Project: Magnus

The head of the task force assigned to work with us in deal­ing with Asgard has been going over the reports and after­math of the encounter in the Boston area for the last 15 min­utes but I've tuned out.

We lost 8 of our own and only man­aged, through shear luck, to cap­ture 1 of them. None of the Asgard fell. From the tiny bits of infor­ma­tion we were able to extract from our pris­oner they not only have the force­field that I encoun­tered, they have also devel­oped a device that allows them to tele­port as well as anti-​​matter bombs. The lat­ter we think was used in the North End.

It means they can strike any­where at will and com­pletely dev­as­tate everything.

It also means they can kill hun­dreds, maybe even thou­sands of peo­ple in the blink of an eye. Ini­tial esti­mates put the loses in North End around 900. We will never know for sure because there are no bod­ies to count.

Some of the ana­lysts now believe that the bank heists and other rob­beries were designed to acquire funds to develop this tech­nol­ogy. Some­one on their side has to have an extremely high IQ. This is tech that's been dreamed of for years but no one else has been able to even come close to these kind of devices. They man­aged to do it in a lit­tle under two years.

The other thing we've learned is that their head­quar­ters is located in Que­bec. They are using one of the older north­ern cas­tles as a base of operations.

I have no idea why Que­bec would aid and abet these peo­ple but ever since they gained their sov­er­eignty the gov­ern­ment up there has gone out of it's way to piss off Canada and the US. What bet­ter way to do that then to pro­vide asy­lum to our biggest threat.

After the debrief­ing we met with the lead­ers of the mil­i­tary arm of the project to dis­cuss the next move. After some debate it's been decided that we will take the fight to them, we are to air drop into their home base and let the gov­ern­ment deal with the con­se­quences of what will be con­sider an inva­sion into Que­bec territory.

Drop from twenty thou­sand feet with­out a para­chute isn't for the weak of heart. It took me sev­eral months to get up the nerve. And like the joke says, it's not the fall that kills you but the sud­den stop at the end. 3 of us have tele­ki­netic abil­i­ties and we use them at the last sec­ond to slow everyone‚Äôs decent at the last sec­ond. We agreed ear­lier not to bring us to a com­plete stop but to land heav­ily in the stone court­yard of the cas­tle. A bit rem­i­nis­cent of the scene in Suck­er­Punch and maybe a lit­tle cliche but it was cool. Con­sid­er­ing the cas­tle looks a bit like the one in the movie it was all the more surreal.

I sent one group to work their way around the right side of the cas­tle and another to the left. Myself and the rest walked straight through the front door like we owned the place.

We searched for hours. Not that the cas­tle was very large, but we looked for hid­den door­ways, secret pas­sages, or hid­den rooms. Any­thing to explain why the build­ing was com­pletely deserted. Sad to think our show in the court­yard went unseen.

Every­one finally mets together in what appears to be the throne room. Along one wall, oppo­site where I imag­ine the throne would be, but where now sits a large orange sec­tional sofa, are four large tele­vi­sions mounted on the wall.

We are all milling around the room try­ing to decide what to do next, the mil­i­tary attach­ment is actu­ally look­ing a bit relieved, when the hiss­ing starts. Our first reac­tion is panic, that we walked into a trap and that an anti-​​matter bomb is about to go off. Funny how we didn't think of that before hand. Only when the tv's flash to life and we are all star­ing at the face of what has to be the ugli­est man alive do we real­ize that it was indeed a trap but that we aren't going to die just yet.

"Inter­est­ing. More of you sur­vived then I expected" says the voice from the tele­vi­sions, "I'm slightly impressed. Not that it matters."

I step for­ward and address the screens.

"You are the one they call Exo­dus I presume?"

"You pre­sume cor­rectly. And you are the son. Father would be proud."

"You do not get to call him 'father'."

Exo­dus laughs and waves his hand, dis­miss­ing my comment.

"Spare me the the­atrics. He was the cre­ator of all of us. He cre­ated the serum and the process that gave us our pow­ers, that made us more than human. He was our Gen­e­sis and I carry on ful­fill­ing my inter­pre­ta­tion of his vision, which is why I call myself 'Exo­dus'. But I don't want to upset you lit­tle one, so I shall refrain from using the term again."

