Chapter 1
Chapter One
March, 1999
What the hell had happened to all of their plans, anyway? Where had the grand dream of the future of the world gone? They’d seized power in the United Kingdom, and then, for the past nine months, had experienced a chaos they had never imagined. Thanks to Voldemort’s appointment as his personal representative on the Muggle Front Government, Bellatrix had been the point-woman for the chaos, too.
Who knew that the other muggle governments of the world would start hitting Britain with a huge number of ‘sanctions’, international punitive laws which crashed the economy, forcing Bellatrix to form a talented body of experts to try and make the economy something called dirigiste so that they didn’t have to deal with a total economic collapse of muggle Britain which would lead to widespread revolts against their rule that they weren’t in a position to deal with? Worse, this immediately threatened the prospect of a military intervention against the new government, as Prince Charles’ claims started to bear more and more weight.
So Bellatrix, despite her great distaste for the terrible muggle weapons, had gone ahead and worked with her experts to come up with a plan to strengthen the nuclear deterrent. The Resolution -class SSBNs had been recommissioned with indigenous nuclear warheads—though they were less powerful than the American ones they had been cut off from and now had a limited supply of on the Vanguard-class—fabricated from nuclear waste from Britain’s nuclear reactors, by adjusting their operating ratio to produce enriched nuclear material for bomb-making. Two months before, this had led to a nuclear accident at Dungeness A while running the reactor hard to produce Pu-239.
Because of the reactor’s position on the Channel, the radioactive contamination had mostly hit France, which had led to the French ministry launching a raid on Britain with their Aurors and the French leading the EU into a high military alert. The dark witch had a sense of responsibility over the incident; she had personally taken charge of the emergency response, and her reward of radiation sickness from going into the hall to supervise the operations had been indescribably awful, particularly when magic was perfectly unavailing against all but the trivial symptoms.
It also had not improved Voldemort’s response to the incident. Bellatrix had been tortured by the Dark Lord for over twenty minutes with the Cruciatus Curse for that failure, though 102 muggles in the operation had been executed, with their families. But the intensity of the torture had been so terrible that her arms still twitched. In truth, though, she felt like she deserved it. She hated the threat of nuclear weapons and she felt enormously guilty at having poisoned France, veritably her second homeland, even in a relatively small measure.
The feeling she had deserved her punishment had left her morose and detached, but she still had almost total responsibility for the Muggle economy and had to keep working through it. It was absurd and insulting that a pureblood witch of her calibre and breeding was reduced to trying to tell these damnable muggle engineers and economists what to do, but there she was. Other measures for the national defence had been necessary as well. Since they had all the plans already, she had ordered the immediate production of six large air-defence frigates of the Horizon type, and from the yard building HMS Ocean, renewed production of the Invincible- class light carrier. The Type 23 line had also been renewed and accelerated. If they needed muggle weapons, it was best to stop the muggles from invading at all, and that meant a Navy; hadn’t that always been the way Britain defended herself?
Spring was coming on, and Bellatrix was glad to be leaving behind all of these muggle concerns and the stressful atmosphere of Whitehall, surrounded by muggles and wizards too arrogant to learn what they were dealing with, while half the muggles were Imperioused and the other half were terrified or the most absolutely vile kind of servile, ambitious personality which existed. She despised all of them.
Life was blossoming again in the world, and, moreover, she was heading to the Ministry Building for a late night meeting that the Dark Lord had called with little notice. It pleased her to, at that point, put aside the thoughts about all the muggle concerns she had taken up, and focus on wizarding matters, even though she had a briefing folio thicker than her thumb stuffed under her left arm in case the meeting turned to more muggle economic and military affairs; she really hoped it wouldn’t, though on the other hand, wasting another evening talking about reorganising Hogwarts when they had an entire country to run would be almost as bad. Secure behind immensely powerful occlumency shields, Bellatrix sometimes dared to wonder why, exactly, her Lord was so obsessed with it, when they had a country to rule and a world to conquer. Her love for him had been sorely tried by the past nine months.
All the senior Death Eaters were there, with Voldemort at the head of the table. Bellatrix arrived on time, and curtsied in her black dress to her Lord.
“Bellatrix.” She had been punished, but it had been quickly swept under the rug by Voldemort, too. “Have a seat.”
Her seat was still at his right side. She smirked contemptuously toward the others, knowing they envied the level of power and freedom she had been granted in running Britain.
There was a girl serving them tea. She was a mudblood who should have been in Hogwarts, but now worked as a servant in the Ministry, with her tongue removed to keep her from speaking words of power that could threaten her betters; she could still do simple wordless house magic to fulfil her duties as a servant. The idea had been Rookwood’s, but Voldemort had modified it by demanding any mudbloods allowed to serve in this way have one eye struck out, so they would not be found attractive for miscegenation by pureblooded men. This entire thing made Bellatrix deeply uncomfortable; the muggleborns were awful but something about casual mutilation for servitude rang wrong. It would be better to just put them out of their misery.”
