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Cargo heard something cry from the basement.
Unquestionably, that sound came from Hawking. He’d never made that noise before, but it wasn’t unlike the dying wails of his fellow Elders; different enough in both form and context to be distinct, but given that Cargo promised Bond the reluctant protection of Hawking’s life, the alert was enough to push Cargo to grab her rifle and speed-walk down to his room.
That Hawking was even alive this long was pure practicality and nothing else. Their group was made of a scant few trying to survive, lucking out on finding this bunker and little else. Someone with such psionic power as one of the Ethereal Ones was invaluable. Unfortunately, there was no reason to believe that an Elder of all people cared about anything but his own well-being and goals. Now that they had enough personnel to assign him nurses, and build a camp outside of the bunker, and fight back against ADVENT, it was in their best interests to lock the bastard down.
He lived with a psionic suppressor at all times, locked up in the basement, and the rights he had were the rights any living thing was owed. Nothing else. To be honest, Cargo didn’t expect to use her rifle on some attacker, somehow slipping so far into the bunker without her notice. She was prepared to put Hawking down like a rabid animal.
Especially when she swung open the door and found him holding the pieces of his broken suppressor.
Hawking sat with his back towards the door, breathing heavily. His hands shook. (The top ones, holding the suppressor— Cargo couldn’t see where the bottom set were.) He hunched over as if sick, but he turned his head towards her after a beat of silence. The crown of the back of his head, closed off when the suppressor was on, struggled to stay that way now that it wasn’t. She could see the glow of his psionic power through its petals.
“What happened?” she demanded.
“…Diane.” Hawking raised his lower hands and, with some difficulty, turned his wheelchair towards her. “I— this…” He looked down at the fragments of metal. “…An accident, I swear to you.”
He was the only one who used her actual given name anymore. It still made her boil a little.
Cargo narrowed her eyes and approached carefully, handling her rifle, trigger finger itching to curve under the trigger guard. She searched his body language for typical Ethereal hostility— a straightening back, or waving hands, or lifting away from the ground. So far, nothing.
Hawking sighed. “Truly. I— I was thinking of… so many things. I suppose enough that this device could not restrain the Gift.”
“Must have been a hell of a thought to break it,” Cargo replied, her tone blank.
“Not a dangerous one. Not externally.”
Cargo lost patience: “Could you give me a straight answer? What were you thinking about?”
Hawking flinched.
Basic empathy pulsed regret in the back of Cargo’s head. For all of Hawking’s thousands of years of intergalactic imperialism, she was threatening an old man. An old man with such serious disability that even his oh-so-great psychic abilities, and the Elders’ advanced technologies, couldn’t cure it. She’d seen the documentation the nurses had put together, and seen for herself just how frail he was. His fear of her was not unfounded when she was his physical superior.
But the fact of his psionic powers was the sticking point. She was his physical superior, but she had no guards against his mind-control. Against a psionic blast, or being thrown by his will alone into the nearest wall. His people had been conquering other civilizations across the universe for millennia. The peoples he and his kin controlled endured generations of abuse and indoctrination. Bad as it felt, she knew, she reassured herself, she had every reason to be strict with him.
Gathering the suppressor into one hand, Hawking stumbled to explain himself. “I was considering the actions I’ve taken to control and discipline the Collective’s subjects. Actions that…” He paused, glancing up at her. “…That very much justify how you currently feel towards me.”
Cargo grimaced. She hated how casually he read her.
“I have done worse than you can conceive of,” he confessed. “Atrocities so great that even now, I cannot fathom how I justified them to myself. Perhaps it is the result of the Collective’s dulling of emotions. But I cannot blame the other Elders for actions that were wholly my own. They did not make my decisions.”
“Are you saying there are Ethereals who wouldn’t have done whatever it is that you’ve done?” Cargo asked skeptically.
Hawking’s brows furrowed. “No. Perhaps they would have. But the fact is that they didn’t, when I was the one who faced those we’d decided had ‘transgressed.’”
That he wasn’t meeting her gaze made it easier to examine him. His other hands sat limp in his lap. The wrinkles of his forehead deepened and shallowed subtly.
“You’re being vague on purpose,” she noted.
“You don’t want me to go into detail.”
“Is it that gruesome?”
Hawking finally lifted his head. “I forced good people to commit horrific acts they never forgave themselves for.”
Vindication, indeed. Cargo wasn’t surprised— but she let go of the insistence of further honesty. This was honest enough, she supposed.
Someone would have to start keeping an eye on him and make sure he didn’t act on what he could do. Two someones, most likely, as one would be easy to control. Cargo dreaded already the logistics of keeping him under control without the suppressor at play.
“You will want to have this repaired,” Hawking said, gesturing his hand towards her. “Frankly, I hope you can see it done quickly. This power is no gift.”
Accepting the pieces from him meant lowering her gun. Cargo squinted one eye.