"What do you want? I pre­sume there is a rea­son we are here and you are talk­ing to us?"

"Yes, there is a rea­son. I want you to run home and tell your pres­i­dent and mil­i­tary lead­ers I have a pro­posal for them."

"And what might that pro­posal be?"

"That is for them to know lit­tle one."

"You can't really expect me to tell them you want to talk and not give them a rea­son why?"

"Tell them I wish to make a deal."

I almost fall over laugh­ing. After all this he really thinks they are going to nego­ti­ate with a terrorist.

"What deal?" I ask when I finally catch my breath.

"We want immu­nity and gov­ern­men­tal sup­port to sell the Ich­a­bod drug to any­one that can afford it. Tell them that if they don't agree we will destroy a city every hour until they do and the clock starts in five hours.", Exo­dus leaned for­ward into the screen, "And you know we have the abil­ity to do just that. Now run along."

It shouldn't be such a nice day

We buried my father today. A man con­sid­ered by many as the bright­est mind that ever lived. Oth­ers called him the har­bin­ger of doom. Appar­ently that's the way it works with men who are super geniuses. If his death had been nat­ural I might not hate the sun­shine and cool breezes blow­ing around me as I stand here on the bal­cony over­look­ing the grave­yard where his body now lies.

My girl­friend is with me and has been try­ing to con­sole me all after­noon. Unfor­tu­nately this is one of those sit­u­a­tions where unless you've expe­ri­enced it, you can't even begin to under­stand what it's like. She kept remind­ing me that her father was killed when she was 12, and while that is true, her father wasn't killed by a ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tion that was cre­ated specif­i­cally to destroy his work. She can't under­stand that because of his work in genet­ics and biol­ogy, and because of the pow­ers he gave me and oth­ers like me, he was tar­geted from the beginning.

I don't blame her. I can't. Of the 10 bil­lion peo­ple liv­ing on this planet and the moon only 15, the ones dad chose for the Ich­a­bod project, would even begin to have an idea of what it felt like. Of those, only five had a par­ent in the project. Then of course only I was lucky enough to have the man that started it all, the man that dis­cov­ered how to give ordi­nary peo­ple what amounted to super pow­ers, as a father.

Right now she is in the other room try­ing to absorb every­thing I told her. In this case I can imag­ine what she is going through. I went through some­thing sim­i­lar 5 years ago when dad told me all about the Ich­a­bod idea. He told me about how he had worked out how to alter a per­sons phys­i­ol­ogy and bio­chem­istry to give them super human abilities.

He had got­ten FDA approval to begin test­ing on humans, and wanted to know if I would be will­ing to be part of the trials.

That's when every­thing went to hell. A group call­ing them­selves 'The Asgard' broke into the lab in Boston, stole all the serum and notes and research and blew up the lab. Injur­ing my dad in the process. They began to exper­i­ment on them­selves. No one is sure where their sci­en­tist came from, or if they even had one, but sud­denly they began to acquire abil­i­ties that were unsta­ble and dan­ger­ous. Well, more dan­ger­ous. Espe­cially in their hands.

Dad went into self-​​imposed exile to recover from his injuries. The worst of which was a shat­tered spine which left him unable to walk. 'Very Pro­fes­sor X' I always said, teas­ing him about it. At least it made him smile.

When he recov­ered to the point he could work again he ded­i­cated him­self to devel­op­ing a serum that would counter the orig­i­nal drug, hold­ing him­self respon­si­ble for all the death and dam­aged caused by Asgard.

Then a year ago they changed course. Some said that the lead­er­ship within Asgard changed, that there had been a coup of some kind and that was why the change of phi­los­o­phy. Oth­ers said it was because they had found out about dad's lit­tle fail safe. That those given the treat­ment became ster­ile and could not pro­duce off­spring. He had said it was to pre­vent the pow­ers from get­ting out of con­trol and evolv­ing into god knew what.

Either way they went from com­mit­ting crimes like theft and extor­tion to ter­ror­iz­ing the gen­eral pop­u­la­tion. I'm con­vinced that they did it inten­tion­ally, know­ing dad would do some­thing and it would bring him out of exile.

