Channel…channel…find the damn channel…
“Control, we have eyes on a suspect packet,” he said. His own voice now rolled out of the speaker system.
On screen, Widow smiled and nodded.
“You see?” she said coolly.
Hawkeye scrambled up the ladder, screwed open the roof hatch, and stuck out his head. Hot sunlight hit him. Swamp heat rushed into the air-conditioned cubicle. The modular yellow compound was spread out below, fringed by the lush green jungle.
“Watch station, what is the location of the packet?”
They were talking to him.
“Uhm, stand by,” Hawkeye replied, hunting for something plausible to say. He perched on the rim of the hatch and unshipped his bow.
“Watch station! Respond!”
“Heat exchangers, west side of the complex!” he yelled.
“Do you need me to demonstrate?” he heard Widow say again. Hawkeye looked down at the cubicle inside. On the screens below, he could see her pretending to adjust the tube of adhesive in her hand.
“Heat exchangers,” she said. “Very well.”
Hawkeye yanked out a blast arrow and fired—just as Widow made a show to the camera of “pressing” the cap of her adhesive tube.
There was a loud crump. A roiling ball of flame rose from the western edge of the compound. All around the complex, flocks of small protobirds and tiny pterosaurs burst into the air, startled by the blast.
“She blew it!” Hawkeye cried into the mic. “She blew it up!”
There was silence. Black smoke from the burning heat exchangers rose into the blue sky.
“Desist from further destruction,” command said.
“Are you willing to comply?” Widow asked.
“What are your demands?”
“Surrender immediately. Assemble all base personnel in your hangar space. Do not impede me. I want a face-to-face with your leader.”
“If we refuse?”
“I continue to press the detonator. Your nanotechnology suspensions are held securely in the fabrication facility. I am confident you do not want them released into the environment at this time.”
“We…comply.”
Hawkeye exhaled. Brinksmanship. Sheer brinksmanship. The question was—what lay beyond the brink? A.I.M. wasn’t just going to fold. They were playing for time.
What was going to happen when they called her bluff?
BLACK Widow walked out onto the main deck of the hangar bay. Four long-range A.I.M. rotorjet shuttles were parked along one wall. A fifth was set on a hydraulic cradle, ready to be lifted up to the rooftop pad.
Just under a hundred A.I.M. technicians and guards were assembled in the main area. The guards had not disarmed, but their weapons were lowered.
As Widow entered, the fire teams that had been shadowing her followed her inside. They fanned out around her, covering her with their P90s. She ignored them.
She came to a halt. The tube was still clenched in her left hand.
“Who is in charge?” she asked.
A man in A.I.M. yellow stepped forward and took off his helmet. He was tall and gray-bearded, and his expression was one of distaste.
“You?” she asked.
“Advanced Ideas Mechanics does not respond well to threats,” he said. “Your intrusion here is undesirable. You will not be allowed to compromise the success of this installation.”
“That doesn’t sound like surrender talk to me,” she replied. “I’m an Avenger.”
“I know what you are,” he replied.
“Then you also know that the Avengers beat A.I.M. into dog meat every time we encounter one another. This is over. You are all prisoners of S.H.I.E.L.D.”
“And where is S.H.I.E.L.D.?” he asked. “You are alone.”
“What is your name?” she asked.
“Thewell,” he replied. “Acting Minister of Control Development.”
“What is the purpose of this facility?”
“I’m not going to tell you anything.”
“Nanotechnology, Thewell. Don’t play games.”
“I’m not. I don’t have authorization to speak to our development work.”
“Who has authority?” she asked.
“A.I.M. High Council. M.O.D.O.K.,” he replied.
“M.O.D.O.K.?” she sniffed. “And where is that charming individual?”
“M.O.D.O.K. is not on-site,” said Thewell. “I report to him.”
“Report to him now.”
Thewell hesitated.
“I cannot. Communication links are not operational.”
Widow took a breath. Interesting. Her inability to send the data hadn’t been down to her lack of skills or security codes. There was something else going on.
