The tac teams went in.
S.H.I.E.L.D. field agent Jerry Hunt led the first team in through the west street access. They were armored in black-and-white body gear and sealed hoods. The fabric of the tac suits contained a refractive polymer that, in combination with the blue smoke, rendered the agents virtually invisible. Their eye-masks, calibrated for heat and movement, painted HUD images that allowed them to see in smoke and darkness; the lenses were also specially filtered to match the prismatic qualities of the smoke particles, allowing them direct and clear vision.
They were carrying S-System Tac Weapons. These hybrid assault rifles could switch from live rounds to tranq at the flip of a toggle, and also pump vari-load grenades from under-barrel launchers. The top rails of the weapons held cold-beam phased-plasma barrels, for those tough moments when energy shots were preferable to ballistic hard rounds.
Hunt had ordered “tranq” at the go point. He didn’t want a bloodbath. Intel suggested that Wyndham had prisoners inside.
S.H.I.E.L.D. stormed the building, clearing it room by room. The agents fired tight, controlled bursts, knocking down anything that moved.
Hunt saw the New Men, Wyndham’s grotesque foot soldiers. He was glad of the psionic blockers that S.H.I.E.L.D. had woven into the undercaps of the tac suits. But he was worried about the atrocious radiation levels his wrist-mounted g-counter was picking up.
A New Man, a cat-thing, came at him on the second landing. It took two bursts of tranq to lay the thing out.
“Clear left!” Hunt ordered. He switched right with his cover man, kicked in a door, and mowed down the New Men that lay in wait.
The New Men were relying on their psionics. They kept pausing to unleash their mental attacks, and that made them good, static targets. By the time they learned that the S.H.I.E.L.D. teams were proofed against psionic assault, they had already dropped.
Hunt knew the advantage wouldn’t last. Psionics would share that information. Deeper in the building, they would start to encounter New Men ready to defend their turf by other means. Their targets were going to learn, and learn fast.
“Watch for guns and blades,” he warned over the link.
Just seconds later, a humanoid ram attacked him with a meat cleaver. Hunt’s cover man dropped the ram with a sustained burst.
Hunt nodded his appreciation. He loaded a fresh clip and moved on. From the building around him, he heard gunfire and the bang of grenades.
He was tracking the radiation source. He wanted that secured as a priority. On the next level up, the stairway landing was defended by three New Men with knock-off AK-47s. Bullets spat and ripped down the old staircase, shredding the wood and brick, and making the air dense with dust and fibers. One of Hunt’s team went down, but her composite armor had stopped the lethal force of the assault weapons. She would go home with bruises and a mess-hall story.
Hunt couldn’t get a clean shot. The New Men were raking fire at them. He toggled his weapon and selected the plasma beamer. Ducking out of cover, he fired, shearing down the banister rail with a beam of green energy and cutting a semicircular section out of the wall. The wall section fell away, its edges fizzling and burning—perfectly excised. The stairhead cover immediately vanished. Hunt flipped back to tranq and picked off the exposed New Men, who were scurrying for a new place to hide.
He took the lead on the way up the stairs. The boards, shot up and weakened, creaked under the weight.
The landing was more solid. Serious underpinning, probably I-beams reinforcing the next floor level. The place had once been a factory, and it had been built to support machines and production lines.
They took the next door and entered a huge chamber. The view stopped them in their tracks.
“Hold your fire!” Hunt ordered urgently. “That’s a bloody warhead!”
The device was huge and sinister. It sat under the raw lights on a heavy carriage. Hunt had seen some things in his distinguished career in Europe and the Far East. He knew a gamma bomb when he met one.
They advanced down the chamber, weapons ready. There was a man in shirtsleeves working at the foot of the bomb, frantically cutting and rewiring.
“On the floor! Now!” Hunt yelled. “Face down!”
“I’m afraid I can’t,” Banner replied, without looking around at them. He stuck his wire cutters in his mouth so he could use both hands to pull off an inspection cover.
“You heard him!” one of the other agents shouted, raising his weapon.