“Tonight,” Voldemort began, immediately drawing the attention of all the assembled Death Eaters, “we are going to review the plan for the next phase in our seizure of power. Yaxley will present it to us.” Voldemort leaned back to listen as the man rose, and bowed to him, before facing all of the others.
Bella couldn’t help but think behind her occlumency shields that they were now emulating the concept of a ‘briefing officer’ from the muggles. This was not a great improvement to the Wizarding World, though she couldn’t figure out how else to handle Whitehall, herself.
“During the 1950s and 1960s,” Yaxley began, “the wizarding world became aware of a powerful new weapon that the Muggles had created. Utilizing a kind of scientific alchemy based on the sun, they had created a device which could destroy an entire city, when delivered from a Muggle flying machine…”
“Nuclear weapons, you’re talking about nuclear weapons, we should know about them by now,” Bellatrix groused. She was impatient to pass the five year old explanation. She had heard that when she was twenty, and she wasn’t twenty anymore; it was part of why she was here.
Yaxley looked archly at her. “Would you like to explain, Bellatrix? We are all in this together.”
He was clearly expecting herself to humiliate herself in front of the Dark Lord, but in fact, Bella realised with a start, it was precisely because nobody had really been paying attention to what she had been doing with the muggles in Whitehall. The muggle engineers working desperately to contain the situation at Dungeness A had managed to impress upon her a reasonable understanding of nuclear physics, and Yaxley didn’t know.
Well, time to show the git up! Bellatrix got up, smiling with a ruthless grin touching ruby lips. “Right, so, nuclear weapons utilize the fundamental material principle of the universe – the transfiguration of energy into matter, and matter into energy, is a concept which is understood by the muggles. However, being useless muggles, they have absolutely no control over this transfiguration.” She slammed her hand down onto the table and everyone looked at her with a start.
“We all know what uncontained, uncontrolled magic, like that used by a mudblood, a cripple, a child, or an idiot would be. The muggles looked at the absolute limit of the universe—the moment where the material world breaks down, and only witches and wizards can understand things—and they saw this power. They can’t understand it, they can’t control it, but they can put it into a spherical metal case and throw it out of an aeroplane or a rocket,” she continued in mock sweetness, with her head twisted to the side in a grin. “A little muggle timer makes it go off. It’s set either to time or altitude. When it goes off, it just… Goes off. It takes the substance uranium, or plutonium, and as long as it’s got some, it just … Keeps going off. They can’t do anything interesting with it. The only thing they’ve figured out, purely by trial and error and lots of dead muggles, is that if you stick an alchemical substance they call a ‘moderator’ into the uranium, it goes off a bit more slowly. So they do that when they stick some into a big steel drum to produce heat with. And that’s all it does. Their powerplants just make heat. And the bombs?” She cackled, and for a moment let them all her see a flicker of her madness.
“Well they make heat really fast. Fast enough to create a shock-wave which will destroy an entire city. Like Fiendfyre spreading in every direction at once. But they make something else, too. Radiation. Sleets of it. It will poison the land. You old veterans of the Knights of Walpurgis should know this well. In the 1960s and 1970s the world feared being destroyed by it—by these stupid muggles just throwing their stupid bombs around without the faintest idea of what they would do, all over some petty muggle dispute about which big muggle which get to shoot the other muggles in Czechoslovakia or something like that. Anyway, there’s no magical cure for it. And they’ve got THOUSANDS of these bombs, all just sitting around. And oh, by the way, even muggles are scared of them now. So they don’t go directly to war with other countries that have them, they rely on assassinations and proxies and what have you. I’m working on doubling our arsenal to keep the other muggles scared until we can reveal ourselves.” Still can’t believe I’m fucking doing that. She thought, as Bellatrix sat down with a look of triumph at having stolen Yaxley’s thunder.
“Thank you for the explanation,” Yaxley said quite stiffly. “At any rate, the reality is that these weapons are a powerful expedient to us. We have been bedeviled with the problem of how to gain control over the muggle populations of the world. There are not enough wizards—Merlin, there are just eighty thousand of us in Britain, against sixty million muggles—for us to exert power over the whole of the world. Worse, of course, the reality is that the world was never made to hold more than two billion muggles, at most; and it would be better if there were only a billion and a half, really; there are presently six billion muggles in the world.”
Bellatrix was listening, somewhat distracted, having secured her triumph in the explanation which stood up Yaxley and then not really caring about whatever inane thing he was going to bring up next. Indeed, she agreed that six billion muggles was entirely too many, and a billion and a half would be nicer, but she couldn’t really think of any way to make seventy-five percent of the world’s muggle population go away…
“In fact, we have an opportunity,” Yaxley continued. “The Wizarding Ministries of the world developed spells which would protect wizards from nuclear attack. We have yet to understand a way to shield against radiation, but we can protect against the physical descent of nuclear warheads across a large part of the world, at our convenience. These spells must be executed by many wizards at once, but they allow wizarding population centres to be safe in the event of a nuclear exchange. For this reason we are confident, for example, we can make Britain, which has a large wizarding population from history and from immigration, completely immune to nuclear attack. Likewise, knowledge of the spells has been disseminated to all major wizarding communities in the world in which we have allies, and personnel under the Imperious Curse have been secured in the nuclear powers’ command and control networks around the world.”
