THE ULTIMATES: AGAINST ALL

ENEMIES

By Alex Irvine

1

Status Report

The period of retrenchment undertaken in the after-math of the <Arizona> events 1.07617 solar year ago ends as of this directive. Survivors of our forces from off-planet, together with our assimilated members untouched by the <Arizona> engagement, are being rearranged into a viable force structure. The human opponent has proved more difficult to surmount than we had anticipated. Steps must be, and are being, taken to eliminate this problem. It will be an ongoing process, and the resourcefulness of the human oppo-nent cannot be underestimated, but early signals from operatives in place indicate that current plans are proceeding per directive. Prospects for the imposition of order are improving both here and in other locations where our enemies have failed to dislodge us. Evacuation to the lower fourth dimension is no longer necessary or desirable. We can, and will, continue to perform our duties. As of now, operational directives will be issued from the Western Spiral Arm.

A breeding program is in place, concurrent with assimilations and technological development. Force increase is assisted by improved cloning technology. We are approaching a viable population. If events do not demand immediate action, we anticipate being able to initiate full-scale operations in approximately ten solar years.

One of the lessons of the <Arizona> setback is that we must avoid concentrating our forces where the humans can bring concentrated firepower to bear. Rather, we should recall that their impulse to act in large forces served us well in the <South Pacifio, and we should attempt a similar misdirection if the oppor-tunity presents itself. Our actual deployments will be smaller and more widespread, and we will be exploring the assimilation of forms other than the human. Conservation of mass limits our options in this direction, but the benefits of deploying scouts in nonhuman form make it worthwhile for us to pursue all possibilities.

Currently we are maintaining low-profile deployments in a number of North American and European locations. Our primary goal with these deployments is surveillance of human security measures, with a secondary goal of influencing policy where deployment makes that possible. The addition of nonhuman scouts has complicated communication channels somewhat, since a shift in form is necessary prior to any communication; however, these challenges are being addressed.

The elimination of <Kleiser> created a temporary leadership vacuum that has since been filled. Current command structure is more efficient than what existed under <Kleiser>, and more flexible in its approach.

<Kleiser>, due to an unfortunate indulgence of desire for revenge, placed too much emphasis on the miniscule but formidable portion of the human population which has undergone genetic or technological augmentation, specifically <Steve Rogers> and <Rogers'> colleagues known as the <Ultimates>. New leadership is refocusing on the ideal of order, without counterproductive individual grudges and pre-dispositions.

We are no longer focused on human political centers in <New York> and <Washington>; the events leading up to the <Arizona> setback made clear that our surveillance must be diversified, encompassing human technological research and cultural production as well as the standard intelligence targets of military and political activity. The <National Socialist> host understood that the imposition of order requires domination and control of cultural production as well as military strength; we are redoubling our efforts on this front. Much of this effort consists of suborning existing structures, such as film production, to increase the dissemination of material that prepares the human mind for the idea of order. Consolidation of cultural production in fewer and fewer hands has made this endeavor much easier. To take one example, <Hollywood> filmmaking has absorbed the idea of order— translated, in human terms, as "traditional values"—far more easily than we might have expected given the chaotic and inconsistent history of that industry. The <American> political discourse, by and large, has followed this trend as well.

What remains is to take these existing political and cultural trends and systematize them. Developments in ordnance, asset strength, and facilities will parallel this exploration of human cultural production. 2

At the table in the Triskelion meeting room down the hall from Nick Fury's office sat six people and a video monitor. The monitor, situated between Clint Barton and Janet Pym, showed the hangdog face of Bruce Banner. On the other side of the table, Tony Stark sat between Steve Rogers and Nick. Every time we walk into this room, thought Tony, something bad happens, or is set into motion. Usually he got juiced, almost high, when he was headed into a meeting. There were deals to be done, money to be made, angles to figure. Today, however, Tony's carefully cultivated cynicism was threatening to mutate into genuine misgivings, which was strange since the presentation he was about to give could only be considered good news.

In any case, it was time to get things started. He stood up and said, "Okay, so there's good news and there's bad news. First, the bad. I couldn't get security upstairs to let me bring martinis down from the helipad."

Nobody laughed. Perfect, Tony thought. They weren't supposed to. He started to feel better. A little self-deprecation, an intentionally unfunny joke, and before they knew it, the audience was liking him despite themselves. On the other hand, this was not a typical pitch audience, in that he knew them all already; also, here he wasn't Tony Stark, multibillionaire industrialist. Here he was Tony Stark, dissipated but necessary in-habitant of the Iron Man suit.

Steve looked annoyed. "Can we-—"

"We can, and we will, Cap," Tony said. "The good news is that due to the enormous black-budget opportunity given Stark Industries in the aftermath of the Hulk incident—thanks again, Bruce—I stand here be-fore you to announce that I've got a prototype imaging technology that will be of great interest to all of us."

Tony saw Steve and Nick exchange a glance. Military, he thought. No patience for the art of presentation. On the video monitor, Banner's face remained glum. I know what you're thinking, Brucie, Tony thought. We threw you out of a plane when we needed you, and now you're back in this cell until we might need you again. Well, it's true. But you brought it on yourself when you shot that needle into your arm and created Captain AmeriHulk.

Then again it wasn't like Banner was the only one whose character could be considered... murky. They all had secrets. Going clockwise around the table...

Who knew what sins Hawkeye would be atoning for when he finally met his maker? Years in SHIELD'S

black ops would have piled them up by the dozen. And Janet, ah, Janet. Darling, Tony thought, nobody likes a mutant. Yet here you are. Steve, Captain America, you brought your proto-fascist politics with you out of the iceberg, even though they have thus far stayed hidden behind those blue eyes and that charming naivete. Nick, our fixer, which of us will you throw under the bus the next time you need a favor from Capitol Hill? Banner's already gone. How long before you need another sacrificial lamb?

It won't be me, Tony thought. I don't need these people. This is my world. I command resources that would be the envy of most of the world's nations. Also I am fairly damn sexy, and cynical enough to avoid the gee-whiz save-the -world complex that most of the rest of my Super Hero counterparts suffer from.

Before he let himself get further carried away with self-analysis, Tony returned to his meeting patter.

"Imaging technology? Who needs it?" he asked, letting the obvious rhetorical question hang for just a moment. 'Well, we do. SHIELD'S got great satellite coverage, and the best street-level cameras around, but there are times when you need to look a little more deeply."

He'd lost Nick. "Sometimes I hope that God will one day decide that you can only shovel so much bullshit," Nick said, "and then he's going to strike you dead."

"He might," Tony said. "He just might. But before he does, let's go into another room where I've set up a little presentation. Sorry, Bruce. We'll have to tell you about this part later." He opened the door and with a nod and a smile indicated that everyone should exit. They filed out without comment, but Tony caught a couple of looks that told him he'd gotten what he wanted. They were bored already, which would make the coming surprise that much better.

"Ta, Bruce," Tony said to the monitor. He led the party down the hall to another meeting room, selected for its north-facing windows and general congeniality. Stopping the party at the door, he said, "You won't see much at first, but don't worry. Like the Jamaicans say, patience make de day come quick." As Nick walked past, Tony clapped him on the shoulder and said, "You know me, General. The play's the thing. God, would it be boring just to show you machines."

"I could stand a little boredom," Fury said, pausing for a moment to let Steve by. Then he shrugged Tony's hand off They started forward together, and Tony angled himself to go through the doorway first, counting on Fury's ingrained military courtesy toward civilians.

This was the part where Tony had relied on the word of a staffer downstairs that Nick Fury hadn't been in this particular conference room since the Triskelion was built. Just inside the doorway, an extra framework was erected, shaped roughly like an airport screener but—in accordance with Stark Industries' design standards—much more attractive, utilizing mirror-polished metal alloys instead of utilitarian off-white plastics. As Fury entered the room, everyone else had already started to mill around inside, wondering where the presentation was.

The moment Fury's shaved skull passed below the screener's crossbar, a metal mesh deployed from both sides of the screener, snapping around his upper body. A split second later, automated clamps hooked around Fury's thighs and ankles, freezing him where he stood. Red lights flashed, and a Klaxon that wouldn't have been out of place in an old submarine movie started ah-ooh-ga-ing. Putting on a surprised face for the benefit of the other Ultimates, who looked like they were about to leap into action even though there was no visible opponent, Tony slowly turned around.

"What the—?" Fury's voice was nearly lost over the blaring of the Klaxon. He struggled in the clamps, but they were designed to restrain someone with the strength of Captain America. He didn't have a chance.

After letting the scene sink in for a few seconds, Tony stepped up to the screener, paused to make sure that everyone in the room could see what he was doing, and plucked a small metal hemisphere off the back of Fury's uniform. Inside it was approximately one gram of Chitauri tissue. He held the capsule up for all of them to see, keeping it within the screener's sensing field. "General Fury," he said. "I would never have imagined that you were a Chitauri in disguise." It was perfect. He had the rest of the group looking back toward the screening walk-through, and immediately to their left was the panoramic view of Upper Bay, punctuated by the Statue of Liberty. Presentation, Tony thought. That's how you close a deal.

Of course, you also closed a deal by coming up with a product that worked, and demonstrating conclusively and dramatically that it worked. He studied the looks on his teammates' faces. Steve was suspicious in his typical knuckle-dragging way, and the others looked plain baffled as they worked out what Tony-had just demonstrated for them. Fury, manacled and wincing at the Klaxons, was eyeing Tony with murder in his heart, but even he was obviously interested to see how Tony was going to explain himself. Perfect. "Now watch," Tony said, and with a flourish stepped away from the screener and dropped the capsule into his coat pocket.

As soon as he took the capsule out of the screener's range, the Klaxons cut out and the clamps relaxed. Now free, Fury stormed over to Tony and stabbed a finger into his chest. "Where the hell did you get that?"

"Ah, I do love that Klaxon," Tony said, deliberately misunderstanding the question.

"You will tell me where you got Chitauri tissue, or I will have you thrown into a goddamn cell with Banner," Fury growled. "Right now, Tony."

"General," Tony said, spreading his arms, and playing to the group, "I can't give away my sources like that. Stark Industries takes very seriously its security obligations under the contracts we signed with the federal government. What you just saw—what all of you saw— was a device that detects the presence of Chitauri DNA. It's a variation on your standard bomb sniffer, but a hell of a lot more sensitive, and with some extra goodies built in. Stark Industries can be building a thousand of them a day by next week." He removed the capsule from his pocket and handed it to Fury. "You can check the validity of the sample, just so you know I'm not trying to swindle you, General. I've got more." This last he accompanied with a wink to the others.

"This is kind of closing the barn door after the horse is gone, isn't it?" Clint said.

"Well, we would have thought that after World War II, wouldn't we?" Tony answered. "The Chitauri being what they are, I wouldn't discount the possibility that some of them are still out there. And if there are some of them, there will be more. The universe's immune system, isn't that how they described themselves? T-cells multiply in the area of an infection."

He aimed this last bit at Fury, who was the one who would have to get the go-ahead from Washington to put the screener into production. Here's your angle, Nick, he was thinking. They don't trust us, but they also know that they have to rely on us when it comes to invasions by shapeshifting aliens. Give 'em the old only-good-Chitauri-is-a-dead-Chitauri spiel, and let's get this moving. Fury picked it up; Tony could see his mind working. So did Janet Pym. "So what," she said. "Are we supposed to all be on permanent standby to go and take care of any random Chitauri who gets caught in one of these at the mall?"

"Think of it as the Super Hero Employment Act of 2006," Tony said.

"I'm thinking of it more as the Tony Stark Self-Aggrandizement Act," Janet responded. "If I were Nick I'd kick your ass."

Tony shrugged. "He still can if he wants to. But I think he can appreciate the value of presentation." Which was when Fury cracked him with a hard right. One second Tony was grinning at Janet, the next he was on his ass. "Ah, Jesus, Nick," Tony said. His eye was watering, but he knew Fury hadn't put everything he had into the punch. "Where's your sense of humor?" Blinking his eye clear, he looked up at Fury, who was standing there with a broad grin. "What are you talking about?" Fury said. "That was funny as hell."

He reached down to give Tony a hand up. "I like this, man," Fury went on. "I'll take it to Washington ASAP Meantime, you get some ice on that eye. You know where to find some ice, right?"

"Sure," Tony said. "As long as it's floating in something alcoholic."

"Men," Janet said. "You really don't know what a bunch of idiots you look like." Tony tipped an imaginary cap to her. "And with that we adjourn." Truly, he thought, we are a snakebit group.

3

Nick Fury's optimism lasted exactly twelve hours, which was as long as it took for someone in Washington to get wind of Stark Industries' new toy. He didn't know how it happened, although he wasn't naive enough to think that the Pentagon and White House didn't have their little spooks inside the Triskelion. To a politician, he mused the next morning while on a plane to D.C., all facts are things to be simultaneously known and denied. That goes for E Ring of the Pentagon as much as it does the West Wing. But before you could figure out whether you should deny something, you needed to know it, which meant that everyone who worked for the government—at least in Fury's experience—was constantly spying on everyone else while at the same time disseminating bad information to throw everyone else's spies off the trail. Probably not the best way to run a democracy, but it was the way this democracy was run. If he was honest about it, Fury knew that he had edged into politician territory himself when he assumed command of the new SHIELD. He'd done his share of covering up and manipulating. Hell, he'd had Bruce Banner thrown out of an airplane, not knowing whether Banner would change into the Hulk or a splat. On the other hand, he still got to go out and shoot bad guys once in a while, so at least he hadn't become as useless and parasitical as most of his political brethren.

The plane touched down at Andrews Air Force Base and Fury got into a waiting limo, figuring he'd have forty-five minutes or so to organize his thoughts before he had to start choking on the mendacity of appointed officials. He was wrong, though. The minute he turned on his phone, it started ringing, and he was in the hornet's nest before the limo had even left the base grounds. The generals he ignored for now, since he had a working rapport with uniformed brass. The undersecretaries he had to call back, because he knew that while they were raking him over the coals they would also be cluing him in to what he could expect in the meeting. He made six calls on the ride, and each conversation made it clearer that he was in for a bad time.

Some of the agency types he was going to meet today were gung-ho about Tony's gizmo; some weren't; some were just professing outrage at the lack of accountability demonstrated by the fact that an alcoholic libertine like Tony Stark had gotten hold of Chitauri tissue. Fury realized quickly that he was going to be the focus of their dissension, since tearing him a new one was the one thing they would all be able to agree on. He already knew what was going to happen. The political appointees would be so hung up on covering their asses that they would be willing to bury a piece of tech that could save millions of lives. He could already see it happening, could imagine the tortured logic of Washington rising up and strangling the good work that Tony had done. The uniforms would be his buffer there. They would know when he was being dog-piled, and they'd step in to help him out.

He got out of the limo, rubbing a spot on his head that he'd somehow missed when he'd shaved that morning. It'd be a hell of a lot easier if he could just go bald. The stubble annoyed him, as if it might indicate that he'd been careless in other ways too. Oh well, he thought. Time to dip my toes in the piranha tank and see which one of them goes after me first.

There were nine people in the room when Fury was ushered in. The first to greet him was a delegate from the Joint Chiefs, an admiral named Esteban Garza. "General Fury," Garza said, and shook Fury's hand. "Glad you could make the trip."

Already in interpretive overdrive, Fury read the sub-text: the Joint Chiefs weren't going to take an active role here, but they wanted him—and everyone else—to know that they were going to be keeping an eye on things. "Beautiful morning for a plane ride, Admiral," Fury said, and made the rounds shaking hands until he reached an empty seat.

The White House delegate was a staffer named Maureen Fowler, whom Fury had never met before that morning. Once Fury was in his seat and gotten out a notepad, Fowler stood and said, "Thank you all for coming. I'm just here to try and keep the discussion moving. The President wants to know what the ramifications of this development are, and what should be done and not done, and he wants the discussion to stay in this room for now. There will be no minutes and no recording, and we'd prefer that you take no notes."

Several of the attendees put away legal pads and tablet PCs.

"Thank you," Fowler went on. "Now, to catch everyone up and make sure we're all leaving from the same station. We are informed that Stark Industries has done some extraordinary work in the area of detecting certain foreign substances. They are to be applauded for their initiative. We are also informed that members of the military and intelligence communities, as well as the executive branch, are concerned that this new technology may be something of a double-edged sword. I suggest that General Fury catch us all up, and then we'll go from there. General?"

Fury stood and nodded at Fowler. "I may not be able to tell you everything you're looking to learn. I just heard about this yesterday myself. But what I can tell you is that Tony Stark gave an impressive presentation yesterday in which he was able to detect a gram of Chitauri tissue, encased in metal and attached to a human body passing at normal walking speed through an airport-style screener. How it works exactly, I don't know. I'm not an engineer. But does it work? I can assure you that it does. We tested the tissue sample Tony used and verified that it was in fact Chitauri." He sat and put on his best meeting smile. "There. Now you know as much as I do." There was a brief pause while everyone waited to see if Maureen Fowler was going to pick up the reins again. Fury made a bet with himself: whoever spoke first, if it wasn't Fowler, was going to be the biggest pain in the ass at the meeting.

The bet was on when a functionary from the congressional Office of Management and Budget spoke up.

"I've been reviewing my files, and I don't see any record of Stark Industries bidding on any contracts related to these, ah... materials," he said.

