons onto those ships! Priority is to be given to the battleships; do not let them get past us."
"My Lord, what about the cruisers?"
The cruisers had dived downwards in spatial terms and looked to be trying to come up underneath the Badoon fleet. "Ignore them! Target them with secondaries if they come within range, but keep fire on those battleships as they close with our main cannons. If we defeat the larger ships in detail as they are offering us, we can clean up the rest of this riffraff easily."
"My most perspicacious Lord, I regret to say we are experiencing difficulties with our remaining kinetic bombardment projectiles," said one of his weapons officers tremulously. "They are not going into hyperspace as they should."
"Great Prince, sensors indicate some kind of gravity well has suddenly popped up into existence all around us!" shouted another Badoon worker at the same time. "We're trapped here!"
"Fools!" Sasskhanna barked, though at first his officers didn't know if he meant them or the enemy. "That's too little, too late. Hundreds of our projectiles are already on their way to the planet and to that other fortress-like structure on the other planet deeper in the system. Once those hit, whatever is holding us here will be destroyed. Their attempt to hold us here just means we'll need be able to deal with this fleet first. Can we still fire the projectiles?"
"Yes, Most Mighty! But they will not be going very fast in spatial terms. They will be able to be shot down."
"Yet, even so, they will force the enemy to remain on its current plan of a limited engagement, which will in turn allow us to deal with each group in turn. Fire!"
Moments later the two fleets came within range of one another, and they began to fire their normal weapons.
With the frigates concentrating on destroying any of the kinetic bombardment weapons they spotted, the battleships zoomed in, unloading their ordinance as they flashed past the slow Badoon ships, coming in at an angle that forced the Badoon to try and twist with them to bring their broadsides to bear, but they weren't quite able to. By that point the former Kree ships were going about as fast as they could, and the computers of both sides couldn't quite compensate for that speed.
Hits were few and far between at first, then the cruisers opened up, zooming through the battle at even faster speed than the battleships had been going, straight through the Badoon formation. They had an advantage, however, because the Badoon ships were not moving on the same angle as they were and were further moving far more slowly. All seven of them targeted a single Badoon ship, one whose shields had already taken a few hits, and, as they zoomed out of the formation, that ship came apart, exploding soundlessly in space.
Yet by the time the third and fourth battleship groups flashed past, the Badoon ships had been able to correct for the relativistic speeds of the two forces. Both of those forces, including the Bowman, took a hammering now. Shields flickered and began to fade on the capital ships, and two of the frigates died, exploding under a few stray blasts from one of the Badoon's main broadsides. But the ships were twisting this way and that, letting the shields take the pounding and never letting just one sector face the Badoon long enough to get knocked down.
Yet, despite that and the fact that these humans had figured out a way to block their projectile bombardment weapons, Sasskhanna was pleased with how the battle was going. Loss of a ship to those cruisers was concerning, but their speed would take them out of the battle for a while. Now his fleet could turn and continue to fire on the battleships, which were the real threat here.
"My Great Lord!" said one of his men in alarm. "Our shields are fading. Request permission to start rotating as we turn to continue the engagement."
"Of course, damn your incompetence! The helmsman should have been doing that already," Sasskhanna said absentmindedly, then went back to staring at the plot. Another of the human, or Kree—after all, it was possible they were dealing with the blue-skinned fools despite their new tactics—frigates died under their fire, and he smirked victoriously.
"My Prince, we are out of projectile weapons!"
"Irritating," he said, waving that man off as well. "But not important any longer. With the planet already dealt with and the fortress soon to become rubble, we can win this fight easily enough."
The weapons officer in charge of their primary weapon system gulped. "My, my most beneficent Lord, perhaps you do not understand. But the kinetic bombardment weapons, we, we have begun to lose telemetry data from the projectiles we fired towards the third and fourth planets."
Sasskhanna looked up at that, his face creased into a snarl that showed his fangs in a display of aggression as he crossed the distance between his control point and that man's position. "Explain, fool!" he roared, reaching out and grabbing the other Badoon around the throat.
For a second the other male's gurgling only enraged him further, then, with a sigh, he realized what was happening and released his grip. "Explain," he ordered as his ship rocked under a blow that had gotten through its shielding.
The lower caste male cringed, then did what a Badoon of his caste did best: he attempted to shift the blame to someone else. "My Lord, I cannot say what is going on. All I know is, we are losing telemetry data on the projectiles. For anything else you would have to ask the sensor specialist."