Well, that’s convenient. Why do we need the nuclear deterrent after all? Bellatrix thought, and took some tea.
“Thus it will be easy to launch the weapons without wizarding-kind suffering. We are confident that by doing this, we can secure the elimination of three billion muggles with minimal collateral damage among the wizarding population, mostly mudbloods that intermix themselves with the muggles in some countries…”
Bellatrix jerked, and froze in place, her eyes going wide. What did he just propose?! “...What did you just say, Yaxley?” She snapped. “You want to launch the nuclear weapons?”
There was a rumble around the table, from more than just her. But it was Bellatrix who lacked any kind of restraint against saying things, and simply blurted it out, in shock and surprise.
“You’ll contaminate the world with radiation!” She continued, heedless. “It will set most of the thinking magical creatures against us, and poison our relationship with the land! And, I might add, the muggles have also prepared for this kind of war, and they will prove more resilient against it than you realise. I have watched muggles react to radiation, and they do have methods of handling it. You are using their own technology as a panacea against them, and it’s very likely to fail!”
“No, Bellatrix, it will succeed,” Voldemort’s voice cut, low and warning, against her tirade. “It is a very simple plan. The wizards will be safe. And most magical creatures like Goblins and Veela and Merfolk are all simply problems to our supremacy, anyway. I know that we had long opposed the existence of these weapons and the risk of nuclear war, as Knights of Walpurgis, and clearly you are thinking of those times. However, the times of changed. The number of muggle nuclear weapons is smaller, and they are cleaner than they were. We will have altered the targeting, to focus precisely on the elimination of muggle cities. With the muggle cities destroyed, we will more effectively control the muggle populations in the rural areas, which we need as a base of slaves for wizarding civilisation, anyway. The plan is a perfectly viable one, and I was not calling this meeting as a debate over it, but an explanation of what is going to happen very, very soon.”
Bellatrix looked in confused shock and hurt at Voldemort. Once, when he had been the amazing and charming Dark Lord of the Knights of Walpurgis, she was sure this would have been unthinkable to him. But something had changed… Hadn’t it?
Voldemort was smirking, now. "So, Bellatrix. You think of muggles as dirty animals, and their magic spawn as dirty blood. I have no doubt of that about you, you are one of my true Loyals. And here you are, complaining about killing them enmasse with their own weapons. Isn't that a truly remarkable sentiment?" He looked around the table, garnering chuckles from the other Death Eaters, as more than a dozen pairs of contemptuous eyes now focused on Bellatrix.
"It's the radiation that bothers me, My Lord," Bellatrix answered, her skin hot with a flush, put out at the moment and exposed by her own Lord. She looked around for support, but only Dolohov looked uncomfortable.
"There are real risks from fallout," he acknowledged. She received no other support, when the Dark Lord had spoken.
"The targeting of the weapons will be changed, I understand, to minimise this. Again, Bellatrix, are you really feeling... Sympathetic, for these muggles?"
“No," Bellatrix answered weakly, lowering her eyes. "It's just my concerns over the radiation, you have my word. How will we take advantage of the operation, My Lord?” She finally asked, weakly.
“That's better. We are preparing the muggle Army now to invade Europe. Thanks to Dolohov’s effort had recovering multiple examples of the ancient Kaptarian Telecasters, we have a plan to control entire Armies from a single point, with the Imperious curse, the Telecaster, and the Pensieve. Many other countries will have their wizarding leadership overthrown in a coup d’etat, and their operations harmonised with our own.”
“That will still be an immensely dangerous operation, requiring magic at the front line, as our Army is small against all of Europe,” Bellatrix answered, desperate to escape this conversation. “I beg your leave to be dismissed from the leadership of the British muggle government, and placed in command of one of the Armies invading Europe.”
“Ah, Bellatrix. If you want to risk your life for me in the front line, I won’t stop you, but I’m surprised you’d accept a demotion before your peers,” he laughed, teasing her again; and there was laughter from the others at the table. "It seems a little squeamish, though."
Bellatrix could only think about Delphini, and the risks of drifting radiation across the globe. “My Lord, it is no demotion in my eyes to risk my life on the front line for your cause. I would rather my wand sing my loyalty than I remain cooped up in drafty old conference rooms. I beg your leave to prove this to you at every moment henceforth.”
He sniffed in bemusement, and looked idly to his wand, as if he were considering whether or not to punish her with a well-aimed Crucio, or indulgently acknowledge her request. In the end, he settled on the later. “If that’s what you want, I won’t deny it to you, Bellatrix. Go.”