Chapter 9

Lisa turned away from the scanning display and glared at Gunner, Quetzalcoatl and, honestly, the rest of the crew and the whole universe. “Well, fuck,” she said, her voice tight and barely controlled. Quetzalcoatl’s feathered ruff flicked back and he hissed quietly, clearly a bit upset about her tone. Before he could say anything, Gunner cracked his knuckles.

“Track that aircraft,” he barked, and the bridge crew hurried to their stations. Pyros was the first one to get on the scrying console and started to tap away with greenish fingers.

“What are we going to do?” Carlos asked. “They napped Relix and Brash and Merton! Putas.”

“We could panic,” Trevor said, his voice ever so slightly snide. Carlos glared at him – but before he could respond, Lisa held up her hand.

“You!” she pointed at Gunner. “Once we track the airplane, I want this ship up and after them. You!” She pointed at Speccy. “Take the overgrown feather duster to Atlantis.”

Speccy crossed all four of her arms over her chest and belly, her eyes narrowing as she hissed in displeasure. Quetzalcoatl looked even more mortified. Both of them opened their mouths, but before they could get in a word edgewise, Lisa snapped her fingers. She had a skill with finger snapping. It sounded a bit like a gunshot. She followed up with a voice that was as even as it was filled with a smoldering anger. A lifetime of arguing with people from pushy HOA members to racists on twitter had given Lisa a backbone – the same backbone she had shown in the Fortress of Regrets.

“Right now, a huge-ass dragon warfleet is coming to Earth. We need every fucking tool that we have. Quetzalcoatl is the only surviving dragon from that time period, and Spectral, you’re the best and most intelligent engineer we have.”

Speccy inclined her head. Quetzalcoatl flared his ruff, but didn’t do much more than that.

“Find every gun, every spell, every bit of armor, everything,” Lisa said.

“I’ve got them tracked!” Pyros exclaimed. “No, bugger, they’re gone.”

“What do you mean gone?” Gunner snarled, his mandibles clacking. “Earth doesn’t have magic, we’re tracking them with level 5 spells!”

“I’m saying what I’m saying, and what I’m saying is they dropped off the charts, even with sympathetic magic,” Pyros said, slumping.

Lisa rubbed her chin.

“We could go to the White House,” Merton’s Dad said – his voice remarkably calm. “I know people in the Defense Department. And if anyone knows who those people were, they’d be them.” He smiled. “Hell, maybe it was D-Com.”

“D-Com?” Merton’s Mom asked, her laugh having a hysterical edge to it – she looked as if she was reaching the upper limit of the amount of weird shit she was able to put up with. Doubly so when it came to threats on her son’s life. “That urban legend?”

The armored soldier knelt down above Merton and yanked the gag away from his mouth smiled slightly. “Hey,” he said. Merton tongued at his gums, tasting the horrible aftershocks of having rubber jammed into his mouth. He looked around at the restraints that kept him and Brash restrained, despite Brash’s incredible strength.

“Sup,” Merton asked, his voice rough.

“Oh, just another glorious day in D-Com,” the soldier said, shrugging.

The two – well, the three of them – were in the belly of the VTOL that had kidnapped Merton and Relix. The faint sound of air screaming past the belly of the craft was audible enough to made Merton’s teeth itch. Small bumps and jostles of turbulance set him swaying and made a quiet groan escape from Brash’s brain.

You okay, little buddy? Merton thought.

The restraints are junking up my ability to compensate for inner ear woobliebooblies ... Brash mumbled.

Merton blinked.

The soldier stood up and paced away, his rifle clacking slightly as he slung it over his shoulder. His armor was unfamiliar to Merton – but it still looked to be roughly on par with human technology. So, this was just some fancy, high tech secret combat force. If Merton had to guess, D-Com stood for Dragon Combat or Dragon Control or something. He wasn’t sure if they were saying Com or Con, with an N. The two sounds blurred together, at least, they did when someone was speaking over a howling set of VTOL engines and the ‘screaming of the damned’ sound of air rushing by the armored hull.

“Hey,” Merton said. “Where’s Relix?”

The soldier looked back at him. He shook his head slightly. “You think you can get her free, dragon-boy?”

“Uh, one, I’m not a dragon,” Merton said. “My name is Merton Miles. I was born in California.”

“Yeah. And I work for the post office,” the D-Com soldier said, rolling his eyes.