Poor kid, Fury thought. OMB knows they need to show up, but they also know that they don't have anything to say about this. So they sent you. He couldn't even remember the kid's name. . An undersecretary from the Defense Department named Ozzie Bright said, "Stark Industries is into shit that OMB has nightmares about. You're sure as hell not going to get details about it at this meeting." Bright looked over at Fowler. "Maureen, I want him out of this meeting. We can't talk about any of this with him here."

Fury watched the quick political calculus happen in Maureen Fowler's head. "Travis," she said, decision made. "Would you mind if I caught you up after we're finished here?" The OMB staffer blanched. "I'm going to need to report to—"

"I know," Maureen said. "And I'll make sure I give you something to report." She looked at her watch, and reflexively Fury looked at his. It was ten forty-two. "We'll be done here in time for a cup of coffee at twelve-thirty. How does that sound?"

Travis might have been new to Washington, but he knew when to throw in the towel. He gave a resigned nod and left the room. When he was gone, Fowler said, "Okay, Ozzie. You made your point. Now can we get on with things?"

There goes my bet, Fury thought.

"I'll get on with things," said Vince Altobelli from Homeland Security. Right away Ozzie flushed. Ah, the old DoD/DHS turf war, Fury thought. That's what I should have bet on. "Vince," Ozzie said, "you can wait your—"

Altobelli kept right on talking. "What I want to get on with is the question of how in the hell did Stark Industries, which is run by a for-Chrissake dipsomaniac playboy, get hold of Chitauri tissue? General Fury, you're going to need to convince me of a couple of things here." Midway through Altobelli's opening gambit, Ozzie Bright shut his mouth. He's thinking the same thing, Fury guessed. Probably hates agreeing with Altobelli about anything.

"Well, Mr. Secretary," Fury said, being extra polite, "Tony Stark's personal habits are not what I would consider ideal either. But the truth is, his black-budget access is mostly outside my purview. He works with your department, he works with Ozzie's department, he works with everyone. Now I know that both DHS and Defense have Chitauri samples because I made sure you got them after Arizona. And yes, there are samples at the Triskelion. I've checked our inventory, and it's intact. Have you surveyed yours?"

Might have been a little too aggressive there, Fury thought to himself He glanced over at Garza, who leaned back in his chair, looking amused.

"You're trying to tell me, Fury, that Tony Stark got Chitauri samples from our labs when all he had to do was walk into your basement and waltz out with what-ever he wanted?" Altobelli demanded. "I know how SHIELD works. You think you've got your own little island out there and you can do whatever the hell you want. Don't come in here and smear my department and this government, when we're the ones who have to step in and clean up the mess after one of your team goes berserk and wrecks Lower Manhattan."

"I hardly think that's relevant, Vince." Heads turned toward Admiral Garza.

"No? I do." Altobelli looked like he was just getting warmed up. Garza leaned over the table. "Are we here to score points or figure out what to do with Tony Stark's new toy?" Nobody responded. Garza went on. "Really. I want to know. Because I could damn sure think of some uses for something that would detect Chitauri anyplace they might have cause to go through a doorway. How about we consider that for a minute?"

It took all of Fury's self-control not to smile. Uniforms, he thought. They always stick together.

"Then I'll ask a question having to do with the use and dissemination of this technology," said Ozzie Bright. "That is, if nobody minds."

"I think we can proceed without the sarcasm, Ozzy If you don't mind," Maureen Fowler said. Bright cracked a smile. "I surely don't, Maureen, and thank you for keeping us all in line. My dog died yesterday, and it's put me a little off my feed. Now, General Fury. I think we can all understand that we don't need to know the details about where Stark got the samples, or how he spends his leisure time. And I think we can all understand that Stark Industries is doing all kinds of things, working on all kinds of projects, that some of us in the room may not have the clearance to hear about. Am I right so far?"

"Yes, sir," Fury said. Not just right, he thought. Also grandstanding. Fury wondered if there were cameras in the room somewhere contrary to Maureen's order, or if Bright, as a former congressman, was just playing to an imagined audience because he'd never gotten out of the habit.

"Okay, then. The question uppermost in my mind is this. Can you offer this meeting—and government

—any assurance that the Chitauri will not simply engineer their way around this problem if the technology becomes widely available?"

Fury had been expecting some variation of this question. He hadn't expected it to come from Defense, which usually wasn't quite as paranoid as Homeland Security. Even so, his canned answer came out smoothly. "Mr. Secretary," he said. "I don't know if I can assure you of that. But I can assure you that they will not have to engineer their way around anything if we sit on this tech because we're afraid of how they'll react when it starts working."

"That's a typical uniform attitude, if you don't mind me saying, General. Build it, get it out there, play with the new toy, the hell with the consequences."

"The Joint Chiefs will find that an interesting opinion," Garza said with exaggerated mildness.

"Hell with the Joint Chiefs, Admiral, and I don't mean that disrespectfully." Bright was redder in the face now, thrusting his finger at whomever he spoke to. "If we give this away now, before we've really thought through how to use it, we could be handing the Chitauri our best tool on a platter."

"If there are any Chitauri left," Altobelli said.

"Oh, there are Chitauri left," Fury said. "You can count on that. You ever heard of a subway tunnel without a rat somewhere in it? It's part of the territory. They came here, and we killed most of them. Then the rest of them multiplied. Then we killed them again. I don't have any reason to expect we've seen the last of them now."

"Which is exactly what you would say to keep your... what was it, General? Remind this meeting of your last appropriation."

"One hundred fifty billion dollars," Fury said without missing a beat.

"And you're going back this year for the same, is that correct?"

"It is."

"So you have a real interest in making sure that the threats SHIELD is chartered to counter are taken seriously."

Fury felt his temper rising, and told himself not to open his mouth, but somehow he already had. "I don't think Homeland Security is in any position to throw that particular stone, Mr. Secretary." That did it, he thought. Now the knives are out. Garza wasn't looking amused anymore.

"You mind if I pick this up again for a minute, Vince?" asked Ozzie Bright. Altobelli nodded. Bright stood and put both of his hands flat on the table. "It's my opinion, ladies and gentlemen, that security reasons compel us to limit the dispersal of this technology to venues and situations that are strictly controlled and monitored. Its loss to the Chitauri would be a devastating blow." Not nearly as devastating as never having had it in the first place, Fury thought.

"I'll ask you to indulge me in a little historical parallel," Bright went on. "During World War II, hard decisions were made about utilizing certain technologies and acting on the information gained thereby. Had the Allies saved every life and thwarted every minor movement they learned about by cracking the Enigma code, the Nazis would quickly have abandoned Enigma; by sacrificing those necessary lives, the Allies maintained their intelligence superiority over the Nazis long enough for that advantage to prove decisive. Do you understand the analogy, General Fury?"

Fury made his tone as level as he could. "I understand the analogy, Mr. Secretary, but I think circumstances here are different enough to render it invalid."

"Well," Bright said. "With all due respect for your understandable difference in opinion, I suggest that the facts speak for themselves."

And Fury knew he had lost. Maybe not just because of his lapse in temper, but he had lost all the same. 4

Steve was watching Some Like It Hot on cable when his cell phone rang. He had to resist the urge to walk over to the phone on the wall in the kitchen. He'd spent twenty-seven years talking on phones tethered to walls, and he was having a hard time getting used to the change. He checked the cell phone's caller ID, saw that it was Nick Fury calling. "General," he said.

"Cap," came Fury's voice. "You home?" This was another thing Steve couldn't get used to. Of course he was home. That's where you were when you talked on the phone.

Only now that wasn't true anymore.

"Yeah," he said.

"Good," Fury said. "I'm downstairs. Let me buy you a beer." On his way out, Steve walked over to the TV and turned it of!" Then he remembered that he'd been sitting next to the remote. Now that's even stranger than the phone, he thought. I never even saw a television before I left for the war; every time I've ever used a TV, it's had a remote. And yet I still go to turn them off manually. Walking downstairs, he wondered if the problem was that he just assumed all electronic things had switches. Then he decided that the whole thing wasn't worth worrying about. There were more important problems.

Such as why Nick Fury had come looking for him at ten o'clock on a Tuesday night.

"I'm kind of a morning person, General," Steve said when he came out the front door of his building. "If you're looking for a drinking buddy, I might not measure up."

"I don't even care if you drink," Fury said. They got into Fury's car—his personal car, Steve noticed, not one of the service limos that usually took them around the city. General Nick Fury, director of SHIELD, was driving a green Toyota Corolla. "I saw that look," Fury said. "This is my incognito car."

"So we're incognito?"

"Just don't feel like drawing attention."

"Okay," Steve said. "Where are we going?"

"Bar I picked because it has the same name as a restaurant I like in San Francisco. It's called the Boulevard, up in Greenpoint."

Greenpoint, Steve thought. The name brought to mind Polish butchers. "I used to get pierogies in Greenpoint sometimes."

"You still can. Don't walk around thinking New York's completely different. In some neighborhoods, fifty-eight years isn't that long." They were driving under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Fury turned left and doubled back, parking right in front of a bar set in the middle of a block of four-story walkups. Inside, the Boulevard was a woody, comfortable spot. Bar on one side, booths on the other, with a space in the back for a pool table. The back door was open, and Steve could see out into what looked like a small courtyard. Two TVs played the Yankees game. There were six or eight people sitting around, all wearing the costume of a breed Steve had learned was called the hipster. The bartender was a big longhair with tattoos, wearing a black shirt that caught Steve's eye because of the German lettering on it. He gave the shirt a closer look and realized it was a soccer jersey. Deutsche Fussball-Bund.

"For Pete's sake," he said to General Fury. "We go and fight a war so this yahoo can be a soccer fan." Fury shrugged. "Past is past, Cap."

Not to me, Steve thought.

Fury bought a beer and a ginger ale and the two of them sat in a booth beneath one of the television sets.

"So, General," Steve said. 'You must have brought me out here for a reason."

"I did," Fury said. "I brought you out here because I spent the morning getting my ass chewed by politicians and I wanted to talk to a rational human being."

"Tony's new toy?" Steve asked.

Fury nodded. "Washington's afraid that if we use it too soon, the bad guys will figure out a way around it. Plus I got in the middle of a pissing contest between two Cabinet departments." He shook his head and drank. "Should have known better. Anyway, long story short, they quashed it. Gave me this long rigmarole about how Tony shouldn't be trusted with certain materials, how I couldn't be trusted because I was running SHIELD like some kind of shadow junta, blah blah blah."

"Let me get this straight," Steve said. "They know we have a tool that would work against the enemy, and they're telling us not to use it because if we use it, the enemy might find out about it?"

"That's the upshot. And you'll appreciate this. One of them actually gave me a high and mighty speech about Enigma, how the Allies didn't always act on the information they got after they broke the code because they didn't want to let on that they'd cracked it."

"Is that true?" Steve asked.

Fury just looked at him.

"And good men died because of it," Steve said.

'Yes, they did," Fury said. "But it wasn't necessarily the wrong call. Would more of those good men have died if the Nazis switched to a new code and the war lasted six more months?"

"Wrong question," Steve said vehemently. "You have information, you act on it. You have the enemy in front of you, you take him out."

"I don't disagree," Fury said. "But you and I aren't always the ones who make the call." Politicians, Steve thought with disgust. "They're out there, though. We didn't get them all. Washington must know that."

"Washington," Fury said, "knows what it wants to know. And it doesn't want to know this. Well, some of them do. And I had this thought as I was walking out of the meeting, Cap. I thought, you know, SHIELD

could do whatever it wants. But we decide to go through these channels because that's the way things are done in this country, or should be. And then I had another thought, which was that ninety-nine times out of a hundred that might be the best way to do things... but this might be the hundredth time." He killed his beer and tipped the glass at Steve. "And that, soldier, is what is known as a privileged communication."

"Understood, sir." Steve sat and nursed his ginger ale while Fury went to the bar and came back. The jukebox started blaring, and Steve's mood soured further. A year after he'd been thawed, he still didn't get the music.

"So I thought to myself" Fury said when he'd settled in the booth again, "uniforms stick together. And it occurred to me that maybe you needed to have a beer. Or a ginger ale. Whatever." Fury raised his glass.

"The uniform."

"Damn right," Steve said, returning the toast. "The uniform." A cheer went up from a group of three people at the bar. Steve saw that they were looking at the TV

over his head. He turned to see the other TV, and watched a Yankee trotting around the bases.

"You look like you just bit into something rotten," Fury said. "Let me guess. Dodgers fan?" The depth of his anger surprised Steve. "Hell yes. That's one of the worst things about coming back. Los Angeles? How could they move to Los Angeles? And the Giants moving, too? And who are these Mets?

That's not baseball."

"Now it is," Fury said with a shrug.

"And this designated hitter rule," Steve went on.

Fury winked his good eye. "Un-American, right?"

"It is," Steve insisted. 'You play the game the way the game is supposed to be played... " He trailed off, and realized that he was really thinking about something else. "Sometimes I think the uniform's all I have," he said. "I turn on the TV... you know, I was just thinking tonight. Before I got thawed out, I'd never seen a television in my life. Now it's on all the time, everywhere. You can see anything."

"Except what's really going on."

"Well. You don't need to see everything. I mean, the average person doesn't."

"You don't think so?"

Steve set down his glass. "No, I don't. That's what we're here for. We're here to keep the boogeymen out from under the bed. It doesn't do any good if we get rid of the boogeyman and then put his picture on the six o'clock news for everyone to get scared of all over again."

Fury was looking at him, and Steve suddenly realized that the general hadn't responded because he was waiting for Steve to figure out the implications of what he'd just said. "No," Steve said. "I don't believe that. I don't believe in all of this mumbo-jumbo about keeping people scared. This is America. We don't do things like that."

'Well," General Fury said, "we try not to, anyway."

That's not an America I recognize, Steve thought. And it's not an America I want to live in. The America I believe in doesn't let political squabbling compromise its security.

And if that's how things really are, then I'm going to do something about it. I've done dirty jobs for this country before, and I'll do it again.

He felt like he was in dangerous territory. You're coming close to going off the reservation, son, he told himself But if what General Fury was telling him was true, America had fallen a long way since Roosevelt had told the country that the only thing it had to fear was fear itself.

Fury was looking at him. "I can see the wheels spinning, Captain Rogers."

"Just thinking all of this over, sir. What do we do?"

"What do we do? We play the game the way the game is supposed to be played." Fury drained the rest of his beer and stood. "Back to running SHIELD. Shadow military governments don't run themselves. Thanks for coming out."

"Any time," Steve said.

Outside, Fury offered him a ride home, but Steve decided he'd rather walk.

"You sure?" Fury was jingling his keys, obviously in a hurry to get somewhere else.

"Yeah," Steve said. The only company he wanted right then was his own thoughts, and his own misgivings, and his own sense that something had to be done.

Fury unlocked the Toyota, but paused before getting in. "Cap," he said. "This country needs people like you, but the people who run it aren't like you."

Steve nodded.

"You need to understand that or else you're going to go off and do something we'll all regret."

"Yes, sir," Steve said. He lifted a hand in a half-hearted wave, and walked off. Maybe it's because I understand that, that I might do something we'll all regret, he thought. That night he didn't sleep at all. 5

Status Report

Intelligence gathering suggests a possible technological advance that necessitates an accelerated mission plan. We proceed accordingly.

The impulse to individuality simultaneously retards the progress of Homo sapiens (to borrow their unwieldy classification system) as a species and enables startling acts of innovation on the part of individual members of the species. This is one reason why Homo sapiens was targeted for ordering. The parallel influences of chaos and reason, however, make humans a particularly difficult case to manage. Under no circumstances should we mistake the actions and rationales of one member of the species for a general tendency on the part of the species as a whole.

A further complication is the observed phenomenon of a member of the species reasoning through a set of circumstances and then acting in a way entirely opposed to the logical conclusion of this reasoning process. Again, this observed phenomenon was one factor in the initiation of the human ordering project; it bears repeating in the current context, especially in view of the influx of new forces unfamiliar with the nature of the human.

The human team known as the <Ultimates> suffers from all of the defects in reason that afflict Homo sapiens as a species; yet they have proved a difficult obstacle. We are intensifying our surveillance of all current and former members of this organization, and have reason to believe that this surveillance will enable us to penetrate the organization and remove it as an obstacle.

Progress in nonhuman form assimilation has been particularly successful in furthering this goal. Increased surveillance, and increased density of assimilated assets in place, is ordered in the following locations:

<Manhattan, NewYork>. Location of team member <Tony Stark> as well as his corporate endeavor,

<Stark lndustries>. Location of team member <Nicholas Fury>. Location of team member <Janet Pym>. Location of <Ultimates> headquarters, <Tris-kelion>, previously infiltrated. Full schematics of

<Tris-kelion> are available and will be utilized as part of the human ordering project.

<Brooklyn, New York>. Location of team member <Steven Rogers>.

<New Rochelle, New York>. Location of team member <Clinton Barton>.

<Wilmette, lllinois>. Location of former team member <Henry Pym>, believed to be engaged in research directly related to our endeavors.

<Washington, District of Columbian Frequent destination of team member <Nicholas Fury>, for political consultation and guidance. Also seat of government of the nation <United States of Americas-, which provides the <Ultimates> with financial and infrastructure support.