"Dammit! These humans certainly are clever," Sasskhanna mused, leaving the male on the ground there before moving over to the male manning the sensors. Before he could get there, however, the Badoon prince got another taste of that cleverness.
"My Lord! Strange looking shuttlecraft have just appeared behind.…" That was the last word spoken before all hell let loose as if the demons of the beyond had reached out for his and his sailors' souls.
OOOOOOO
The Ravens were the only ships that had so far been retrofitted with both weapons systems that Reed Richards had come up with, the graviton cannon and the phasing energy beam. Those weapons were large, larger than most Kree weapons, and the blue boy ships would have to be retrofitted with them. The four battleships had been fitted with three batteries of the phasing energy beam, but they didn't do any damage against shields.
The graviton cannon, however, worked very, very well against shielding. Especially when all twelve Ravens fired at a single target as they roared up from behind the alien ships, one after another, while the Badoon were attempting to concentrate on the battleships and their smaller escorts. The frigates followed them in, their own weapons blasting point blank range.
Large segments of the Badoon's shields went down on every ship, and the admiral quickly ordered the next maneuver. "Fire as you bear! All battleships slow and move to engage the enemy at point blank range! Cross the T, repeat, cross the T!"
The Badoon ships had panicked, almost. Their shields had been ripped down by ships they would term as little more than planet-to-orbit shuttles. Even as they smashed back, most of their shots missed, with one of their ships blasted apart by a new kind of weapon system that turned their armor into nuclear blasts, tearing it apart. No longer acting in tandem, they nearly hit each other several times, though three of the Ravens popped out of existence, immolated under a wave of fire. And the two frigates had to race away with both of them heavily damaged, but were not destroyed outright.
So busy were the Badoon with the Ravens, they didn't notice the battleships coming back into the fight. Moving far slower now, the four battleships lined up their shots with a calm, cool deliberation. Then they crossed the T, moving in line right in front of two of the Badoon ships, blasting their broadsides straight down the ship's prow.
Three more of the remaining Badoon ships came apart within a few minutes of this bombardment, though they hit back, twisting this way and that to bring their own broadsides to bear as they quickly tried to shift fire from the little demon ships who were still tearing away their shielding. But the damage was done, and then the cruisers came roaring back in. Their part of the fight hadn't been as well managed as the ambush by the Ravens, but, even so, they hit hard now.
The battle continued for several more minutes, with the Badoon unable to retreat and unwilling to surrender. One of the battleships, the Adamant, under an American captain, was mauled heavily and fell out of formation, leaking atmosphere and other fluids into space as if it was a living thing. But at last, the last Badoon ship was blown up out space.
After last Badoon ship exploded on his plot, Admiral Whitaker sighed, leaning back in his crash chair, utterly exhausted. Overhead he heard his flag captain stand the ship down from battlestations, which would send even more men out to help the repair crews and would, in spaces like the flag bridge, allow the men and women to remove their helmets. Whitaker did so now, breathing in deeply for several minutes before getting down to business once more.
"Communications, get on the line to Fortress Mars. I pray that those emergency portkey systems worked, or else we just lost a lot of fine people. Sensors, work with communications. I want a full damage report from all ships. Tactical, find me five of the least damaged frigates to stay out here and mark this battlefield. The scientists might want to go over the debris."
There wasn't much of that, he reflected. Whatever was done to the Badoon ships to make them that fast and yet that strong in shielding made their generators very volatile when they were damaged. There might be a few chunks of outer hull, maybe one or two bodies flung into space by hits dealt earlier in the running fight, but he doubted there would be much more than that.
OOOOOOO
While they couldn't stop instant deaths from happening, the emergency portkeys did work. The EDF had nearly a hundred seventy-nine dead, but they had over two thousand who would have died without those portkeys, although despite Ororo and Harry using Ororo's healing spells on them not one of them would be good for duty for several weeks. Having to power jumping from that far away had hit the metabolism of all the survivors hard, burning calories as if they had been on a marathon run for weeks while fasting at the same time. They would be eating like starving men for weeks, so much so that it would have a noticeable impact on Fortress Mars's food stores.
But everyone from Harry on down knew that the EDF had won this fight. That the Earth Defense Force, without anything in the way of help from superpowered individuals, had done it; they had stopped an enemy fleet. Admittedly, they wouldn't have been able to protect Earth from the projectile weapons, but Harry certainly wasn't going to point that out to anyone.
