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Lies. Dominic was chomping at the bit to unleash on the world whatever it was he’d been working on, but even Oliver almost believed his serious, sad blue eyes.
“But unfortunately, I believe its day has come.” Dominic made a few swipes on his tablet sitting on the podium’s surface, and the screen behind him filled with an aerial image of Ralscoln still burning, rubble in the street, and a black flag flying over its capital building.
He paused for a moment—to let the image settle in—and Oliver took a quick read of the room. Serihk, Harrison, and Patrick looked unmoved, likely ready to reject any Turner proposals out of hand. But the klah’eel in the room looked suitably unnerved, angry, or determined. They were ready.
Oliver only hoped whatever Dominic had cooked up wasn’t too horrifying.
“Your enemies are tenacious, driven, organized,” Dominic continued. He swiped a few more images onto the screen—a group of rebels at target practice with obliterated dummies that had once had tusks, a refinery with that black flag over it, and then a shot familiar to all of them now: the intense stare of the Resistance leader. “And worse: fearless. I can fix that for you.”
Low murmurs rustled around the room, too soft to hear, but Dominic’s eyes lit up.
“Fear can bring down a force’s defenses faster than orbital bombardment and with infinitely less structural damage. It can cause loyal men to flip, sow discord in the ranks, and erode trust. It impedes tactical decision-making and compromises leaders.”
“And fear”—Dominic threw up a slide full of chemical formulas and the diagram of a large organic compound that Oliver didn’t bother trying to understand—“is biological.”
More murmurs. Oliver was beginning to see where Dominic was going with this, but his brother continued before he could wrestle with the ramifications.
“My team and I have developed an aerosolized compound that when inhaled produces staggering results in human, qesh, and klah’eel test subjects.” Dominic paused with his finger poised over his tablet. “I warn you: the following videos are disturbing.”
Disturbing did not cover it.
A human man sobbing and screaming in the corner of a sterilized white room with such a profound look of terror, Oliver felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise.
A mottled brown-yellow qesh shrieking and clawing a window open before disappearing out of it.
A klah’eel tearing at his own nose. A human with a gun to her own head. A human unloading a gun into the heads of—
Oliver looked away.
He swallowed and breathed against the sounds he still heard.
How had Dominic even gotten permission to conduct such experiments? How had he managed to override his humanity to carry them out?
Eventually, the screaming of the last video ended with the echoing of a gunshot, and blessed silence fell over the room.
“As you can see,” Dominic said quietly, “it is quite potent. These were not civilians. These were hardened criminals, both civilian and military.”
So that’s how he had gotten the permission. No one cared what you did with death row inmates. Maybe someone should have.
“Modern gas masks aren’t effective. The compound is very small.” Dominic returned to the slide of chemical formulas and diagrams. So innocuous. It might as well be the slide for the latest anti-aging pill. “A completely sealed hazmat suit would be effective, but Southern Tava doesn’t have enough of those to clad an entire organization in, and you can easily blockade the area to prevent the raw materials required to make them from entering the region.”
Oliver glanced at Minister Hashi, who nodded thoughtfully. Dominic had already won. Goddamn it. Oliver was the one that had insisted on Minister Hashi being here. He’d known Hashi would go for anything that might give him a leg up no matter how brutal.
“What about application?” Oliver spoke before he could stop himself. “How would you subject a single force or group without affecting surrounding civilians? Or your own men?”
Dominic’s eyes flashed with pure hatred for a moment before his cool demeanor covered it over. “The compound is light, but it can bind with different mediums without losing effectiveness. It could be applied using a simple grenade filled with heavy gas for targeted operations. Or dropped in a timed capsule from orbit to disperse over a large area.” Dominic turned away from Oliver and toward Hashi instead. “That would be entirely up to you and your men, sir.”
Entirely up to Mal’ik. Oliver’s throat tightened. Mal’ik was the one who would be deciding to dose people with literal fear. To terrorize them. To drive them mad.
“And do people recover?” Serihk spoke suddenly but mildly, as though he were merely curious. “After they’ve been subjected to your compound.”
“Completely,” Dominic nodded. “Aside from any physical injury they may have sustained during the experience, they return to themselves within a few hours of coming out of contact with the compound.”
“Completely?” Harrison crossed his arms, and Oliver saw the moment Dominic registered his uneducated accent in the tick in his jaw. “They recover completely from the most terrifying moments of their lives?”
Dominic narrowed his eyes at him. “There may be some lingering effects on the subjects’ psyches, but our tests have found no evidence of degraded mental faculties.”
“Did you look for any evidence?” Oliver asked.