<Uppsala, Sweden>. Frequent location of team member known as <Thor>. Notes regarding symbolic significance of this identity to one iteration of human mythology attached. Deployment orders pursuant to intensification of surveillance efforts in these locations attached. Assimilation and infiltration activities in other areas of the planet are to remain unchanged. We consider the <Ultimates> a primary threat, and we redirect our resources to reflect this conclusion. Previous efforts to eliminate the <Ultimates> focused on direct attacks on members of the group as well as the <Triskelion> headquarters. At this time that strategy is no longer considered viable. Current strategy prioritizes more indirect methods. Results indicate that this approach is successful at this time, and it will be pursued. The timetable for execution of this phase of the human ordering project accelerates due to security questions noted in appendix. Time before missing humans provoke police investigation not known, but estimated to be less than .01916 solar year.

Appendix: Field Report

Priority human asset assimilated in <Falls Church, Virginia>. Mission security compromised by presence of human asset's mate and offspring, contrary to advance reports. Human asset's mate and offspring eliminated.

Priority nonhuman asset assimilated in <District Heights, Maryland>. Priority human asset assimilated in <Evanston, Illinois:^

Priority human asset assimilated in <Manhattan, New York>.

6

Another day, another fruitless hour spent trying to reason with people whose minds were deadened and senses numbed by the onslaughts of multimedia consumer capitalism. Today Thor was in Nick Fury's office trying to convince Nick to throw SHIELD'S weight behind an effort to release the Stark screener technology. Normally this wouldn't be the kind of action he could endorse—what the world needed was less surveillance, not more—but Thor knew what was coming. He hoped to be able to impress the importance of this on Fury, but he wasn't optimistic. For all of Nick Fury's virtues, he was still a man of his times.

And this, Thor thought, is the difference. I am neither a man nor of any time. In this way it becomes impossible for us to understand each other.

Perhaps I understand Steve Rogers a little better than most, because he is lost in time as well. But he is also a creature of duty and obedience, and I understand only the first of those. In obedience I have not the slightest interest.

"So, Loki said something to me the other day," he began, just to get Fury in the right frame of mind.

"Oh, did he?" Fury said, not bothering to hide his skepticism. He was at his desk comparing two sets of figures.

"He said that of all the Ultimates, Steve Rogers was his favorite. I think your conversation the other night really made him a fan."

Fury put down his pen and squeezed the bridge of his nose. "Okay," he said with his eyes closed. "I get it. If I have to raise my right hand and swear that I believe you're the Norse god of thunder just to get you to leave, I'll do it." He raised his right hand, looking down at his desk. Ten seconds or so later, he looked up. "You're not gone."

"You're not very convincing," Thor said.

"Neither are you, Mister Son of Odin, or Wotan, or whatever we're supposed to call him. I don't believe in gods—any of them—and until you bring Jesus Christ himself in to walk across the Upper Bay from Battery Park to here, that isn't going to change. Far as I'm concerned, you're a garden-variety anti-globalization wacko who got hold of some tech that nobody can reverse-engineer. Doesn't make you anything special."

Thor had started smiling at "Wotan," and couldn't stop. "Quite a speech, General Fury."

"You provoke me," Fury said.

"Well. Let me provoke you to pay attention."

"Right now I'm paying attention to a question. Where's the belt and hammer?"

"Safe," Thor said.

"If you had to get them right now, could you?"

"Do I have to?"

Fury shook his head and laughed. "Here I go, getting sucked into a conversation about possibilities with a crazy man. Okay, never mind, crazy man. What did you come in here and screw up my day for?"

'You need to get Tony Stark's new technology into the—as much as I hate to say it—marketplace, General," Thor said. "Believe me or don't, but it's more important than anything else you can do right now."

"Okay," Fury said. "Let's say I believe you. How do you suggest I explain to the congressional inquiry that I knew I had to do it because of the word of the Norse thunder god?" Thor put away his smile. "Is that the worst problem you can think of?" Fury was about to answer when his office door opened at the same time as a knock came from the hall.

"Excuse me, General, but I just need—"

The uniformed man in the doorway was dark-haired, lithe, mischievous. Loki. Perfect, Thor thought as he looked back at Fury and saw on the general's face only the beleaguered annoyance of the desk officer who in his mind is never far from the field. "Please," he said. "Come in."

"We were just discussing how to circumvent a political roadblock to the production of an extremely important technology developed under a black-budget contract by Stark Industries," Thor said. "I believe General Fury has political concerns, with which I sympathize, but I can't agree with his decision." Loki winked at him. "General Fury, all I need is just this one signature," he said, approaching Fury's desk with a manila folder opened to expose a document.

"I don't think I have to tell either of you how important it is to be able to recognize Chitauri infiltration wherever it may occur," Thor said. "And Tony's innovation—"

"Goddammit," Fury said. "You keep talking, and I'm going to have to kill one of my only competent secretaries. Have you ever heard of a goddamn security clearance?"

Thor put the smile back on. "Oh, but General. He already knows." In a double take that would have done Jim Carrey proud, Fury's head snapped back and forth between Thor and Loki. Then he caught himself and said, slowly and angrily, "Are you telling me you think this man is Loki?"

"I don't have to think it, General. Should I make introductions?" Fury stood behind his desk and pointed at his secretary. "You. Get the hell out and forget whatever you heard here."

"Yes, sir," Loki said, and closed the door behind him.

"And you," Fury went on, now pointing at Thor, "are one crazy son of a bitch." Thor spread his hands. "General. After all we've seen in this past year, you still think it's crazy to believe in shapeshifters?"

Fury glared daggers at him.

"However you want to rationalize it to yourself is fine."

"Oh," Fury said. "You're going to lecture me about rationalizing? Let me get out my tape recorder."

"General Fury," Thor said. "That was Loki. Last night he was telling me that after your conversation with Steve Rogers, Steve was angry about the suppression of Tony's tech. Is that true?" Fury didn't answer.

"Is it also true that you talked about baseball, and that Steve drank only ginger ale?" Still only silence from Fury.

"If you need to think I'm crazy because that's the way your world makes sense to you, be my guest," Thor said. "But this happened. And what needs to happen now is you need to get control of the Stark Industries technology before someone else does it for you." Thor stood. "That's what I came to tell you. I'll leave now, but remember: if you don't act, someone else is going to. I know that, too. You can figure out how."

On his way to the helipad, Loki fell in alongside him. "Not everyone finds your righteousness charming," Loki said.

"It isn't meant to charm," Thor said. "It's meant to be right."

"You know it's not going to work," Loki said.

Thor looked down at him. "What's the name of Fury's secretary?"

"Who cares?" Loki shrugged. "He's downstairs filling out a report on something ridiculous like equipment depreciation."

"I don't care," Thor said. "What's his name?"

Loki sighed. "Arthur Kostelanetz. Why?"

"So I can know who I'm going to be accused of assaulting," Thor said, and leveled his half brother with a roundhouse right.

When he got outside and into the helicopter, Thor opened his cell phone and called Steve Rogers. The phone rang only once before Steve's recorded message clicked on. Thor shut the phone, opened it again, and re-dialed. Again the message. One more try, Thor thought. He called Nick Fury.

"I've had enough of you today," Fury said when he answered the phone.

"Do you know where Steve Rogers is, General?" Thor asked.

"No. And if I did, I wouldn't tell you. I'll see you next time we convene as a team, and I hope not before." Fury hung up on him.

Mortals, Thor thought. It's too much for them. Everything is too much for them. He called Fury again.

"Did you not hear me?" Fury said.

"No, I did. But I wanted to find out if your secretary Kostelanetz is all right."

"Is that—" Thor could almost hear Fury doing another double take over the phone. "You son of a bitch," Fury growled, and hung up again.

Thor laughed. What could you do?

He leaned forward and tapped the pilot on the shoulder. The pilot leaned his head back, still keeping his eyes front. "Where can you put me down in Brooklyn?" Thor shouted into his ear. The pilot leaned forward to consult some gauge or other, then leaned back again. "What part of Brooklyn?"

"I believe it's called Flatbush?"

"What?"

Thor sighed. "Flatbush!" he shouted. "Flatbush Avenue!" Again the pilot consulted a display. "I can't get you down any closer than the Brooklyn Navy Yard," he yelled. "Unless you want to set down in an empty lot."

"Fine, yes," Thor shouted, nodding, "let's do that."

"You going to explain it to General Fury?"

"He'll know why. Just do it."

Ten minutes later Thor was stooping as the helicopter angled up and away to the southwest. He was in the middle of an acre or so of cracked and weedy asphalt, once a truck yard and now just one more place where the commerce of New York had come and gone. When he got to the fence, he jumped up and caught the razor wire, bracing his feet on the top of a fencepost before vaulting over. As his feet hit the ground, he saw three passing teenagers gaping at him. "Pretty good trick, isn't it?" he said with a grin, spreading his hands so they could see that he hadn't cut himself.

"Damn," one of them said. "Homey's a ninja."

They watched him walk down Flatbush Avenue back toward Rogers's apartment, which was in the as-yet-ungentrified hinterlands of Brooklyn. The block Rogers lived on looked like nobody had put a coat of paint on anything since he'd left for the war. At times like these, Thor thought, I would just as soon fly, and to hell with this pretense for mortals and their small fears. He felt the absence of Mjolnir in his hands. Then he cracked a smile again, thinking of the teenagers and their wonder and what must have seemed an impossible thing to them. Being immortal had its privileges... and its drawbacks, Thor thought, remembering the dark and shining malice on the face of his half brother.

Steve Rogers is my favorite, Loki had said. That much Thor had told Fury. What he had not mentioned was that Loki had said something else. Rogers I love, Loki had said, because he will squeeze so hard with his fists of order that chaos will inevitably squirt out. And laughed, Loki had, long and loud. Thor picked up his pace, spurred on by a sense he couldn't shake that something was about to happen, some trick about to be played on a man whose goodness would be the lever that evil would use against him. To be a god was to know things; the joke of fate was that too often, what even the gods knew was not quite enough.

Rogers wasn't home. Thor stood on the street, watching the mortals pass. What would he have told Rogers? That Loki had taken a special interest in him? Rogers believed in flag and country, nothing else. His was a pure belief, not ignorant of nuance but dismissive of it, deeply invested in a black-and-white view of the world. There was an innocence about it that gave Rogers much of his strength, but that innocence was also part of what made him a useful tool for those who operated by deceit. Strength of belief, Thor thought, was admirable, but it was a lever that when used against you always tipped you long before you knew it was being used.

And so, Thor thought. I have come looking for him to call him a naif and tell him that my half brother, another god he doesn't believe in, has a plan for him. Hardly an errand with good prospects of success. To know and not to be believed. This was the lot of gods. All the same, Thor was glad he wasn't a mortal. Fate would do what Fate did, to Steve Rogers and to them all.

7

One thing about coming out of a fifty-seven-year deep freeze was that it diminished the number of people you could turn to when you needed to figure something out and couldn't do it on your own. All I have left, Steve thought as he signed in at the visitor desk of Mount Sinai Hospital, is the thread that keeps Bucky fighting his cancer. When that breaks, my last link to life before the freeze will be gone. Except for Gail. But she wouldn't ever be able to get close to him. All they shared anymore was the knowledge that they'd both gone on without ever quite getting apart. When Bucky dies, Steve thought, I'll go to the funeral, and I'll see her there, and then maybe we'll talk a few more times, but she will be a widow in her seventies and I'll be a super-soldier figurehead for SHIELD, and he knew how that would go. Someone would call him when she died.

Snap out of it, he told himself. Quit wallowing.

The door to Bucky's room was open, which meant he was probably awake. Knowing he was a friend of Captain America's, the nursing staff—all of whom had kids who were Captain America fans—took outrageously good care of him. They did everything but cure his cancer.

Steve tapped on the door. "Hey, Buck," he said.

No answer.

Two steps into the room, Steve was certain Bucky was dead. He lay on his back, mouth open, tubes and needles everywhere... but the monitor next to the bed ticked off a steady heartbeat. Steve took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and settled in the chair next to Bucky's bed. He wondered where Gail was. Usually when Bucky had to go into the hospital, she spent most of her time there with him.

"Ah, Buck," he said softly. He didn't want to wake Bucky but he couldn't stop himself from talking. He had to talk, even if it was just to hear himself thinking things through.

"I need you on your game, pal," he said. 'You want tactics and strategy, bad guys taken out and objectives accomplished, I'm the guy. But what do you do, Buck?

What do you do when you might be walking past the bad guy on the street, and there's a way to find out but they won't let you use it?"

Bucky snorted and shifted a little in the bed. Steve waited to see if he would wake up, but then Bucky's breathing settled back to normal. He hasn't got much left, Steve thought, listening to the shallow, wheezing breath of his oldest friend, and his eyes started to sting.

"They're not with us, Buck," he said. "Everyone wants shades of gray, but that's what it boils down to. We're fighting the bad guys, and they're not with us."

The monitor chirped, and Steve heard a whir and click as one of Bucky's machines dispensed meds. For a while Steve couldn't think of what else to say. Then it came to him.

"All enemies foreign and domestic, right?" he said.

"Right," came a voice from the doorway behind him.

He turned, and there was Gail. "All enemies," she said again. "Foreign and domestic. You do what you know is right, Steve."

"Yeah," Steve said. He looked down. "But the thing that I know is right... it's against the law. It's wrong." She stepped over to him and put a hand on his shoulder. "We have to trust someone to know when to make that decision. We have to trust you, Steve."

His cell phone rang. Gail whacked him half-seriously on the shoulder, where her hand had just been resting. "You get out of this ward with your phone. They're not supposed to be on in here." Steve muted the phone without looking at the call. A passing nurse stuck her head in the door and said,

"Turn your phone off in here."

"Already did, miss," Steve said. "Sorry."

"No you didn't", she said. "I can still see the display. Either turn it off or you're going to have to leave the ward."

"Okay, I'm turning it off." He flipped the phone open and as he was hitting the power button, he saw that the call had come from Admiral Esteban Garza, one of the top members on the Joint Chiefs. He stood up. "I have to take this one, Gail."

"Go," she said, and he was struck by how strong and dignified she was in her old age. Would she have become the same if he'd never hitched a ride on that rocket?

Wrong question, he thought. All the questions he came up with were wrong.

"Take the call," Gail said, shooing him out the door. "Then turn your phone off and come back, and we'll talk until he wakes up."

The cell phone prohibition extended out into the main corridor, and Steve kept on walking until he was outside. Why was Admiral Garza calling him instead of Nick Fury? The soldier in Steve didn't like circumventions of the chain of command. He called Garza back, though, as soon as he'd gotten away from the crowded sidewalks around the hospital.

Garza picked up on the first ring. "Captain Rogers," he said without preamble.

"Admiral," Steve said. "I was visiting a friend in the hospital."

"Is he dying?" Garza asked.

"Not right now."

"Then get to the Triskelion. I'll have a chopper there. I need you at Andrews pronto." Three hours later, Steve was walking alongside Garza down an underground hallway that could be entered only through a triple-keycarded steel door in the basement of an anonymous Quonset hut set all the way out at the western perimeter of the base. "This was brought in to us last night," Garza said, "and the first time I saw it was this morning. I believe you'll be able to offer an expert opinion." They came to a dead end, with another featureless steel door in front of them. It had been a long time since Steve saw a sign. We're off the map, he thought. This place doesn't exist. Remembering his conversation with Fury the night before, he thought: this is where the boogeymen live. Admiral Garza slid his keycard through a slot. A panel opened in the wall, exposing a keyboard, and he entered a long alphanumeric code. The door opened to reveal a small room, and Steve followed Garza into it. Garza's keycard was waiting in a tray on the other side. The room was a white cube with a single workstation and another door on the wall opposite the one they'd come in. At the workstation sat a pale woman with gray-shot blond hair and haunted eyes. She stood when they entered.

"Admiral Garza," she said, then looked Steve up and down. "And you must be Captain America."

"Steve Rogers," he said, and extended his hand.

She didn't take it. "I assume you're here to observe the specimen?" she asked Admiral Garza.

"No, Justine, we thought we'd take you to lunch. Cap, meet Justine Ichesco." Garza walked over to the other door.

This time access involved a complicated series of key-card readings, code entries, and simultaneous turnings of physical keys. Everything but a secret handshake, Steve thought. The door opened and they went into a larger room, one wall of which was obviously one-way glass. So we're being observed, Steve thought... and then his attention was riveted to the thing on the steel laboratory table in the middle of the room.

It had the rough shape of a man: bipedal, bilaterally symmetric, and so forth. But it was more than seven feet tall, and its limbs were deformed, each a different length than the other and each jointed in a slightly different way. But it was the face that Steve couldn't look away from. Scrambled somehow, as if a late Picasso had been given flesh, the face brought to mind another malformed humanoid, in the Arizona desert, with fire and falling steel all around...

"They do that when they've been badly injured," he said, keeping his voice level. "Lose their cohesion."

"So you're sure it's Chitauri?" Garza asked.

"I'm sure," Steve said.

"Sampling matches existing specimens of recovered Chitauri tissue," Justine said. Garza stepped closer to the strapped-down body. "Well, this one's a ways past injured," he said. "We killed it on the base perimeter last night."

"Then you can expect its shape to scramble even more," Steve said. Justine walked around to the other side of it. "How many of these have you seen?" Steve remembered starships falling from the desert sky.