Merton frowned. Then he felt a faint quiver in Brash’s body. It pressed against his skin and made me gulp down his own sense of nausea. He shook his head – then grinned. “Hey, fuckface. If I was a dragon, how would I know that DC movies kick Marvel movie’s ass hands down?”

The soldier swung around, his eyes wide with shock. He took a step forward. “What did you-”

I’m gonna be sick, Brash gurgled.

And he threw up.

Which meant Merton went flying out of Brash’s mouth, buck naked and slick with juice that he’d really rather not identify. He focused as he flew, lifting his arm as if he was a D&D fighter in the middle of a bull rush. His psi-shield crackled to life as his mage awakened talent roused, now that he was no longer restrained by the strange webbing that Brash had been wrapped in. The shield met the guard’s face and the two hit the ground with a groan. Merton skidded along a deck so cold that he felt as if his dong might freeze and snap off. But he had no time to think. He grabbed onto the rifle as the soldier clutched at a broken nose. He yanked the strap off from around the man’s neck.

He fired a single shot at the restraints that still wrapped around the undifferentiated mass that was Brash’s groaning body. A spark flew from the net and the blue glow they emitted faded. Brash sprang free a moment later, landing on Merton’s shoulder with a cheerful cry of: “Hup!”

Merton swung his rifle around and fired off a spray of bullets at the stairs leading into the cargo hold – causing the soldiers who had started to come down to investigate the noise to jerk backwards with cries of alarm. Merton stood, his knees shaking, his feet skidding thanks to the Brash-slime that slicked against his soles.

“Everyone up there!” he shouted. “I’m willing to fucking talk! But if you say no, I have a tiny dragon with tac-nukes and I’m not afraid to use him!”

“Yeah!” Brash said, then whispered. “We’re not actually going to use tactical nuclear weapons right? We’re over an ocean!”

And, quite suddenly, the floor became the wall and gravity vanished. The VTOL was arcing downwards – in a howling, screaming arc through the air. Brash giggled cheerfully, flipping around as Merton tried to keep a hold on the rifle as he bounced up towards the ceiling. Through the narrow windows on the wall, he could see the ocean rushing up to meet them.

Well, he thought. Balls.

It took five minutes after the Talon-9 shot off into the distance before Quetzalcoatl finally opened his mouth to say: “Well, that wasn’t how I expected that to go. At all.”

Spectral Time – or, as people kept referring to her as, Speccy – did not sigh. She had a long lifetime of learning to not sigh. Her people were known as technicians and sorcerers both, and she was considered quite skilled among her people. As a skilled tech-priest from a planetary population of tech-priests, she had been a valuable commodity. And at times like this, Speccy remembered all her previous masters and her previous exposure to other dragons and took heart from knowing that no matter how bad it was...

She could still be working for House Bryaugh.

And so, she turned to see that Quetzalcoatl was sitting with his large, feathered head resting on his chin, glaring at a pile of frost dusted debris. The lost city of Atlantis – or at least the part of Atlantis that they had discovered – stretched out before Speccy, visible under the magical spectra that her eyes had been enchanted to perceive. In natural light, only a tiny circle of the city was struck by the natural sunlight shining through the hole the Talon-9 had punched through stone and ice. As a scientist, the indications of techno-sorcerey that she had seen thus far was ... breathtakingly mundane.

She knelt down and picked up a piece of a street mage-light that had fallen down thousands of years before and frozen solid. She used her upper right hand and opened it up, pursing her lips ever so slightly as she shifted her vision through the arcanic spectrum – working her way through divinatory lenses. Once she was done, she shook her head and made a quiet tchss sound under her breath.

“I spent thousands of years watching the slaves, seeing them ... a ... a race that could really claim the title of what the ancient magi stood for. They did so much. But they’d never manage anything, not with dragons sitting on the great wheel...” Quetzalcoatl muttered. “And I finally find a dragon that could see it, and...”

“Are you quite done?” Speccy asked, turning to face Quetzalcoatl, her lower hands on her hips, her upper arms crossed over her breasts. She frowned down at Quetzalcoatl, who looked up at her, his head drawing back, his ruff settling down against his scales.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, his voice venomous. “I-”

“Shut up,” Speccy said, frowning. “Life is filled with failed incidents. You could have spent thousands of years acting rather than watching. Instead, you waited for the right moment and it failed. If you had a thousand other failures under your belt preparing you for this, maybe you would have a contingency plan. As it is, transform yourself into a carrying device or leave, because you’re currently being as much use as a wet fart in a space suit.”