And they were right. He came out of seclu­sion and, with the help of the gov­ern­ment, formed the super-​​human group he dubbed 'League'. He kind of named it after the 'League of Extra­or­di­nary Gen­tle­men', but also, as a pri­vate joke, because the train­ing part of the pro­gram would be called 'The Minors'. He did love his baseball.

Because I was his son I was recruited to join. Train­ing was bru­tal. Not only did we get train­ing in using our pow­ers but we went through the stan­dard Marine basic train­ing. Only it was accel­er­ated because no one felt we had a lot of time to fig­ure it out.

We held our own the first time we face Asgard. No one died and no one got seri­ously injured. How­ever in retal­i­a­tion they attacked and lev­eled Atlanta. Sher­man would have been proud, and prob­a­bly a lit­tle embar­rassed. That was six months ago. They are still search­ing for miss­ing peo­ple. They announced a cou­ple weeks ago that they were tar­get­ing Boston next since that was where it all began and where League had setup it's headquarters.

When the announce­ment hit the news dad jumped on a plane from LA, where he had been work­ing to setup a west coast divi­sion, and headed back to Boston. They attacked his plane some­where over Kansas and brought it down. They pulled my father from the plane, tor­tured him for fun then fin­ished the job they started back when they first attacked the lab. I'm told he died quickly once they decided to kill him. Small consultation.

Steph came out after a cou­ple hours and is stand­ing next to me. We stay like that, nei­ther of us talk­ing for sev­eral min­utes until the sirens start­ing going off, announc­ing Asgards arrival in Boston, and my sig­nal that it was time to met the rest of the team.

I really wish it wasn't such a nice day.

---


 Gus­tav sat up as the small grey and black dog walked into through the open gate. He looked around at the pack of dogs that flanked him on both sides.


He smiled, which con­sid­er­ing he was a large Golden Retriever made a fairly expres­sive grin.


"Sam. You have some nerve com­ing here. Espe­cially with out your lit­tle white bodyguard."


"I fig­ured she might upset you a lit­tle after the inci­dent last month, and I wanted to talk to you peacefully."


"Talk? Why should I talk to you? You and your lit­tle 'pets' mean noth­ing to me."
Gustav tried to put every ounce of dis­gust he had into pets. It was a lot.


"Maybe, but the sub­ject mat­ter of our con­ver­sa­tion will inter­est you a great deal. "


"Really. And what could you pos­si­bly want to talk about that I would be inter­ested enough in to pre­vent me from sic­c­ing Thun­der after your scrawny butt?"


"I'm help­ing a cat try to find his friend…"


"A cat!", if pos­si­ble Gus­tav man­aged to put even more dis­gust into cat than he had into pets, "Why on earth would I care about help­ing some flea bit­ten lit­tle furball?!"


"Because he might be a vic­tim of a cat­nap­ping and ani­mal traf­fick­ing." 
 Gus­tav froze with his mouth par­tially open. He close his mouth, licked his lips and looked around at the oth­ers sur­round­ing him. They were all look­ing back at him with a mix­ture of anx­i­ety and sadness.


Finally he low­ered his body to the ground, stretched his paws out in front of him and held his head up.


"Let's talk"


**********


Wat­son was on his hind feet with his front paws on the side of the house try­ing to push his nose as close to the open win­dow as possible.


"Inter­est­ing."


"Whats inter­est­ing?" asked Harley, trot­ting over to see what Wat­son had discovered.


"Sniff and tell me what you smell."


Harley put his nose to the ground and sniffed every­thing he could find. He cir­cled under the win­dow sev­eral times, occa­sion­ally look­ing around as if he expected to some­thing to sud­denly appear.
"Fear."


"And why is that odd?"


Harley sniffed.


He con­tin­ued to sniff and began to work his way away from the house towards the yard.


"Oh, because if he was run­ning away he wouldn't give off fear, but would be anx­ious or nervous."


"Right."


"So he was stolen!"


"Slow down, all it tells us is that he didn't runaway.


Harley sniffed again.


"There's else some inter­est­ing here."


He began weav­ing back and forth across the yard, try­ing to pick up the scent again. Occa­sion­ally he would look around as if expect­ing some­thing to sud­denly appear.
 Sud­denly he froze and looked up at Watson.