The Chitauri opened its eyes.

Steve felt the adrenaline shock like a punch in the chest, his super-soldier overdrive kicking in. The Chitauri snapped the straps holding it down, wrenching the table loose from the floor. One of its hands shot out and caught Justine around the throat; the other reached for Steve, but he was already pivoting out of the way when he saw the first twitch of muscle, and he caught the arm at full extension and broke it across the edge of the table. The snap of the fracture was counterpointed by the crunch of the Chitauri crushing the life out of Justine Ichesco. Garza had fallen back and drawn his sidearm; out of the corner of his eye Steve saw the admiral stepping to the side to look for a better shot. In front of him the Chitauri sprang from the table. He saw it looking at him, and could have sworn—in the split second before it shifted its focus to Garza—that he saw recognition in its eyes.

A bell went off in his head as the Chitauri caught him with a roundhouse kick, using the momentum to get a running start at Garza. The admiral began firing, emptying the nine-shot magazine of his old Browning. Each of the shots hit the Chitauri and froze it in place for an eye blink before it drove forward once more. Until Steve tackled it, crushing its head into the floor. Already he could tell that its shape was decomposing. Where the human flesh was peeling back, some recognizable Chitauri features shone through, and in other places the only thing visible was an anatomical mishmash. Between the bullets and its weakening hold on its human shape, the Chitauri looked like some of the bodies Steve had seen in the aftermath of an artillery barrage in Europe. But it could still fight; it threw him off into the one-way glass, which rang with the impact but didn't crack. Back on his feet, Steve saw it closing on Garza again, and reflexively he drew his arm back to throw his shield.

He had no shield.

The lab table would do just as well.

Tearing the twisted steel tabletop loose from the frame, Steve flung it Frisbee-style. It hit the back of the Chitauri's head with a wet crunch.

The creature's arms shot straight out and its back arched. Momentum carried it forward to slam into Admiral Garza and bear him down to the floor, but Steve could tell it was dead before the thud of their impact reached him.

On the other hand, that's what Garza had thought last night.

"Admiral," Steve said, pulling the limp body off Garza. "You injured?" The door burst open and a response team fanned out, weapons trained on Steve and the admiral. Garza put out a hand, palm down, and the team lowered the muzzles of their rifles. With his sleeve, Garza swiped at the Chitauri blood on his face. "We'll need a medic for Justine," he said. "But I don't think there's any hurry." One of the response team was already kneeling over her where she lay, the table frame tipped over onto her body. I did that, Steve thought. He felt as if he'd defiled her somehow, even though he could hardly have been concerned with where the frame fell. He'd had a Chitauri to kill. This is where they keep the boogeymen, he thought. I was right.

"Captain Rogers," Garza said. "Follow me."

Five minutes later they'd returned through the three security-keyed doors and were in a ground-level office framed off from the rest of the Quonset hut by naked two-by-fours and drywall. "We're under construction here," Admiral Garza said. He was still rubbing at streaks of blood on his hands.

"Admiral," Steve said. "Is this the first time you've caught a Chitauri on base grounds?"

"Caught? Yes," Garza said. "I suspect there might be others." He paused, picking at one thumbnail.

"Captain?" he said.

"Yes, sir."

"Can I count on you to get Tony Stark's toy to the right person?"

"With all due respect, sir, I think Tony's the right person."

Garza looked him in the eye. "Noted. Now can you get Tony's toy to the person I am about to tell you to get it to?"

In other words, Steve thought, are you willing to commit industrial espionage against an American company for the benefit of Americans? Is this what it's come to? Once he'd had an argument with Thor about the point at which it became necessary to contravene your ideals so that other people could believe that those same ideals still existed. In other words, at what point do you grant yourself the privilege of knowing better than other people what's best for them?

Now, I guess, Steve thought. I guess that time is now.

"Yes, sir," he said. "I can."

"Good answer," Garza said. He handed Steve a business card. "Memorize it." Steve did, and handed it back.

"You know why Stark can't have it, right?"

"I'm guessing it has something to do with politics," Steve said. All at once he couldn't look Garza in the eye.

"Politics," Garza repeated. "Damn right. If Tony Stark built these things, the next day Nick Fury would be walking sentry duty in Barrow, Alaska. That's how things work down here." There was a long pause. Steve looked at his hands, heard again the sound of the table crushing the Chitauri's skull, hunted around in his mind for words that weren't there.

"You know, Cap, there are people in this government who think like you do. And like I do," Garza said.

"But there aren't enough of them, and they aren't always in the right places."

"Someone has to stand up," Steve said.

"Right. But that someone can't always stand up in front of everyone. Not right away. It's not the way we'd like to do this, but it's the way we can make it work. Know what I mean?" Steve didn't like it. No. That wasn't true. Part of him did like it, the part that wanted to act, to be done with rules and procedures. You saw the enemy, you hit the enemy.

But then there was the part that knew the consequences of acting before you knew what you were doing. Last year's Hulk incident was all the proof anyone would need of that.

"I know what you mean, sir," he said.

"Good," Garza said. "And the name I gave you? I can't give this to Fury, for the same reasons I just outlined. He's too vulnerable. The Hill doesn't like him anyway. They think he's too much of a loose cannon. But you—you're untouchable politically. Anyone who goes up against Captain America better be planning to retire."

"I understand, Admiral," Steve said.

"And what the hell, we need a loose cannon here and there. Can't all be deskjockeys like me." Garza grinned and chucked Steve on the shoulder. "Time for me to move along. Good work in there today, Captain Rogers. Make this happen."

"Yes, sir," Steve said. "I will."

8

Tony spent most of his morning running through quarterly reports, and then he went downstairs to see what the R&D boys had come up with for the new Iron Man prototype. And lo and behold, when he got there, who should he find but Nick Fury?

"General?" Tony said. "To what do I owe this unexpected pleasure?"

"Well, let's see." Fury started ticking off points on his fingers. "SHIELD is curious about how Stark is spending all of that money we got for you; I'm curious to see what this new toy can do; and I want to make sure that you understand the ramifications of what Washington told me yesterday."

"Ah." Turning to the assembled tech team, Tony said, "Ladies and gentlemen, would you excuse us?" When they'd filed out, Tony sat on the stairs that led up to the prototype staging area. The new suit loomed over them. He'd had it redone in darker colors as a whim, but on the inside there were real innovations to be excited about. The new battery could deliver 15 percent better acceleration, a full eight g's, and (luckily for Tony's brain) the team had come up with better acceleration-damping gel. His turning capacity was improved, the servos and condensate hydraulics had finally caught up with the tensile strength of the armor plates... "It's a doozy," Tony said when he'd finished listing all of the new gadgetry.

"Oh, and the force field and force beams, I'm getting 30 percent more repulsion per square centimeter."

"Do tell," Fury said.

"I'll be happy to outfit all of SHIELD'S shock troops with a slightly less gaudy version, General," Tony said with a mock toast. Then, as if he'd reminded himself, he added, "Listen, if we're going to have to talk much more, I'll need a little refreshment. Especially if you're going to break my heart again about my marvelous screener."

"Are you of the opinion that martinis are going to cure your cancer, Tony? Or are you just a garden-variety boozehound?"

"In no way," Tony said as he stood, "am I a garden-variety anything. Let's go upstairs." Tony maintained a modest—for him—suite of apartments on the top floor of Stark Industries'

headquarters. At times he imported Jarvis to work there, when he knew he wasn't going to get home for long stretches, , and Jarvis had a tray of martinis waiting for Tony and Fury when they came out of the elevator into Tony's study. "General Fury," Jarvis purred. 'Your company is far too rare a pleasure, sir." Swiping his glass from the tray, Tony rolled his eyes. "For God's sake, Jarvis. What are you trying to do here? General Fury has closed-minded and brutish superiors! Haven't you heard of don't ask, don't tell?"

"Don't ask," Jarvis shot back. "And General, you're under no obligation to tell." With that, he left through the kitchen door.

"You didn't take your drink, Nick," Tony observed.

"Spare me," Fury said.

Now it was Tony's turn to roll his eyes. As he did it, he thought, my God, sometimes I come across just like Jarvis.

As if he'd read Tony's mind, Fury quirked a smile and said, "Not that there's anything wrong with that."

"Go to hell, General Fury," Tony said with a grin. "Now, what was it you wanted to talk about again? Ah; wait. I remember. We talked about the toy, so now you must be waiting to hear about Stark Industries'

fiscal responsibility, as well as my reaction to the news from Washington. Which, since you haven't given it to me, I j assume must be bad."

"Bad for you, yeah," Fury said.

"I'll be honest with you, Nick," Tony said. "I'm trying to be a good citizen and do the right thing for my company at the same time. Do you see my conflict?"

The phone rang. "It can wait," Fury said.

"Not when this line rings, it can't." Tony picked up.

"Tony, it's HankPym."

"Well, Doctor. How can I help you?"

"I need to ask you a favor."

"A favor," Tony repeated.

"Nick won't take my calls, and I need to get a message to him. This is crucial, Tony. What if I told you there were still Chitauri around?"

"Oh, for God's sake," Tony said. "Call back when you're taking your meds again." Listen to me, Tony thought. If Hank Pym wasn't a wife-beating sycophant, I might actually feel badly about the way I'm lying to him. He hung up.

"That wasn't Hank Pym, was it?" Fury asked.

"Nope," Tony said. "Business. This line's too important for troglodytes like Pym."

"Pretty short for such an important call," Fury observed mildly.

"I know how to get to the point."

"Okay, then I will, too. I hear you talking about con-flict, and I get a little worried about what I'm not hearing you say." Fury sat in one of the chairs Tony had turned toward the window. "Believe me, Tony. I know how you feel."

"No, you don't," Tony said. "I might have made six hundred million dollars this year on those screeners." For a long moment Fury was silent. Then he stood back up and said, "That's one of those comments that makes it hard for me to spend time around you."

"Oh, General Fury," Tony said. "You're not still mad about my little demonstration the other day, are you? Come on. You were the one I needed to convince."

"That's got nothing to do with it. What worries me is that there was a leak, and I don't think it came from SHIELD."

Tony noticed his drink was already gone. He called for another, mostly to give himself time to cool off Banter was one thing, the kind of bullshitting you did with people you worked with. It was something entirely different when someone who ought to know better—a friend, no less—accused you of being the source of a serious security breach. Jarvis brought the drinks and, sensing the tension in the room, left without comment. "Okay, Nick," Tony said. "Apart from a desire to cover your own ass after you got chewed out in Washington, what makes you think the leak is here? Are you somehow under the impression that I would let Washington know about a program so they could get cold feet and step on it?"

Nick didn't turn around. Over his shoulder and out the window, Tony watched a helicopter landing at the Triskelion, far away to the south. He could see the entire spread of the Upper Bay, except Liberty Island, which was blocked by Fury's shining head.

"I have to tell you, Tony," Fury began. The tone of his voice, more measured and softer than was usual, hinted to Tony that something unpleasant was coming. "There's quite a few people in Washington who are still fighting the last battle when it comes to you, you know? They want your contracts reviewed, they want your security clearances revoked on lifestyle-risk grounds... the whole works." Now Fury did look back at Tony. "I'm not a hundred percent sure they're wrong," he finished.

"Oh, aren't you," Tony said.

"No, I'm not. I believe SHIELD needs Iron Man; I'm not sure I believe that the defense business needs Stark Industries."

"This is because I have a drink in the morning and I'm not a picket-fence family man?" Tony said. He was getting angrier by the second here, and found himself not caring whether he alienated Nick, or the government, or anyone else. He was Tony Stark, he was Stark Industries, the economies of nations rose and fell with the check marks he made in the margins of The Wall Street Journal every morning. "You want to apply those same standards to the people professing their worries about me, Nick? Or is what we have here another version of just plain old jealousy? How many congressmen wish they had my money and my women and my looks?" Tony laughed. "Tony Stark!—not just a billionaire playboy, but a billionaire playboy egotist! Keep our homeland safe from this monstrosity!" He got quiet, realizing that of all the people in the world, Nick Fury was perhaps least likely to be affected by a rant. "Nick, I've got enough juice in Washington that if I put my mind to it, I can get this project cleared. But now you're telling me that there's going to be opposition that has nothing to do with the project. So do you want me to see what I can do, or will it be easier on your office if I just stay out of the way and keep coming up with great ideas that nobody will use? I can go either way. Just let me know."

"Okay, Tony. Then the truth is, you almost punked out in Arizona; we have multiple reports to that effect. You drink like a rock star, you go through women like a rock star... there are legitimate security concerns that come with this kind of lifestyle. I'm sure I don't have to tell you what a honey trap is."

"No. And I'm sure I don't have to tell you what a brain tumor is." Nick was silent for a moment. "No."

"Well, then. I'm sure that you understand why I could not possibly care less about what the defense bureaucracy in Washington thinks about my girlfriends or the olives in my martinis."

"Yes, I do," Nick said. "And I understand something else, too."

"What's that, O swami of SHIELD?"

Now Nick turned around to look Tony in the eye. "I understand fear. You don't think of yourself this way, but you're listening to the clock tick, and you're worried that when that tumor finally gets you, people are going to stand around your coffin and say what a waste it was that you never did anything but make money and play with fancy gizmos. So now that—"

Tony looked away from Nick, his attention caught by a flash outside the window. "Uh oh. Gotta go, country needs me," he said, and shrugged out of his suit coat as he headed for the elevator.

"What... ?" Nick glanced back at the window. Wish I could see the look on his face, Tony thought. The elevator door opened, and Tony held it for Nick, who was barreling across the room with his Grim Reaper face on. A big fireball like that coming out of the Triskelion, Tony thought. Yes sir, that'll take the steam out of your armchair psychoanalysis any day.

"Move this goddamn thing," Fury growled. The elevator door shut, and the bottom dropped out of Tony's stomach. Express train to hell, he thought. As the door closed, he heard the phone ring, but Hank Pym could wait. After seeing Nick Fury caught speechless, Tony had the idea that this was going to be a pretty good day. He couldn't wait to put on his suit.

9

Status Report

The tension between order and chaos that constitutes much of what humans call personality is proving to be a useful if delicate tool. It is observed that in intra-human conflicts, the side operating at a material and technological deficit prioritizes the sowing of chaos, while the side with a surplus of materiel and personnel prioritizes direct assault and the imposition of order. Thus the imbalance between plenitude and insufficiency becomes a determinant in tactical and strategic choice. Lessons are available from this observation, and are being processed and incorporated into short-term planning. A new emphasis on the sowing of chaos is instituted, and assets redeployed accordingly.

In the longer term, open conflict is unavoidable and desirable, once resources are more fully developed. Sensitivity to human political activity will offer cues as to the correct time to abandon small-scale operations designed to compromise key individual targets in favor of a standard battlefield configuration. Assimilation efforts accelerate, and prognosis for the human ordering project is rated good. Diversionary tactics, although of limited long-term value, have previously proved useful in managing the enemy's movements and priorities. Activities in this vein continue. Reports are imminent on the success of the most recent diversionary mission, location <Triske-lion, New York>. Although complete ramifications will not be known immediately, early signs should indicate whether the mission was successful on its terms and should be repeated. The strategic truism that surprise and morale erosion are force multipliers need not be retested; what remains to be seen is the specific realization of this truism in the actions of <SHIELD>, especially with respect to the political treatment of current <SHIELD> initiatives.

Political reaction to <Andrews> mission unfolds as expected. <Garza> has contacted <Steven Rogers>. Details of the conversation are not available due to minimal assets and difficult communication channels. It however appears as if both <Garza> and <Rogers> have acted according to mission plan. This situation will be monitored intensively.

Intelligence gathering and resource placement in <Wilmette, Illinois> improves. Assets are in final placement anticipating orders to execute planned mission.

Mission Timeline and Preliminary Report: Triskelion

-.090349 solar year: Assessment of security procedures in and around Triskelion. Identification of possible weak point in shipping and receiving of cargo due to involvement of several different groups.

-.078222 solar year: Identification and surveillance of contracted non-military personnel involved in logistics.

-.038874 solar year: Targeting of <Roger Boudreau> and <Antonio Puyol> due to length of service, with presumed increase in institutional trust, and absence of family and social networks.

-.030582 solar year: Assimilation of <Roger Boudreau> and <Antonio Puyol> Preparation of ordnance.

-.022916 solar year: Elimination of two employees of contracted logistical service, causing reassignment of their duties to assets in place, <Boudreau> and <Puyol>.

-.000342 solar year: Deployment of assets in place on mission.

-.000171 solar year: Assets in place destroy portions of Triskelion. Assets lost as a planned consequence of mission.

Appendix

Priority nonhuman asset assimilated in <Ronkonkoma, NewYorkx

Priority human asset assimilated in <Buenos Aires, Argentina;..

10

Steve Rogers could not remember ever being so angry.

Thirteen SHIELD contractors were dead, and three soldiers. The Triskelion had an irregular hole in its side sixty feet wide and extending up through the third floor over the loading dock where the explosion had occurred.

