The Ark was a hive of activity, with engineers and volunteers and observers crawling over and through every traversable inch -and many inches that weren’t quite so traversable, but were damn well being traversed anyway-, as it had been ever since Raven Reyes and Octavia Blake had departed. The people were excited, determined, and hopeful for the first time in at least a couple of decades, and the energy that they were putting into their efforts was nothing short of incredible.
And why wouldn’t it be?
For the first time in living memory, for the first time in a century, it actually looked as though they might be able to go home. They might be able to breathe real air, not recycled, to hear the sound of wind in the trees and feel the breeze on their face. They’d be able to plant crops, and purify water, and rations would become a dimly remembered thing of the past.
That was something tangible, something real. It wasn’t an ever-distant and bitter-tinged dream any longer. The people aboard the Ark could now look down at the world their great-grandparents had been born on, had walked on, and say: That’s where we’re going. That’s home. That’s going to be us. In a few months, we won’t be looking down from the stars…we’ll be looking up at them.
And that knowledge? That changed everything for everyone.
It changed how people walked the halls and corridors, how they carried themselves and how they spoke to one another. It changed the expressions on their faces and the tenor of their voices. There was a lightness now, a buoyancy that had been absent longer than most of them had been a live, so weighed down as everyone had been by the knowledge that their species was, through them, hanging on to existence by its very fingernails. There was still some tension, some grudges that weren’t quite gone and some discomfort between the stations that would linger for some time yet, but no one was interested in letting such things hold back their efforts. What was the point in holding onto bitterness, in acting on that bitterness, when salvation from what so many of them feared would be their tomb was crossing the horizon?
Of course, it wasn’t only the general population that was busy, the Council had rolled up their sleeves -for the most part- and were either leading the way, lending a hand, or helping organize things as best they could. They hadn’t even been meeting all that often, only short interactions or messages to keep one another updated on the progress that they were making in there various spheres of responsibility and projects.
Then ‘that’ had happened.
The activation of precisely thirty-two energy signatures of immense power -from what records that they had, whatever was generating them had to be fission powered at the very least- placed equidistantly around the planet. At first, the technicians that had noticed them activating had panicked, believing that some sort of global power-plant melt down was occurring, or perhaps some sort of malfunction in leftover ICBMs had them detonating, ruining mankind’s homecoming. That, however, had been swiftly shut down. Nuclear power-plants didn’t just explode, that’s not at all how that worked, and the records well established the fact that all of the world’s nuclear reactors had been scrammed by their staff the moment the Last War had gone unconventional.
Likewise, ICBMs -or, rather more accurately, their warheads- couldn’t just ‘go off’ due to a malfunction either.
No, whatever was happening down on the home world was something else entirely. The synchronicity implied it was something deliberate, something that had been activated, and as reassuring as that was, it was equally unsettling. Unsettling because the records, the histories, and even the oral knowledge that the Ark possessed didn’t give even the slightest hint as to what the source of these signatures could be.
After they’d been notified, it had taken Sinclair and his team the better part of a day to gather enough data with their meagre resources to even begin forming the thinnest of hypotheses, and what they’d been able to find and extrapolate had only ended up deepening the mystery further. The energy signatures weren’t just powerful, they were clean. Impossibly clean. As far as every resource that the Ark could bring to bear could determine, they weren’t generating any form of radiation whatsoever. Which, again, was deeply reassuring and unsettling alike.
As clean as the weapons used in The Last War had been, as far as technology had come before the world ended, that level of technology was beyond their known capabilities. Which, logically, had to mean that the governments of the world had been hiding things, powerful things, while in the midst of a near-extinction-causing war. It made no sense, but what other explanation could there be for a technology that, by all appearances, was not just beyond fission, but beyond fusion?
It meant that there was more going on than any of them knew, and who wouldn’t be discomfited by such a thing?
That being said, if they could land in close proximity to those power sources, they would likely find shelter and supplies, and were guaranteed to have access to all the electricity that they could possibly hope for. Which, of course, meant that those massive mysteries might just end up being one of the greatest strokes of luck that humanity had ever experienced, even if they might not be able to take immediate advantage just yet.
