For several seconds after everyone had settled into their seats, nobody spoke.
The Round Table had accommodated us all without complaint, its surface now considerably larger than Reed remembered it being, though judging by the occasional glance he continued to give it, he had not yet accepted that particular mystery.
There would be time for that later.
For now, there were considerably more important matters.
Or so I thought.
Magneto's gaze remained fixed upon Loki.
His expression had been restrained throughout the Regent King's entrance, but I knew Erik well enough to recognize the coldness behind it.
Eventually, he leaned back in his chair.
"How fortunate."
Loki turned his attention toward him.
Magneto continued before anyone could interrupt.
"Asgard arrives just in time for the victory."
The room became noticeably quieter.
Loki did not immediately answer.
Neither did he appear offended.
If anything, the faint smile upon his face disappeared as he studied Erik more seriously.
"I imagine you have something more you wish to say, Your Majesty."
Magneto's eyes narrowed slightly at the title.
"Millions of mutants live in Albion because they were promised sanctuary here. Sentinels descended upon that sanctuary, hunted them through their homes, and killed them for weeks."
His fingers tightened slightly against the arm of his chair.
"Your people watched."
That was considerably less diplomatic than the conversation Loki and I had shared the previous evening.
But then, Erik was not particularly interested in diplomacy at the moment.
Nor, apparently, was Stark.
"He's got a point," Tony said, all amusement from earlier gone. "Last time you did your grand tour around Earth, there was a lot of talk about friendship between realms, protecting Midgard, Asgard standing beside us, all that good PR stuff."
Loki glanced toward him.
Tony spread his hands.
"Then killer robots try to wipe out the planet and Asgard goes strangely quiet."
"Tony," Steve said.
"What? I'm asking."
"I know."
Steve turned toward Loki himself.
Unlike Tony or Magneto, there was no accusation in his tone, but neither was there much softness.
"I'd like an answer too."
Loki looked around the table.
Reed was watching him.
Charles remained silent, though his attention was obvious.
Even several of my knights appeared curious as to how Loki intended to answer.
I already knew.
Still, I said nothing.
This was his decision.
He should be the one to defend it.
Loki folded his hands together upon the table.
"Very well."
There was no smile now.
"No request for assistance ever came from Camelot."
Tony frowned. "That's it?"
"No. But it is the beginning."
Loki's gaze moved toward him.
"Your Majesty disappeared without announcing where you were going. Most of the Round Table disappeared with you. Tens of thousands of Enforcement Knights vanished at the same time, and Albion's government refused to explain where they had gone."
He paused.
"I did not know whether King Arthur had been killed, imprisoned, deliberately concealed, or whether your disappearance itself was part of some larger strategy."
Magneto remained unmoved.
"So you did nothing."
"I ruled."
That answer caught the room.
Loki's voice never rose.
"I am not an Avenger, King Magnus. I am not a wandering hero who may see suffering and simply decide that my strength gives me the right to intervene. I sit upon the throne of Asgard."
His eyes briefly met mine before returning to Magneto.
"Had I dispatched an Asgardian army into Albion without the consent of its King, I would have been placing foreign soldiers upon the soil of a sovereign allied realm whose ruler had mysteriously disappeared."
Tony opened his mouth.
Loki raised one finger.
"Consider what you would have believed had Asgardian soldiers appeared throughout Albion three days after Arthuria vanished."
Tony stopped.
That, at least, made him think.
Loki continued.
"Perhaps you would have thanked me. Perhaps Camelot would have thanked me. Or perhaps everyone on Midgard would have wondered whether Asgard knew more about Arthuria's disappearance than it admitted."
Silence answered him.
"Thor wished to come," Loki said. "Repeatedly. I refused him repeatedly. Heimdall watched your world, and had Midgard truly reached the point where extinction was imminent, I would have acted regardless of the consequences."
He looked toward Steve.
"But you were still fighting."
Steve's expression tightened.
"People were still dying."
"Yes."
Loki did not attempt to soften it.
"They were."
That answer seemed to matter.
He was not pretending there had been no cost to his caution.
"But humans die every day. Should I send down my army to stop every murderer? What about your wars? Should I stop those as well?" he asked, a rather natural question.
But it was also spot on.
It was the same reason I didn't get involved with things outside of Albion itself.
There were just some things humanity had to deal with on their own. To both Loki and me, every war was pointless, but to humanity, to those who fought, didn't the fighting have meaning?