Seeing to the wounded took hours, and finished the job of thoroughly exhausting Harry and Ororo, and at the end of it, they had to return to the atrium. Stepping out onto the plateau, the two of them were immediately inundated by hundreds of questions, but he held up a hand wearily and moved to the table to grab a carafe of water and drain it before saying anything. "Ladies and gentlemen, as you know doubt have figured out by now, we had a bit of an emergency. An unknown alien force jumped into the system and immediately began a long-range kinetic bombardment of Earth. They had a few tricks up their sleeve, but myself and the Custodes were able to stop the projectile weapons from getting close to Earth."
Harry went on after draining another cup of water. "As the Custodes were doing that, the Earth Defense Fleet, such as it is, under Admiral Whitaker, engaged the aliens. He was able to achieve victory, but not without cost. I will make a formal statement in front of the media tomorrow morning as soon as I have a full list of the dead and wounded. I have ordered Admiral Whitaker back to Mars, and he should be here in a few hours. For now, let us set aside questions of the battle. I will have people show you to your temporary quarters for the evening or back to the gateways if you wish to head home. But please do not press them or anyone else for more information on the battle. We don't know who these aliens were, only that they used weapons systems that were very different from the Kree or any other alien race our prisoners have fought before.
"We also know that they were very bloody-minded," Harry finished grimly. "The bombardment that they targeted on Earth would have smashed our civilization back into the Stone Age. Now, if you'll excuse me," he said after draining yet another cup of water. "I need some bloody sleep." With that he left the atrium, causing shouts of anger and affront to amass as other people came in, moving to take charge of the different delegations and groups and gesturing them out the door.
William looked up as his son moved to his side and helped him rise. "And did you have fun?"
His son rolled his eyes. "Oh, indeed, Father. I had a front row seat…to watching little red dots and blue ones disappear on a screen. Even so, I don't think this is the proper time to press Mister Potter on the idea of colonization; he is not going to be amenable now."
"No doubt," William said, glancing over at the Chinese and American representatives, who both frowned but eventually nodded agreement. "I don't suppose you gentlemen would like to join me in the quarters I've been assigned for the night? If, that is, you hadn't made your own plans?"
Hours later there were smiles and cheers all around as the EDF ships who had been involved in the battle returned to Mars. Most of them remained in orbit, but more than a few, led by the Adamant, were heading down into the new dry dock for repairs.
Their crews, on the other hand, all came down in shifts to many shaking hands and smiles from their fellows and from the delegates and others who were quick to grab at this momentous PR moment. Carol and MJ organized this, along with Steve and Duncan, getting together a regimental band for the occasion, not just for the incoming crews, but for the formerly injured as well, bringing in their loved ones and friends to cheer them up.
While this was going on, Harry and his high command debriefed Admiral Powers. "I don't want a full after action report, Jacob," Harry said, waving Powers back into his chair in the pickup. "I don't even want you working on it for the rest of today, you've earned some downtime. Right now, I just want your impressions on the flotilla, how it fought, what your impressions were. You can tell us more about your impressions on the enemy in the AAR."
"We need more Ravens," Jacob Powers said simply. "The weapons Mr. Richards devised are amazing, and I'd love to see them on our ships, but the Ravens, the enemy had no answer to them. Ships that small seemed to take them completely by surprise, and their systems couldn't track them very well. They had weapons which could target small objects, but not enough to have all around protection, and they seemingly couldn't deal with the Raven's dodging around."
He paused, then shrugged. "More Ravens, and maybe more shielding for our capital ships. Double up their defenses since I think our offensive power will be more potent than the number of weapon systems might suggest."
Harry waited to see if Jacob had more to say, but when it was clear he didn't, nodded and moved on. "Alright, now give us a brief piece on your tactics, something I can tell the newsies and the other civilians. Then, I think you've got a reception to get to."
With MJ's help Harry incorporated what Jacob told Harry and the others into a speech and a public announcement. They didn't know yet much about this new species other than their name, which Mar'vel supplied after being told about the ships and how they fought: the Badoon. Sifting through a battlefield several light years wide for debris was going to take a very long time, even with Jean and the Scarlet Witch doing the sifting from one of their cruisers.
After his speech, Harry gathered the delegates along with William and asked them if they had any questions about the battle or about Mars and the plans going forward. When they didn't, and didn't have any other further questions for him, he led them all back to the Gateway except for William and the two he and his ladies had picked up who wanted to speak to him about something else.
"We want to talk about colonization," Williams said bluntly. "Colonization rights and ability."
"Rights are one thing," Harry said with a shrug. "Ability is another. I have been thinking about it, honestly, but the how will differ greatly from one planet to another. However, what exactly are you going to pay with?" he asked, leaning forward with a smile as he felt Emma's interest rise behind him.
