[Locked] And we're off to see the Wizard ...
[The result of this thread.]
Second floor, first hallway, down the corridor … gotcha.
It required very little thought after the coffee shop went up, really. A few days of going over the possibilities in his head, running through the scenarios. What’s the worst thing that can happen if Elashte turns out to be a complete asshole? What’re the advantages ( Read more... )
Second floor, first hallway, down the corridor … gotcha.
It required very little thought after the coffee shop went up, really. A few days of going over the possibilities in his head, running through the scenarios. What’s the worst thing that can happen if Elashte turns out to be a complete asshole? What’re the advantages ( Read more... )
Of course, with the ever-present threat of having ships fall out of the sky, maybe “relaxing” is the wrong word here …
Jack takes Harkness’s offered scotch glass without breaking eye contact, watches him closely. He doesn’t drink from it, not yet, just rotates it in his hand as he considers his next words, because this is hardly an icebreaker despite Harkness’s claim. It’s all there in his voice.
“Surgical strike team, take out the key players,” he says, after a moment. It’s his gut instinct. Shoot first, ask questions later, and for Christ’s sake, worry about the goddamn fallout later when the threat's gone. “We’ll need to gather intel on how the CLF operates. Does it work like a traditional terrorist organization, with cells, or does it operate differently. Where are the weak points, what are the lines of communication. If we can find those lines, we can sever them and leave them floundering.” Like taking a link out of a chain; everything comes undone.
He lets out a thin breath, rubs his temple with his free hand. “We’ll need to figure out a way to keep the Barnams out of town. Either make a deal with them” - Jack doesn’t precisely have many prejudices against the family yet - “or send a team to Boston to be a constant pain in their ass so they can’t concentrate all of their forces here. Distract them, split them up if possible.
“In the meantime, we tell the Wanderer community to keep their heads low while we wait for Elashte to come back. Teach them self-defense, arm them with whatever we can, but make it clear to them that they’re not to go out onto the streets to take justice into their own hands. We don’t need a bloodbath.” He pauses. “Train a couple of medics, get everyone acquainted with the basics of first aid. Get together a group to keep a watch on the neighborhood to report any suspicious activities; we’ve got a couple of trained cops lying around here itching to do something with their time, so we can put them to good use. If we catch a guy, interrogate him, then release him to create distrust in the group.” A tactic that's been used before. Generate distrust, you generate friction, and the CLF's united front may start crumbling.
Though to be honest, it’s the entire angels and demons conflict that’s difficult to deal with, not necessarily the CLF. (If it was just the CLF, then it’d be a piece of cake, relatively speaking.) He doesn’t know the Barnam family philosophy, but he wonders if a show of strength and competence from the Wanderer community will persuade the Barnams to leave Chicago alone. Francis’s public service announcement gives him a sliver of hope there.
He takes a drink from the glass, rolls the scotch around on his tongue. Not bad. Though, actually, if he's going to be frank with himself, the entire angel and demon thing can go die in a fire for all he cares. So long as they don't cause trouble in this city and get innocent civilians killed, he's generally fine with them going at each others' throats.
Reply
"Experience says the CLF is too decentralized for key players to matter for more than a few months," Jack says. "Their MO tends to revise itself every time the seasons change. So far as I can tell, the entire Front is nothing more than a bunch of people with a lot of anger, waiting until any damn opportunist to comes and gives them something to fight against. It's risen at least three times, never with quite the same ideals." He takes a drink of his liquor. "...kinda makes you want to give them a puppet government, doesn't it?"
OH JACK HARKNESS NO
"But, hey, even a few quiet weeks might be something to aim for, so long as the population stays active. That's one thing we can say for the CLF - it's giving the wanderers a reason to organize. When the Barnams come-" and there's no if on that, "-I doubt we're going to have a grace period." He knocks the scotch glass against his knee. "As for the Barnams? They're not just a family, they're an army. Most of whom, so I'm led to believe, have decades if not centuries of combat experience focusing on urban warfare, hunter-killer style. I'm not sure anything we could do would divert enough of their forces to nullify that threat, short of putting Boston to seige, any aggresion on our parts might just give them an excuse to declare a holy war on us." He shrugs. "Much as I hate to admit it, the peace here was predicated on Demonic nonaggression and Angelic guilt. Elashte pulled a Gandhi and led the local First into a Jallianwala Bagh."
