Participants:
| Scene Title | On Wax Wings |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Two spies from different ends of time read one-another in on long-held secrets. |
| Date | November 8, 1970 |
By the time the sun has come up on the horizon every sailor in harbor can still see their breath in the air. Mercifully, there isn't much wind. It's a bitter morning, the kind where the sky feels mercilessly clear, where the sun feels pale and anemic, when every surface is cold and covered in a fine sheet of frost. The deck of the USS Eldridge is no different, this morning, glittering in the dawn light as engineers run insulated cables up and down the length of its deck. Nervous marines mill around at the pier, watching work done to the exterior of the ship.
"When do you go back to the front?"
The question knocks Marcus Raith out of his thoughts. He turns to find the young Markus Ryans standing at his side, watching the engineers laying cable across the Eldridge's hull. Raith nods to Markus, then looks back at the ship. "Two weeks. Time enough to take care of things here."
"Where do the Krauts think you are?" Ryans wonders.
"Right now, on my way back from France. There's going to be an accident," Raith explains, "my convoy is going to be hit by French resistance fighters. My entourage killed. I'll be lucky enough to survive in the woods, snake my way back to Germany on foot. They're going to fly me in, parachute down outside of Gronigen in the Netherlands. Really do the rest of the way on foot, just from somewhere else."
Ryans nods, his attention locked on the ship. "You think you're gonna go two for two?" He asks, nodding at the ship. Raith cracks a smile and shrugs. "Take one from the Krauts like you did the Japs?"
"Nakamura was smart." Raith admits, motioning to the ship. "Cared enough about his wife and son to give us this. Leverage is easy."
"No leverage for the Nazis, then?"
"Not in the same way." Raith admits, shifting to face Ryans partly. "See, Takekuma Nakamura was a family man. I'm trying to figure out which ones on the Supermen project have that. Volken and Monroe are out, they're fucking psychopaths. Meier has family, but he couldn't care less if they died tomorrow. Zimmerman's family is one bad day away from jumping the fence, I'd be risking too much to twist them. Wagner and Brum are the ones I still haven't gotten a good read on. But I know Brum has a wife and kid."
Ryans nods, jaw flexing slightly. "I thought we agreed, no kids."
Raith glances at Ryans, squinting his one good eye. "You agreed no kids." Then, he gestures to the Eldridge. "I am making miracles here. This technology is going to revolutionize American warfare. And if we control Project Icarus, we're going to have an edge on everyone like us. We're going to control the balance of power. Can you even imagine it, Ryans?" Marcus holds out a gloved hand, slowly curling it into a fist. "Can you imagine being able to pick and choose who has an ability? We'd be like the Gods of fucking Olympus."
Ryans rankles his nose, turn adjusts his hat. "I'm not a big book guy, but I know my mythology, Raith." He glances at his superior. "You sound more like Prometheus trying to steal fire."
Raith tilts his head to the side, listening intently.
"You know how his story ended?" Ryans' tone is tense, barely concealing guilt and contempt.
"Educate me," Raith says with a spread of his hands.
"He got chained to a fucking rock so a bird could eat his entrails for eternity." Ryans tugs a cigarette from his mouth and flicks it to the side away from the two of them, and walks away, leaving Raith standing in the cold shadow of the USS Eldridge.
Today was the second test. He didn't have time for doubts. Time for nay-sayers. For Marcus Raith, this was the start of a new era.
Gods be damned.
Twenty-Seven Years Later
The Long Lines Building
Manhattan
November 8th
1970
8:10pm
"Teleporting boats isn't what I asked about."
Kara Prince sits on the corner of Raith's desk in a way that frustrates him as much as her wearing pants does. She folds her hands in her lap and fixes him with a cold stare. "Project Icarus," she says with a nod to the folder she dropped on the desk. "You tell me what that was, and I'll tell you why the name Daniel Linderman is familiar."
Now Kara has leverage. Marcus bristles, but in a way that is at once infuriated and infatuated. He steps around the desk, ignoring the folder. "I may as well read you in. You were close enough to the project without even realizing it." That elicits a tit-for-tat frustration from her at Marcus. "Back in the 40s the Third Reich saw fit to try and crack the code on people like me. Try to figure out what made us tick, how we existed, and if what we were could be controlled."
Kara follows Marcus with her eyes around the room. "So, I know that didn't work." She says in a telling way.
