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xp_logs2008-10-26 10:37 am
x-cyclops.livejournal.com) wrote in xp_logs2008-10-26 10:37 am
Day Zero - Briefing
Things get even more serious when both Val Cooper and Nick Fury show up to brief the X-Men on the situation.
The Situation Room was never a place for mirth on the best of days, but today it seemed like it was more somber than a tomb, well-earning the sobriquet that the younger X-Men tended to give it - the "War Room".
On one side of the 3-D display table stood Cyclops and Storm, leaders of the X-Men. On the other, Valerie Cooper, Secret Service agent and direct liaison to the President on matters involving the X-Men; and the imposing one-eyed presence of Nick Fury, director of the top-secret intelligence agency SHIELD. The fact that both high-ranking government officials had journeyed to the mansion in person was evidence enough of the gravity of the situation.
"Basically," Fury began, as holographic images of the destruction in Manhattan began to display, "we're looking at some potential end-of-the-world shit here. The first undeniable public act of mutant terrorism on American soil, and the President wants us to pursue every option before looking at a direct military solution. Which brings us here to you."
"We've been monitoring," Scott said quietly. "Trying to figure out how to get in there - obviously hopping in the jet is right out." He was hoping that Fury and Cooper would have a thought or two on that; while he and Ororo had been tossing around options, they hadn't come up with anything terribly compelling yet. Plus they just hadn't had enough information to work with. Their guests had rectified that, but Scott was still hoping there was more to come.
Val produced a small video disc from a portfolio and handed it to Fury, who slotted it into a receptacle in the table. The images of New York flickered and were replaced with a half-scale image of a young man, clad in a dark peacoat. His sharp features would be described as handsome if not for the look of restrained rage and contempt on his face.
"Kevin Tremain," Fury announced. "Flagged in our files when he manifested as a mutant and took the entire city of Oslo offline for six hours. He vanished, we've been looking for him. His ability's almost impossible to describe, it's like he has some sort of connection to cities, he manipulates them, controls them. Calls himself 'Post'. We wondered where he'd vanished to. Now we know."
"He's responsible for raising that spire from the ruins of MSG and Penn Station," Cooper continued. "And for broadcasting that... manifesto. But the two that brought down the Air Force jets..."
Two more figures appeared in the air above the table, a large bald man with strange organic-looking armor coiling around his body, and a slender young girl leaning against a mechanical horse. Cooper gestured at the pair and continued speaking. "Abraham Kieros was a Major in the Rangers in Somalia. His mutant power manifested and brought a building down on top of him when he emitted some kind of concussive field. Shattered his back, he'd been in an iron lung at Walter Reed until six months ago. The girl is Autumn Rolfson. She's one of the only ones that we have previous intel on, really. Raided a UN food shipment in southern Africa back in '07. She does something to organic matter that rots it away at a cellular level. They've been identified as War and Famine in our initial intel."
"Horsemen of the motherfuckin' Apocalypse," Fury drawled. "They managed to down two F-22 interceptors like they were swatting flies. So you're damn right an aerial engagement's out of the question."
"Okay, so what you're saying is that their bench is considerably deeper than, say, the Brotherhood," Scott said - and had a momentary, uneasy thought about Magneto and what he might think about this. He's not showed his face, Summers. At least not yet. Don't borrow trouble. "Which makes it even more imperative, I'd say, that we get in there."
"Imperative ain't the word," Fury answered, pulling up another image. This one was two-dimensional, and looked like a file photo of a plain-looking young woman, Cyrillic lettering under the image shifting into Roman letters reading "NATALYA IGNATOVA".
"Here we got a problem," the director of SHIELD continued. "Natalya Ignatova, codenamed Mastermold. Russian technopath, came out of their Chernyakhoskoye program during the Cold War. They turned her into some kind of human computer, and when Communism fell, she got locked away in some secret installation. Rumor has it she surfaced about two years back, but we've got confirmation that she's running with this group." His face screwed up in a grimace. "Because our best data analysts at the NSA have discovered exactly where she is. Somehow she's trying to hack the financial servers at the New York Stock Exchange. She gets into there, all that stored data - ain't no telling what kind of chaos we're looking at. They've cut all network access to NYSENet, but we figure we've got seventy-two hours until she works her way past that and cracks all the encryption."
Three days seemed almost a luxury, Ororo thought, even though the initial shock had disippated and been replaced by cold determination. This was something that needed to be dealt with now. She took a deep breath. "Are these four the only known associates? And do we have any information on the locations of the others besides Ignatova?"