Hunt waved the man down.
“Banner?” he called. “Doctor Banner?”
Banner took the cutters out of his mouth.
“Little busy,” he replied, working furiously.
Hunt approached Banner. “What are you doing?” he demanded, pulling off his headgear.
“Saving the world, I hope,” Banner replied. “Unfortunately, Wyndham was a stranger to standardized color coding.”
Hunt looked up at the bomb.
“Is this bloody thing armed?” he asked.
“Yup,” said Banner. “Armed and set. Remote trigger. Pass me that screwdriver.”
Hunt obliged.
Banner, who still had not looked up, took the tool and used the grip end to hammer off the wedged inspection plate.
Hunt could see that Banner was focused and intent. He could also see that the man was sweating. Agitated. Suddenly, Hunt realized he wasn’t sure what he was more afraid of: the bomb or Banner.
“Do you know what you’re doing?” he asked.
“I hope so. I ought to.”
“Is there a schematic?”
“Plenty,” said Banner. “But hardwiring of the trigger mechanism is pretty standard. Ah.”
“Ah? Ah what?”
“There’s the transceiver for the remote signal.”
Banner reached in with pliers.
“Where’s Wyndham?” Hunt asked.
“Gone. Just now. Teleported. I couldn’t stop him.”
“Damn,” said Hunt.
“Hence the rush,” said Banner. “He’s intending to detonate this from his new location.”
“It’ll take out the island,” said Hunt.
“Just for starters,” Banner agreed.
He made a cut, and then pulled out a sheaf of wires.
“That’s the remote trigger,” he said, and breathed out.
He looked up at Hunt. Beads of perspiration had collected around the lower-inside rim of his spectacles.
“The bomb is still armed,” he said. “We’ll need to see about that. But the trigger’s disabled.”
“I’ll get a disposal team in,” said Hunt.
“Do it fast. I’m pretty sure there are no backup triggers, but Wyndham is smart. This thing needs to be taken apart, right down to its components. And it’s dirty. Get your team suited.”
Hunt made the call. Banner stood up.
“You okay?” Hunt asked.
Banner nodded.
“Doc? Doc?”
They turned. McHale was limping into the bomb chamber, escorted by the tac team that had freed him from his cell.
He shook off their support and walked up to Banner. They stood face-to-face.
“You were playing him?” asked McHale. “Tell me I read that right. You were playing him?”
“Yes,” said Banner. “I’m sorry about the—”
“Just tell me you were playing him.”
“I was. I had to go along with him. I had to convince him I was sympathetic.”
“I guess hitting me over the head was a pretty good demonstration,” said McHale.
“Had to make it convincing,” said Banner. “Sorry.”
“My skull forgives you,” said McHale.
“You played along with Wyndham to learn about the bomb?” asked Hunt.
“Yes, but more than that. The bomb was Wyndham’s response to a threat—a threat that affects us all. But he wouldn’t talk about it. I had to hang on until he was willing to tell me.”
He looked b
ack at McHale.
“If you’d sprung me when you had the chance, we’d have lost any opportunity to find out what he knew.”
“There’s a problem bigger than a gamma bomb?” asked Hunt.
Banner nodded.
“Much bigger,” he said.
“Did you pull it off?” asked McHale. “Did you convince him to talk?”
“I ran out of time,” said Banner.
“Dammit!” exclaimed McHale.
“So I forced him,” Banner said. “I threatened him.”
Hunt looked the scientist up and down.
“With what?” the British agent asked.
“Something even I’m afraid of,” said Banner.
He took off his glasses and cleaned them on the front of his shirt.
“He talked,” he said, “then he got the hell out.”
Banner turned back to Hunt.
“I need to speak to the Avengers,” he said. “Maximum priority.”
“There’s a problem,” said Hunt. “Comms are dark. No one’s talking to anyone.”
TWENTY-THREE
WASHINGTON, D.C.
13.13 LOCAL, JUNE 13TH
STARK’S first blast of repulsors staggered Ultron, forcing it back a step or two.