Weren't they all fighting for what they believed in?
To stop that... it wouldn't be right; it would trap humanity as it was right now, unable to grow. Because with growth came growing pains, and if you shielded them from all pain, then that would strangle their growth.
"That's..."
"That clearly isn't the same."
And while they weren't wrong, neither was Loki.
For a moment, nobody spoke.
Then I placed one hand against the table.
"His decision was correct."
Several eyes immediately turned toward me.
Tony looked surprised.
Magneto less so, though he clearly disagreed.
I continued before either could respond.
"Had I wished Asgard to intervene in my absence, I should have made that clear before leaving, or granted Agravain the authority to request Asgardian military assistance should it become necessary."
Agravain inclined his head slightly.
"I did neither."
The fault was mine.
There was little purpose in pretending otherwise.
"Loki respected the sovereignty of Albion while ensuring Asgard remained prepared should the situation become irrecoverable. I would have done the same."
Steve studied the two of us for several moments before slowly nodding.
He did not necessarily like the answer.
But understanding a decision and liking it were hardly the same thing.
"Fine," Tony eventually said. "I still don't like it."
"You are under no obligation to," Loki replied.
That earned him a slightly more approving look from Steve.
Magneto remained silent for another moment before leaning back.
"I suppose arriving late is preferable to never arriving at all."
Loki's mouth curved faintly.
"I have recently been informed that this is a popular sentiment upon Midgard."
Steve gave me a look.
I ignored him.
That was enough of that.
"The question of Asgard's absence has been answered," I said. "Now we should discuss its presence."
Reed activated a small display device placed in the center of the table, and high-quality holographic imagery of the Nexus rose above us.
The atmosphere changed almost immediately.
Tony leaned forward.
Steve's expression hardened.
Magneto's attention left Loki entirely.
The Sentinels had returned to the centre of the room.
"Our problem hasn't changed," Reed began. "The Nexus is still the single most heavily defended Sentinel installation we've identified. Every model we've run assumes that once we begin the assault, the network will redirect whatever forces remain toward its defence."
"Then destroy them," Mordred said.
Reed paused.
Mordred looked back at him.
"What?"
Tony stared at him for a moment before gesturing toward the hologram.
"That's the plan."
"Then why are you saying it as though it's a problem?"
That earned a silence very different from the one before.
Gawain looked toward the display as well.
"How many remain?"
"Several thousand operational units that we know about," Tony answered.
Gawain nodded.
"Then it should not take particularly long."
Tony slowly looked around the table.
Mordred appeared entirely serious.
So did Gawain.
Agravain barely seemed interested in the number at all.
Before my return, the return of my knights and army, he might have had a headache over such a number, but now? Not even ten times that number would make him blink an eye.
Tony seemed to notice that as well.
He slowly looked from Gawain to Mordred, then toward Agravain, perhaps waiting for one of them to show even the slightest hint that the number had concerned them.
None did.
"Several thousand," he repeated, just to make sure there had been no misunderstanding.
"Yes," Gawain replied.
"Sentinels."
"I am aware of what we are discussing, Sir Stark."
Tony leaned back in his chair and rubbed at his forehead. "Right. Okay. I think we might be looking at this from very different perspectives."
"Clearly," Mordred said.
Reed glanced toward him. "Those several thousand machines have spent weeks adapting to almost everything we've used against them. Every engagement gives the central intelligence more information, and every new model has been noticeably more effective than the last."
"And yet they remain machines of metal," Mordred replied, apparently struggling to see where the difficulty lay. "You cut them apart, crush the remains, then move on to the next."
Tony stared at him.
"You make that sound really easy."
Mordred's brow furrowed. "It is."
That answer hung over the table for a moment.
There was no arrogance behind it.
No attempt to boast.
To Mordred, it was simply a fact.
A Sentinel could develop whatever weapon it pleased, but it still needed a weapon capable of harming him before that mattered. It could predict his movements with perfect accuracy, but prediction meant little if it lacked the speed to respond. It could reinforce its armour again and again, yet Clarent would still pass through it.
The same was true for the others.
Gawain.
Lancelot.
Tristan.
Gareth.
All of them stood on a level where the machines that had terrorised humanity for weeks simply weren't particularly impressive opponents.
And that was before considering the Enforcement Knights.
Or Asgard.
Or me.
"They're not wrong," I said.
Tony looked toward me.