“Tell me about the nanotech, Thewell,” she said.
Thewell glanced at the techs behind him. One shook his head slowly.
Thewell looked back at her.
“The nanites have been engineered to enter the human system and fabricate receptor nodes in the neuroanatomy of the neocortex,” he said.
“Receptors for what?”
“Receptors to receive, process, and amplify psionic signals.”
“Mind control, by psionic means,” she said. “M.O.D.O.K.’s stock in trade. You intend to reengineer human brains to make them captive to his control.”
He nodded.
“Which population centers do you propose to target?” she asked.
“No particular center,” he replied.
“Your scope is global?”
He nodded again.
She thought about the nod. Her mind was trying to take in the full horror of what A.I.M. was devising. A world slaved to M.O.D.O.K.’s whim, a race of human puppets obeying A.I.M.’s every command. But the nod bothered her. Thewell had refused to speak at first, but now he was telling her everything, as if none of it mattered.
They expected her to be dead very soon.
“How is the nanite material going to be delivered?” she asked.
“Water supplies,” he said. “Water is an efficient medium. Introduced into water supplies, the self-replicating nanites will rapidly enter the food chain.”
“Global water supplies?” she asked.
Again, he nodded. Why did that nod bother her so much?
Because when he’d consulted his colleagues, one of them had shaken his head. Then Thewell had started talking. If he’d been looking for approval, Thewell would have received a nod, in turn, from his colleague. But he’d gotten a shake of the head instead.
That shake of the head didn’t mean, “Very well, tell her.” It meant something else. It meant, “No.” It meant, “Not yet.” It meant, “We’re still waiting for something, and we’re not ready.” The implication was, “Talk to her and keep her talking. Keep her busy and buy us time.” During surveillance ops, she’d seen phone-tap operators make exactly the same wordless signal to the agent trying to keep a caller on the line. “Keep going. Not ready yet.”
Things were about to get unpleasant. Her bold play had put her front and center in an effort to control this environment, but now that seemed like a very bad place to be.
Her turn to spin things out. “Show me specifications for the nanite units,” she said.
Thewell looked back at his colleagues again. The one who had shaken his head before now nodded and handed him a tablet.
A nod. The damned nod. It was coming.
Thewell looked at the tablet. He walked over to the Widow and handed it to her. Then he stepped back.
She looked at the device. There was an open message window. It read:
“Scanning complete. Individual is armed. No trace of active radio or wireless device. Suspect object is a tube of glue.”
“Goodbye, Avenger,” said Thewell.
The guards brought up their weapons to fire.
One of the hydraulic legs of the lifting cradle exploded and sheared. The cradle buckled, and the hefty rotorjet shuttle atop it fell sideways
, hit the deck, and rolled. The assembled A.I.M. personnel scattered out of its way.
Widow threw herself backwards, firing her P90 sideways. Casings spat out in a rising arc. Her auto fire raked into the guards circling her to the left. Bullets chewed the deck. She rolled, firing the other way. Three guards to her right flew backwards off their feet. But she was never going to hit them all.
Three more jerked and dropped in very quick succession, an arrow embedded in each one. From his high-and-hidden vantage point, Hawkeye had rapid-fired at the targets, shooting the second and third arrows while the first was still in the air.
The remaining guards turned and fired, hunting for the archer. Widow emptied her clip into the last of them.
She ditched the P90, jumped up, and ran for cover. Shooting was wholesale. Bullets chipped and smacked into the risers of the hangar maintenance bays. She threw herself into a dive and crashed into the tool carts.
From the flight-control platform, Hawkeye saw her reach cover. He nocked another arrow and targeted anybody below with a gun. Most of the A.I.M. personnel were rushing for the exits. He spotted the guy with whom Widow had gone face-to-face, spun up a bolas arrow, and brought him down with a seventy-five-yard arc shot.
