Industrious: Engineering Marvels - Chapter 9 (Patreon)

I heard the door open.

There was a moment of silence as clothing ruffled and the door slowly closed again. I ignored the event and, instead, continued my regular breathing as my mind sought out true nothingness. A good meditative state didn't merely reduce one's consciousness to the measure of one's breathing, instead reducing consciousness entirely and completely to the point that it-

The door opened again.

“Ray?” Steve asked, his voice somewhere between curiosity and exasperation as I heard fabric slide over fabric, most likely him crossing his arms. “Why are you in the closet?”

I snorted, rolling my eyes as I opened them. “I'm meditating, Steve. Centering myself. I had a stressful morning and wanted to relax a bit.”

Steve blinked, cocking his head to one side. “...in a closet.”

“It's the only place even remotely quiet I could find,” I replied in the same deadpan tone he'd just used.

A moment of silence passed between us before someone to one side of Steve cleared his throat and the soldier grimaced. “Well, c'mon. The janitor needs his stuff and we've got a meeting in ten anyway.”

“Fine,” I sighed, straightening up and popping joints as I stood. Passing by Steve, who acted for a moment as if he was coaxing a wild animal out of its cage, I nodded to the janitor as he waited impatiently next to the closet I'd been occupying. Discreetly slipping out a five pound note, I flashed it to the man before tucking it in his hand as I shook it. “Sorry for the inconvenience, I was talking to a bunch of assholes who think they're important and it really took it out of me.”

The man eyed me oddly and very obviously still considered me a weirdo, but took the money without protest and seemed remarkably less irritated by the entire affair.

Walking away, Steve coughed awkwardly. “Ah... thanks, for helping Peggy. She seems a lot more relaxed now that her superiors aren't breathing down her neck.”

I shrugged. “It's... not fine, exactly, but it's a tolerable pain in the ass. I knew stuff like this was going to happen the moment I told Bucky the truth about when and where I'm from.”

Steve snorted. “I still can't thank you enough for that, you know?”

“And you don't have to,” I replied casually. “Odds were, if I wasn't there, you'd have found him.”

The supersoldier shook his head, then gave me a glance with a momentary solemn expression. “I don't like playing odds with my friends' lives.”

I huffed, amused, Steve's blue eyes flicking back to me. I shook my head and waved him off. “You're just such a boy scout sometimes, Steve.”

He quirked a lip in a tight grin. “I'll take that as a compliment.”

I chuckled outright. “You would.”

Steve laughed in reply, clapping me on the back. We got a few more steps down the hallway of OSS's borrowed base before I spoke up. “So... how's Bucky taking everything, anyway? You've known him longer.”

Steve sobered slightly, frowning. “He's... making it. We split a bottle of vodka and tried to get drunk.” He paused with a grimace. “It... kinda' worked. We got buzzed for an hour, anyway.”

I sighed and ran a hand through my hair. “Sorry about that, but... he deserved to know.”

Steve nodded. “You're right, he did. We know what to look out for this time around, though. Even if he is stronger now that he knows he got injected with the serum, I'll make sure nothing like that happens. There won't be a Winter Soldier this time around.”

I had my doubts about that. The name was too catchy to pass up and, even if it wasn't Bucky, some unfortunate person was likely slated to be inducted into the program. Bucky was likely just a fortunate find for them instead of having to start from nearly-scratch trying to catch up to Project Rebirth. Even if the result was nowhere near as effective, Stalin almost certainly knew of Captain America and had already devoted substantial resources to duplicating or improving upon the work. History was often like that. Things just couldn't be outright prevented after a certain point.

“I'll be right there with you,” I nodded, then sighed.

“Is everything really okay?” Steve asked, his concern shifting to me. “I know you said you expected it, but that doesn't make it easier if you have to talk to people you don't want to.”

I sighed again. “After speaking with Roosevelt and Truman again... then getting shipped back across the Atlantic and being dragged in to speak with Churchill and de Gaulle... they all want miracles and, even if I've got a few of those in stock, I don't have anywhere near as many as they actually want.”

Steve frowned curiously as he stepped to the side into a corridor and grabbed two cokes off a catering cart before handing me one. “What do you mean?”

“I thought we had a meeting?” I asked, accepting the coke anyway.

Steve grinned and shrugged. “In half an hour. You were giving the janitor a hard time.”

I scoffed, popped the cap and downed a quarter of the drink. “Ah... that's good. Well, if we've got the time... the issue is that certain historical trends, once set in motion, are very difficult to stop.” I hesitated, thinking. Something he'd know... “Like, say we were around fifteen-fifty. Do you think it's possible to actually stop the colonization of the New World?”

Steve cracked his own coke and took a sip before exhaling a quiet burp off to the side and thinking through the question. “I... guess so? I mean, That was back with, like Cortez and the Spanish, right? They didn't have that many people over here yet.”