"Dog!"
 


**********


"So my con­tacts at both the Wilm­ing­ton and Tewks­bury police depart­ments con­firm what Gus­tav said." Zena said as she set­tled down into a lying posi­tion on the blan­ket next to Sebas­t­ian, "There have been 31 thefts in the last 3 months. No one has any idea who is doing."


"Is there any kind of pattern?"


"Not really. They are tak­ing all types of dogs from pure breed to mutt, cats, rab­bits, ham­sters and even a par­rot. The only anom­aly seems to be age. Older ani­mals aren't being taken."
 "So all young animals."


"Yep." replied Zena. She sat on the floor and looked around at every­one. The only miss­ing mem­bers of the group were Tim­o­thy and Mag­gie who were assist­ing Mal­com with the search for Peri.


Every­one had returned home and gath­ered to share what infor­ma­tion they had gath­ered. No one looked par­tic­u­larly happy.


Sam paced around in cir­cles. He went over to the water bowl, got a drink and water, and with his beard still wet sat down and looked at Watson.


"What did you guys learn at Peri and Chester's house?"


"There was a lot of fear scent all over the place under the win­dow and even some up the wall. Almost like he was try­ing to climb back in."


"Fear scent would be expected in a kid­nap­ping" replied Zena, "Even up the wall. He was prob­a­bly try­ing to get away."


"That was my orig­i­nal the­ory, but he wasn't kid­napped. We fol­lowed the fear scent away from the win­dow and across the yard to a tall oak tree. He appar­ently climbed the tree to escape a dog."


"Wait," inter­rupted Sam, "What do you mean escape a dog?"


"There was a dog scent that over­lapped the trail we fol­lowed out to the woods, but it doesn't look like the dog was actu­ally chas­ing him."


"Wouldn't the dog cause the fear even if he ran away?", Sam asked.


"The dog scent seemed to weave back and forth across Peri's. It appears the dog fol­lowed the scent to the tree, cir­cled a few times and finally gave up."


"Did you find any place where Peri came down?" Zena asked.


Wat­son waited and after a few sec­onds nudged Harley gen­tly with his nose.


"Oh right! Yea!" Harley exclaimed real­iz­ing it was his turn to share infor­ma­tion, "This was my idea! The branches in the trees are thick and look fairly sturdy. There are a lot of them close together and I think Peri, real­iz­ing there was a dog below, must have used the branches to travel with­out com­ing out of the tree."


Tim sud­denly appeared in the win­dow out of breath, "Malcom's patrols found Peri!", he shouted, "He's about 2 miles away in a lit­tle cul­vert. They said he looks okay but appears to be scared out of his mind. Not that I blame his with all those birds cir­cling overhead."


"It's far­ther than I thought he would be but if he used the branches like Harley sug­gested it would be pos­si­ble." replied Sam as he stood up and began pac­ing in circles.


"Far­ther than you thought? You know some­thing we don't?" Tim­o­thy asked as he leapt down from the win­dow and sat fac­ing Sam.


"I think have a fairly good idea of what hap­pened, and I believe I know how."
 
 


Sub­mit­ting this to the #tues­day­se­r­ial to see what hap­pens and in the hope it forces me to fin­ish the story . I'm leav­ing all the com­ments from the orig­i­nal sub­mis­sion waaay back in Octo­ber of last year (god, has it really been that long).

Wife edited and approved. Hope you have as much fun read­ing as I did writ­ing. Com­ments (even crit­i­cal) encouraged!

---

Tim­o­thy lay curled up in the big bay win­dow, his orange and white tail hang­ing casu­ally off the edge, swish­ing lazily back and forth while he ignored the seag­ull cir­cling overhead.

When the gull landed on the rail­ing out­side the win­dow he gave a big sigh but refused to oth­er­wise move.

"Hey youse guys," shouted the gull.

'Seri­ously? A Boston accent?" replied Tim lift­ing his head.

"Hey, I'm a gull from Baw­ston, whadda want?"

"Char­lie, you live down the street, eat out of our trash and have vis­ited Boston once."

Tim put his head back down, hop­ing the gull would take the hint.

He didn't.

"Believes what youse want cat. Any­ways, I gotta case for youse guys."

