“It’d be like a tether, or a Sword of Damocles. Just the fact that those two could reach out at any time, and you have to do what they say, or else...” The Fixer’s words trailed off as his face went long. “Dammmmmmmnnnnn...” he finally realized.

“Uh huh?” I prodded him.

“Does the president have one?” he had to ask.

“Which president?”

“Oh, of the United States,” he clarified quickly.

“No. She probably just calls heads of state through normal channels.” What were they going to do, hang up on her?

“That means she doesn’t consider them important enough or powerful enough to rate a Crystal Phone.”

“That’s exactly right.”

He got back to work silently, thinking, trying not to make the connections in some disbelief and denial.

The Great Bear and the Golden Hag had direct lines to the most powerful individuals on the planet, and those individuals, regardless of where they stood on the moral lines, would do what the two of them said, or they would be removed from the List.

“Does... does that bother you?” he asked after a minute. “The... threat?”

“Nah, because it’s stuff I’d do anyway, she’s just informing me of it and where to go. The timing may not be the best, but, eh. And if she’s telling me not to do something... I’m not the hyperegotistical sort. I’ll find something else to do.

“Now, if Max Midas gets told to direct his new spy satellite into a cloaked B’nox vessel and detonate it, I’ll imagine he’ll be very angry... but his super power is money and influence, so that’s what he gets to spend.

“You know about Dhabu Kya?”

“That’s the country Midas runs over in the Horn of Africa, right?” Fixer replied after a minute. “Took it over, turned the economy around, made it a model place to live and work in the middle of a bunch of warlords and stuff?”

“Peggy told me that country is the result of a phone call from the Great Bear. He called up Midas and told him to fix the area. So, he went in and did.”

“Doesn’t he make a lot of money there?” Fixer had to ask.

“No. He earns reputation, but he has to spend his time and effort governing the place. He also employs a lot of mercenaries to take care of problems in the area. Mr. Hill’s been there a dozen times in the past few years on jobs for him. Mr. Hill is not cheap, and there’s a lot of merc Powered who spend some time there.

“It’s an enormous time-suck for him, the money he put in there is basically lost if Midas pulls out or trades it away and he knows it, and even if the people love him there, it’s a big heavy stone around his prim Caucasian neck, and he can’t take it off.

“He’s offered to sell the entire country to Wakanda multiple times, and would do so in a heartbeat. They keep turning him down, probably laughing behind their hands, but at least they run a lot of trade down his rail lines to Port Dhabu there.”

Ebersol thought again for a few minutes. “Fuuuuuck. The Askari loathe the damn place...”

“Now you got it,” I said around making adjustments to the cloaking field.

“White man showing the black men how it’s done in their own goddamn homeland, right in the middle of one of the poorest, most war-torn areas in the world. He’s like a modern colonial all over again...”

“And?” I prodded him as we adjusted the field strength between us, and moved onto the next set.

“Well, the Crux will happily support him...”

“Except Midas is about as atheist and humanist as they come. He doesn’t care what churches are worshipped, as long as the people work and make money. Religious fanatics bore the shit out of him.”

“And yet Crux die there all the time...”

“Imagine that.”

He stiffened. “The whole damn country is a distraction for the Crux and the Askar to kill one another over, and Midas is managing the fight!”

“Because the Great Bear told him to.”

“Fuuuuuck...” the Fixer muttered, as the field blooped and warbled between us. “He must really hate the Great Bear...”

“They are fellow rulers of a country, a rare and prestigious group, peers and fellows who understand one another.” I didn’t bother to hide my amusement.

“They both belong to the Country Club?” he got out, only a little stiffly, and I burst out laughing despite myself, and the words just came out.

“Ima member of the Country Club.

“Rulin’ countries is what I love.

“I drive an old T-34,

“Put my sweatshops down on the floor.

“Hey Ima bonafide shootin’ fools,

“Brainwash ‘em all at my patron schools,

“At any high-rollin’ high-stakes pub,

“Ima member of the Country Club.”

It was his turn to start choking with laughter. “I hate country music!” he spluttered, and then I started making verses about mercs and warlords and starving kids and air conditioning and refrigerators and taxes and laws and forced pep rallies and werewolves and vampires and casual alien invasions and stiff upper lips and on and on, and he couldn’t stop laughing...

He secretly started piping it over the coms channel, and a whole lot of work didn’t get done for a while as everyone howled, especially as my accents were getting wild and changing with every stanza...