The fires were almost out, and already the grim work of recovering remains had begun. Choppers circled overhead. New York City fire department boats had come and gone, their offers of help rebuffed for security reasons. Now came cleanup, and the painstaking reconstruction of how this had happened. Except Steve already knew the important thing: two Chitauri suicide bombers had left a smoking hole in the Triskelion, sixteen families grieving, and SHIELD with a black eye whose consequences none of them would know until the media vultures had finished picking over the corpses. And if Tony Stark's screeners had been installed at the loading dock, none of it would have happened in the first place.

Before coming down here to work with the fire and cleanup crews, Steve had replayed the security tapes. Frame: the boat eases into the dock. Frame: a forklift comes out to start offloading pallets. Frame: one of the boat's crew says something to the forklift operator. Frame: the crewman hops on the forklift and picks up a pallet. As he turns it around, another member of the boat's crew hoists a stack of three large totes.

Right there, Steve thought. No man can lift three of those when they're loaded, especially not a skinny fifty-year-old, which was what the man had been. Correction: what the man had looked like. Frame: the two crewmen stop for a brief conversation with Master Sergeant Antonio Cullen, who grins and waves them through.

I can reconstruct that one, Steve thought. Hey, this isn't on the manifest. Yeah, I know, it wasn't scheduled till tomorrow, but common carriers, who knows when anything's going to get anywhere

... and now Sergeant Cullen was dead.

Then a different camera. Frame: the forklift stops about ten feet inside the intake door. The man with the totes—the Chitauri with the totes, Steve corrected himself—drops them and rips the top off one. The forklift driver loosens a cable from inside the shrink-wrap holding the boxes together on the pallet. The two of them bend over a small black box.

The view dissolves into static.

From the outside camera: Sergeant Cullen and four of the contractors hired to move freight around inside the Triskelion are annihilated in a stop-motion bloom of fire threaded with black smoke. The camera washes out. When its light meters stabilize, the dock area is in ruins. Small fires burn on the boat, one slowly catching on the clothing of an unconscious or dead crew member. The hole blown in the side of the Triskelion has cross-sectioned three floors. Papers from upstairs offices flutter out over the Upper Bay, wafted by the scorching updraft from the fire burning in the intake warehouse. A woman lies dead near her desk, one of her arms dangling over the edge of the exposed floor. Major Christina Akinbiye. Steve had poured her a cup of coffee three weeks before in the Triskelion cafeteria. After that he couldn't look at it anymore. When he'd gotten downstairs, response teams were already reporting nonhuman remains.

Some of which he was still cleaning up. Steve gritted his teeth and let slip a curse that Gail would have slapped his face for.

Since nobody knewwhat the hell would happen if a seagull happened to fly by and pick up a snack of Chitauri tissue, every cell needed to be collected and accounted for. They were still, almost a year later, doing final cleanup on the Arizona site. Getting the Triskelion shipshape wouldn't be nearly as big a job, which wasn't much consolation since it sure wasn't the kind of job for which Steve was suited. But he was here and General Fury wasn't, and Banner was still locked up downstairs until they put him in front of a firing squad. So instead of hunting down the aliens, Steve was picking up pieces of them. It wasn't his job. He was wasted here.

"It's like a Willie and Joe cartoon," he said to the tech closest to him. The tech looked up from bagging a bloody piece of acoustic tile. "A what?"

"Never mind," Steve said. He should have known better. Might as well have made a joke about a political cartoon from the Civil War.

Resentment was so thick in the back ot his throat that he could practically spit it out. God, he hated them. Hated them worse than he'd ever hated the Nazis or the Japs. He would have killed them all himself, shot them in the back as they fled. If God Himself came down and gave Steve Rogers the gift of prophecy, and he knew that the Chitauri would leave tomorrow and never come back, he would still have killed them as they filed onto their ships. And they could have done some thing about it. From the circling cluster of choppers, one detached itself and came down to land on the sea-level helipad. The blast of prop wash blew away some of the smoke that still hung over the dock. When General Fury got out, Steve looked to the skies, searching for some resolve that would help him stop himself from saying something he shouldn't... and there was Tony Stark, showing off in his suit, blasting back and forth long after it might have done any good.

Steve knew at that moment that he couldn't hide from it any more. Admiral Garza had been right. Fury strode through the wreckage to Steve. "Tell me," he said.

"Chitauri in human form. Suicide bombers," Steve said. He bent over and picked up a stringy gobbet of flesh, now sparkling with scales. Holding it up for General Fury's inspection, he snapped, "They lose their cohesion when they're dead. Only when they're dead."

"Hold on there, soldier," General Fury said. "Aim that anger where it counts." Steve dropped the bit of flesh into a collection bag, sealed it, and put the bag in a plastic tote not unlike the one that had carried the detonator. Then he stood up, looked General Fury in the eye, and said,

"With all due respect, sir, that's the problem here. It might have counted."

"I don't follow you," General Fury said.

Pointing up into the sky, Steve said, "If Tony's tech had been installed, they would have been tagged. I could have done something." Whatever resolve he'd been looking for failed Steve, and he kept talking.

"But instead Washington wanted to be careful. Well, this is what careful gets you when you're fighting an enemy who isn't afraid to die. We've got sixteen in the morgue, and who knows how many others burned. People died, Nick. Excuse me. General."

Fury didn't answer right away. Eventually, after Steve had bagged and tagged two more pieces of Chitauri tissue, he said, "You're relieved. We can find someone else to do that."

"I'm not doing anything else," Steve said.

"I am relieving you of this duty, soldier," General Fury said, and let it hang. Not hurrying, Steve bagged one more piece of tissue and then stood. "Yes, sir," he said.

"That's more like it," Fury said.

He was about to say something else when Tony came in for a landing on the ruined dock. "Perimeter's clear out to a mile," Tony said. "Can someone give me a hand with the helmet here?"

"I'll do it," Steve said. He worked the helmet's seals and clamps loose and lifted the faceplate away, releasing a flood of greenish gel.

"Hell of an upgrade," Tony said. "Although I guess we can talk about that later." Steve leaned in close to him. "One thing," he said quietly, not wanting Fury to hear. "Your screener would have stopped this." .

Caught up short, Tony looked at him, a puzzled expression on his face. He wiped some of the gel away from his eyes. "You're not blaming me for this?"

"Not a bit," Steve said, still keeping his voice down. "I don't blame you. But I wanted you to face what happened here because I might need your help."

"My help?"

But Steve had already turned away. "General," he said. "I was here. I'll take media point on this. What we have is two Chitauri suicide bombers. I don't have to tell you that this is a new tactic for them, and it tells us quite a bit about where they think they are strength-wise."

"Well, that's not going to help the reporters," General Fury said.

"No?"

"No. Because we're not going to tell them that," General Fury said. "People do not need to hear that alien suicide bombers got into the Triskelion. They are more than willing to laugh at what incompetent idiots we are, accidentally blowing ourselves up, but they'll forget all about that the next time we save their asses. They will not forget the idea of infiltration, and that is what needs to be managed here."

"Managed," Steve said disbelievingly. "You're worried about how to manage this."

"Would you rather see our funding gutted because we come across as a bunch of amateurs? Would you rather go back to working out of whatever space the Army can spare at Fort Drum? Remember what we talked about the other night, Cap."

Steve looked around and spread his hands. "Isn't this part of what we talked about the other night?"

"What did you two talk about the other night?" Tony wanted to know.

"Nothing," Steve and General Fury said in unison.

A silence fell, broken by the thud of circling helicopters and the scrape and shuffle of the tissue-recovery detail. "Fine," Steve said. "Okay. My offer to take media point stands. You let me know how we're going to handle it."

"Well," Tony said. "That's a little disappointing from our straight arrow." Steve spun and jabbed a finger in Tony's direction. "You get that one free," he said quietly. "But don't ever say anything like that again. Is that clear?"

He could tell Tony was trying not to smile, but right then Steve didn't care. Tony Stark could have his bravado. That, and money, was all he had.

"Clear, mon capitaine," Tony said.

"French," Steve said with disgust. "On top of it, he speaks French." He stripped off his gloves and threw them on the dock. "General. Permission to stand down until a briefing whenever you decide to schedule it."

"Okay," General Fury said. "Where are you headed?"

"I have a date. If Washington can screw around while we get infiltrated by aliens... " Steve let the thought trail off. "You always know where to find me."

"A date," Tony said as Steve walked away. "He's learning." And later that night, after steaks at Peter Luger's— which made Janet laugh about how old-fashioned he was, but somehow she was the only one of the team who could make that joke without it making him angry or maudlin—Steve took a piece of paper out of his pocket. He was walking down Broadway in Brooklyn, under the elevated BMT tracks. No, not the BMT anymore, now everyone just called it the JMZ line. There was no more BMT, no more IRT, everything was just the MTA. Janet was on a cab back over the Williamsburg Bridge. He found a pay phone on Havemeyer and made a call. On the way back to his apartment, he dropped the paper down a storm drain.

11

Nick had maybe five minutes' notice that Tony Stark was about to appear in his office and was, in the words of the desk sergeant, "loaded for bear." Fury put away a report he'd been about to sign off on and started to straighten his desk, a pre-meeting reflex he had ingrained in himself when he'd made the transition from commando to command. It was useful in that it cleared the mind as well as the desk. Two minutes after he'd been served notice of Stark's approach, there was a knock at the door. "Come on in," Fury said, and in walked not Tony but Steve Rogers.

"Don't tell me," Fury said.

Rogers looked like hell, at least for him. Physically he wasn't any different, but there was a look in his eye that Fury didn't like at all. He remembered thinking, the day before yesterday after Tony had said He's learning, that he didn't want Captain America to learn. He wanted Captain America to act when he was told to act.

Now it looked like Steve had both learned and acted, and hadn't done either one the way he was supposed to. "What else was I supposed to do?" Steve asked.

"I said don't tell me," Fury said, "and I meant it."

The one thing Fury had left on his desktop was a copy of the business section of that day's New York Times, the front page of which featured a story about a breakthrough Chitauri screening technology. Accompanying the article was an illustration of Tony's screener, run through Photoshop just enough to avoid being identical. A single line midway through the piece noted the breakthrough had been "partially derived from a canceled defense project," which Nick read as a wink from someone in Washington who had authorized the leak. Limiting himself to people who had attended the meeting where Tony's project was discussed, Nick had done some initial handicapping of likely sources. His early favorite for the leak was Garza, although it might have been any of them. Even Alto-belli or Bright, who had made such a big deal out of the security risks. The way Washington worked, that might have been nothing but a charade to polish up their collective deniability.

Nick quashed an impulse to find out whether either Altobelli or Bright held directorships or stock in Stark Industries or in the company that had miraculously invented a tech that did exactly what Tony's would have. What bothered Nick more than identifying the source of the leak from Washington was that the leaker had used Steve Rogers to pipeline the project specs to this, who was it... SKR TechEnt. Ten minutes on Google had taught Nick that SKR was a development clearinghouse, basically four walls and a roof where control-freak venture capitalists funneled projects they wanted to keep an eye on. But Nick had been around the block long enough to figure out that more was going on there than met the eye. The whole setup screamed shell company. Who had decided an outfit like SKR could possibly be the best company for the job?

"Tony's going to be here any minute," Fury said. "Keep your mouth shut until I tell you to open it. That's an order."

Steve didn't like it, but he was a soldier. "Yes, sir, General," he said. As if on cue, Tony Stark barged in without knocking. "Nick, goddammit," he began, then caught himself up short when he saw Steve standing off to the side of Nick's desk. "Ah," he said. "This goes higher than I'd thought."

"How do you mean that?" Nick asked.

"Him," Tony said, pointing at Steve. "If you were just going to do this yourself, you wouldn't need to wave the Human Flag over there."

"Permission to speak, General," Steve said.

Fury didn't take his eyes off Tony. "Granted."

"I did it, Tony," Steve said. "General Fury didn't know."

"He—" Tony took this in for a long moment. "Well. What a coincidence. And am I to assume that when you were picking up little bits of fricasseed Chitauri, and you said to General Fury something about how we could have done something, it had nothing to do with today's newspaper article?"

"Saw this, did you?" Fury said. He picked up the paper. "Figured you might have. I was as surprised as you until Captain Rogers here showed up and let me in on what happened." Fury didn't look at Steve as he said this. They could get their stories straight later. Right now the important thing was keeping Tony on board, and if Tony could blame Steve for the whole thing, he might just be able to get over it and remain a member of the team. Apart from the fact that Steve had done it, so Nick had told the truth, mostly. Steve hadn't let him in on what happened yet, but he was damn sure going to the minute Tony left.

"I hope, at least, that some kind of insubordination or espionage charge is going to keep me from losing sleep over all the money this just cost me," Tony said. He shoved his hands in his pockets. "I wasn't that pissed about this when it was just me not making as much money as I might have. This is different. Now someone else is making money that should have been mine. And the PR, Jesus. This is killing me."

"No, the tumor's killing you," Steve said. "Also I'm hoping it's the tumor making you complain about money when we've got a new Chitauri conspiracy on our hands, because if it isn't, then you're pretty much the shallowest son of a bitch I ever laid eyes on."

Tony turned to Fury. "So my medical history is public now, Nick? This is how they tell you to build team unity?"

"What I came to say is this," Steve said. Fury held up a hand to stop him, but Steve pointedly didn't look at him. "I was going to say it to General Fury, but since you're here, Tony, I'll say it to both of you. The people need this. And I'm going to make sure they get what they need."

"Soldier, I don't have to tell you that's not your job."

"Maybe not," Steve said. "But I'll do the jobs that need doing, whether they're supposed to be mine or not."

In the silence that followed, Fury thought: so this is how it begins.

Eventually someone had to say something, and as might have been expected, it was Tony. "There's going to be a review of Stark Industries' defense contracting policies," he said. "Even with all the skimming and no-bid lard, I can make more money doing other things. Headaches like this are the last thing I need."

"Your financial decisions aren't really what we're talking about here," Fury said.

"Well, I don't appear to have much to say about national security or the typical courtesy that one might hope would be extended when one's proprietary tech is going to be stolen and farmed out to a glorified machine shop," Tony said. "So it looks like my finances are the only thing I can talk about. General, I don't suppose you have a bottle in your desk."

As a matter of fact, Fury did, but he wasn't about to break out the bourbon at ten in the morning. Not even for Tony Stark. "Afraid not," he said.

"And I don't guess that Captain America here is about to go up on espionage charges?"

"I don't see how that's in the national interest," Fury said.

"Ah. National interest. There was a time when intellectual property was part of national interest. I guess that isn't the case now."

"Oh, for Pete's sake," Steve said. "Are you really going to get self-righteous about this?"

"No, Steve, I'm going to stay angry You might be able to bamboozle the general here with your line about the people, and dirty jobs, and whatever else, but I'm going to tell you what that is. You've always been a latent fascist wrapped in a flag that we all happen to love, and we've cut you too much slack for it. Not anymore."

Steve took a step toward Tony. "Knock it off," he said.

"Go to hell," Tony said. "You want to take a swing at me, go right ahead. Who are you serving?

Whoever fed you SKR TechEnt, why do you think they did it? Do you think they care about the people?

"Who are 'the people,' anyway?"

"They're the ones I rode a Nazi rocket for," Steve said, moving even closer to Tony. "They're the ones I got shot up with experimental chemicals for. They're the ones I pledged my life to, and if you're about to say that they don't know who I am and don't care what I've done, I'm here to tell you that doesn't matter. I believe in them. You don't believe in a damn thing except your bank balance."

"The people, huh?" Tony said. "Shouldn't you say der Volk?

Faster than Fury could see, Steve leveled Tony with a pile-driver right hand. Tony went over backward, banged his head against the wall, and sprawled next to the ficus tree Fury had brought with him from the last SHIELD headquarters. Then something happened that Fury never would have figured: Tony shook his head and got to his feet. Blood streamed from a cut under his left eye, and he couldn't quite focus his eyes, but he got up. Fury's opinion of Tony Stark changed in that moment. Before then, he'd always thought that Tony without his suit was just an unusually smart rich guy... but anyone who could take a shot from Captain America and get to his feet was more than your ordinary CEO.

"Don't ever say that about me again," Steve said. He was breathing hard, from anger rather than exertion.

"Ever."

"You wouldn't be so pissed about it if you didn't think it was true," Tony said. He leaned against the wall and hawked an enormous gob of blood into a handkerchief Blood had started coming from his nose, a slow trickle compared to the flow on his cheek.

"Next time I'm not holding back," Steve said.

Tony grinned. "Next time I won't stand there and wait for you to do it."

"All right," Fury said. "I've seen enough. What's done is done. Now it's up to us to make sure that the consequences work for us. You two want to kill each other, do it some other time. Right now what we need to do is find out who we get in touch with at SKR."

"Can't beat them, join them," Tony said. "You're a better politician than you give yourself credit for, Nick. And I hope that now you're not so worried that the original leak came from Stark Industries." He pressed the handkerchief to the cut on his face and added, "Now if you'll excuse me, there's a plastic surgeon whose golf game I need to interrupt."

After Tony was gone, Fury said to Steve, "Sit." He indicated a chair.

"Sir," Steve began, but Fury cut him off.

"No. I did not say talk. I said sit."

Steve sat.

"Thank you, Captain. Now. I am going to ask questions and you are going to provide answers."

'Yes, sir."

"The first question is who asked you to leak the screener."

After a pause, Steve said, "Admiral Garza."

Sometimes, Nick thought, the obvious answer is the correct answer. "And I assume that Admiral Garza suggested SKR?"

