2. Prologue
Director Johnson leaned over the mic. "Senators," he concluded, "it is my considered opinion that the long-term negative effects incurred by a lack of threat response are much worse than casualties faced at the hands of Behemoth."
Senator Pierce looked up at Johnson, over the rim of his glasses; down at Johnson, over the edge of the chamber seating; down at Johnson, the condescension in his voice dripping onto the floor below. "How do you rectify that with the nearly existential threat faced every time Behemoth appears?"
Johnson replied quickly. "And the difference made - by any single Parahuman, in a conflict against an existential threat? - insignificant."
Senator Pierce countered. "On the contrary, it is the contributions of the individual Parahumans that
make a difference. Not to mention the unpredictable and...exponential...ways in which their powers can combine and synergize."
"And this synergy typically happens between heroes and the villains that fight them, in the heat of battle, when communication is hectic at best?" Johnson scoffed, "The FBI longitudinal cross-study of declassified PRT records from the last year of Behemoth battles shows
little villain-hero collaboration in fights, especially in - as you put it - 'synergistic' - ways."
"It is soldiers that win wars, director - not armies."
Johnson snorted to himself. That was one hell of a ballsy thing to say, what with one of the Joint Chiefs in the committee chambers right now.
The senator finished "-and it is my view that removing any soldiers from a conflict that has the potential to sweep a city off the face of the planet is an unacceptable price."
"Will the senator yield the remainder of his time?"
Senator Pierce affirmed that he was finished, and a senator from New York began speaking into her microphone. "In this war with celestial monsters, so much worse than any of the terrible monsters like Godzilla that captured our imagination..." The speaker paused, and Director Johnson again snorted to himself. Massive monster films hadn't quite seemed as entertaining after Behemoth showed up the second or third time. Certainly there was a huge spike in sales of
Godzilla ,
Mothra , and the like, in the immediate wake of Behemoth's emergence in Iran. But within a few appearances - certainly by the time New York got hit - the interest waned. It's not much fun to make-believe about a nightmare that could wipe out everything you knew of a city in hours. Especially when that nightmare was a recurring one: a wailing siren that rose in cities across the world multiple times a year since that first time in Iran...
Johnson was snapped back to what the senator from New York (Sen. Weinfeld, he noted, reading the embossed plaque in front of her) was saying, but was surprised to find it departing in a different direction than he had initially thought it was going.
"While it is true that this price is indeed high, I think Senator Pierce will recognize that the price of
every city slowly rotting is higher yet. The price of losing a few more lives, of risking the loss of an entire city, is high indeed. But we are left with no economical option. Since the appearance of Scion 1982, much of our agency has been taken away from us. While many have turned their powers to good, it is a fact I think the entire committee can easily recognize-" She paused, eyeing key members of the Senate committee in turn. "-that most have not. Most have used their powers to bend or break the law, or to live outside its confines altogether. The erosion of
our power to make choices leaves us with these few expensive options."
Weinfeld continued, "Organized crime was a thing of the past at one point in time, yet we find ourselves in a worse situation now than before. Since Hobbs, we've gradually eliminated public corruption in the United States. Organized crime, however, is at its highest levels since prohibition. If we do not act, we will see the gradual erosion of public power and the rule of law,
as we have been seeing ."
She paused for breath, "This decision is not just about the long-term tradeoff of fewer drugs and weapons on the streets. This decision is also about the future of the rule of law in the United States of America. Without the rule of law, there is no state. So yes, it is an expensive decision. But the alternative is unspeakably costly. What does it matter if Behemoth arrives in Los Angeles and does slightly less damage, if all following relief efforts fail because the city is under feudal control? The resurgence of the Mafia in my own state..." She snorted.
Director Johnson looked at Senator Pierce. He did not look as certain as he had at the beginning of this. There were two wars to be fought, and they were both wars of attrition. One was against a monster, the other against the massed forces of human villains - a fight against human nature, a far more insidious threat than a monster. But it was hard to convince somebody who held conviction that Behemoth posed the greater threat. Behemoth presented an out-of-context problem for humans. How do you fight a literal monster, a being not of this planet? His skin appeared to be made of rock - obsidian, or something like it - but only a naive interpretation of his appearance suggested this. Bullets did not chip his skin. Tank shells did not pierce his armor. Air-to-air missiles launched from fighters and tactical weaponry dropped from bombers did little more than enrage him.
Because of this, it was easy to imagine he was the greatest threat to humanity. Johnson might even agree, but that did not mean he was the only threat, or that sacrificing a slight advantage against him - the willing cooperation of some of the world's villains - was not worth addressing other threats.
Parahuman villains. There was little doubt in Johnson's mind that whatever gave Parahumans their powers gave Behemoth his, too. For thousands of years, the laws of physics were just that. Then the laws became violable, mutable: suggestions. No way the appearance of a literal monster within the same lifetime of people who could manipulate energy with a whim
wasn't related.
So the war against Parahuman villains and the war against Behemoth were both wars of attrition - and wars humanity was losing. But Behemoth...nobody had any solutions. For this exact reason - the lack of experience or perspective with which to view this Behemoth - the creature seemed like the bigger problem to policy makers, the general populace, and those on the side of the law. Johnson saw this, the monumental problem that lay ahead of humanity (or rather, below them, tunnelling through the crust and upper mantle to emerge every few months). He just also saw the long game, and thought maybe the Senators were finally beginning to see it too.