Quetzalcoatl spluttered, his head rearing back even further. “A ... a ... a carrying device!?”

Speccy picked up the mage light and held it up. “What is this?”

“A mage light,” Quetzalcoatl said, his voice smug. “It uses the light spell, augmented by electrostatic generator to prevent mana-burn.”

The mage-light bounced off his nose.

“Inefficient!” Speccy said, an anger she hadn’t realized she could feel actually beginning to grow and build inside of her. “Do you think modern mage lights are kindled by first year apprentices recasting the same cantrip again and again?” She scoffed. “We have mage lights linked to a central power system, usually powered via arcano-gravitic fusion or by straight line connections to the plane of positive energy.”

Quetzalcoatl blinked.

“You do?” he asked.

Speccy frowned. She thrust her upper left hand at a building that looked as if it had once contained a maunfactory center, from the draconic runes she recognized underneath a few millennia of decay and frost. “Knock that wall over.”

Quetzalcoatl frowned, then reached out with his foreclaw. He smashed into the brick and metal wall, sending up a cloud of dust and spray of debris. Before it had even cleared up, Speccy stepped over the wreckage, picking her way along carefully. Not for the first time, she thanked the gods of fashion that her garb was tight and form fitting. Not for any prurient reason – she had yet to meet a male that she’d lay with for any reason beyond abject pity or a direct order from Princess Relix.

What about Merton? A teeny, tiny part of her brain whispered.

She waved her hand, and instead, focused on the interior of the former factory. And, like dumping a bunch of petrochemicals onto a burning fire, she felt her anger intensify. “Look at this nonsense! You have old orchialicum pools right in the open, without any bleed-off vanes or magic captors above the pools! And ... artificial sunlight focusing lamps?” She gestured at an ancient, shattered hunk of glass and plastic. “Tchss! This isn’t fit to work on a backwoods pirate den!”

“It’s top of the line!” Quetzalcoatl exclaimed.

“It was top of the line ten thousand years ago!” Speccy said, turning to face him. “Now. Become a wheelbarrow.” She looked over at the ruins, her eyes narrowing. “I have a way to salvage something from this terrible idea.”

Her tone added the subtext so plainly that it might as well have been uttered aloud: As per usual.

The Talon-9 kicked on its retro-engines after blazing past several layers of top of the line human air defenses. Several SAM sites, each one scrambled to activity by frantic screaming from radar detection grids and satellite surveillance systems, fired their missiles into the air the Talon-9 had been in mere seconds before. The missiles arced around and were intercepted by polar-rays fired en mass from the PRC grid along the Talon-9’s spine. The sudden, killing cold of the PRCs did not actually take the missiles down instantly, but the sheer weight of polar rays did manage to blow missile after missile out of the sky.

Then the Talon-9 dropped down and landed on the broad lawn of the White House’s front porch, the howling gale of wind kicked up by the landing thrusters knocking over a vast, bright orange inflatable chicken that had been set up on the outskirts of the lawn. AS the chicken tumbled away, it bowled over a few dozen news cameras and sent a team from CNN scrambling for cover. The secret service were scrambling as well – weapons were being readied, phone calls were being made, and the President was being forced away from his cellphone by two retainers.

The front of the Talon-9 opened and Lisa came walking out, flanked by Gunner in his best power armor and Julia dressed in a wizard hat, a thong, a bra and nothing else. Since, after all, armor restrained arcane magic. Honest.

Several secret service agents were already in cover.

“Sleep!” Julia shouted, then thrust her finger at the lot of them. A ball of glowing energy flicked from her fingertip, struck the air above the knot of men in hastily donned flack jackets. To the last, each of them slumped to the ground. Julia breathed a sigh of relief as Gunner started forward. “Okay, good. Secret servicemen are 1 HD creatures. I was worried.”

Lisa looked like she was having the time of her life.

Gunner reached the closed and barricaded front door shoulder first. The door splintered inwards and the trio headed inside. From the bridge of the Talon-9, Merton’s Mom bit the back of her knuckles. “Do ... do you think this was the right tactic to be taking? I mean, this may, ah, sour opinions, right?”

Dad shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m having fun.”