The AI ramped up the shielding of its stolen armor and fired back, throwing Iron Man into the side of a munitions cart. Missiles rolled off onto the floor like bowling pins.
Ultron advanced, firing again. Stark took off, zooming across the vast interior space. Repulsor beams chased him, blowing out ducts, vent systems, and jet-blast screens.
Stark circled and fired back, ripping a deep gouge in the deck’s surface and blasting Ultron up into the air.
Ultron adjusted its boot jets and flew at Stark. They clashed in midair, trading blows. Stark heard receptors whine as they strained to soak up the beating. He smashed his hand up under Ultron’s chin, and fired his repulsor.
Ultron cartwheeled out of the air, trailing smoke, and knocked over a fuel pump. Relentless, Ultron rose up out of the mangled wreckage.
Stark was coming for him, head down, at high velocity.
Ultron fired the suit’s unibeam and blew Stark out of the air, sending him back down the deck. Stark collided with a parked warplane, demolishing forty million dollars’ worth of military hardware. The warplane exploded.
Ultron turned away.
“Next?” it said.
Automatic-weapon fire raked the captured Iron Man suit. Three S.H.I.E.L.D. security teams, in spread cover around the main deck access, unloaded with everything they had.
Ultron barely moved. Bullets spanked and pinged off the suit. Stark had built it well.
“Pathetic,” said Ultron. It raised a hand to unleash repulsor energy.
The Vision came up out of the deck in front of Ultron, phasing directly through the metal. Instantly solidifying, the Vision threw a punch of vast, synthetic strength. Ultron reeled, its head smashed so hard it was facing the other way.
Ultron straightened up. Metal squealed and complained as it turned back its head. The neck of the Iron Man armor buckled and rebounded as nanites repaired the damage.
The Vision surged forward, fist drawn back. Ultron swung at him, but his blow passed straight through the phased Avenger’s insubstantial form.
The Vision plunged his fist into Ultron’s head.
“Since you last did that, I have learned,” said Ultron, the Vision’s arm extruding from its grinning faceplate.
Ultron sent feedback surging through the armor’s shielding system. The Vision cried out in pain and staggered backwards, phasing in and out of solidity.
Ultron timed its punch for a moment when the Vision was tangible. The impact hurled the synthetic Avenger across the deck.
Explosive rounds nailed Ultron and the deck around him. Flames licked out from each impact. Nick Fury stood on one of the deck’s raised walkways, hosing the rogue AI with shots from a heavy-caliber machine gun.
“Pour it on!” he yelled.
The S.H.I.E.L.D. security squads resumed firing. Additional teams had arrived from other sides of the deck. Massive gunfire enveloped Ultron. From a service ramp, Valentina de la Fontaine blasted with a laser pistol.
Ultron staggered under the monumental onslaught, but did not drop. It turned toward Fury and fired off several repulsor bursts. The energy blasts blew out part of the walkway and its guard rail, and Fury had to dive out of the way. Ultron kept blasting until the entire walkway fell away from its support brackets. It crashed to the deck in a tangle of struts. Fury leapt clear as it fell, landed on top of a parked service truck, and jumped down into cover.
Ultron turned back and raked the security teams with its repulsors. S.H.I.E.L.D. troopers were thrown into the air and hurled into bulkheads.
“Ha ha ha,” said Ultron.
Something blurred around Ultron. Quicksilver was barely visible, running between bullets and blasts in a display of astonishing speed and coordination. To Pietro Maximoff, the blizzard of slow-spinning rounds looked almost static in the air. He slid between them, circling Ultron.
Ultron had detected him. It swung punches, trying to swat the Avenger, but Pietro was moving too fast for even Stark-designed target predictors to catch. The lunging fists kept missing Pietro’s blurred, whipping shape as he ducked and swerved in circles.
Ultron’s nanites rebuilt the predictor systems rapidly, upgrading them to new levels. They quickly managed to log Pietro’s track. Ultron swung another punch that would have killed Quicksilver had the Avenger not darted back.
Quicksilver slid across the deck and skidded to a halt, looking back.