After all, even with the population fully engaged in their work, it would take weeks before anyone else could be sent down to Earth in an Exodus ship. That didn’t mean that they couldn’t plan, however, and quite a lot of planning had been underway at all hours, most of it only vaguely official and definitively spontaneous.
Which, as it turned out, ended up being a very good source of protection for Marcus Kane and Abigail Griffin to continue meeting privately in her quarters. Meetings that had some small part to do with what promised to be a budding romance, to the surprise and tentative happiness of all involved, but had significantly more to do with Abby revealing more and more of what Jake had revealed to her about his family legacy to her companion.
A risk, given how devoted Marcus had always been to enforcing the rules, to maintaining law and order, and in another world she never would have trusted him. But this Marcus had been changed by his constant exposure to Clarke, this Marcus valued justice as much as he valued maintaining the law, and this Marcus was as horrified as she was by the beliefs of the Templar Order.
And by what they had done throughout history in an effort to enforce those same beliefs, the Last War amongst them.
He hadn’t been able to believe it at first, had laughed in Abby’s face and asked her if this was her way of recommending a new book series to him, and why wouldn’t he? The idea that two groups had been waging a secret war behind the scenes for all of recorded human history, and possibly before that, for the fate of mankind was the stuff of fantasy. Throw in the ironic twist that the devout holy order was actually the villains seeking world domination, and the back-stabbing, dishonorable order of assassins were the ones fighting for free will and self-determination only reinforced that impression.
Oh, and he couldn’t forget that humans were the slave-descendants of another, more evolved version of humanity that had set themselves up as gods by using their unfathomably powerful technology, technology so powerful that it could literally rewrite memories and personalities, down to the very genetic level!
Then she’d shown him some of the things Jake had left behind. Journals, notes, ciphers. Things that she hadn’t even known existed until he’d died, things that he’d deliberately kept from her in an effort to keep her safe. Things that they’d had to work on breaking together, spending hours hunched over scratched notes, scattered books, and strings of seemingly-nonsensical numbers and letters.
What few things they were able to decipher had reinforced Abby’s statements, but Marcus had still been more than a little skeptical. Clarke was incredible, especially for a girl her age, he would be the first one to admit that. A good leader, both in the decisions she made and the loyalty she engendered, with a deep and passionate love for their people and a burning desire to make their lives better. But an heiress to some sort of super-human legacy that had been the origin of some of the greatest, most legendary, even mythical heroes of human history?
Asking him to believe that was more than a bit much.
But then the energy signatures had shown up, with no information being found or known to what they were or how they could exist or even what was generating the power to begin with. Things beyond all known technology of mankind, so far beyond it that even ‘secret government programs’ was far from sufficient to explain it all.
And suddenly, the idea that there was something else out there, something that predated human civilization as they knew it and had technology beyond their understanding, didn’t seem quite so fantastical anymore. Naturally, with that possibility came the probability that two differing groups, each knowing of this ancient secret, would develop very different intentions for such power.
Which made it all to easy to believe that a war between those two groups, a war that had grown to be between not just nations but entire regions and peoples of the world, would finally push someone into using Weapons of Mass Destruction.
And that…that was really the crux of it all, wasn’t it? In the end, the Last War hadn’t been about ideologies, or at least not as most people would imagine the word. It wasn’t about methods of governance, systems of finance, or even religious beliefs. Not really, anyway. Oh, plenty of the soldiers that had fought had been fighting for exactly those things, most of them even. Hell, the governments were fighting for those things. But none of them had realized that behind all of that was another, far more ancient war with a far simpler prize: control. About just who would get to decide the future of the human race, on whose terms and with what tools.
The Templars had wanted order. Absolute, unquestionable, enforced order, backed by the power of artifacts that could literally program obedience at a neurological level. The result would be a world without war, without crime, without dissent…but also without choice, without growth, without the messy, beautiful, often-infuriating chaos that made humanity what it was and had brought it so far. And the Assassins had wanted freedom. The right of every person to think, to choose, to fail and succeed on their own terms and by their own merits. Even if, all to often and all to terribly, that same freedom came with all the blood and suffering that free will inevitably and eventually produced.