"No. The Nazis only scratched the surface. By the time they were making any breakthroughs the war was almost over, so the top US brass initiated Operation Paperclip to pick up the best minds the Reich had and secret them to the US before other countries could snatch them up. I'd already had my list. The doctor at Roswell, Volken? He was one of them." Marcus shrugs. "That didn't end well. Volken lost his fucking mind and had to be put down. A lost a lot of good people that day. And we moved our research from Fort Daedalus to Coyote Sands. A relocation center the OSI was starting up trying to detain all Specials in one location."
Kara slides off the table, arms still crossed. "History moves in circles," she says. "I recognize that name from the news in my time. Big cover-up, huge fucking scandal. War crimes tribunal territory. But that wasn't until the mid 2010s."
"Twenty-fucking ten." Marcus says with a laugh and a shake of his head. "You know I would've killed you for trying that shit with me if I hadn't run into people like you before." He says with a squint. That admission has Kara tilting her head to the side again.
"Not the Roswell pickups?"
"No." Marcus says casually, walking over to a shelf where he keeps a metal case of cigars. He plucks one out and then offers the case to Kara, who obliges herself one of his cigars in return. "Back in '45, I met a woman who went by the codename Nightingale. She told me some shit about the future, the war, the Space Race." He laughs softly. "She and a handful of others had fallen through time thanks to the actions of a man named Hiro Nakamura." He waits for Kara to have a reaction to the name, but she doesn't. "See, I knew Nakamura's grandfather. He was the one we got the tech for the Philadelphia Experiment from. Never realized his family made it. I don't think Hiro ever knew what I did to his grandfather, either."
"What happened to Nakamura and the people he brought with him?" Kara asks, tearing an end off the cigarette with her teeth and spitting it in a nearby waste basket.
"Escaped." Marcus admits with a shrug as casual as talking about forgetting his keys. "But they did enough. They proved that time could be traversed from one end to the other. Confirmed my suspicions about the things I saw on board the Eldridge in '43." Marcus lights his cigar, then holds out the lighter for Kara, who leans hers into the flame.
"What happened at Coyote Sands?" Kara asks pointedly.
"Security was shit, oversight was worse, there was a prison break and some of the detainees escaped." Marcus explains, again like he's discussing the weather. "OSI swept it all under the rug. That kid," he motions to the folder on his desk, "Linderman? He was one of the detainees."
"I wasn't sure at first," Kara says, taking a drag off of her cigar, "but I recognized the name. Daniel Linderman was one of the people tried—after his death—for war crimes in my time. I was off the grid pretty hard by the time it all came up, so I only got pieces of it. But he had a group called the Company that was running the US Government from behind the scenes for a long time."
Marcus has no reaction to that, save for a tell-tale crinkling at the corner of his one good eye. Tension, anger.
"You look like you just ate a shit sandwich?" Kara says with a bit of cattish amusement. Marcus finds none of it in her tone.
"And you'd never heard of me in your time?" He's asked her this a dozen times, always getting the same answer.
"Nope."
Marcus isn't sure whether that's a victory or a failure. The doubt propels him across the room, sucking down a lungful of smoke. "So, Linderman is dangerous."
"I would've killed him when I had the chance back in my time." Kara admits, following Marcus' pace. "But I never got it. Cancer got him, I guess."
Marcus stops, turns and regards Kara with a thoughtful expression. "Because you were the second coming of the Third Reich. Just with different uniforms."
"Fuck you." Kara says flatly between puffs on her cigar. "Your kind fucked up the world." Marcus laughs in response, waving his cigar at her.
"My kind?" Marcus scowls, stepping in closer to her. "We're probably less a half a percent of the entire population of Earth. If you want to look at the people that fucked this world, look in a god damned mirror."
Tension hangs between them, and Kara looks Marcus up and down. "How the fuck are you still young? Your ability is orbs not eternal youth." It's a challenge. Tell me more. Marcus sucks in a deep breath of his cigarette and exhales it into Kara's face.
"I found the devil at the crossroads and struck a deal." Marcus says with a lopsided smile.
"Fuck you." Kara hisses at him.
Marcus searches her eyes for a moment, then steps away from her, leisurely taking another drag of his cigar. "Tell me more about the war you lived through," he asks, watching her size him up as if she were going to take a swing at him.
"…who started it?"