“How pointless,” remarked Ultron. “You run around me, but you present no harm to me. Did you even try to land a blow?”
“It’s on,” panted Quicksilver. He wasn’t replying to Ultron.
Iron Man stepped out of the conflagration that had once been a S.H.I.E.L.D. warplane. The firelight reflected off his polished armor. Backlit by the fireball, he walked down the deck toward Ultron.
“I wish I had a button to press,” he said sourly. “You know, something satisfying to click.”
He didn’t. The initializer was simply a pop-down menu option on his HUD.
He selected it anyway.
Ultron looked down, and saw the data-isolation unit that Quicksilver had magnetically clamped to its chest plate. The device was small, no bigger than a coffee cup.
“This is not acceptable,” Ultron said, and tried to detach it.
“Tough,” said Stark. He activated the initializer.
Ultron screamed. It shuddered as if it were being electrocuted and sank to its knees.
The isolation unit rapidly extracted Ultron’s digital essence from the armor and the nanite swarm supporting it. It sucked Ultron’s sentience into a tiny, field-insulated containment grid.
Ultron stopped twitching. The suit stayed upright on its knees, head tilted up, back hunched. Smoke from burned-out nanites billowed off the armor.
Stark walked up to the dead armor and unlocked the isolation unit.
He held it up.
“A glass and a magazine,” he announced. “Now let’s find somewhere safe to put this. I’m thinking Pluto.”
He looked around. Fury was rising from cover. De la Fontaine and other agents were tending to the fallen troopers. Pietro was helping the Vision to his feet.
“We can turn the world back on now,” Stark said to Fury.
He looked back at the grinning, dead features of Ultron—features that the nanites had sculpted into the Iron Man faceplate.
“You can wipe that grin off my damned face,” he said, and he vaporized the head of the kneeling suit with a blast of his repulsors.
TWENTY-FOUR
WASHINGTON, D.C.
14.07 LOCAL, JUNE 13TH
ACROSS the Helicarrier’s main command deck, screens were flashing back into life. Systems were being reactivated and restarted. With the Ultron threat gone, locked-down netw
orks could be restored safely.
“There’s a lot of repair work still to do,” said the Contessa. “The power and communications infrastructures have been seriously disrupted. But we can work on fixes now.”
“How’s the satellite coverage?” asked Stark. “Do we have anything on the Siberian incident?”
“Preliminary views look stable,” said de la Fontaine. “There’s a massive storm formation moving southwest, but the dimensional breach seems to have closed. The chunk of the continental structure that vanished is back.”
“That’s something,” said Stark.
“Any word from Wanda or Thor?” asked the Vision.
“Is my sister alive?” Pietro demanded.
“There’s been nothing,” de la Fontaine replied. “But atmospherics are terrible in the region, and our network isn’t fully up yet.”
“But we have some comms?” asked Fury.
“We’re rolling out the relinks,” she replied. “As you might expect, there’s a huge amount of traffic. Everybody’s trying to talk at once.”
“Triage it,” said Stark.
“We are,” said the Contessa. “Priority channels and emergency broadcasts first. S.H.I.E.L.D. links are going live globally. And we have an Avengers priority.”
“Berlin?” asked Stark.
“Yes.”
“Let’s have it,” said Fury.
They stood in front of a wall display. A section of the screen plate fizzled, and then became an open window. G.W. Bridge appeared.
“Director,” he said.
“What’s the story, Bridge?” asked Fury.
“Hydra threat is contained,” said Bridge. “Touch and go for a while there, but the situation is now safe. We’re downscaling from Alpha. How about you?”
“We’re through the worst,” said Fury. “I’ll catch you up later. Right now, I’d like to speak to Cap.”
On screen, Bridge moved aside, and the camera settled on Captain America.
“Did you fight World War II again?” asked Stark. He was standing beside Fury, his arms folded, his faceplate retracted.
“Feels like it,” replied Cap. “Listen, I don’t want to waste time. I know things have been pretty hairy for you, too. There’s another potential Alpha.”