Two visions of paradise, each one with merits that could be argued until the damn sun went out, and each one with flaws potent enough to bring the world crashing down when pushed to the extreme and left with neither the space nor the will to back down.
And so each had lost, and in doing so cost humanity almost everything.
It was enough to make a man cry, which he had at least once in the privacy of his own room, and drive a man to drink. Which it hadn’t, because Marcus didn’t doubt things were only going to get more complicated, and he wasn’t interested in drinking himself to death. Nor, for that matter, was he the sort of man to drink as a method of handling stress to begin with. As far as he was concerned, getting blackout drunk to handle stress or grief just meant that, when you woke up the next morning with the same damn problems that had started you drinking in the first place, you’d be having to deal with a hangover on top of everything else.
No, Marcus Kane handled his stress the way he handled everything else: by doing his job. By working to solve the problem, working to discover a solution where possible and create one where not. And in this case, doing his job meant learning as much as he could about this ancient conflict from what Jake had left behind.
It also meant understanding Clarke’s place in it all, because if even half of what Jake’s coded journals suggested was true, then his protégé wasn’t just a remarkably gifted young woman with an outsized sense of responsibility. She was something else entirely, something that the world hadn’t seen in a very, very long time, and something that both sides of this ancient war would have very strong opinions about.
The Templar remnants —if any survived, and given the cockroach-like tenacity that seemed to define the Order throughout history, Marcus was grimly confident that they did, even if he wasn’t entirely onboard with Abby’s claims that Thelonious was one of them— would see her as either the ultimate asset or the ultimate threat. There was no middle ground with people like that. You were either a tool to be used or an obstacle to be removed, and Clarke Griffin had never been particularly good at being either.
The Assassins, on the other hand... well, that was murkier, which in some ways was worrying. Jake’s notes suggested that the Assassins weren’t much better than the Templars at times. They tried to limit collateral damage -it was one of their cardinal edicts, really, ‘stay your blade from the blood of the innocent’- but unfortunately how closely that particular dictate was followed tended to be flexible. Not to mention the fact that their typical modus operandi was murdering people in cold blood, often-times after gaining their trust, even their friendship.
That wasn’t exactly the sort of thing that made a man sleep soundly at night, no matter how noble the stated cause behind the deed might be. Sure, he could understand the logic behind it, the idea behind targeted killing to remove leadership preventing larger casualties from outright warfare, but that didn’t mean he was comfortable with it, and it certainly didn’t mean that it was always successful.
Cutting the head off the snake might kill the snake, but if the snake was a hydra, it’s new head might be a lot worse than the old one ever was. And God knew, oh did God know, that history -written and unwritten alike- was nothing less than full of examples where killing a tyrant had only resulted in a successor that proved far worse than the person they had killed. Not all the time, and sometimes it had been necessary regardless, but it hadn’t exactly been rare either.
Frankly, though, and even with all of that being true, he still found himself more on the side of the Brotherhood than he did the Templars. Not by much, perhaps, but he recognized a fundamental reality of the situation: that freedom with consequences, however wretched and horrible those consequences might sometimes be, was still freedom. Order, peace, and security without having any choice was really just slavery in better packaging.
Which had led to more than a few hours of quiet, uncomfortable contemplation in private when it came to the nature and society of the Ark, but he was also wise enough to know that life on the Ark had had to be limited, if the human race was going to live long enough to return home and learn from their mistakes. The key difference, he knew, would be the relinquishment of that absolute control and unforgiving laws the moment it was possible to do so.
A slippery slope, those last few words, but one that existed nonetheless.
“You’re think too hard again.” Abby’s soft voice cut into his thoughts, gentle but firm, and he gave a short, tired chuckle as he accepted the mug of ‘coffee’ -which was little more than an artificial stimulant in hot water, but it was the closest that the Ark had and did the same job- that she offered him.