I grinned sadly. “Even then though, by fifteen-fifty, Spain had already conquered most of what's today Mexico, Peru, and Chile. Incredible amounts of silver were already flowing back to Madrid and the rest of Europe was slowly becoming aware of how much wealth there was to be found in exploiting the New World.”

“So you'd have to go earlier,” Steve nodded, understanding at least part of my point.

“A lot of the problems people like Churchill and de Gaulle want me to head off, even Truman and Roosevelt to a lesser degree, are already set in stone. They have been for decades at this point. Even telling them chapter and verse of the consequences isn't going to change the decisions they make, not really, because all of those decisions are responses to current problems.”

“I think I see where you're going with this,” Steve mumbled, rubbing at his chin. “But... uh, maybe a concrete example?”

I shrugged and took a sip of my drink. “Back in nineteen-sixteen there was a secret treaty signed between the United Kingdom and France. There have been some modifications over the years, and there will be a few tweaks here and there post-war, but by and large those are the borders that the region is saddled with. I had to explain to Churchill that those lines on a map were drawn without any regard for ethnic, cultural, religious, linguistic, or geographic boundaries.”

Steve frowned. “Well that isn't that bad, is it? I mean, America's got a lot of different people in it and we're doing fine.”

Oh you sweet summer child, Steve...

“Jim Crow and the Japanese Internment Camps would beg to differ,” I replied bluntly, Steve wincing and opening his mouth to rebut my statements before I waved him off. “Look, I'm not arguing for a homogenous nation-state or anything, but there's a difference between creating borders that are conducive to stable self-governance and establishing boundaries that actively undercut the very idea of stability.” I paused and shook my head. “My point here is that all I can do is tell the people in charge what happened with the fallout of the decisions they're going to make tomorrow and how to, maybe, ameliorate a bit of the damage. To nudge them away from the worst of the pitfalls they could otherwise avoid. I can't give them new decisions to make.”

That said, there were some things I could do.

I thought I'd driven home the point of creating a Kurdish state to Churchill, at least. I think my explanation of the Isaaq Genocide had also stopped any plans to fuse British Somaliland and Italian Somalia cold in their tracks. Those were much further in the future than the most pressing issues of Indian Independence and the Palestine-Israel Issue.

Both of the latter two were coming up quickly and I knew nowhere near enough about geopolitics to actually suggest a real and lasting fix for either. At least, no actual ‘fixes’ that would pass political muster. Britain had passed the Balfour Declaration back in nineteen-seventeen and committed itself to the creation of a jewish state. In and of itself, that wasn’t an iron-clad piece of legislation, though. Nations realistically went back on their word all the time. The reality, though, was that much of the Arab leadership in the middle east had either subtly or openly aligned themselves with the Axis Powers, simply out of sheer political pragmatism.

With France and Britain on the side of the Allies and holding colonial dominion over the region, of course they would side with the Axis. It was their best shot at destabilizing colonial rule and pushing forward an agenda of independence for the region. Local leaders in Mandate Palestine also knew that jewish settlement had been occuring in the region since the Russian Pogroms in the eighteen-eighties and wanted to halt any possibility of a massive jewish exodus from Europe that might end with the region shifting demographics.

Which, in and of itself was understandable, but it also meant hundreds of thousands of refugees died in Europe when they could have found shelter elsewhere. A sin which, to be perfectly fair, America was also guilty of. The difference there being that the United States would ultimately be part of the destruction of the Nazi regime instead of maintaining diplomatic and economic ties with it.

And all of that was before anyone got into the horrors of the holocaust and the resulting political will of western European nations to fix a heinous wrong. Which was more than fair, but meant that a decision was going to be made as much to punish the Palestinians as to benefit the Jews simply due to the geopolitics of the time and area. Because, again, Britain would not make a decision which benefited a group which had aligned themselves with the primary enemy of the greatest war they’d ever fought.

I would console myself with the warning I’d given Churchill, but under the circumstances I didn’t see much of an alternative than to follow through with the decision they already knew they had to make. I very much wanted to avoid the violence that was to come and still hoped that, being forewarned of the problems that were on the horizon, a miracle would occur. Maybe the lines would shift enough that the Palestinians wouldn’t feel insulted by how little land they were granted, maybe increased negotiation with the Hashemite kingdoms would result in them being less willing to go to war, maybe…

Something would happen.

But I doubted it. There were things I could change and things that it was simply too late to meaningfully avoid in any substantial way.

“Churchill wanted to know how to keep India,” I admitted.

That was its own nasty bag of snakes as well. The man hadn’t been happy to learn that the post-war government would let India go its own way and seemed darkly satisfied by the fact that the division between Pakistan and India would result in at least a million dead, even if he’d made a solemn promise to avoid such a fate nearly in the same breath.

Again, though, there was no easy way to keep the British Raj. That ship had sailed. Britain would end the second world war economically, politically, and militarily exhausted and would have no stomach for the war it would take to keep the sub-continent under their rule. Granted, they wouldn’t call it a ‘war,’ but it would certainly take a special military operation to subdue independence movements in the region.