Round and around the scotch glass goes against Jack's knee, the edge tracing meaningless little patterns onto the fabric of his trousers.
"How much have you picked up about inter-species politics, here?"
Reply
Though he hasn’t yet mastered Teal’c’s ability to say half a million words with the cock of one eyebrow and a disapproving head tilt, Jack's eyebrows occasionally speak his mind all too clearly for him. Like now. At the moment, they’re kinda reaching for his distant hairline, because he’s not entirely sure if Harkness’s suggestion for the puppet government was made in jest, or if the guy’s being dead serious here. He settles for assuming the former, just for sanity’s sake.
Unfortunately, Boston was a long shot to begin with; Jack's still going through the logistics of that in his head, wondering at how much damage a small team of trained units untraceable to Torchwood Chicago can do all by their lonesome selves in Beantown. Like Taiwan acting like the proverbial thorn in China’s side. Of course, the metaphor's imperfect. There's no USA to watch over the entire thing; that’d probably be Elashte, who’s out of town at the moment. The guy’s timing, Jack has to admit, is really damn impeccable.
The decentralized command structure gives him a bit of pause, though. Yes, harder to tamp down, but more unstable, relatively speaking, and possibly less secure to infiltration. They might be able to get a person in through the “proper” channels if they figure out the recruiting methods. (And if they can find someone crazy enough to volunteer.) Knowing what’ll go down when can keep the casualties low, and if the CLF catches wind of a mole in their midst ... distrust breeds discord. Something like that. Whatever the saying is, the same principle applies.
In any case, when Harkness asks about the politics, Jack raises his glass for another drink. Takes the opportunity to delay and to think about just how much he loathes politics. Then he’s lowering the glass again, and there’s really no avoiding it, so he dives right in.
“There’re the Barnams,” he says, with a grimace, “who apparently want to wipe every single demon out of existence, even if it breaks that treaty that was signed a while back. The demons, meanwhile, claim to want peace. So do the other non-Barnam angels, and the Wanderers like to get about, mingling with whatever friendly crowds they can find. Meanwhile, most of the Chicago citizenry don’t seem to know what to do with us. Since we’re sitting on our asses without any legal recognition, none of our cases are top priority for the police, and because of that, the CLF are completely free to rampage around trying to spread anti-Wanderer sentiment throughout the city. If we respond with too much force, we’d just prove them right, so we have one of our hands tied behind our backs already, and am I missing anything here? I haven’t gotten in touch with any werewolves or vampires yet lately, so I’m not sure if there’s a war going on behind the scenes there too.”
He's only half-joking there at the end.
Reply
Anyway, the supernatural humans seem to be, by and large, the most reasonable group of natives in the place.
"It's not just the Barnams versus the demons, and it's not like it's Demons For Peace And Equality," he says. "From what I can tell from two and a half years here - and that's not to say I'm an expert, because the politics here make Feudal England look sane - everything comes down to two damn callings; archangels on the angelic side, rakshasa on the demonic. They're the ones liable to see their entire purpose in life as to hunt and kill the other side, and they're the ones sitting at the top of the hierarchies, right under Firsts and Neqa'el." He tilts his glass at O'Neill. "Demons aren't big on organization, and they've never made a concerted effort at peace before. They'll follow Elashte because he's a Neqa'el, but when there's not a Neq to hold their leash..." Shrug. "And archangels have that good old angelic arrogance, a compulsion-powered holy war, and enough standing armies to make your life either miserable or very, very short. Demons outnumber angels two to one on this planet, and still end up skulking in the shadows unless they manage to take and hold cities entire, like Las Vegas."
He takes a quick drink.
"More of it than you'd think breaks down along type lines," he says. "Subspecies. Callings. Whatever you want to call it. Guardian Angels are going to put the needs of their wards first, if those wards are human or supernatural human or whatever. Behemoths, and I shit you not, these are my observations, apparently just want to have fun. The only impetus for this war is centuries of blood feud and prejudice and the fact that archangels and rakshasa turn sixteen and develop monomaniacal obsessions." He snorts. "And most demonic callings aren't exactly Good Citizenry: Just Add Action. There's a psychological component - callings want to be used."
And when that calling happens to be "kill someone" or "give people nightmares," things get a little messy. Jack tilts his head to the side, giving O'Neill an entirely unamused smile.
"Still following? You kinda look like you want to braid a noose out of your bootlaces."