“I am, yes, but I don’t think I have much of a choice, under the circumstances. After all, it turns out that I know exactly, or damn near, why and how those ‘enormous, unknown power sources’ exist, but I can’t prove it and I can’t say a damn thing about it, either!” he shook his head, his laughter mostly-mirthless exhaustion of the mental and emotional as much as it was the physical, and Abby hummed softly in agreement as she sipped from her own mug.
“No, no you can’t. Not now, not yet, and maybe not ever, depending on how things play out over the next few months.” she agreed, settling in beside him on the couch and making herself comfortable, not quite against his side but not too terribly far away from it either. “Certainly not before we get back to Earth and see what happens.”
“See if Thelonious loosens his grip a bit, you mean.” he corrected, well aware that it’s what she really meant, and she tilted her head in acknowledgement. Running a hand through his hair, he sighed again. “I don’t know that you’re right about him, Abby, but I’ll admit that I don’t find the possibility quite as outlandish as I wish I could.”
“I know what I’ve heard, Marcus, and I know what I’ve researched. There isn’t a single god I could find in mythology that had ‘Father of Understanding’ as an epithet. Not in ancient times, and not the more modern faiths. The only reference I have to that title is from Jake’s notes, as the being that the Templars…well, they didn’t pray to him, necessarily, but they did refer to him often enough in a semi-religious way.” Abby responded a bit sharply, huffing softly in aggravation, and he gave her an apologetic smile.
“Abby, I’m not calling you a liar, but you’re already asking me to take a lot on faith. Faith that I have in you, and faith I like to think I’ve followed up on quite nicely.” he said gently, enjoying the way her cheeks tinted faintly at the subtle expression of praise and trust in those words, even as she turned her head away slightly with a scowl. “And I’ll even agree that a lot of his actions and decisions, especially about your family, make a lot more sense if he’s a Templar. But I think he’s genuinely ignorant of what’s going on down on Earth, just like we are, and I’m not going to write the man off without giving him a chance.”
“A chance to do what, exactly?” Abby asked, and he was gratified by the fact that there was no hostility in the question, only genuine curiosity and perhaps a trace of weariness. “Reform? Step aside gracefully? Accept that the world he wants to build isn’t the one that’s coming, because his people killed the old one trying?”
“Any of those. All of those. I don’t know, Abby, I really don’t.” Marcus admitted, staring into the murky depths of his mug as if it might offer some sort of divine revelation from a God he wasn’t sure he’d ever believed in. It didn’t, of course. It never did, never had, and probably never would. “But I’ve spent the better part of two decades enforcing rules that I now know were often -not always, but often- necessary but not always just, and I did it without questioning them nearly as much as I should have. I’m not going to make the same mistake in the other direction by condemning a man without giving him the opportunity to prove me wrong.”
He shrugged lightly.
“If he’s just an ambitious man who made terrible decisions under impossible pressure, then we can work with that. We can manage him, redirect him, and eventually he’ll find his place in whatever new world we build with Clarke’s help. If he’s not, we deal with it however we need to whenever we need to.”
Abby was quiet for a long moment, long enough that Marcus glanced over to check if she’d fallen asleep from the exhaustion weighing them both down. She hadn’t, of course. Her eyes were open and fixed on the far wall, though he doubted she was actually seeing it. In fact, he knew she wasn’t, because he recognized that look. It’s what the Old World probably would have called a Thousand-Yard Stare. The look of someone who’d seen a lot, done a lot, and was haunted by it.
“Maybe you’re right, Marcus, but…Jake tried that.” she said at last, and her voice was so dreadfully quiet, almost broken. It was disturbing to hear, coming from someone so stalwart and opinionated as Abigail Griffin. “He tried giving Thelonious the benefit of the doubt. Trying to believe that their friendship meant something, that the man he’d grown up with, the man who’d stood beside him at our wedding, wouldn’t...” she trailed off, jaw tightening, and Marcus felt something cold settle in his stomach as he was forced to acknowledge the point that she was making. “He tried, Marcus, begged and pleaded. And when it came down to it, when he tried to do the right thing regardless, Thelonious proved unworthy of that trust.”