Hopefully, and I was using that word quite a lot these days, Churchill would be more focused on the oil and natural gas reserves in the North Sea I’d pointed him to or the ones off British Guyana. The lengths I’d gone on about green energy and energy independence as a strategic necessity (much the same as a talk I’d given to Truman and Roosevelt) had also seemed to get him thinking.

Steve was quiet for a moment, subdued distaste flashing over his face. He'd never minced words over being against colonization, he just hadn't quite been informed about the subject when it came to America's hand in it. He hadn't liked the ugly business in the Philippines, but had bought the polite lie that it was a 'civilizing mission.'

He hadn't appreciated the ugly truth.

“What'd you tell him?” He asked quietly.

“Not to fight World War One,” I replied bluntly.

Steve sputtered, almost choking on his drink as he coughed. “Jesus. You didn't?”

I chuckled darkly. “They didn't take it too well.” Which was an understatement, especially given my follow-up suggestion that they should have listened to Joseph Chamberlain's attempts to forge an Anglo-German Alliance back in the eighteen-nineties. Thankfully, I'd managed to restrain the urge to compare the Concentration Camps from the Boer War to the ones in current use by Germany. It had been difficult, but I had managed that much. “I might have made a few enemies today.”

“You going to be okay?” Steve asked.

“I also told them that they hired me to tell them the truth, not what they wanted to hear.” They hated it, but... well, it was a good point. “It ties back into my point about there being a time where you can divert the course of events and a time when you have to follow through on the hand that's already been dealt.”

Steve downed the last of his drink. “Well, it's about time we play the hand we've been dealt, don't you think?”

I mirrored him and nodded. “Pretty much.”

Steve and I clinked glasses before dropping them into the trash and beginning to walk towards the briefing room again. “So, I never did ask... what do you miss most from the future?”

“Microwaves,” I replied instantly, not missing a beat.

He blinked. “Like... radiation?”

“The full name is the ‘microwave oven.’ It's like a conventional oven, but smaller, faster, and it runs on electricity. Admittedly, it's almost never quite as good as a normal oven, but it's so much faster. Like, I know how to preheat an oven and everything, but it's such a pain in the ass.” I shook my head.

“Huh,” Steve stated, shrugging.

It was another few minutes before we managed to cross the labyrinthine underground structure beneath London to make it to the briefing room, where a very unamused General Phillips. Bucky, looking more put-together than he was in the aftermath of our last conversation, gave us a nod from across the room. Peggy stood off to the side as well, Erik perking up from where he was sitting with a set of metal jacks doing simple pick-up exercises.

If you watched closely, you could even see them jump and spin in a way that didn't quite match the motion he physically imparted to them.

“You'll pardon me if I haven't had the time to officially congratulate you in the time you've been back,” Phillips began, looking between Steve, myself, and Bucky. “The President was quite effusive in his praise, to the point of expanding the budget I'd asked for and allocating us more transports. That said, if you do find any more little green men impersonating government officials, I would ask that you tell someone instead of going off half-cocked like you did in DC.”

Bucky pulled a grin. “Now that we know we won't be laughed out of the building and into a padded cell, sure.”

“Noted,” General Phillips snorted, turning away and back to the map on the table as we followed him. “Now, you've wined and dined, you've saved the President from an alien infiltrator, and Stark has finished an upgraded equipment package. All of which means you're ready for deployment. So,” he stated, picking up a stick and slamming it down next to one of the Hydra bases, “here is your first mission.”

…

“YAAAAAAGH!”

As Shmidt's cry echoed through the castle walls, the man leaning over his bound form sighed and pulled back. “There we are, Commander. I believe that the final connection is complete.”

The Red Skull heaved heavy breaths as he forced the new appendage into motion, the glowing blue energy of the exposed circuitry on his right arm crackling over the flexing metal as an oversized fist clenched and unclenched.

“You do good work, Zemo,” Shmidt complemented, his organic hand drawing across his brow to wipe the sweat from it. “How goes the hunt for the Blood?”

Zemo chuckled, beginning to undo the straps holding the supersoldier down. “My agents have located the crypt he was bound in after the Great War and are working to retrieve him as we speak.”

“Excellent,” The Red Skull grinned venomously as his new hand bore down on the metal table, bending the steel supports. “I will mount the fool Captain America's head on a pike and skin that assassin alive as a warning.”

“I will sharpen my tools in preparation, Commander,” Zemo chuckled darkly.

~~

Here's the next chapter of Engineering Marvels, hot off the press!

I had to rewrite... certain sections a few times for, well... what should be obvious reasons.

Anyway!  I'm going to be working on getting out a Code Geass update over the weekend and then get a Winning Peace update out in the last few days of this month.  I'm sorry for the wait on that one, but I've been thinking about some stuff and making decisions on how to go about things on that story.

Thanks again for all your support!