"They all seem to be based out of this structure that's been constructed here, over what's left of Madison Square Garden," Cooper explained, showing a map of Manhattan, overlaid with what appeared to be a satellite photo. "And as of last night's attack on the George Washington Bridge, we have evidence of at least one other individual -eyewitnesses are saying that some kind of 'angel' destroyed the bridge. We're not even into the stages of counting the death toll yet, but near as we can figure, this is the mastermind behind it all."
She touched a button, and a number of smaller images appeared, orbiting a composite photograph of a somber-looking dark-skinned man. As Val cycled through various images, she kept speaking. "We've done some cross-referencing - he was at Walter Reed hospital shortly before Kieros vanished from there. He was in Oslo not long after Post's manifestation. We have footage of him in Namibia immediately prior to Rolfson's attack on the UN supply mission. We don't know who he is or what he can do, only that the 'manifesto' that was broadcast yesterday refers to him as 'Apocalypse'."
"Half dem think he's God, de other half think he's useful." As usual, Remy LeBeau hadn't bothered to mention that he had arrived, instead slipping into the mansion and the meeting through his own methods. Ororo had spoken to him earlier, surprised that he already had some information about New York, and was on his way to the mansion with any of his X-Force people that he could easily contact. "CIA thinks dat dis Apocalypse comes out of Africa, maybe from one of de west coastal conflicts, but dat's just guess work. Dey said dat he brought a mutant force wit' him. Any idea how large we looking at under de command of dese Horsemen?"
Cooper's look of sudden confusion was at odds with Fury's nod of acknowledgement to Remy as the Cajun took a seat at the table. "From our last onsite reports, Apocalypse has made an open call to mutants, asking them to join him in his newly-annexed territory, as he sees it. Last night a ferry was hijacked and delivered as many as sixty, possibly close to a hundred mutants to the island of Manhattan. Folks out there are actually sympathizing with this terrorist motherfucker," Fury spat out. "But that ain't the worst of our problems."
He looked at Val, then back to the other three and took on a more serious tone. "Goes without sayin' that what I'm about to tell you is so far beyond classified that I can't even begin to describe. Yesterday afternoon, two Air Force jets did a flyover of the Citadel, got shot down. Those jets were providing air cover for a SHIELD team that was inserted successfully into Manhattan. At four a.m. this morning, we lost all contact with them. Their mission was to infiltrate the Citadel with a portable neutron detonator, with enough yield to wipe out every living thing on that island. You know President McKenna's stance on not dealing with terrorists, but let me tell you, this operation wasn't done with presidential authority. Now we can point the fingers of assigning fuckup later, but now there's two big threats on that island - Apocalypse getting access to NYSENet through Ignatova, and if he gets his hands on that device."
"That makes things more than a little complicated," Scott said, his tone neutral. "We could have tackled his followers - we've faced similar numbers before, but if we have to split our forces..." He shook his head, re-focusing. "The bomb's the obvious first priority to me," he said more crisply. "We know we've got a window with Ignatova, but the bomb's a completely unpredictable variable."
"The window is shorter than you might think," Val said, leaning forward. "In less than seventy-two hours, the President is going to authorize an airstrike, codenamed ANVIL. Carpetbombing the entire island. Do you understand? If it's necessary, we are going to have to engage in a full-scale military bombing of American soil to prevent an even greater catastrophe."
"Kill thousands to save millions," Fury added. "Seventy-two hours, folks. That's as much time as we can buy you."
"Then, unless you've got more information for us, I'd say we'd better get planning," Scott said, without a visible reaction to that latest tidbit. It wasn't as if they hadn't worked on a timeline before. Admittedly, the consequences for not meeting it weren't often quite so dire. Only more reason to get to it...
"Wait." Remy said, his face suddenly hardening. "Seventy-two hours, Fury? Who calls de island clear? Been on missions before were de people on de ground got ignored dat de mission was secured, in de interests of 'certainty'. We got people in dat city. If we give de 'all clear', you willing to back dat all de way up to de President and de Joint Chiefs?"
Cooper leaned forward, an obvious "Who is this guy?" prepared, but Fury held a hand up to silence her imminent protest.
"You give the all-clear, SHIELD comes in to mop up what's left. Officially? Y'all were never there. We never saw you, we never knew you."