Parahuman villain-backed organized crime. In the late twenties and early thirties it had been members of his agency - then called the Bureau of Prohibition (of which the ATF was a direct descendant) - who had mounted offensives against the likes of the unstoppable Al Capone. His agency was now focused on the border from the West Coast to the Gulf Coast, trying to stop (or even slow) the flow of weapons and drugs over the border from the south. Cartel warlords had the same air of invincibility that Capone had in the mid-to-late twenties. And their aura was spreading. Spreading north of the border, and helped by the drug dealer's recruitment of Parahumans.
It used to be that if you caught somebody dealing on the side of the road, and got them to turn their supplier (that part was easy enough), and somehow traced the supply chain back a few links (where it got harder), you'd eventually get to somebody who was too afraid of dying to talk. And that person was usually only a few spots on the badguy orgchart from the actual drug runners coming over the border.
It was a cell-based design. Each person only knew the names of maybe their supplier, a few peers, and whoever they sold to. Optimized for a war where the adversary was the government - and all it could do was throw you in jail for a couple decades if they caught you with your pants down. The chief security was obscurity: it kept you from getting caught, tagged, and locked up.
But now? Once the top guy recruited a few parahuman enforcers, and the proliferation of powered people spread through the ranks? Power began to be the real security. Now, the police wouldn't come after anyone too high up on the orgchart, because they couldn't afford to get into that kind of conflict. Or because they couldn't afford to kill a Parahuman, because you
might help with Behemoth's next appearance. And even if they did tag you, some friends could break you out en-route to prison.
Now it was an actual organization. None of the dark network, subterfuge-based cell design. Everyone knew who their boss was and could afford to say it aloud because their boss had
power , and could protect them. The more Parahumans the gangs got, the more power they got, the more public they could be. And the more public they were, the more parahumans they recruited. If nobody had noticed the snowball gathering size and speed at first, they were noticing now.
The United States had started to take a firm stance on organized crime with those heroes in the late twenties. The stance would firm up over the next few decades. Ultimately, though, Parahuman criminals represented the same out-of-context problem Behemoth did. Most good guys thought they understood the bad guys - just normal criminals and villains, but a little bit stronger - but ATF Director Johnson
knew they did not. Organized crime had found some sort of loophole - some sort of blind spot - in the public and private awareness by attaching itself to Parahumans. The US government had made it clear that organized crime was not permitted in the country, but then they had gone and let it spring up under the guiding hands of Parahumans. Criminal gangs operating across the country, and some with deeper connection to outside groups. Gesellschaft had connections in New England,
La Cosa Nostra had seen a resurgence in New York since their steady erosion in the wake of RICO in the seventies, and of course - the growing problem of cartel connections in Mexico.
New gangs were forming constantly. If you were a villain and wanted to start a gang, all you had to do was find a few jerkoffs who shared the same ideals as you and had powers and you were seriously in contention for most powerful group of any midsize-to-large city.
A mention of his name snapped Johnson out of his train of thought, but he had missed whatever it was that was said. Senator Pierce was speaking: "-and the focus is on Parahuman-backed organized crime." Pierce looked at him for a reply.
"Correct, senator. Again, the apprehending and interrogation of Parahumans in most cases is still left to the PRT. The purpose of the proposition here is just to focus on removing Parahumans from the power structure of existing organized crime groups so that my agency and the FBI can make traditional raids and arrests."
Pierce, seeking confirmation, asked: "It is, as the proposal says-"
"A surgical strike force."
---
Senator Pierce was the main opposition to the passing of the Act. Johnson could hear from the direction of his questions that he had largely been persuaded; you don't advance quickly through the ranks of field agents without having some capability to read people.
Johnson smiled, remembering his time spent in interrogation rooms with perps. He would never admit it to anybody who he spent time talking to these days - all of them were ranked way too high to let something like this slip - but he had honestly enjoyed himself the most as a Field Agent. There was something that really appealed to him about the dynamic in an interrogation room - the psychological battlefield he could almost see superimposed on the cold steel desks they sat at during interrogations. The suspect always had a simple objective: walk out of the room without saying anything incriminating, without giving anything up. The rules about what he could do (not much) and could not do (pretty much everything) during an interrogation made it hard, and most people saw them as fetters on the capabilities of law enforcement. But not him. To him, they were a challenge.
It was this attitude, and his ability to overcome those challenges like no other, that led to his promotion. His promotion brought with it new objectives and new challenges as he was promoted to Special Agent, and eventually to Director. At every level of the organization the objective shifted a little on the spectrum - from bringing down a single suspect to mounting a cohesive offensive against an entire organization. His goals became wider, his methods more macro-oriented. But every so often, he still got to employ his charisma and ability to read people - like at this Senatorial Committee hearing.
His expertise was telling him that the committee was all but ready to pass the Act into law. And he was ready to start taking down Parahumans, to change his goals and strategies once again. He was ready for the new challenges, and he suspected this would be the greatest yet.