Marcus was silent as he set down his mug on the small side table, the soft clink of aged ceramic on faux-wood almost painfully loud in that silence. He…didn’t really have a response for that, certainly not a rebuttal. He wished that wasn’t true, desperately wished that, because the alternative was the idea that a man he considered a friend and supported in leading their people because he was their best choice and chance was…not as good a man as he’d always thought that he was.
Which was, or could be, a bitter pill to swallow.
“I’m not saying you’re wrong, that you’re lying to me.” he reiterated, feeling a bit helpless. He’d never been particularly good at this sort of thing, he was a pretty direct person and not always the best at dealing with emotional moments. “But if I’m going to come to the conclusions that you think I will, if what you’re worried about is going to end up being true, then I need to come to those conclusions myself. I’ll watch him, and I’ll keep my eyes open, alright?”
“That’s all I’m asking, Marcus.” Abby murmured, and there was relief in her voice, thin but genuine, the kind that came not necessarily from having won an argument, but from knowing that her words had been both heard and taken to heart. She shifted slightly, and this time she did lean against his side, just barely, her shoulder pressing against his upper arm with a tentative warmth that made his breath catch for reasons that had nothing to do with ancient conspiracies or power-hungry chancellors and everything to do with the proximity of a beautiful woman he had long admired and now had rather complicated feelings for.
He didn’t move away, though. Didn’t comment on it either, because commenting on it would mean acknowledging it, and acknowledging it would mean having to decide what it meant, and he wasn’t sure either of them was ready for that particular conversation. Certainly not tonight, not when so much other heavy conversation and thinking had been taking place, and not when he’d just gently rebuffed her like he had! He knew bad decision when he saw it, and that would most certainly qualify.
Instead, he simply sat there, sipping terrible coffee in comfortable silence with a woman he cared for, letting the future worry about itself for at least a few minutes more.
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Diane Sydney wasn’t a happy woman. For a wonder, she wasn’t currently an angry woman either. Nor was she entirely ambivalent. It was a confusing mix, really, because on the one hand all the inroads she made on fomenting dissent in preparation of a coup when Jaha’s little plans inevitably became both public and a disaster had gone completely to waste. More than that, the current Council -especially that cunt Abby Griffin- had pulled the populace well onto their side with their little earth settlement ploy. It would be suicide to go against them now, even her most die-hard supporters wouldn’t want to risk their chances of going back to Earth.
On the other hand, where one door closed, another one opened. If the Council was going to send a bunch of people down to Earth ahead of time, starting with the kids in the Skybox, then she would have plenty of opportunity to tip the odds in her favor. After all, the juvenile criminals were children, which meant that they were emotional and easy to manipulate. If she could get herself sent down to the ground alongside them, turn them into a little band of loyal levers to bend their parents with, while making herself a little more popular with the adults in the effort.
Granted, getting herself sent down to Earth with the kids probably wouldn’t be the easiest thing in the world. She wasn’t exactly popular with the Council these days, and she didn’t think she could press her supporters into a work-strike for leverage at this point. It would undercut her too much, even risk turning her main powerbase against her.
Unless…this might be something Shumway could be useful for. If he recommended it, in order to keep her from ‘causing problems’ on the Ark, to remove a ‘potentially problematic element’, Kane would probably be able to convince the rest of the Council to go along with it. Of course, a member of Ark Security would have to go along, and who better than the man who’d recommended the plan to begin with?
It was almost elegant in its simplicity, really. Shumway gets to play the dutiful officer to the Council and second-in-command to Kane, she gets boots -and the influence with them- on the ground before anyone else of real political consequence, and the Council gets to pat themselves on the back for being proactive about ‘managing’ her. Everyone wins, or at least everyone thinks they do, which was often more important than the reality of the situation. Especially when it was to her benefit, rather than their own.