Tim heaved another sigh, gave up on nap­ping, stood up and stretched.

"Okay fine. Whats the case?"

"This mook down the street was telling me his room­mate got cat snatched yes­ter­day. He's afraid it might be part of that there theft ring that's going around. He asked me for help and of course I sug­gest he hire the Pack."

Tim sat and started at the gull. He squinted his eyes. He swished his tail.

"Theft ring?"

"Yea, there's been a bunch of these ani­mal thefts in da neigh­bor­hood lately. Dogs, cats, even a cou­ple rabbits."

Tim swished his tail some more.

"I assume you men­tioned our rates?"

"For­getaboutit. He can't cover, I will. You know I'm good forit."

"Right, " Tim stared some more, "Bring your mook by this after­noon, I'll let Sam know to expect you."

"Fan­tas­tic."

"And Char­lie? Lose the accent."

**********

Sam sat on the blan­ket on the floor fac­ing the oth­ers with a small grey cat sit­ting ner­vously beside him. In front sat 3 other dogs and 3 cats includ­ing Tim. Sam had his black and grey tail curled up against his back while he waited for the oth­ers to set­tle down.

"Let me intro­duce every­one. The black and white cat is Mag­gie, the two orange tab­bies are Tim­o­thy and Sebas­t­ian, the white Schnoo­dle dog is Zena, the black and tan Ter­rier that can't stay still is Harley, and the black and grey Schnoo­dle is Wat­son. Every­one, this is Chester. He was brought to us by Charlie."

The lit­tle grey cat nod­ded to each ani­mal as they were intro­duce. Each dog bowed their head when their name was called, the cats merely swished their tail.

"Accord­ing to Chester here, there have been sev­eral cats and dogs taken from their homes in the area over the last few days. Yes­ter­day his house­mate Peri, who is a small grey Burmese like him­self dis­ap­peared. Chester is afraid Peri was taken by the thieves. All he knows is that Peri jumped into a win­dow late in the after­noon, a win­dow with a locked screen, and when Chester return from the lit­ter box Peri was gone and the screen was missing."

"Any infor­ma­tion on this sup­posed rash of thefts?" asked Watson.

"It's not 'sup­posed' replied Chester, I heard from Lula next door that the dog across the street was taken!"

"Relax Chester, I'm not doubt­ing you. We take every­thing as con­di­tional until proven. " Wat­son shifted slightly on the floor, "It helps if we don't go into things with our minds already set on cat­nap­ping. Might miss something."

Chester nod­ded. He was still ner­vous being sur­rounded by so many dogs. Char­lie hadn't men­tioned there would be so many. He licked his paw to help calm him­self and tried to relax a bit. It didn't work.

"Bas­tion, can you escort Chester and make sure he gets home safely?"

"Cer­taintly." Sebas­t­ian replied as he stood up and stretched, "Come on kid."

Sam nuz­zled Chester with his nose gen­tly to encour­age him along.

"You'll be safe with Sebas­t­ian, he might not look like much but he can be tough when he needs to."

Sebas­t­ian glanced at Sam, flicked his tail twice and headed out the door, Chester fol­lowed gin­gerly behind. After they had left the room Sam stood up and began to pace.

"Some­thing both­er­ing you?" asked Zena

"Yes. I've heard rumors about the rash of kid­nap­pings recently, but this doesn't feel like one and it's bug­ging me as to why."

Zena stretched out on the floor as Harley twitched around in a circle.

"You think­ing this wasn't a cat­nap­ping but a run away?" asked Harley

"It had occurred to me, but there is still too much we don't know. You and Wat­son inves­ti­gate Chesters house, focus on the out­side for now. See if you can find any evi­dence or clues that will give us a direc­tion. Zena, you can­vas the neigh­bor­hood. Talk to any dogs or cats or any­thing else that will talk to you about the thefts and see what you can find."

"What shall Tim­o­thy and I do?" asked Maggie.

"I need you two to go talk to Mal­com. See if he can arrange some aer­ial sur­veil­lance of the area. Maybe they can spot Peri or some kind of trail"

"And what are you going to do?"

"I'm going to try to talk to Gus­tav. If there is kind of ani­mal traf­fick­ing going on he will at least have heard about it."