Echidna was out handling the camp. Bond was on mission. Cargo radioed the camp’s lead engineers to come collect, as they were the only other ranked officials who were burdened with knowing who Hawking was and that he was here.
Hawking lowered his hand. “Dare I be remotely honest?”
“About what, now?” All Cargo could discern was that she wasn’t going to like what Hawking was about to say.
“If I wanted to destroy this place, I’ve already had ample opportunity. I’ve been able to ask Bond to remove this device for me every so often. When you and Echidna are not present, and its pressure grows unbearable.”
“God dammit.” Cargo pinched between her eyes. Of all the authority figures Bond had to be loyal to, she’d gone right to the top. “And I suppose that your point is that you’re not doing so because you don’t want to?”
“Because this invasion was a fool’s mistake. You convinced me of that.”
“Uh huh.” Cargo dropped her hand and shot Hawking with a glare. “Oh-so-conveniently, the moment you were free from XCOM’s captivity—”
“I could have saved Echo.”
Cargo’s breath caught in her throat.
It’d only been a matter of a couple of years. At this point, there was little else to talk about when it came to Echo— the lone infantry-class sectoid that joined them out of the base, only to slowly bleed out from a gunshot wound. Echidna and Bond had mixed feelings towards him. Admittedly, Echo was far from kind. He was aggressive, and high-strung, and was never able to give an apology.
Which wasn’t far off from most people in Cargo’s life prior to now. Still, she had bonded with Echo over the months he had spent in captivity, the photos she’d taken for him of the world he’d been sent to die on, and the memories she shared with him in his final moments. To his own people, he was cannon fodder. To Echidna and Bond, he as an arsehole.
Cargo still thought of him as a friend. A friend she missed enough to name this camp, in part, after him.
“My psionic abilities allow me to drain the life energy from one being into a second,” Hawking explained. “And I know, had I said anything of the matter at the time, you would have jumped to volunteer. It would not have even given you much physical trouble in the long run. If not you, then Bond would do anything I ask of her. Echidna… … She would not trust me, any more than you do, and would not be so inclined. Except perhaps to protect you.”
“You were there and in full health,” Cargo commented.
“I know. And the thought did cross my mind.”
But you thought he didn’t deserve it, didn’t you.
“I was too arrogant to make the offer, or to simply perform with my own strength. But in his final moments, I intruded into what you shared with him, and it tempted me to save him.”
Cargo said nothing, disappointed without shock. If there were any flaw undeniable in Echo’s character, it was that he cared nothing for what other people thought or felt, despite being a psion privvy to those things. Hawking, obviously, was the opposite— devoid of propriety.
“Up until that moment, I still considered the notion of… I don’t know. Perhaps in my hubris, I thought I could sway the rest of my kin to a less bloody means of control over this world.” Hawking tapped a finger against his leg. “But I still had that desire to return, until you revealed just how much humans would have welcomed us if we had come in peace. Truly, come in peace. We knew humanity’s patterns as weaknesses to exploit. Flaws of character that preemptively validated our decision to wage war upon you.”
“Not making me feel any better, you know.”
“But,” Hawking persisted, or at least sped up towards his point. “That bond you and he had proved there was something better worth working towards, one that would lead to a less wasteful outcome. I understood the practicalities first. I understood the emotions second.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“I am still processing those emotions. Applying them in retrospect to other events which could have benefited from my mercy. That is how I broke my suppressor.”
Cargo paused to fully parse out what he had just rambled on about, for all that this old man could never just say what he intended within a hundred words or less. “Are you telling me you felt such intense grief for those you harmed, that it led to some kind of psionic outburst?”
“Yes.”
“And that it’s fallout from choosing not to save Echo.”
“Yes.”
Well, the verbal run-around was… insightful, even if not perfectly believable. Cargo doubted she would ever fully come to trust Hawking.
But she finally dropped the rifle from one hand to accept the suppressor’s corpse with it. Hawking carefully handed the pieces over as not to drop even the tiniest chip of hardware.
The engineers finally made it down to the basement. Cargo hesitantly released Hawking from her line of sight to explain to them what had happened and what she needed them to do— never forgetting that behind her back was the single most powerful psion in, at minimum, a thousand-mile radius.
He did and said nothing. He simply sat in his wheelchair, hands folded, watching the interaction without so much as a note of complaint.
The engineers left with their task. Cargo turned halfway to ask one last question: “Every time you’ve told Bond to take the suppressor off. You’ve really never used your power? For anything?”
“No point. Bond already does everything I tell her to.” A strange expression twisted Hawking’s face. “I ask it of her as a matter of physical comfort, but mental comfort prefers that I keep it on. Especially when Bond is in the room.”
“Why?”
“Because her mind is a minefield of sexual perversions that I wish I knew less about.”
“I won’t ask you to explain that one. I’ll just choose believe you.”