She’d have to be careful about the timing, of course. Too eager and it would raise suspicions. Too late and the slots would be filled by people the Council actually wanted down there. The sweet spot was somewhere in the middle: after the plan was publicly announced and the kids in question chosen, but before the final roster for the adults was locked in. That would give her enough time to make sure all the pieces were in place and that Shumway was ready to do his part. Not to mention she would have to take the time to inform him through third parties, since it wouldn’t exactly work out if he made the suggestion after having a meeting with her.
Speaking of Shumway, she thought she had an idea of how to dispose of him now. He’d make a useful ‘heavy’ with the kids on the ground, a heavy that she could push back against to win their trust, their loyalty. And when he finally, inevitably, pushed too hard at her prodding, she’d ‘save’ the kids from him one final time.
It would be messy, of course. Shumway wasn’t stupid, for all that he was vicious, short-sighted, and even naive, but if she gave herself away he would catch on and turn on her just as quickly as he’d turned on Kane and the rest of the Council. Fortunately, though, by the time she needed to get rid of him, he’d be isolated. On the ground, away from any allies he might have cultivated on the Ark, surrounded by children who feared and hated him. All she’d need was one moment of genuine violence on his part —and she didn’t think that would be too hard to arrange, not with juvenile delinquents and the stress of a new, dangerous environment— and she’d have all the justification she needed.
The kids would tell their parents what a hero she’d been, and she’d own each and every one of them.
Of course, all of this planning was predicated on the assumption that the situation on Earth would be at least somewhat manageable, malleable and manipulatable. That the kids wouldn’t ditch her and go wandering off into the woods at the first opportunity, that they wouldn’t get rid of her and Shumway at the same time, that they were able to survive long enough for everyone else to arrive, and -most importantly at all- that Clarke Griffin and her influence wouldn’t sweep all of her plans right out from under her.
That last concern was, perhaps, the most significant concern of all, and the one that she had the least ability to actually control or plan around. Nobody had much luck at all in controlling the little bitch, including her own damn mother, even before her father had died. In fact, it had always tended to be the opposite, if she was going to be honest, and manipulating her more subtly wasn’t likely to work quite so well as Diane would hope. Her issues with the Council aside, Clarke wouldn’t do anything that she didn’t consider to be ultimately beneficial for mankind as a whole, and while in some ways that probably made her easy to nudge in certain directions, it also made her damn near incorruptible.
The way that she’d stayed pure and idealistic during her queenship of the Skybox had proven that well enough. No abuse of power, no stamping down on dissent, no imposing her will on those who’d bucked her rules or pushed back against her leadership. Few and far between as those people had been. No, all she’d had to do was be a good example and inspire those beneath her to try and rise beyond their nature as prisoners.
If she was a better person, she’d probably be humbled by that fact. Instead, she just found it irritating and problematic. It wasn’t exactly an easy thing to undermine someone who led by genuine virtue, at least not unless they made a genuinely horrific mistake…or unless you didn’t mind making yourself look entirely like a villain in the effort. Which Diane didn’t, since that would undermine literally everything that she was trying to accomplish.
No, Clarke Griffin would have to be worked around, not through. She’d have to be managed indirectly, through third parties and patsies that didn’t know what was really going on, with her influence acknowledged and accounted for rather than challenged head-on. And that meant finding the gaps in her armor, the blind spots in her vision, the places where her idealism couldn’t quite reach or where her attention was stretched too thin. Because everyone had blind spots, even Clarke, and the bigger the responsibility someone carried, the more of those blind spots tended to appear.
The key for success on her part would be finding and understanding how to leverage those blind spots, without anyone catching on and preferably before anyone else could do the same thing that she was aiming to do. Not the easiest thing in the world, especially since all the people she could use most easily to gather the foundational information she needed to start her analysis wouldn’t trust her as far as they could throw her.
Well, she sighed to herself as she made herself comfortable, that just meant that she’d have to get creative about succeeding, didn’t she? And that was just fine, because getting creative about collecting power and achieving revenge were two things that she had a great deal of practice and talent in.
And this time…this time she would be playing for all the marbles.
This time, she’d finally get what she’d been aiming for this last decade.
Chancellorship would be hers again, this time until the day she died, and she would accept no other result.