OOOOOOO
No smile was in sight as Harry looked at the blood covering literally every surface of the small kitchen he was currently standing in. He, Dani, Hela, and Ororo were in a house in downtown Detroit, the home of a poor family, two of whom, the father and the oldest son, had been working for Harry. They had both been taking training in how to work in a space environment as miners but were among the thousands of Americans who, now that it was on offer, preferred to come home after training. They hadn't reported back in, and their supervisor, another man from Detroit, had decided to just stop by and see what was going on. He'd promptly called the police, and Harry had discovered what had happened a little bit after.
The entire family had been killed here in their own kitchen. This consisted of a father, a mother, two kids in their teens, and their oldest, a twenty-four-year-old who had lived at home. All of them had been of Hispanic heritage and had been murdered in as bloody a manner as possible.
"The police report seems to indicate that the police felt someone owed money to the wrong people, and one insensitive detective stated that it was probably a good thing that the kids had all been boys. What might've happened to girls of a family who owed the wrong people money didn't bear thinking about," Ororo said, her blue eyes chips of ice as she bowed her head in prayer for the five innocents who had died here.
That callousness struck Harry as just wrong, coming from a policeman, but Harry supposed that the man just simply saw too much horror to feel anything. Chicago and Detroit were known as the twin crime centers in America at this point, thanks in part to organized crime taking a major hit in New York, thanks to Spider-Man, and all of California, thanks to the Fantastic Four, and shifting to those cities.
Unlike the policeman, Harry did feel something. He felt fury, as did Hela, judging by the fact that she was simply standing there, vibrating in place, her hands clenched on her sword at her side and her new vambrace glowing with her wrath. These had been his people for all that they were Americans, not his actual citizens. Two of them had worked for Harry, and they could've used the money they were earning to lift their family out of this place and whatever trouble they had been in. That was enough.
Moreover, Harry wondered if this might've been a deliberate attack for another reason. There had been other incidents, men and women known to work for him as miners and so forth being attacked when they were at home, their families being stalked. None, though, had reached this level. While most of the time Harry was willing to let local authorities see to such, this was different and demanded a response.
The police weren't even going to open up an investigation, not having the manpower and, frankly, not having the reach into the Hispanic community here to follow up on any leads they could find in the first place. Harry had other resources. "Dani? I know this to be unpleasant, and I hate to ask it of you but.…"
Dani shrugged, trying to put on a brave face. "Blood doesn't bother me much, Harry. Nor does violence, as you should know by now."
"There's a difference between taking part in violence and seeing it happen without being able to do anything," Ororo said gently, touching her shoulder in turn as Hela did the same with her head. "And whatever happened here, it was ugly."
"I know, but whatever I can do to help to bring these down, I'll do it," Dani replied firmly.
With that Dani knelt down and touched the ground where one of the chalk outlines was, carefully not touching the blood splatters with her fingers as she looked around. She then closed her eyes and summoned up her mutant power. Part of her power allowed Dani to communicate with animals and even commune with nature, which had made her the hunter that she was. But her power was devoted to feeling out the empathy of people and places, backwards in time. With enough of a feeling suffusing an area, she could re-create what had occurred in the form of images. And here, here there had been a lot of pain and a lot of fear.
An instant later, all around them, the images began to appear. They watched two men enter the kitchen, the younger man grinning and giving the older man the finger, something that, Dani thought absentmindedly, would never have occurred to her to do to any elder. Then both of them paused as seven men around the kitchen pointed guns at them.
These men were done up like a mix of pop-rockers and, oddly, some kind of crazed clowns or band members, like a few of the wilder groups Dani had seen in videos. One of them even had his head uncovered, showing a wild mane of blonde hair, a face done up with far too much cosmetics, and a wild grin on his face. He had stars painted or tattooed around his eyes and teeth that looked almost like that of a crocodile.
What happened then was horribly unpleasant, and Dani soon found herself outside, throwing up what she had been eating for the past few days. Harry was beside her, gently rubbing her back and shaking his head as Hela and Ororo stood nearby, regaining control of themselves. Of all of them only Harry hadn't been sick, with even Hela turning away and running outside to get some fresh air. He had seen worse after the Death Eaters had had their fun.
Eventually Dani recovered enough to sit up right and shake her head. "I, I've got enough of an empathic sense off one of them, I think," she muttered, shaking her head. "I should be able to find him, given time."