"Yes, sir," Steve said again.

Fury caught himself pacing the room. Pacing annoyed him, in himself more than in others. He went back around behind his desk and sat. "I'm going to repeat one of Tony's questions to you. Why do you think Admiral Garza suggested SKR?"

Steve shifted in the chair. "I didn't give it that much thought, General. Something needed to be done, and Admiral Garza found a way. That's as far as I took it."

"Did Admiral Garza suggest to you that SKR was ready to take the screener into production?"

"No, sir. He suggested them, and I made the call."

Something about the newspaper article was bothering Fury, but he couldn't figure out what it was. "See, Cap, my problem here is that I'm not necessarily opposed to this, but at the same time I can't have SHIELD team members doing end runs around Congress whenever they don't like the political winds."

"This isn't just any circumstance, sir."

"Agreed, Captain. The point still holds. I took a lot of heat about Tony Stark at the meeting in Washington, because people there think he's a loose cannon. Now I get home, and I have an actual loose cannon to deal with, who also happens to be the public face of SHIELD. This is one more headache than I need."

Steve stood. Fury eyed him but didn't comment on the small insubordination. Mostly he'd put the conversation on a chain-of-command footing because he wanted to calm Steve down. Now it didn't seem necessary. "General, I stand by what I said to you earlier and to Tony. This needed to be done. I did it. I'll take whatever heat is coming my way. Admiral Garza showed me the corpse of a Chitauri caught on the grounds of Andrews. Then we have the bombing downstairs. I'm not the most politically savvy guy in the world, but even I can tell something's coming. Do you want to look back and know that you didn't do everything you could?"

Now Fury stood to look Steve eye to eye. "I don't know, Cap. Do you want to be the guy who stands up later and says he had to destroy the village in order to save it?"

"I don't get the reference," Steve said.

"You don't need to. Do you want to be the guy who uses the flag as an excuse to burn the flag? And what if Garza's got some other plan? You know as well as I do that you can't trust a single person in Washington. You should have brought this to me."

For the first time since he'd come into the room, Steve's gaze wavered. "Admiral Garza suggested I not do that, sir."

"Which is exactly why you should have done it, Captain Rogers. You're dismissed." Hell of a way to start the day, Fury thought after Steve had gone. What do we do now? He sat considering for a few minutes, idly spinning the newspaper around on his desk; then he picked up the phone and started making calls.

12

For Hank Pym, regret was something to be suffocated by work. Also booze, but he was doing his best to keep the two separate. This morning he'd woken up with his eyeballs throbbing and a railroad spike in his head, but here he was at the lab at seven a.m., coffee slowly working its way through his system and his tech, Greg, already in place at a microscope.

"Do you ever sleep?" Hank grumbled. First things first; he went to the lab coffee pot and got it going. Then he glanced at the morning's news feed. "Hey, would you look at this," he said.

"What's that?" Greg said, eye still glued to the microscope. "Oh, and as far as sleep, the answer is no. Not when there are eggs to count. You tell me to get fertility data on Myrmecia pilosula, that's what I'm doing, boss."

Lab techs, Hank thought. Either they're humorless drones or merry pranksters. Why couldn't any of them be normal? Not that he was complaining. Greg was like Super Lab Tech. He worked hard, made few mistakes, and didn't ask too many questions about things like how Hank had invented a wireless method of controlling ants. In a way, Hank felt badly about keeping Greg so completely in the dark. It would have been nice, not to mention more efficient, if Greg understood a little more about the goals of Hank's various projects. So, Greg, Hank imagined saying. There's these aliens, and they can take the appearance of human beings, and I think I can figure out a way to get ants to detect them so we can stop them from taking over the world. You on board?

Ay yi yi, Hank thought. Time for some normal conversation.

He pushed back his chair. "You see the news today? All of a sudden everyone's in love with screening technology again. SKR TechEnt. Hmm. Wonder if I should send them a proposal."

"Might not be a bad idea," Greg said. "But I thought they were a consortium kind of thing. A bunch of venture types creating a collective in-house lab or something."

"Whatever," Hank said. "There must be someone there who can read a proposal." He sat back and thought about it.

It occurred to him to wonder if anyone at SHIELD was involved. Wouldn't have been the first time that Fury and the gang had put the media to work for them... although that thought led down a memory path that Hank didn't want to travel again. He couldn't help it, though. He dreamed, when he wasn't too drunk to remember his dreams, of two things: Janet and the Hulk.

The Janet dreams were usually short, overwhelming spikes of sensation. He could feel the headset, and through it came the mechanical buzz of predatory satisfaction felt by the tetramorium ants he'd turned loose on her. In the dream, that feedback always crested as the darkest of pleasures, which was the curdled pleasure of revenge-—and he woke up with a pain in his chest and guilt like a second skin. Hank knew he couldn't undo what he had done, but he had resolved to atone for it. He would make them understand that sins could be expiated, failures forgiven, if he had to spend the rest of his life in the lab to do it.

When he dreamed of the Hulk, too, it was typically the same moment over and over again: the tearing at the corners of his mouth as that homicidal freak tried to rip off his jaw. Never in his life had Hank felt so vulnerable, and never had he expected his size advantage to be so completely and easily overcome. He hated himself when he woke from that dream, even more than after the Janet dreams, because the Hulk had made him look weak. Flat on his back, mouth wide open, unable to get loose... he couldn't think about it. Even Steve Rogers hadn't shamed him that way.

"Huh," Greg said, startling Hank out of his self-loathing. He looked up and saw that Greg was reading about the screening tech over his shoulder. "Lot of R&D goes into something like that," Greg went on.

"Wonder who's keeping his name off it."

"Me, too," Hank said. The fact that Greg's thoughts were moving along the same lines as his made him feel a little less paranoid. Maybe he could call Tony again, although he couldn't go to that well very often. The next time he'd have to have something concrete. Tony Stark was the only real human being in the whole damn Triskelion; he'd done Hank a huge favor giving him the Chitauri sample, and Hank would pay him back for it. Starting today, with any luck.

"If it was me, I'd just train dogs," Greg said. "Nothing beats Fido when it comes to sniffing."

"Except what we've got here," Hank said. "These little guys put dogs to shame. Nothing against dogs, but they work one at a time. What I've got here is the equivalent of a million dogs who can communicate almost instantly by chemical signals, and don't need to be housebroken." Greg laughed and went back to his microscope. "There's your proposal, Hank. Write it up and send it out."

Hank got up and started running the checklist on the new headset he'd designed to test a little screening process of his own. It all seemed to be in order, so he went to the farm closet, where he kept something like fifty million ants of twenty-seven species that he'd found best suited to the kind of work he wanted them to do. Once he'd had them move boxes and make coffee; now he was going to put his little myrmidons to work protecting the people who crushed them on sidewalks and fried them with magnifying glasses. Good thing they weren't sentient enough to bear a grudge or note the irony, he thought.

"Paraponera clavata, come on down," he said, rolling one of die farm boxes out of die closet. He didn't have too many of these, maybe ten thousand, but it was plenty for a test run. The inside of P. clavata's farm mimicked a system of tree roots, reflecting their preferred habitat on the South American Atlantic coast. They were big, about an inch long, and mean as hell.

"What have you got there?" Greg said, coming over from his workstation.

"Bullet ants. Most toxic insect in the world except for my soon-to-be-ex wife." Greg chuckled. "Scientific objectivity."

Hank grinned along with Greg, but he hated himself for making the joke. "You know why they're called bullet ants? People who are lucky enough to have been both shot by a bullet and stung by one of these ants say that the experiences hurt about the same. Fierce little bastards, aren't they?"

"Keep 'em in the box. Jesus," Greg said.

Back at his terminal, Hank ran through the broadcast sequence he'd written. With any luck, it would provoke P. clavata to swarm and bite the Chitauri tissue sample he'd hidden in one of the lab wastebaskets. Then Hank would switch off that signal, send them back to the farm, and call Nick Fury with the test results. Presto! New reputation, big welcome back into the great stew of mutual exploitation that was SHIELD. If Fury could keep using Banner as a researcher after what happened in Manhattan, there was no reason for him not to take Hank back.

Also, maybe Janet would start returning his calls.

He finished the pretest check and went back to the farm. "Okay, fellas," he said. "Showtime." Hank leaned a four-foot two-by-four against the edge of the farm's top, and then slid back part of the lid.

"Putting them through their paces?" Greg asked from his workstation.

"Yeah. If any of them look like they're coming after you, go ahead and step on them. There's plenty." Greg looked nervous. "Are you saying they might come after me?" Only if you're a shape-shifting alien, Hank thought. "No," he said. "They have a very specific assignment. I want them to find something in the trash. So stay clear of your trash can and you shouldn't have any problem." Greg didn't look any happier, so Hank decided to cut him a break. "Look, if you want to leave until this is over, go ahead."

"No, I guess I'm okay. It's just that what you said about their stings, man, that shook me a little."

"Don't blame you," Hank said with a smile. "But like I said, they're looking for something else. If I've got this tuned right, none of them will even give you a second thought." Insofar as ants could be said to think, he added to himself.

The way it was supposed to work, he rehearsed to himself as he slid a thin stick down into the farm, was simple. The signal went out saying that the ants should detect and go after Chitauri tissue; the ants sent out scouts; they found the tissue; they swarmed the tissue; he cut the signal and sent them home. Hank's previous experiments in this vein had him predicting that the whole thing would be over in three minutes or so. He had the cut-and-return-home commands polished perfectly, to the point where the last couple of times he'd run them he hadn't found a single straggler. The search command was a little tougher to nail down absolutely, since ants were sensitive enough to find minuscule traces of whatever they were assigned to look for, but in this case Plank had been careful enough with the Chitauri tissue sample that he didn't believe there was any contamination. So, unless there was some odd chemical in the air that to an ant would mimic the characteristics of Chitauri tissue, everything was good to go. The more adventurous members of the P. clavata colony were already exploring the stick when Hank got back to his terminal, put on the headset, and sent the search command. As soon as he did, the colony erupted like a bomb had gone off. Ants swarmed over the tree roots and boiled around the base of the stick that led out of the farm. "Everybody out of the pool," Hank said. "That's right." From behind him he heard Greg say, "Wow. What are they looking for again?"

"Lunch," Hank said. "It's the best way to get them to do anything."

"Me, too," Greg said. Hank was preoccupied with the computer, watching the microtransmitters he'd attached to some of the bullet ants to see if they would fan out in a mathematically expressible way. Some species were pretty random, but others—usually the more aggressive ones—operated almost as if they had the equations worked out ahead of time. The bullet ants, he decided after watching them move for less than a minute, were about as decisive a species as he'd ever seen. They came out of the farm, went down the two-by-four, and spent only a few seconds sniffing around before making a beeline... wait. Two beelines.

Hank turned around, tapping on the headset as if it were a balky old television. It was a dumb reflex, but he'd gotten into the habit back when he was still using wires. A thin stream of the ants were marching in the direction of the trash can, which was good; but a much heavier stream were headed toward the workstations, which was not good. Greg's eyes got wider as the ants got closer. "Hey, Hank?" he said.

"Sit tight," Hank said. "There must be some contamination from their target sample over there somewhere."

He turned back to the monitor and fired off a new command refining the search to prioritize the most intense source of Chitauri tissue particles. "Okay," he said, swiveling around in his chair again. Now both streams of ants were headed for Greg.

"No, Hank, not okay. Jeez, look at this. They're all over me... ow!" Greg leaped out of his chair and started slapping at the ants crawling up his legs. "Ow, ahh, Jesus!" Hank turned to stab a cutoff command into the keyboard—for this experiment, he hadn't got all of it programmed into the headset's subvocalizer—and then he froze under the weight of a horrifying realization. Oh, no, he thought, and spun around again.

The ants were all over Greg now, stinging him by the dozen. His yelps of pain had progressed to full-throated screaming, and then into a sound that no human being could make. As Flank locked eyes with him, he saw that Greg's face was starting to contort. The muscles jumped, sank, began to reform themselves as Greg's skin began to blister and peel. One of his eyes burst and from the socket glittered a reptilian vertical pupil.

"Did you think we would not find you?" the Chitauri said, and sprang. 13

Status Report

Prospects for the success of the human ordering project are immensely improved. The integration of operational goals with the mechanisms of the human form of government known as representative democracy presented a number of challenges due to that government's differences from the totalitarian institutions previously subverted and redeployed. The primary difference lies in the timetable, and the delay between initiation of programs and fruition as expressed in direct action. Lessons in this area have been learned at nontrivial cost in assets and time.

Current forecasts call for completion of asset placement in .084873 solar year. Enaction of final phase of human ordering project to commence immediately after completion of asset placement in <United States>, and to progress beyond <United States> according to existing post-assimilation plans. Pre-<Arizona> project components including chemical and hormonal treatments of water supplies are still envisioned as part of the current project; however, differences in asset structure call for variations from former versions of the project. In addition, human awareness of the ordering project necessitates increased sophistication in assimilation and subversion. Previous iterations of the project have yielded important knowledge regarding human political institutions and cultural trends. This knowledge is being exploited as events and assets allow.

The issue of human surveillance and detection technology has recently become more prominent. Efforts are under way to retard the progress of this technology, but outcomes are unclear. In this instance, the lack of a truly authoritative central government in the <United States> complicates efforts to control the dissemination of new technologies. Market imperatives are such that humans are often willing to ignore the dictates of their elected officials if their crude risk-benefit analysis indicates such action to be worthwhile in financial terms. Possibly this process is underway with the <Stark> technology; intelligence efforts continue.

Alert

Resources in <Wilmette, lllinois>, indicate that secrecy has been inadvertently breached. Loss of assimilated assets is probable. All assets in the area undertake extreme precaution. Assume heavy

<SHIELD> presence for immediate future. All high-risk operations postponed until further notice. Exception

Assets in place are instructed to increase initiative in scouting and planning potential operations involving individual <SHIELD> members.

Appendix

Priority human assets assimilated in <New York, New York>.

Priority human assets assimilated in <Christchurch, NewZealand>.

14

Hank got his hands up, but the Chitauri's impact knocked him back into his workstation. He grappled with it as it got one hand around his throat. It was still changing, its head flattening and growing a snout and its hands morphing into claws whose talons dug into the flesh of his shoulder and throat. Its shoes split open and fell away from long, clawed feet. The two of them wrestled against the table until one of its legs gave way and they hit the floor in an avalanche of papers, takeout cartons, and ballpoint pens. The computer slid along the inclined tabletop and banged Hank's head on its way to crashing against the chair. Hank threw a punch that tore some of Greg's skin away from the Chitauri's face; in return, the Chitauri squeezed Hank's throat until he could feel his larynx pressing into his airway. Trying to fight it off, Hank found that it was much stronger than he was; he couldn't loosen its grip. Its tongue flicked out and stung the flesh of his cheek.

"Very interesting, what you have done with these ants," the Chitauri said. "Their stings are quite painful." Hank tried to answer, but even with both hands locked around its wrist, he couldn't get out of its chokehold. The Chitauri plucked a bullet ant from behind its ear and pressed it into the back of one of Hank's hands. The pain that exploded up his arm when it stung was like nothing he'd ever felt before, and he gargled a scream through his constricted windpipe. All of the strength went out of his arm.

'Yes. Quite painful. We are very interested to explore your knowledge and abilities, Dr. Pym," the Chitauri said, showing its fangs. Its voice had transformed from Greg's cheery baritone to a gravelly chirp. "Your assimilation will be experiment as much as repast." It flicked its tongue across Hank's face again and made a wordless sound of hunger, as its free hand searched for and found a bullet ant stinging its forehead.

All at once, before he could make a conscious decision, Hank grew. And he grew fast; the headset cracked into pieces that bounced off his shoulders as he expanded, feeling his limbs lengthen and hearing the crackle in his ears that came as his anvil bones grew to the size of well, anvils. The Chitauri's grip became a tearing pinch, and the alien fell free, taking with it a divot of skin from Hank's neck. Hank grabbed the Chitauri before it could hit the floor—then his head and shoulders crashed into the lab ceiling, starting a cascade of acoustic tiles and light covers, along with an explosion of dust. With a growl, Hank heaved against the ceiling and grew through it, feeling the steel roof beams bend and pop loose from their welds as the roof collapsed with a rumble. Standing thigh-deep in the sudden wreckage of his lab, his feet and legs on fire with the stings of P. clavata loosed from the headset's influence, Hank saw and heard people pointing and shouting in the parking lot his lab shared with a call center and two nondescript offices. As the debris from the lab's collapse settled, he could hear more normal tones of voice as well.

"Holy smokes, it's that giant guy," someone said from the smoker's refuge outside the call center, maybe a hundred yards from where Hank stood.

"What, the Hulk? I thought they got him."

"No, idiot. The Hulk is green. This guy look green to you?"

"Nope. Just big and naked."

They weren't even scared of him. He was fifty feet tall and had just destroyed a building with the back of his head, and they weren't even scared of him. Hank lost his temper. Raising the Chitauri up to eye level, he said, "Did you think I wouldn't have a way out of your kung-fu grip, asshole?"

"The ants, I'm afraid," the Chitauri said. Hank had it gripped around the torso and one arm. Its other arm, damaged in its ascent through the lab's roof, dangled over Hank's thumb. "Pain causes confusion, which compromises the ability to think."