Reply
He suspects it’d be a bad idea to even half-jokingly suggest getting rid of all the archangels and rakshasa (bless you, did you get a piece of beef stuck in your windpipe?), so he keeps his mouth shut until Harkness is done. His understanding of Callings is minimal at best, but he's gotten the impression it’s one of those unavoidable things to being an angel or a demon. Biological imperative, psychological imperative, it's all the same, kinda like how all Goa’uld seem destined to become power-hungry, melodramatic bad guys with a propensity for flashy clothes and insubstantial threats. There’s just no substance. (And all right, all right, maybe they've got a little bit of substance. It’s not so much that they’re all bark and no bite; they just spend so much time yapping that they never get around to fully carrying out their evil plans of universal domination.
Except for Anubis.
Dammit.)
“All right, is there any way to get rid of these Callings?” he asks, partially to distract himself, partially because it's just one of the first insane ideas to pop into his head and his brain didn't really have enough time to censor his mouth. He's back to rotating the glass. Toppling the archangels sounds like a goddamn deathmarch, so those guys are probably going to be stuck at the top of the hierarchy for the rest of eternity and a half, but maybe they can get a friendly First in here to hold them back. Which, speaking of … “What happened to the First who signed the treaty?” he says, looking up.
Reply
Which is actually something of a common problem in Torchwood and the SGC/SCRT both, Jack suspects. Yeah, eventually the brilliant folks will come up with something to pull everyone's asses out of the fire. The trick, and it takes a fair amount of talent, is to keep them all from roasting while they work it out.
"And you're going to love this. The last time anyone saw that First Angel, he was heading for a monastery in a remote part of Tibet. Even trying to get ahold of him to sign the damn thing took, what was it, four months?" He considers that. "And that was with archangels looking for him. To the best of my knowledge, there is no archangel comman structure here any more."
Good news: u no can has.
Reply
Though, as bad as this situation is, if there’s one saving grace about the entire business, it’s the fact that he doesn’t have to deal with anymore snakes. (And, given any luck, no snakes will pop on through the Rift.
… right. Luck. Haha.)
He makes a face. “… all right. Plan B,” he says. Oh right. “What’s Plan B?”
Reply
He debates leaving that as self-explanatory. Of course, given that he should be briefing O'Neill on what he's going to expect from this position, That Would Be Wrong.
"There are ten First Angels in the world, at any given time," he says, "and the demons had just killed their oldest and greatest. Finding a First willing to sign, let alone one with any interest in America, let alone another First Archangel - yeah, I'm still amazed the treaty happened at all. So that leaves us with Plan B: ...which is, at the moment, 'come up with a Plan B.'"
He points to O'Neill.
"That's where you come in.
"The world went to shit in May and no one's finished hosing it off yet. We're trying to rebuild the Wanderer community, trying to keep an eye on the rest of the world, trying to stay one step behind the Rift instead of the usual five. Torchwood is neck-deep in the larger political sphere, but at this point, we're just reactionary. We have to be. We don't have the manpower or focus to start stepping out. That's why we need a second team, with some autonomy, out there taking the proactive approach to saving all our asses. To that end..."
He smiles - a grim, tight predator's smile, and tilts his glass.
"Resources, some oversight, intel, and a long leash, Colonel. If this were the Time Agency, I'd be calling you Instagur."
Reply
“Oh, Instagur’s my middle name,” he says. It really isn’t, and he has no idea what the hell it means, but he’s down with it. So far. The ball's in his court, and it's time to play.
“So you want me to make you a team,” he says, wetting his throat a little. “Any recommendations?”
He hasn’t been here for too long and nobody’s really caught his eye yet. Then again, he doesn’t exactly “get around,” per se, and if Harkness knows anyone out there … well, though he'd prefer to make his own team from scratch, a place to start wouldn't be unwelcome.
Reply
And oh, wouldn't he like to be a fly on the wall of that meeting.
"She's been organizing the civilian response efforts. And what can I say? She makes friends."
Sure, this is all a bit more cobbled-together than most people would like, but that's practically the definition of Torchwood and its tactics. Empty out the odds and ends drawer, and if you can't save the world with that?
...well, you're screwed.
Reply
He’s asking because he’s noticed more than a few cops around the area who’ve dropped into the city with nothing to do, all of them cooling their heels on the sidewalk or walking the beat at random. Though it’s better than nothing, it’s not exactly very efficient, and some organization on that end might do the community a world of wonder.
Reply
Leave a comment