Hawkeye was drawing fire. Bullets struck the platform, the railing, and the roof overhang. He retreated to the back of the platform and threw the controls that opened the roof canopy. With a heavy thump of electric motors, part of the hangar roof began to slide open.
Hawkeye went for the stairs. One flight down on the open metal steps, he turned and loosed more arrows into the chamber: another blast arrow to scatter more of the A.I.M. goons, and a clutch of smoke arrows to really mess up visibility and sow confusion.
He leapt down the last flight and ran across the floor. An A.I.M. tech came at him, and Hawkeye punched him aside. Two A.I.M. guards loomed in the smoke. Hawkeye shoulder-barged one, ripped the assault weapon out of his hands, and used it to club the other in the side of the head. Then he delivered a standing spin-kick to drop the disarmed guard.
He reached Thewell. The A.I.M. exec was on his face on the deck, his arms and legs bound by the cords of the bolas arrow. He’d hit his head in the fall and was out cold. Hawkeye shouldered him like a roll of carpet.
An A.I.M. guard appeared, training his weapon on Hawkeye. A shot, from close range, hit the guard. He buckled and fell.
Widow stepped out of the smoke. She had an A.I.M.-issue Sperek Six pistol in each hand.
“You got a plan?” she asked. “Or is this all atmospherics?”
“I figure we leave,” Hawkeye replied. “This is not a healthy place to be. We take this creep with us as insurance, and for info.”
“Leave how?”
“One of the rotorjets. How hard can they be to fly?”
They ran to the nearest one. With Thewell over his shoulder, Hawkeye wrenched open the shuttle’s cabin hatch. Widow squeezed off a couple more shots, and then eyed the roof.
“You killed the riser hoist,” she said.
“Hey, I opened the roof!”
“It’s going to be a tight fit.”
“I’ll show you how it’s done.”
She shook her head and ran aboard. He came in behind her, dropped Thewell onto a seat in the cargo section, and slammed the hatch.
Widow had reached the cockpit. There was no time for pre-flight checks. She threw the power on, woke up the jets, and adjusted the control settings before sliding the pilot seat forward and strapping in.
“I told you I’d fly,” said Hawkeye.
“I’m a better pilot,” she replied. She checked the power readings. The rotorjets were fusion-powered. Plenty of range. Transoceanic, if necessary.
She engaged lift, and the rotorjet bucked and left the deck. It hovered forward—nose tipped down, landing gear extended—its downwash blowing whirlpools in the smoke Hawkeye had laid down. They heard several shots strike the outer skin.
“Up and out,” Hawkeye urged.
Widow eased the nose around and let power run to the VTOL-set rotor pods. The shuttle rose. The hangar roof seemed very close. She adjusted the attitude again and lifted higher, moving toward the open canopy.
It was going to be tight. From an exterior perspective, the shuttles had looked much smaller than the canopy hatch. From inside a shuttle, the hole didn’t look anywhere near large enough.
She went for it. Proximity alarms started to sound. She nursed the controls.
“Easy! Easy!” Hawkeye said.
They came up through the delivery aperture in the landing pad. Hawkeye closed his eyes. He was positive he could hear metal scraping and grinding, but it was just his imagination.
“Go!” he yelled. “Go!”
She turned back to look at him.
“Missiles,” she said.
“What? Where?”
“They took the Quinjet down with ground-to-air! They have missiles here, Barton!”
“Just fly!” he ordered.
He ran back to the side hatch and slid it open. Wind blew in. The shuttle was rising above the yellow structure of the A.I.M. compound. He hunted. There, to the north. He saw rotating sensor domes on the roof of one of the modules, set on either side of a larger pod.
A shutter on the large pod began to open, revealing the missile rack. The pod rotated, tracking them.
“Get us out of here!” Hawkeye yelled.
He heard a frantic pinging from the instrumentation.
“Missile lock!” she shouted.
Braced in the open side hatch, Hawkeye pulled down his bow, nocked an acid arrow, and took aim.