"You're goddamn right about that," Hank said, and crushed the Chitauri in his hand. Gasps came from the parking lot. "He just killed that guy!" someone shouted, and then people were running. Hank looked after them, mouth open, his fury beginning to recede. No, he wanted to say. Not a guy. You don't understand.

But they'd seen the gout of blood that came from its mouth and trickled between Hank's fingers, and that was all they were going to understand. Screwed up again, Hank thought. Even when I do the right thing, it doesn't work. He could already hear Fury saying that he should have kept the Chitauri alive so they could interrogate it. Like the rest of them, Fury wouldn't understand.

Hank looked around at the sound of sirens. Think, he told himself Worry about Fury later. The thing to do right then was get out of there.

He took a deep breath and laid the mangled Chitauri down between his feet. Then, exhaling so his lungs wouldn't rupture, he slowly let himself back down to normal size, accompanied by a spattering on the floor as his unclenched hand shrank away from the blood that coated it. Two things to do, he thought. Hide the body, find the sample in the trash can. Then I'm out of here. Wait. Three. Better get dressed, too.

Two hours later, he called Tony's private number. It rang for nearly ninety seconds before Tony finally picked it up. "Hank," Tony said.

"You watching the news, Tony?" Hank asked.

He was in the basement of the house he'd grown up in. His old bedroom had been redone as a TV

hideaway for his father, and Tony was there now, watching helicopter footage of his destroyed lab with a reporter on voiceover speculating about terrorism.

"As a matter of fact," Tony said, "I was just having lunch with Nick. The topic of your lab accident had come up, but we're definitely curious about what you might add to our discussion."

"I'm going to tell you again, Tony. There were survivors."

"Of course there were. We know that."

"You... then why did you cut me off last time? Is Nick there?"

"Why don't we put this conversation on the speakerphone?" There was a pop, and then Tony's voice came over the line again. "How's that?"

"Fine," Hank said. "Nick? You there?"

"I'm here, Doctor Pym." Fury sounded farther away, but Hank didn't know how the room where they were was laid out. It frustrated him not to be able to get a mental picture of the arrangement.

"There were survivors, Nick."

"I believe Tony just told you that we knew that."

"Yeah;" Hank said. "He did, but he still hasn't explained to me why he cut me off when I told him that before."

Tony started to say something, but Fury got there first. "I'll take this one, Tony. Doctor Pym, Tony cut you off because you are no longer a member of this team. That was true when you talked to Tony a couple of days ago, and it's true now. I asked him to take your call today so we could get that clear." On TV, a reporter was interviewing one of the people Hank remembered from the parking lot. She was saying that the giant guy had killed someone. The interview cut to a police lieutenant saying that no bodies had been recovered from the site, and from there the report went to a fire department team tearing into the wreckage of the lab. The reporter noted that several members of the police and fire departments had been bitten by extremely venomous ants, which led to a short interview with a Northwestern University political science professor on whether poisonous insects might be used in a terrorist attack. Hank knew he didn't have much time. He needed SHIELD to swoop down and trump the local investigation with black-ops credentials. "Remember what they said to Janet about being the universe's immune system, Nick?"

Fury said, "How exactly do you know about that, Doctor Pym?"

Are you going to step in here, Tony? Hank wondered. How's Nick going to feel about you feeding me tissue samples? "It's important for me to keep up on certain things," Hank said. "For research purposes."

"You will immediately cut out whatever the hell it is you're doing that involves access to classified discussions among the team, Doctor Pym. Do not cross me on this."

"Nick, I'm watching TV right now. The fire department is snooping through my lab, and the police are there too because someone told them they saw me kill somebody. There's a dead Chitauri in the lab freezer, Nick. When they find it, what's going to happen to me? It's long past time when you could feed me any bullshit. Is SKR an accident, and now I've got a spy in my lab? You tell me what the hell is going on!"

"What's going on is that you were working in an area you shouldn't have been working in, and now you've got a problem," Fury said coldly.

"And I have to say you're sounding a little bit paranoid, Hank," Tony added.

"Oh, am I? Okay, I'll put it to you this way. If the police show up at my door with an arrest warrant, I'm going to sing like a canary, and SHIELD can go to hell. If, on the other hand, SHIELD wants to step in and get the cops out of my lab, I might be able to tell you something interesting about the results of the last experiment I got done before a goddamn Chitauri spy made me wreck my lab. If that's paranoid, then I plead guilty."

Silence on the other end of the line.

"You've got a little time to think about it," Hank said. "Call me back." He hung up and watched the report loop back to aerial footage of his lab. The ants worked, he thought. And they'd work a hell of a lot better than whatever sensor SKR TechEnt had come up with. Hank watched the television and worked himself up into a cold fury over how Tony Stark was treating him. He resolved that Tony wouldn't get away with it forever. You couldn't just treat someone like that, especially not Hank Pym. No, sir. When Nick decided to cover his ass and come in to get the Chitauri out of the lab, Hank would have a chance to talk to him without Tony around, and General Nicholas Fury was going to get an earful. That was for sure.

15

The call from General Fury came while Steve was in the middle of a cheeseburger and a TCM showing of The Thin Man. "Need you at the Triskelion pronto, Cap," Fury said. So Steve got there pronto, and found his way to a helipad where General Fury was waiting for him with Tony Stark and, of all people, Thor.

"What's he doing here?" Steve said, pointing at the self-professed god of thunder.

"You'll find out when we get there," General Fury said.

"Get where?"

"Illinois," Tony said with a wink. "Try not to start any fights this time, okay?" Two hours later they were standing inside a police cordon that extended in a hundred-yard radius from a partially collapsed single-story building in a business park in Wilmette, Illinois. Hazmat-suited SHIELD

personnel picked through the wreckage, while under the blades of the turbocopter that had brought the SHIELD team, General Fury was making an emphatic point to a local police detective. "I've got reports of a murder taking place here, General," the detective said. "You can say national security this and terrorism that, but what am I supposed to tell people? We're not investigating a murder?"

"You will tell them to talk to me," General Fury said. "If we determine that a murder has been committed, that part of the investigation goes back to you once we get it untangled from some other things that, I promise you, you don't want to know anything about."

Steve could tell from the detective's face that he did in fact want very much to know, but that he knew he never would. "I have your word on this?" he said eventually. "This isn't Chicago. If somebody was killed in there, we've got to know who it is."

Fury handed him a card. "You call me at this number tomorrow morning. By then I'll know what I can tell you and what I can't. Fair enough?"

The detective took the card, but he didn't like the deal. "As fair as I'm going to get, is what I'm hearing."

'You're hearing right, Detective. Now I'm going to ask you a favor."

"Oh, well, we're getting along so well already. Sure. Whatever I can do."

"I know you're going to go right home and find out who was actually the tenant of this building," General Fury said. "So I'm going to save you that trouble. His name is Doctor Henry Pym. I am going to askyou, as a professional courtesy, to not contact Doctor Pym until you hear from me. Can we agree on that?"

"Is he the giant guy?" the detective asked.

"Detective," General Fury said. "You have all kinds of witness reports saying all kinds of different things, I'm sure. If you let me get to what I need to do here, I can save you a lot of work putting them all together."

A silence hung between them, broken after thirty seconds or so when the detective lit a cigarette and said, "Okay. Fine. I'm calling you at eight a.m., General. Hope you keep early hours."

"Eight a.m.," Fury said, rolling his eyes. "I'll be lucky if I get to sleep by then."

"Boo hoo," the detective said, and walked away trailing cigarette smoke. Fury walked back over to where Steve was waiting with Tony and Thor. "Nick," Tony said. "I'm supposed to be at an art opening with Scarlett Johansson. Please explain to me why this is more important."

Steve kept his mouth shut, but he was just about fed up with Tony's posturing. General Fury had briefed them during the flight, as a result of which Steve knew that Tony had taken the call from Hank Pym that had brought them all here. What Steve couldn't figure out was why Thor was along. He couldn't imagine that General Fury had decided to trust an obviously crazy pinko with something as serious as the details of a new Chitauri incursion. Regardless of what Thor had done with the Chitauri bomb in Arizona, Steve didn't for a minute believe in a thunder god. Either the bomb hadn't done what the Chitauri said it would, or the tech in Thor's hammer had some secret function that he hadn't told any of them about. Whichever it was, Thor was a loose cannon and a security risk. If it was up to Steve, Thor wouldn't have been let within a mile of the Triskelion.

But that wasn't his call. It was General Fury's.

That thought led Steve in an uncomfortable direction, recalling the Chitauri at Andrews and the phone call he'd made after dinner at Peter Luger's. From any angle, Steve knew, he was going off the reservation. Good soldiers didn't do that.

Or did they? It had been a long time since he'd been just a soldier. When he'd ridden a Nazi rocket into the troposphere, he'd earned the right to think for himself. General Fury still wanted him to be the super-soldier chess piece, moved here and there without question, but General Fury—there Steve was going off the reservation again—too often had to make decisions polluted by political considerations. Maybe it was up to the soldiers to simply do what was right.

General Fury didn't answer Tony in any case. He turned to an approaching member of the response team and said, "What have you got?"

Pulling off her suit's hood, the tech said, "Well, he was right about the Chitauri in the freezer. We're pulling the whole appliance as soon as we get it sealed. Looks like Pym squished it pretty good, but you can never tell. I've got guys in there sterilizing the blood on the floors. Also he mentioned a test sample, right? That we haven't found."

Looking away from her to Tony, General Fury said, "You have any idea about that?" Aha, Steve thought. That's why he's here.

"None," Tony said. "Is that what you brought me nine hundred miles to ask? If it is, then I've got a jet warmed up and waiting over at Palwaukee."

"Not until I get an answer. Did you give Chitauri tissue to Mank Pym?"

"Nick, how much do you really want to know about how I spend black-budget money?" General Fury walked over to Tony and stood a little too close to him. "I want to know," he said quietly,

"whether you hired Flank Pym or diverted resources, including Chitauri tissue, to him. That's what I want to know."

"Okay," Tony said. "Yes, I did. He really has done some interesting work. Hard to tell from this," he waved a hand at the wreckage of Pym's lab, "whether any of it worked, but if you want my opinion, SHIELD'S shooting itself in the foot by turning him into a pariah. I mean, my God, the things some of us have done and you cut him loose for spousal abuse?"

"Cut it out," Steve said.

Tony flipped a hand in Steve's direction without looking at him. "Okay, Romeo. I know you and Janet have a thing going now," he said before continuing his spiel to General Fury. "We've all got our hands dirty, Nick. I happen to think Hank Pym is a coward and I wouldn't piss on him if he was on fire; but if he can help us, that's more important." Then he looked over his shoulder at Steve and said, "Of course you'd never do anything that wasn't perfectly aboveboard. That's why all of us regular people who compromise their morals seem so filthy to you."

"I told you the other day," Steve said. "Next time you and I go at it, I'm not holding back."

"Then do it," Tony said.

"Stand down, Captain," General Fury said. "Last thing in the world I need is TV cameras catching the two of you in a fight. Tony, get the hell out of here. Cap, you and Thor meet me back in the copter." He walked away toward the lab, where the techs were clearing some of the rubble to make way for the sealed freezer. Halfway there he stopped, turned around, and called, "Tony. I meant it. Out. Now." Tony winked at Steve and said, " Au revoir, mon ami. Next time let's fight some bad guys, how does that sound?"

Steve didn't answer. He watched Tony walk to the cordon and duck under it. A car pulled up out of nowhere, and the door was open before Tony could reach for the handle. A guy like that, Steve thought, everything done for him, everyone bends over backward for him, and what is he? An amoral boozehound with a brain tumor. That's not the kind of person we need running things around here.

"So that's why Nick brought Tony," Thor said. Steve had forgotten he was there. "What do you think the two of us are doing here?"

Steve shrugged. "I'm following orders. You, who knows?"

"Not me," Thor said. "Although it's crossed my mind that the general thinks the two of us might correct each other's worst tendencies."

"Give me a break," Steve said, and started to walk away.

"Steve," Thor said, and for some reason Steve stopped. He waited for Thor to go on and deliver whatever loony speech he'd cooked up this time.

But Thor surprised him. "Steve, you need to stop thinking all the time that you're different from the rest of us."

Steve turned around. "I'm different from you, that's for sure."

"Fair enough," Thor said. "If that's the distinction that makes you feel better, go with it. But I'm going to ive you some advice. When someone wants something from you, ask yourself why they want it, and who wanted them to ask you."

"Okay, Ann Landers," Steve said.

Thor chuckled. "Funny. Anyway, that's Loki's advice, not mine. He asked me to pass it along."

"Oh, for Pete's sake," Steve said, and walked over to the lab building's doorway. On the way, he spotted a chalk circle with a spatter of Chitauri blood in it. The team hadn't yet gotten around to sterilizing it. We're chasing them, Steve thought. Always a step behind.

He went inside. "Watch out for the ants, sir," a suited tech said. "Some of them bite like hell."

"Thanks," Steve said. The inside of the lab, although partially cleared out, was a complete wreck. He could see from the shape of the bent beams where Hank had gone through the roof, and how on his way through he'd snapped the main support beam, causing most of the rest of the roof to come down. The collapse had crushed most of the ant farms, and the response team was getting ready to fire offa series of insecticide bombs because nobody knew for sure whether Pym had created some kind of mutant ant that might get out and wreck the local ecosystem.

Fury was observing the removal of the freezer. He saw Steve picking his way through the wreckage and said, "What brings you in here, Captain?"

"Well, General," Steve said, and finally let go of th question he'd been asking himself all night. "I've got another version of the same question for you. Why did you bring Thor and me?" General Fury looked surprised. "You serious, Captain? Muscle. We didn't know what was out here. Didn't know whether we might have to take Pym down, for that matter. Turned out we didn't need you, but better safe than sorry." He winked his good eye. "Sun Tzu says that somewhere, right?" The next morning, which made it the third day after he'd made the call from the pay phone on Havemeyer Street, Steve was eating breakfast at his kitchen table when he heard a knock at the door. Probably the kids down the hall selling candy bars again, he thought, fishing in his pockets. He still couldn't believe that anyone could keep a straight face while asking two dollars for a candy bar, but that was the world now... and what the heck, if any of that money really did go to whatever cause they said it did, the rip-off would be worth it.

Opening the door, Steve was all ready to give the kid his two bucks and complain about it, but instead of the kid, he found himself looking at Admiral Esteban Garza. "I—oh," Steve said. "Admiral. I was expecting someone else."

"Captain. May we come in?"

Steve stepped aside and let Garza pass. A second man, who had spook written all over him, followed. Garza stood in the middle of Steve's living room, not speaking or touching anything while the spook took out some kind of sensor apparatus and scanned every surface. It took ten minutes or so, at the end of which he said, "Looks clear, Admiral."

"Okay, Larry. Fire me up a baffler and then Captain Rogers and I will have a talk." Larry pocketed his first apparatus, came up with another one, and put it on the coffee table between Steve's couch and the TV He flipped a little toggle switch on its face, and it began emitting a low hum.

"All set?" Garza asked.

"Yes, sir."

"See you in the car, then." Larry left without another word and Admiral Garza sat on the couch.

"Go ahead and finish your breakfast, Captain," he said.

Steve found that he wasn't hungry anymore. "If it's all the same to you, sir, I'd just as soon talk first," he said. "What's with the spook stuff?"

"I don't really have to tell you that, do I?" Garza said. "You know what we're doing here." I do, Steve wanted to say. And even though I think it's the right thing to do, something about it makes me sick to my stomach.

"Anyway," Admiral Garza said. "What I'm here about is the next step."

"The next step," Steve repeated.

"We've got the screeners in production, Steve. That's an important step. But already there's pushback from Altobelli; he's twisting all kinds of arms on the Hill to try and limit SKR's ability to sell and install the screen-ers. What needs to happen now is a concerted push on our part. We need to tell the American people that this can help protect them, and tell them that they need to get behind us so we can make this argument—their argument—in Congress and over the airwaves." Garza leaned forward and tapped Steve on the shoulder. " You're going to be critical to this effort. Americans feel like they know you, Steve. They admire you. The women have crushes on you and the men want to be like you." Steve's bullshit detector went off. "Admiral," he said. "With all due respect, you're laying it on a little thick."

"This is a pitch, Steve," Admiral Garza said. "You don't have to do a single thing I'm asking you to do. I can't order you around. All I can do is trust that you and I have similar ideas about what this country needs. Can I trust in that idea, Captain Rogers?"

The real question here, Steve thought, was whether Garza could trust Steve to do as he was told. Which was exactly the question he had been chewing over himself the night before. It was decision time. Could he commit to this, not knowing what exactly might come of that commitment later?

On the other hand, could he stop now?

Garza stood. "I can see you need some time to think," he said. "You know how to find me, right?" He started to walk toward the door, but stopped when Steve, too, stood. Admiral Garza turned to face him, and Steve said, "Admiral, I wouldn't have come this far if I didn't think we were doing the right thing."

Garza nodded as if he'd heard what he needed to hear. "Good, Captain. You're going to be needed as we move forward. I might ask you to come to Washington soon. Will you be able to navigate that with your commitments to SHIELD?"

"Yes, sir. I will."