"Just as well we are not in it for the glory," Ororo muttered, having bitten her lip thus far as the 'requests' had been laid out on the line. She turned to look at Scott and Remy, her expression set. "If seventy-two hours is all we have, gentlemen, then we had better start planning."
The Situation Room was never a place for mirth on the best of days, but today it seemed like it was more somber than a tomb, well-earning the sobriquet that the younger X-Men tended to give it - the "War Room".
On one side of the 3-D display table stood Cyclops and Storm, leaders of the X-Men. On the other, Valerie Cooper, Secret Service agent and direct liaison to the President on matters involving the X-Men; and the imposing one-eyed presence of Nick Fury, director of the top-secret intelligence agency SHIELD. The fact that both high-ranking government officials had journeyed to the mansion in person was evidence enough of the gravity of the situation.
"Basically," Fury began, as holographic images of the destruction in Manhattan began to display, "we're looking at some potential end-of-the-world shit here. The first undeniable public act of mutant terrorism on American soil, and the President wants us to pursue every option before looking at a direct military solution. Which brings us here to you."
"We've been monitoring," Scott said quietly. "Trying to figure out how to get in there - obviously hopping in the jet is right out." He was hoping that Fury and Cooper would have a thought or two on that; while he and Ororo had been tossing around options, they hadn't come up with anything terribly compelling yet. Plus they just hadn't had enough information to work with. Their guests had rectified that, but Scott was still hoping there was more to come.
Val produced a small video disc from a portfolio and handed it to Fury, who slotted it into a receptacle in the table. The images of New York flickered and were replaced with a half-scale image of a young man, clad in a dark peacoat. His sharp features would be described as handsome if not for the look of restrained rage and contempt on his face.
"Kevin Tremain," Fury announced. "Flagged in our files when he manifested as a mutant and took the entire city of Oslo offline for six hours. He vanished, we've been looking for him. His ability's almost impossible to describe, it's like he has some sort of connection to cities, he manipulates them, controls them. Calls himself 'Post'. We wondered where he'd vanished to. Now we know."
"He's responsible for raising that spire from the ruins of MSG and Penn Station," Cooper continued. "And for broadcasting that... manifesto. But the two that brought down the Air Force jets..."
Two more figures appeared in the air above the table, a large bald man with strange organic-looking armor coiling around his body, and a slender young girl leaning against a mechanical horse. Cooper gestured at the pair and continued speaking. "Abraham Kieros was a Major in the Rangers in Somalia. His mutant power manifested and brought a building down on top of him when he emitted some kind of concussive field. Shattered his back, he'd been in an iron lung at Walter Reed until six months ago. The girl is Autumn Rolfson. She's one of the only ones that we have previous intel on, really. Raided a UN food shipment in southern Africa back in '07. She does something to organic matter that rots it away at a cellular level. They've been identified as War and Famine in our initial intel."
"Horsemen of the motherfuckin' Apocalypse," Fury drawled. "They managed to down two F-22 interceptors like they were swatting flies. So you're damn right an aerial engagement's out of the question."
"Okay, so what you're saying is that their bench is considerably deeper than, say, the Brotherhood," Scott said - and had a momentary, uneasy thought about Magneto and what he might think about this. He's not showed his face, Summers. At least not yet. Don't borrow trouble. "Which makes it even more imperative, I'd say, that we get in there."
"Imperative ain't the word," Fury answered, pulling up another image. This one was two-dimensional, and looked like a file photo of a plain-looking young woman, Cyrillic lettering under the image shifting into Roman letters reading "NATALYA IGNATOVA".
"Here we got a problem," the director of SHIELD continued. "Natalya Ignatova, codenamed Mastermold. Russian technopath, came out of their Chernyakhoskoye program during the Cold War. They turned her into some kind of human computer, and when Communism fell, she got locked away in some secret installation. Rumor has it she surfaced about two years back, but we've got confirmation that she's running with this group." His face screwed up in a grimace. "Because our best data analysts at the NSA have discovered exactly where she is. Somehow she's trying to hack the financial servers at the New York Stock Exchange. She gets into there, all that stored data - ain't no telling what kind of chaos we're looking at. They've cut all network access to NYSENet, but we figure we've got seventy-two hours until she works her way past that and cracks all the encryption."
Three days seemed almost a luxury, Ororo thought, even though the initial shock had disippated and been replaced by cold determination. This was something that needed to be dealt with now. She took a deep breath. "Are these four the only known associates? And do we have any information on the locations of the others besides Ignatova?"