He loosed. Given the distance and conditions, it was an astoundingly difficult shot. Hawkeye was sure it would take him two or even three arrows to find the target.
But he aced it. The arrow hit the missile rack in the gearing under the frame. The capsule head shattered, drenching the gear assembly with hydrofluoric acid. The acid ate through the missile rack’s frame in seconds, and the entire rack slumped forward drunkenly, nose down.
The missile lock warning ceased abruptly.
“Just go,” he yelled, “before they find something else to throw at us!”
There was a flash and a shiver behind them. Though their frame support had been ruined and their aim disrupted, the missiles—triggered on an automatic cycle—had nevertheless launched.
Straight down into the base.
There was a rippling series of explosions. Detonations ripped apart the center modules of the A.I.M. compound, sending up columns of flame and cascades of shredded plating. A secondary blast, perhaps a power system that had been hit, blew out through the ground level of the primary modules.
An enormous fireball rose up. The shockwave hit the shuttle, rocking it hard, and Hawkeye had to grab on to stop himself from being flipped out of the hatch.
Widow fought to keep the shuttle stable and airborne. They roared out of the expanding conflagration.
“Did you mean to do that?” she asked.
“No!” Then he grinned. “Still, you know, it solves a few problems,” he added.
She just glared at him.
SIBERIA
LOCAL TIME UNRECORDED, NO RELEVANT DATE
THOR grabbed Wanda around the waist, pulled her close, and spun his hammer by the strap. He let it fly and pull them both into the air. The last, monumental blocks of stone, their only foothold, collapsed beneath them in a thunderous roar of crumbling rock.
They landed a mile away on a blasted, dead plain. Fog drifted like white smoke. Blackened, extinct trees dotted the landscape, their trunks bent, their branches splayed. They looked like figures screaming in abject horror at the sky.
He let go of her.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“Given the circumstances,” Wanda said, nodding. She looked back toward their point of origin. Beyond the tree-punctuated bank of white fog, the mountain had been reduced to an immense pall of gray dust. Flames leapt and danced on the horizon.
br /> “He’ll be coming for us,” she said.
“Undoubtedly,” said Thor.
“I mean, we can’t fight him.”
“I can fight him,” said Thor. “I’m not afraid.”
“It’s not a matter of fear,” she replied. “He outclasses us both. Many times over.”
“Then we need help,” Thor said.
The Scarlet Witch smiled. She had observed the resilience of heroes in her fellow Avengers over the years and hoped she shared some of that quality. But the indefatigable spirit of a god was another thing altogether. It charmed and lifted her. There was something immensely reassuring about Thor’s dogged courage. No matter the odds, the Asgardian maintained a conviction that heroes would always prevail. She supposed it was the mindset of a god, a super-mortal: an almost blinkered focus on triumph that bullishly refused to acknowledge hopelessness.
“I don’t know if we can get a message out of here,” she said. “We’re not in the world anymore. We’re not connected to the plane of Earth. Of Midgard.”
“You don’t have to couch it in my terms,” Thor said. “I understand. Is there no conjuration you can make? No message you can send by means of magic?”
She shrugged.
“Perhaps,” she said. “I trained with the Sorcerer Supreme to refine my craft, and during that time he described many obscure, arcane processes. But I’ve never used them practically, and I’m fighting to remember the details. Thor, I’m no Stephen Strange. I don’t know the depth of lore the way he does. Even if I can remember the conjurations he mentioned, I don’t know if I can cast them in a place like this. I don’t know if I should. It could be dangerous—”
He grinned at her. That god-spirit confidence again.
She caught herself and smiled back ruefully.
“Yeah, I know. Like this is safe.”
“Do what you can,” he said.
“The first thing I have to determine is where we are. Exactly where we are.”
She sat down on the filthy, wet ground and scooped up a handful of black soil, examining it.
He watched her.
“It may take some time,” she said, without looking up. “Geomantic divination is painstaking.”
He nodded, breathed out, and folded his arms.
“Gather some wood,” she told him.