The interior of the White House was a lot smaller than Lisa expected. She looked around as bullets pinged and sparked off Gunner’s body. Julia, crouching behind the huge armored bug-man, shouted out the magical word again. Once again, people went sprawling as they were knocked out cold. Gunner’s head was scanning around. Then he nodded. “There!” he pointed to a wall, then rushed forward. His shoulder struck wood, which splintered, then rebounded off thick steel. With the bunker revealed, he lifted his right arm. A searing beam of laser light struck the steel as Julia kept her eyes open for any more Secret Servicemen.

Gunner kicked the circle he had cut into and the metal fell inwards with a clang, revealing a bunker that had been designed to keep the President safe in the advent of thermonuclear war. Several aides, officials, and the Vice President, were all crowded inside, with the President himself nowhere to be seen. A secret serviceman stepped up, firing his 9mm pistol into Gunner’s chest. The bullets pinged and sparked and Julia yelped, lifting up her palms to create a magical force field that hummed to life, catching the ricochets before they could harm anyone.

The gun clicked repeatedly for a few seconds before the flack jacketed, sunglass equipped, brave as balls man realized he was empty. He blinked – and then Gunner yanked the pistol from his grip. He chuckled. “Nice grouping,” he said, in English, as Lisa ducked past him. She reached under the table and dragged a whimpering President out.

“Hey,” she said, cheerfully. “We’re here to talk about an alliance.”

The impact of VTOL to ocean sent Merton slamming back into the deck. His jaw hit metal and his teeth clacked together and his head started to ring as he sprawled there. For a few eternities, he didn’t think about anything. Instead, he simply sprawled there and wondered what else would go wrong today. When his head cleared and the pain subsided, he saw that Brash was once more restrained by a tube of metal, and that Merton’s hands had been ziptied behind his back. He was dragged to his feet and the soldier yanking him up growled in his ear.

“That was a dumbshit move you pulled, kid.”

“Fuck you,” Merton whispered.

The next few minutes were a confused stumbling up stairs, down a narrow corridor of chairs, then out into something dark and narrow and metal. The flickering lights overhead made Merton think ‘underwater base.’ But the room he was finally escorted to made him think ‘evil underwater base’, because it contained nothing but a pair of chairs, a few bright lights, restraints, his wife, and an unsmiling Asian woman in body armor. Merton was jammed into the chair and his restraints were upgraded from zip-ties to fuckoff huge zip-ties. Brash was set down on his lap. Brash, with only his head and tail free, craned his head around, snapping at the men who had roughed them into the room.

“Relix?” Merton hissed. “You okay?”

“I mean...” Relix groaned. “I’ve been electrocuted, de-powered, restrained, questioned, and bumped around. So, yes, I’m just peachy, husband.”

Merton glared at the Asian woman. “You fucking assholes! We came here to help!”

“You’re dragons,” the woman said. “Or at least, two thirds of you are. And we here at the Dragon Combat Unit are dedicated to one thing: Keeping dragons from conquering the Earth. The Dragon Empire has better tech and more planets. But we have the advantage of being off the beaten path and very ... very ... very good at learning what we need to learn.” She walked forward, her hands resting on her thighs as she leaned forward and looked at Merton. “But you are a mystery.”

Merton snorted. “Merton Miles. Interplanetary man of mystery, that’s me.”

“How did the dragons brainwash you?” She asked, frowning.

Merton, still feeling a bit loopy from the knock to the head, said the first thing that popped into his head: “Have you seen Relix’s titties?”

“Merton!” Relix hissed. “Don’t forget my rump.”

“Right, ass that won’t quit,” Merton said, grinning at the Asian woman. She looked less than amused. Her arms crossed over her armored chest piece.

“Uh-huh. So, a bit of T&A was all it took for you to forget your loyalty to your species?” She asked.

Merton closed his eyes. “Okay. Here’s what I would have said if you people had started off by talking, rather than fucking shooting. We came here to warn you. The Five ... the Dragon Empire has just gone into a civil war. Do you know the difference between a chromatic and a metallic dragon?”

“Chromatic dragons are honest when they fuck you over?” The woman asked, arching an eyebrow.

Relix bristled behind Merton – he could feel her tension from the contact points between their bodies on the chair. Merton sighed and wished he could squeeze her hands. To comfort her. Instead, he just said: “A Chromatic House has genetically engineered superweapons on their hands and have already attacked Draconis Prime. Princess Relix here is the only surviving Castrovel left. That means that they will want her dead. She’s a threat to their power.” He shook his head. “And humans are a threat all by themselves.”