"They all seem to be based out of this structure that's been constructed here, over what's left of Madison Square Garden," Cooper explained, showing a map of Manhattan, overlaid with what appeared to be a satellite photo. "And as of last night's attack on the George Washington Bridge, we have evidence of at least one other individual -eyewitnesses are saying that some kind of 'angel' destroyed the bridge. We're not even into the stages of counting the death toll yet, but near as we can figure, this is the mastermind behind it all."
She touched a button, and a number of smaller images appeared, orbiting a composite photograph of a somber-looking dark-skinned man. As Val cycled through various images, she kept speaking. "We've done some cross-referencing - he was at Walter Reed hospital shortly before Kieros vanished from there. He was in Oslo not long after Post's manifestation. We have footage of him in Namibia immediately prior to Rolfson's attack on the UN supply mission. We don't know who he is or what he can do, only that the 'manifesto' that was broadcast yesterday refers to him as 'Apocalypse'."
"Half dem think he's God, de other half think he's useful." As usual, Remy LeBeau hadn't bothered to mention that he had arrived, instead slipping into the mansion and the meeting through his own methods. Ororo had spoken to him earlier, surprised that he already had some information about New York, and was on his way to the mansion with any of his X-Force people that he could easily contact. "CIA thinks dat dis Apocalypse comes out of Africa, maybe from one of de west coastal conflicts, but dat's just guess work. Dey said dat he brought a mutant force wit' him. Any idea how large we looking at under de command of dese Horsemen?"
Cooper's look of sudden confusion was at odds with Fury's nod of acknowledgement to Remy as the Cajun took a seat at the table. "From our last onsite reports, Apocalypse has made an open call to mutants, asking them to join him in his newly-annexed territory, as he sees it. Last night a ferry was hijacked and delivered as many as sixty, possibly close to a hundred mutants to the island of Manhattan. Folks out there are actually sympathizing with this terrorist motherfucker," Fury spat out. "But that ain't the worst of our problems."
He looked at Val, then back to the other three and took on a more serious tone. "Goes without sayin' that what I'm about to tell you is so far beyond classified that I can't even begin to describe. Yesterday afternoon, two Air Force jets did a flyover of the Citadel, got shot down. Those jets were providing air cover for a SHIELD team that was inserted successfully into Manhattan. At four a.m. this morning, we lost all contact with them. Their mission was to infiltrate the Citadel with a portable neutron detonator, with enough yield to wipe out every living thing on that island. You know President McKenna's stance on not dealing with terrorists, but let me tell you, this operation wasn't done with presidential authority. Now we can point the fingers of assigning fuckup later, but now there's two big threats on that island - Apocalypse getting access to NYSENet through Ignatova, and if he gets his hands on that device."
"That makes things more than a little complicated," Scott said, his tone neutral. "We could have tackled his followers - we've faced similar numbers before, but if we have to split our forces..." He shook his head, re-focusing. "The bomb's the obvious first priority to me," he said more crisply. "We know we've got a window with Ignatova, but the bomb's a completely unpredictable variable."
"The window is shorter than you might think," Val said, leaning forward. "In less than seventy-two hours, the President is going to authorize an airstrike, codenamed ANVIL. Carpetbombing the entire island. Do you understand? If it's necessary, we are going to have to engage in a full-scale military bombing of American soil to prevent an even greater catastrophe."
"Kill thousands to save millions," Fury added. "Seventy-two hours, folks. That's as much time as we can buy you."
"Then, unless you've got more information for us, I'd say we'd better get planning," Scott said, without a visible reaction to that latest tidbit. It wasn't as if they hadn't worked on a timeline before. Admittedly, the consequences for not meeting it weren't often quite so dire. Only more reason to get to it...
"Wait." Remy said, his face suddenly hardening. "Seventy-two hours, Fury? Who calls de island clear? Been on missions before were de people on de ground got ignored dat de mission was secured, in de interests of 'certainty'. We got people in dat city. If we give de 'all clear', you willing to back dat all de way up to de President and de Joint Chiefs?"
Cooper leaned forward, an obvious "Who is this guy?" prepared, but Fury held a hand up to silence her imminent protest.
"You give the all-clear, SHIELD comes in to mop up what's left. Officially? Y'all were never there. We never saw you, we never knew you."
"Just as well we are not in it for the glory," Ororo muttered, having bitten her lip thus far as the 'requests' had been laid out on the line. She turned to look at Scott and Remy, her expression set. "If seventy-two hours is all we have, gentlemen, then we had better start planning."