"I know they're not wrong," he replied, and there was perhaps more frustration in his voice because of that. "That's kind of the problem."
"Explain," Agravain said.
Tony gestured toward the hologram. "For the last few weeks, one of those things showing up meant people died. Maybe we killed it. Usually we did, eventually. But first somebody got hurt, or a building came down, or another machine learned something that made the next fight worse."
His eyes moved across the knights.
"You guys look at a thousand Sentinels and think about how long it'll take you to kill them."
He tapped the table once.
"We look at a thousand Sentinels and think about how many people they'll kill before we're done."
That was better put.
Mordred's expression changed slightly.
Not because Tony had convinced him that the machines were suddenly dangerous to us, but because he understood the distinction.
"Then keep them away from the people," he said.
"Exactly," Steve finally spoke.
He had remained quiet throughout the exchange, listening rather than immediately taking control of it, but now his attention was fixed upon the holographic image.
"The problem isn't whether the Sentinels can beat Arthuria."
His eyes moved briefly toward Loki.
"Or Asgard."
Then toward my knights.
"Or any of you."
Steve reached forward and touched the controls Reed had placed upon the table, reducing the Nexus until the image showed not merely the fortress, but a large portion of the surrounding world.
"The problem is how much damage they can do before we beat them."
That silenced the room.
Because that was the war we were now fighting.
Not one whose outcome remained uncertain.
One whose price did.
"Humanity would have won eventually," Charles said quietly, his fingers folded together before him. "Even without His Majesty's return."
Erik glanced toward his old friend, but Charles continued.
"We were adapting as well. Stark and Richards were producing increasingly effective weapons. Mutants were learning how to fight the newer models. Governments were finally cooperating, at least where necessity forced them to."
His expression grew somewhat darker.
"But eventually could have meant another month. Perhaps two. Perhaps longer. And with each week, the dead would have continued to accumulate."
"Millions," Reed said.
Tony's expression hardened. "Tens of millions if things went badly enough."
Loki listened without comment, though I doubted those numbers affected him in quite the same way they affected the mortals around this table.
Nor, truthfully, did they affect me in precisely the same manner.
That did not make those lives unimportant.
It merely meant we understood death differently.
Steve enlarged the image of the Nexus again.
"So we don't give them those weeks."
"Agreed," I said.
"And we don't assume they're going to fight this the way we want them to."
That drew my attention.
Reed frowned. "Every projection indicates the network will attempt to defend the core."
"I'm sure it will," Steve replied. "I'm asking what else it does."
Tony looked at the map for a moment before understanding began to show on his face.
"You're thinking diversion."
"I'm thinking these machines have spent weeks learning what makes us stop fighting."
Steve began moving across the holographic globe.
New York appeared.
Then several major mutant settlements.
Military installations.
Population centres.
Albion.
"They don't need to beat Arthuria at the Nexus," he said. "They just need to give her a reason to leave."
I almost corrected him.
Almost.
Because there were very few things that would make me abandon the Nexus once the assault began.
But Steve wasn't really speaking about me.
He was speaking about everyone.
Stark had people he would protect.
Richards had people he would protect.
Erik had an entire species he considered his responsibility.
Steve himself would abandon almost anything if the alternative was knowingly allowing civilians to die.
The Sentinels knew that.
"So they attack somewhere else," Gawain said, finally seeing the shape of the problem. "Not because they expect to achieve victory there, but because they expect us to respond."
"Exactly," Steve replied.
Mordred leaned back slightly. "Then we leave enough people behind that nobody has to respond."
Simple and direct.
And, given the forces now available to us, entirely possible.
Loki's faint smile returned.
"I believe," he said, folding his hands before him, "this may be where Asgard becomes particularly useful."
Steve looked toward him.
"How quickly can the Bifrost move an army?"
"To anywhere Heimdall can see?" Loki asked. "Almost immediately."
Steve's attention returned to the map.
For several seconds, he said nothing.
Then he began moving the pieces.
"All right," he said. "Then we don't try to predict where the Sentinels will attack."
Reed frowned slightly. "What do we do instead?"
Steve looked around the Round Table.
"We make sure it doesn't matter."
That earned my attention.
"Explain."
Steve reached toward the hologram.
"Arthuria, I need you at the Nexus. Stark and Reed go with you. Everyone else—"
He paused.
Then smiled faintly.
"Everyone else gets the harder job."
And so the planning began.
(End of chapter)
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