The woman frowned.

“We have two weeks,” Merton said. “To figure out some way of stopping this fleet. Now, please, let’s work together. That’s the only way we’re going to fucking survive.”

The woman held up her finger, then wordlessly turned and stalked out of the room. Once she was gone, all that was left was the faint hum of the lights. Merton leaned back in his seat. Brash bumped his head against Merton’s thigh. “You did good!” Brash said, cheerfully.

“I just hope that everyone else is doing all right,” Merton said, shaking his head. “But, hey. We left Lisa behind. Lisa is pretty calm and rational.” He nodded again.

Relix was silent for a few moments. Then, quietly. “Merton. What do we do if there is nothing that we can do? There is a single loyalist legion near Earth. But that’s one Legion against three Warspheres and who knows how many of the B-suits.” She craned her head back. “We need an alternative plan.”

Merton bit his lip. “Shit!” He leaned his head back. “I should have asked Dart before we left...”

“Asked her what?” Relix asked.

“Asked her to find an alternate Earth, somewhere, in the multiverse. Somewhere that we could evacuate people too.” Merton shook his head. “There are, uh, nine billion people on this planet. But if we use the portal emitters that Speccy has, we could set up ... how many portals?”

“If we used every part of the Talon-9?” Relix asked. “I don’t know. Between ... ten to thirty.”

Merton bit his lip. “Ten to thirty, operating round the clock for, uh, almost two weeks. That’s...” Not everyone. “That’s a lot of people.” He tried to sound cheery. “It’ll be something to ask Dart once we come back.”

Speccy and Quetzalcoatl were trundling through downtown Atlantis. Well, Speccy was walking. Quetzalcoatl was thumping along on six legs, grown out from a dump-truck style growth of bone that thrust along his broad, flattened back. It was highly undignified for a dragon, but he gritted his teeth and bore it as Speccy continued to fill him up.

Dart waited until they were a good distance away before she tip toed out from the small, shadowed alcove she had ducked into as the Talon-9 roared away. She slung the pack full of stolen supplies over her back and grinned to herself as she started to walk towards the still semi-active dimensional portal.

It was a bit of a hike.

And she had a long way to go before she was outta here.

Lisa sat, flanked by Julia, Gunner, Merton’s Mom and Merton’s Dad. Carlos and Trevor were back on the Talon-9, ready to turn the teleporter on and yank them out of the room if the need came. Sitting across from them was the Secretary of Defense, the President, the Vice President, a bunch of aides, and the most important person in the room, the President’s cell phone. His thumbs tapped away as he looked at Lisa over the edge of the old blackberry.

“So,” Lisa said. “That’s the situation. A battlefleet-”

“We can take them,” the President declared.

“You...” Lisa blinked, then rubbed her temple. “They’re an alien battlefleet with three planetkillers. We have a Soyus with a machine gun duct taped to the front. And that’s not even ours, it’s Russian!”

“Listen,” the President said, wheezing slightly. “We have, uh, the best. The best navy. The best air force. The best, uh, armed forces. We’re the best, we have the best. And that’s all there is too it. You won’t hear about that in the media.” He shook his head, his hair coming slightly off center. Lisa continued to rub her temple. Julia glanced at her, raising a single eyebrow. The Vice President remained placid faced – though his eyes betrayed the utter loathing he felt at Julia’s very presence. It was either the wizard’s hat or the lack of other clothing. The President, by the way, was still going. “We have the biggest ships, the best ships, they’re really good, these ships-”

The door opened and a stern faced man in a suit, flanked by two men in FBI field uniforms, walked in. The President craned his head back. “What the flying fuck is this?” he asked – then yelped as one of the FBI men dragged his arms behind his back. Handcuffs clicked and the former President was dragged to his feet.

“This is bulls-” his voice was cut off by the door.

“Well,” the new President said, adjusting his tie. “I think that, hey, what are you doing!?” He yelped as the second FBI man dragged his arm behind his back and forced him to his feet. “I didn’t know anything about any treason, what!?”

The second President in as many minutes went out the door shouting for his lawyer.

The stern faced man adjusted his tie and nodded to Lisa.

“ ... so, uh, the Speaker of the House?” Lisa asked.