------

It turned out a lot of the SHIELD techies were musicians. They made emergency requisitions for their instruments, and in two days Ebersol and Jenkins somehow had a state-of-the-art sound stage wired up in one of the empty storerooms. They all begged me to do the vocals as they worked out the music behind it all very eagerly.

They might have blackmailed me by threatening to release the original recording (not that they could have done so, but they did put their merry hearts into it), and if my cheeks were a little red when I caved, they only cheered the louder.

At least I’d be out in space when they released it. I’d leave someone else to be embarrassed for me.

Gwen and Cindy weren’t going to be left out of that, of course, and they actually had band experience, working out the music and adding in the back-up vocals quite happily between everything else they had to do.

They had never actually heard me sing, or Sing, especially. I left all that to Dealer as part of the Sublime Chord, as I didn’t do any real Casting, and naturally you couldn’t record the Sublime Chord. Finding out I could Sing like, well, someone with 17 Ranks in Perform/Singing was just gonzo, and everyone was deluging me with song requests and telling me to go pro and whatnot.

I wanted to give my sense of spontaneous humor a good swift kick in the arse. I was hanging around with Peter Parker too much...

-------

“Ima member of the Country Club,

“Rulin’ countries is wut ah luv.

“Ah bombs away ‘em from the sky,

“Flames go up an’ ah watchem die...”

“Ben!” I protested as he kept singing under his breath.

“Hey, it’s a catchy tune!” he protested, avoiding my glare. “Steady as she goes, McCoy.”

“Steady as she goes, Mr. Grimm,” the Beast said in his precise diction. “I tell them to keep a stiff upper lip, those unwashed rabble who just want a sip...”

“Haaaaaaaank!” He did the accent perfectly, however.

He coughed. “Oh, excuse me, Dyna, trying to stay composed here.”

“Arseholes, the lot of you,” I grumbled, and there were snickers all around the bridge.

Ben’s steady hands took the Starholder out of dock and smoothly away from the station. The cloak was down with the refit and modifications all completed, the internal cloaks giving the few nearby ships conniptions with their not-so-subtle scanning.

It was a big ship putting out a lot of energy, after all.

“Nice and steady,” he complimented the handling as McCoy laid in the course. The inertial dampeners powered up, and the ship’s main engines kicked in after the gravimetrics got us out of LaGrange Station’s gravity well.

“Accelerating smoothly at one percent of c per second,” McCoy reported, as our course for Saturn, and more specifically its moon of Titan, came up before us, curving off into space and steadily adjusting as our speed picked up.

It was mostly automated, of course, but testing out the manual back-ups was all part of the shakedown cruise.

I, of course, had precious little to do, officially. Chief Medical Officers generally don’t, especially when the trio of medics below me took care of boo-boos. I was there to alchemically heal shit up, not deal with mashed fingers and pain-killers. I put a Healing Trap in Medbay One, and all of the accidental stuff was healed up with a footstep, while headaches and stuff got aspirin and call them in the morning.

Unofficially, I was playing back-up to anyone who needed it, and finishing up all my stuff for Dr. Richards at the same time... when I wasn’t being dragged into the sound stage for another song someone wanted me to sing and record. Musicians get serious about that stuff!

I’d had to upgrade parts of my suit on the fly with Xandaran tech, which meant integrating it with Terran tech, which meant totally developing the technology and exchange paradigms and standards to make that happen. Oh, happy-happy twelve thoughtstreams, always with something to do...

To my immense relief, Dealer and the Dupes came through, delivering Water and Air Elemental Command Rings to Ben and I for the trip. They even had a Fire Command Ring waiting for Johnny when he got done with his sabbatical.

Ben’s Ring was actually optimized for Reed, but that was fine, they’d just swap when it was time. I immediately started on the process of making my Ring a Primal Elemental Command Ring. Dealer had our main one, and I wasn’t going to take it from her. At this point, no reason not to have two of them, right?

Everyone was on station, looking and listening. Pointedly, Iceman was outside on the Hull.

“I’ve got a heat signature at two o’clock high,” Bobby’s voice came over local coms. "Shall I shoots 'em up an' watch 'em die?"

I groaned...

=========

Author's note: C is short for light-speed, part of the famous E=mc^2.

Dhabu Kya is a shout-out to Grrrl Power.