No voice or words could come through Dani's ability, but there had been some signs there that Harry took to mean that the police might have been onto something when they said that the parents owed people money, and he said so now, not removing his hand from Dani's back. "I'll get Emma and some of her people on that aspect and the past of this family. Most of what happened here was deliberate sadism, but that group was set on that family by someone else. I want both the one who ordered it and the group which carried it out."
He frowned thoughtfully, then asked "Who else would you take to hunt these people down?"
Dani frowned in thought, then slowly said, "I don't think I'd take anyone, unless I can have Wolvering, Giau Su and Coyote? Nikolai too, maybe, but he would probably refuse to go unless you ordered it, sir, and even then his heart wouldn't be in it. He is really becoming more and more concerned with the upcoming Russian issue."
Harry winced at that. Both Nikolai and Garnoff had been talking his ear off about how to try to get Russia to the table, but Russia simply refused to talk to him, calling Harry's position and activities an American plot in the news, and what propaganda that was coming out of the country was not good. Someone was trying to whip the Russian populace up into a frenzy about 'regaining their rightful lands,' and other such, and it was working
Luckily for all concerned, there had been no further mutant deaths in Russia, simply because no further mutants had been born there, or, at least, so Harry supposed. But Nikolai was itching for a chance to go in and see if they could root out the aliens who he was convinced were the cause of the problem. Harry wasn't so certain about that, but at the moment that was a problem too convoluted for them to solve without being given an opening.
"And frankly, sir, this is going to be as much an investigation as a hunt, and none of the others have any powers or abilities that would help us there or even any background experience except maybe Logan."
Harry looked at her closely, then nodded. "If you want just the three of them, Dani, you've got them. Just find me a target, Ghigau; that's all I'll need."
"You'll have it, my Jarl," Dani replied formally, causing Harry to twitch and Hela to let out a slight chuckle at the choice of honorific.
Later that day Dani prepared for the hunt in her own way. She spent the morning saying goodbye to her friends, exchanging hugs with Amara and others, then spent a few hours just tramping through the woods with the kids before sending them back off to the castle to warm up.
Several minutes later found Dani meditating alone in front of a fire, her hands in front of her in a triangle as she pushed past the horror of the executions she had just witnessed via her powers, pushed past the event entirely and sifted through the emotive signature of those who had done the deed. Most of them were indistinct, but, thinking back on it, she could make out the mark of one of the others, one of the chief cameramen. That gave her two people to look for with her mutant powers, one of whom she had seen enough to be able to track physically.
Opening her eyes, she stared into the fire for several seconds, then bent down to the tiny cairn she had created with a few rocks and other totems in front of it. Prominent were two bear claws and a large falcon feather. Dani had hunted and killed them all, including one of the bears, which had been rabid at the time. The falcon, though, was the one she was proudest of, having taken it while the bird flew on the wing in a killing dive.
Bowing over the cairn, she sent her thoughts out, not to the totems of her people, but to the Aesir goddess she felt closest too. "Skadi, lady of the hunt, hear my call. Guide my senses so that I might find the trail of these monsters. Aid my eyes that I might see true, so that I can bring the dead justice," she murmured.
Hela had walked her through this ceremony earlier that day, but then left Dani to meditate on her own. Hela was many things, but she was no huntress. She just hoped that Skadi, who she had met but briefly to her memory, would be able to hear this particular prayer despite Midgard being cut off from the realms of Yggdrasil.
Dani was not surprised by the deep, rumbling growl of a voice behind her. "Would that I could go with you, young huntress. From what my mistress told me, these monsters in human flesh need killing."
The young Cheyenne turned to look at Garm, coming out of the cold, windswept forest like the earliest nightmares of man-made flesh, but for all his dangerous appearance, she simply smiled. "I know, and I wish I could have you along too. Your experience would be invaluable. But your duty is to your mistress, and while this is a hunt, it is smaller than one such as you should be tasked with." Then Dani smirked. "Besides, you'd be miserable hunting through a city. It isn't nearly as clean as a forest, and even covered with spells I'd bet your presence would make itself known."
Garm huffed, then turned away. "I will not wish you good luck, young one. A huntress of your skill needs no such. Simply keep your eyes sharp and your hands steady, and that will see you through."
Smirking at the gruff animal's way of wishing her well, Dani picked up Sigyn's Gift and moved through the forest back to Hogwarts.
There she found Logan, Shiang-Chi and Wyatt waiting for her in casual clothing, much like Dani was for all that she had been tromping through the woods. Nearby a house elf waited to bring them to New York at the Xavier Mansion, where they would pick up a truck to take and use in their hunt in Chicago. "Let's go."