“He was arrested in at the Capital building,” the man said. “President Mattis.” He nodded to the Secretary of Defense, who coughed and adjusted his tie. He stood, shifted to the chair the President had sat in, then looked back at Lisa.

“Normally, there’d be more of a ceremony,” President Mattis said. “But I believe time is short.”

Lisa breathed in, then out. “All right. First things first, we need to get Princess Relix out of internment. She was captured by some forces ... uh, Gunner?” Gunner slid a holo of the scan of the VTOL craft that they had detected capturing Relix and Merton. President Mattis rubbed his face, then nodded.

“Of course. We’ll need to send a signal to this loyalist legion you mentioned,” he said, slowly. “But will it be enough?”

Lisa shrugged. “It better.”

Merton was bouncing his thighs to keep Brash entertained – and doing quite a good job at it, considering how excited the tiny dragon was at bouncing up and down – when the lights came to full and several D-Com sodliers walked in, including the Asian woman who had been questioning them before. Before Merton could ask more than a garbled ‘what the-’ a knife had cut off his zip-ties, and the keycode to open Brash’s restraints was being typed in. Relix stood with an aggrieved harrumph as she rubbed at her wrists.

“The name is Lieutenant Kisogawa,” she said. “Sorry for the roughness – but ... uh...” She sighed. “We just got the order from the Security Council. D-Com’s going public and we’ve all got a fuck of a lot of work to do.”

“Finally,” Relix said, sticking her nose into the air. “I accept your apology.”

“Thanks,” Kisogawa said, her voice flat. She folded the knife back into its hilt and pocketed it. “We need to get you two on a flight to Geneva. That’s where the organization is going to be held. We’re calling in the armed service of NATO, former Warsaw Pact ... everyone.” She smiled, slightly. “Thanks, Princess ... you may have just gotten us world peace.”

She shrugged. “For a day.”

Relix, Brash and Merton followed her to the VTOL. Now that Merton wasn’t half dazed with an impact to the chin, he could actually get a fairly good look at the surroundings of the D-Com base. It looked a bit like an old oil platform that someone had sunk under the waves, with lots of narrow corridors and heavy machines that whirred and groaned quietly. Noticing his looks – and his expression at seeing the faint drips of water falling from several points in the ceiling, Kisogawa explained: “It’s an experimental Soviet submersible aircraft carrier. The idea was to emerge off the coast and launch more than just short ranged multistage warheads. Tactical nukes on jets, city busters on planes, that kind of thing. It never took off, doubly so once ICBMs were invented. The half-built prototype sat around for decades ... but it fits D-Com’s needs.”

Merton blinked, then said. “Let me see. Uh, mobile. Carries aircraft for rapid deployment...” He paused. “And you can put an ocean between you and orbital lances?”

“Bingo,” Kisogawa said, grinning. “You picked a good boyfriend.”

“Husband,” Relix snarled. “And I know.” She smiled at Merton in a way that still made Merton’s heart hammer.

“Husband?” Kisogawa shook her head as they walked up to the VTOL. “Okay.”

“Hey!” Merton said.

“Listen, I’ve spent my whole life training on how to kill dragons. The idea of someone marrying one is just...” Kisogawa shrugged. “Gross. Now, get one. We’ve got a straight flight to Geneva.”

The VTOL rose from the ocean with a spray of cascading water and steam, then shot off towards the horizon. Merton leaned back in his seat, feeling a heavy bone deep ache of tiredness. He closed his hand around Relix’s hand, smiling at her. She smiled back. And while she smiled, he felt like they might actually have a chance.

“We don’t have a chance.”

Merton felt like Speccy had literally pulled a fish out from between her amazing tits and smacked him in the face with it.

“But ... but ... Atlantis!” He stammered, gesturing to the dead city.

“Useless,” Speccy said, crossing her arms under her breasts. This had the effect of drawing Merton’s eye, despite the dire situation and day and a half without a single wink of sleep. Geneva had been, just as he had expected, a clusterfuck. They had arrived to find that the United States was undergoing the largest mass trial for treason in its history, the NATO alliance on such shaky grounds that there had been some debates as to whether or not Canada would even show up. The Russians had initially refused to even believe anything until Relix had transformed to her draconic form and froze their diplomat solid on the floor of the United Nations. And even once everyone had started to (grudgingly) work together, Merton had left the administrative complex without knowing who was going to lead the united human defenses or what those defenses were going to be.