Admiral Garza opened the door. "And we'd like you to meet some people in Los Angeles, too," he said before leaving. 'You won't mind a little fun in the sun while we save the world, right?" Sun Tzu probably said that somewhere, too, Steve thought, as the door swung closed. 16

For Janet Pym, the sudden change in Steve's behavior seemed like a relapse after all of the progress he'd made during the last year adapting to the twentieth century. For a while there, he'd almost seemed like a normal person... not that she could get judgmental about normality given her own, ahem, altered genome. But still, he was coming along, and in the aftermath of what she internally referred to as the Ant Incident, she'd needed someone. Needed him: strong, forthright, honest, confident. Even though she'd been cruel to him at first, he'd hung on, and now she was glad that she'd rewarded his persistence. She liked spending time with him, feeling his combination of naivete and chivalry wash over her and cleanse her of the trauma she'd suffered at Hank's hands. Or (more accurately and flippantly) the mandibles of Hank's minions.

Since the night they'd had dinner at Peter Luger's, though, he'd been different. Since a short time before then, really. Something had happened to him, and he'd been acting distant, even bitter. Some bitterness wasn't particularly strange for someone who had been through the upheavals Steve had, but she'd watched him get over it in the aftermath of the confrontation with the Chitauri; for a while after Arizona, he'd been positively basking in the adulation of twenty-first-century America, while still somehow retaining the boy-next-door quality that had attracted her to him in the first place. At Luger's, he hadn't been like that at all. Something had been on his mind, distracting him in the middle of sentences. He hadn't even commented on her dress, which she'd chosen specifically to provoke him because he was still such a fuddy-duddy about women's clothing. After dinner, he'd disappeared, saying he had something important to do, and she hadn't seen him since.

Janet sat back on her couch, TV on at low volume, glass of wine in her right hand and the fingers of her left drumming on her knee. It was almost time for the phone to ring. Every night at about eleven, Hank called her from wherever he was in Illinois. Every night she let the phone ring. He only called once each night, but he never gave her a night off either, and he left the same message, practically verbatim, each night. Janet. Forgive me. I'm not asking you to forget, but please, I love you. Forgive me. For the last week or so, Janet had begun to consider either taking out a restraining order or just picking up the phone. The first option would be great if successful, but might also provoke him into another rage. She shivered a little at the thought. The second might work out better in the long term, but talking to him... The phone rang.

Janet let it ring, and waited for the message. The machine clicked, and Hank said, "Janet. We need to talk. It involves... let's just say it involves Kleiser, and I need your help." Dead air stretched out. "Janet," Hank said again.

She picked up the phone, but did not speak.

For a third time, Hank said her name. "What?" she asked softly.

'You picked up the phone," he said, amazed.

"What do you want, Hank?"

"I—there isn't time to tell you everything," he said. "God, Janet. So good to hear your voice." No, she thought. We are not going down that conversational road. "Hank. What do you want? Why did you mention Kleiser?"

"Because two days ago a Chitauri tried to kill me in my lab." Hank paused. "Is this line secure?"

"Hell of a time to ask that question," Janet observed.

"You're right, never mind. The 'terrorist attack' in Illinois? Heard about it?"

"I read the papers, Hank."

"Then you'll notice that they didn't mention me. Or the Chitauri. They're back, Janet. There were survivors after Arizona, and now they're back. Fury knows about it. He was at my lab right after it happened doing the old scrub-and-shrug. Thor was there, too, God knows why. And your boyfriend. Uh, Steve."

Janet didn't know what to say. There was too much to respond to. Typical Hank. Throw out a jumble of conversation containing three or four things that needed to be addressed separately, and then pick the one you didn't address to get pissed about. "Are you okay?" Janet asked.

"Yeah," he said, and added, with real feeling, "I'm glad you asked."

"What happened to the Chitauri?"

"I killed it. Fury's probably got it in a tank by now. Janet, they must have told you something. Nobody will talk to me. "What's going on?"

She sat back on the couch. "Come on, Hank. You know I can't—"

"Fine," he said. "Maybe next time they'll kill me and you won't have to worry about it anymore."

"Oh, for God's sake. Do you... no. I am not doing this."

"Do you love him?" Hank asked.

"I'm not doing this," Janet said again.

"I wonder if I'm the only one it's happened to," Hank mused, his tone of voice suddenly different. She wondered if he was taking his meds, and appreciated once again how glad she was to have someone stable in her life now.

As she looked out her living-room window, she could see across the Williamsburg Bridge, and just about pinpoint the rough location of Steve's apartment farther away; not that she could see it directly, but a wasp always knows the way back to its nest, and she'd inherited some of that trait in the form of a nearly unshakable sense of bearings and distance. Right there, she thought... and then she heard Steve's voice on TV

"I have to go," she said to Hank, and hung up the phone.

Staring at the TV, Janet fumbled around on the coffee table for the remote. When she found it, she accidentally changed the channel, then started a DVD, then finally got back to where she was and got the volume up to where she could hear it without straining. Steve was speaking into a cluster of microphones against a banner backdrop she couldn't quite read from the angle of this network's feed: "... here today to lend my support to efforts to keep Americans safe through the immediate and widespread distribution of SKR TechEnt's screening technologies. After the terrorist attack in Wilmette, Illinois, two days ago—as well as other incidents and intelligence not publicly available—it's time to present a united front. Civil libertarians and ACLU types are going to raise hell and file their lawsuits, but the average American knows that now more than ever, it's critically important to maximize the protection of the public through surveillance and screening of public spaces. This is not Big Brother; the government isn't putting a dime or a single man-hour into it. This is the free market with a conscience, doing its job. If you're not doing anything wrong, you don't have anything to worry about."

Steve's voice was swept under a tide of questions from the assembled reporters. A splash across the bottom of the screen announced the location as Los Angeles. "My God, Steve," Janet whispered. He was answering a question about why the Department of Homeland Security wasn't getting behind the screener tech. "Governments work slowly," was Steve's answer. "And sometimes events call for speed. Governments work through consensus, and sometimes events call for decisive leadership. I believe in America, and I believe in our government. In that order."

The phone rang. Janet let it. "Janet," Hank said on the machine. "Pick up. Janet. We've got to talk." The machine beeped.

She watched Steve take another six or eight questions, and with each answer she felt herself falling away from what she thought she'd known about him. "All enemies, foreign and domestic," he said. "We will protect this nation."

The phone rang again, and again Janet didn't pick it up. "My God," came Hank's voice. "You must be watching what I'm watching." There was a pause, and then he added, "That's some man you got there." Janet picked up the phone. "You go to hell," she said, and hung it up again. Then she unplugged it from the jack. She'd gotten a new cell, and so far he hadn't called her there, but she knew he'd find it if he really wanted to. In the meantime, she needed to think. And she needed another glass of wine. She ended up doing both thinking and drinking at the lab, where by approximately four in the morning she was in that exhausted interim space that lay at the end of too much work, too little sleep, and a bottle of red wine. She'd come down to finish the monthly update on the next-generation super-soldier project, which Fury was going to want tomorrow, and which meant Janet had to deal with Banner. Knowing all that, she'd decided to get it out of the way, file the report, and then sleep all day and let her dreaming brain figure out what to do about Steve.

Banner didn't sleep much; he was too depressed, and his physical cycles were too disrupted by all of the drugs keeping him from going green again. Janet had known this, but had counted on his morose self-pity to keep him from talking too much... but things didn't turn out exactly like she'd planned. Bruce was talkative and relatively unself-pitying, which was rare for him but made it hard for her to keep her own confused wallow going. Instead she found herself confiding in him from the other side of the transparent wall at one end of his cell, especially when they were opposite each other on either side of the exchange tray through which they passed various drafts and documents.

"You know Steve and I have been dating, right?" she asked while they were both running over the version of the report they planned to submit to Fury.

"Who doesn't?" Bruce said. "I'm the only one on the team without a girlfriend, so whenever anyone else gets maudlin, they come dump it on me."

"As if you're not maudlin enough," she said.

Bruce cracked a rueful smile, which was the only kind he seemed to be capable of "Careful there, Miss Wasp," he said. "That almost sounded like backhanded sympathy." The truth was that Janet did have a sort of backhanded sympathy for Bruce, even though he'd done one of the dumbest things she'd ever heard of when he shot himself up with Hulk juice mixed with super-soldier serum and destroyed much of lower Manhattan... because, he'd said at the time, he wanted to give the Ultimates a public enemy as a way of letting them show the American public what they could do. But weren't there enough real enemies? And was that Bruce's real reason? Janet had a feeling the real reason had a bit more to do with Betty Ross than Bruce had ever let on. God, she wanted to ask him about it; in his current mood, he might even tell her, which would sure liven up the report editing process... Janet bit her tongue. It wouldn't do any good to start talking to Bruce about that now. He'd be lucky if he ever saw the outside of the cell again.

"So what about Mr. Captain America, anyway?" Bruce wanted to know. Janet put down her pen. "He's different lately," she said. "He's had this harder edge the past few weeks, and then tonight I saw him on TV giving a press conference about this new—" She caught herself, wondering how much Bruce knew about the suppression of Tony's screener tech and its subsequent leak to SKR. No way was she going to be the first to tell him. In some ways the Ultimates as a group were like a bunch of third-graders where gossip was concerned, but this was one of the times, Janet thought, when you needed to know when to keep your mouth shut.

She shrugged. "Sometimes it seems like his whole patriotic thing is an excuse," she said, and wanted to go on, but wasn't sure what she might think it was an excuse for.

"Last refuge of a scoundrel," Bruce said.

"What?"

"Samuel Johnson said that," Bruce explained. "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel." He must have seen her expression change, because immediately he started to backpedal. "Not that I think Steve is, you know—"

Janet stood and slid her copy of the report in the exchange tray, half-edited. "Why don't you finish these," she Said, and walked out.

17

Status Report

Operations involving <Steve Rogers> continue to progress. Assets in place around <New York> and

<Washington> signal readiness to commence the next phase of the human ordering project. Observations of human cultural production including television broadcasts indicate that <Rogers> is behaving according to projections. These observations increase confidence in further projections, which are to be acted on beginning immediately.

<New York> assimilation of nonhuman targets should commence immediately as preparation for "the next wave of diversionary missions.

In addition, redirection of assets away from infiltration and control of human cultural production will commence. The institutions in question behave according to rules that defy systematization, and the institutions are thus useless for our purposes. Assets previously dedicated to this portion of the human ordering project will receive orders attached to this directive.

Further misdirection and subversion operations to commence in <New York> at the earliest opportunity. Assets in place are given initiative to assess and execute as rules of engagement indicate. Impact of research of <Henry Pym> involving manipulation and control of arthropods, order

<Hymenoptera>, uncertain. Consideration of possible consequences for success and timeline of human ordering project continues. Laboratory at which <Henry Pym> conducted research was destroyed during combat with assimilated asset in place; however, <SHIELD> appears to be constructing a new laboratory with similar facilities in close proximity to current residence of <Henry Pym>. Placement of new assets and adjustment in placement of existing assets to commence immediately per previously issued directives.

Further, it is directed that construction be restarted on facility abandoned after events in <Arizona> 1.10453 solar year ago. Financing and rearrangement of asset deployments is underway, and will be refined as events dictate. This directive should in no way be considered an expression of doubt in the human ordering project; rather, infrastructure penetration should—as <Kleiser> articulated—be one of the primary long-term goals of the project. Despite <Kleiser>'s many shortcomings, on this topic he was useful. In addition, <Kleiser>'s belief that the human opponent, especially its augmented cohort—specifically the <Ultimates>—should be leveraged and weakened through the exploitation of individual personalities is in the process of being vindicated.

Appendix

Pursuant to previous directives encouraging development of viable contingency plans, priority assets have been assimilated in <Buenos Aires, Argentina;-; <Johannesburg, South Africa>; <Sao Paulo, Brazil>. Assets required for use of facilities necessary to the execution of viable contingency plans are under surveillance in these and other locations. Assimilations ongoing and productive. 18

Considering the fact that I've bought and sold everything from steel to genes to currency, Tony thought to himself, it shouldn't have been so damn complicated to get hold of a bunch of ants. He'd had an easier time putting his hands on radioactive isotopes, for God's sake. Harvester ants were the easiest, but even for them he'd had to pull all kinds of strings at the Department of Agriculture because it turned out that Pym had been working without the proper permits. This was where all the money he spent on lobbyists every year paid off... although it galled him to think that he was putting $2,000-per-hour lobbyists to work on behalf of Hank Pym. His defense of Pym to Fury the other day had been mostly motivated by annoyance at Fury's high-handedness. The truth was, if Tony never had to lay eyes on Hank Pym again, it would be too soon.

Another thing that galled him was that he'd had to fly into the Podunk Palwaukee airport again, also because of Fury, since Commandante Eyepatch had decreed that the team should come out to observe a demonstration of Pym's ant wizardry in Illinois. Why not just bring him to the Triskelion, Tony had asked, instead of dragging everyone off to the Chicago suburbs... but Fury had been his usual stubborn self So here they were. Tony, Fury, Clint, and Thor. Just like last time, except that Clint was along this time and Steve had flatly refused to come (once again getting away with it when the rest of the team wouldn't have been able to, Tony thought sourly). Janet had begged off for reasons that, Tony assumed, were more reasonable than whatever Steve had come up with. If he'd bothered to come up with anything at all. A SHIELD tech team had built Hank a new lab not too far from his old one, where Hank could show off his repertoire of tricks with all of the new ants Tony had flown in from all over the world. Probably he'd just gone out on the sidewalk and kidnapped a bunch more since then; Hank Pym in his headset was a kind of ant Pied Piper. Tony imagined mother ants telling their babies to never, ever get close to the human with the metal hat on. The anthills around the lab were probably ghost towns by now. Sidewalk ants, leaf-cutter ants, regular old harvester ants, Hank had them all. One of these days he was going to invent a technology to turn himself into an ant, and then Hank Pym's human problems would be solved. Tony had half a mind to start the research himself, just to spare the world more of Hank's paranoid, self-pitying neediness.

All in all, Tony was in the perfect frame of mind to watch a scientific demonstration. The new lab was about the same size as the old one, but without the thrown-together quality that had been obvious in the old one even when Tony had observed the ruins from out in the parking lot. Whatever their deficiencies in creative thinking, SHIELD teams had a good eye for organization. This space was arranged around a slightly raised central control desk, with all kinds of terminals and headgear piled on it. No organizational impulse could survive the prolonged presence of Hank Pym. Ringing the outer wall of the lab were small doors, behind each of which was an ant farm designed along the environmental lines of each species' favored habitat. Compartmentalized areas in front of each door provided space for observations of the ants and experimentation with various headgear and control broadcasts.

"Ants and wasps have a common ancestor. They're really very similar," Hank said, in response to a question Tony hadn't heard. Tony immediately found his attention wandering to the question of whether Hank's headset would have any power to control Janet Pym, and what one might do with that control in the event one had it... oh my.

He snapped out of it in time to see Hank putting on one of his helmets. Something about the sight took all the steam out of his Janet fantasia, which was just as well, since Tony had better things to do than joust with a jealous Steve Rogers. The world was full of women. He could find one who wasn't an emotionally scarred mutant.

"Okay, people," Fury said. "Everyone up on the island." The four Ultimates, plus Hank and two SHIELD techs, clustered in the middle of the lab. Hank touched a terminal screen, and walls slid across the gaps through which they'd entered, sealing the command platform off from the rest of the lab. "The walls have a mild electrical current running through them, too," Hank said. "They won't come near us."

"They're just ants," Clint said.

Hank laughed. "Say that again after you've been stung by a bullet ant."

"Where's the target?" Fury asked.

"There are three," Hank said. "I have a couple of things to show you."

"Okay. Where are the targets?" Fury asked, less politely this time, and with sharp emphasis on the plural verb and final s in targets.

Hank shot Fury a wink. "You'll see soon enough. Just wait. In ten minutes, you're going to wonder why you ever worried about screeners in the first place."

A veiled shot at me, wondered Tony? Or not so veiled? It didn't matter. Years had passed since Tony's ego had been vulnerable to people like Hank Pym. Genius or not, Pym was a pathetic bundle of inferiority and worry. If you were going to worry about what people like him said about you, you might as well carry grudges against bugs that hit your windshield.

Various chirps and audio dingbats started percolating out of Hank's terminals as he powered up the main control routines. It fit exactly with Tony's perceptions of Hank that the good doctor was one of those geeks who had a different sound effect for every keystroke. "Okay," Hank said. "When I was designing and rehearsing this experiment, it occurred to me that you might not be impressed enough if I only had the ants find a sample. So what I've done here is run three parallel routines, involving different groups of ants. Each one is instructed to look for a particular mass of Chitauri tissue, as expressed by the density of particles in the air. They can tell the three samples apart on this basis alone, but what I want to call your attention to is the way that each species will come out, reconnoiter, and then focus in on the sample they're directed to find."

"I can't wait," Tony said.

"Actually, neither can I," Hank shot back. "This is the first time I'll ever have kept these three plates spinning live. Oh, and I went for one final little flourish. Each of these three species typically attacks one of the others on sight. So if you see an ant massacre out there, you'll know I dropped the ball. If not... " He shrugged and grinned to himself at how smart he was. "Everybody ready?"

"We have the Orkin men in place?" Fury called out.

"Yes, sir," said a white-suited SHIELD tech waiting near the front door. Hank spun on Fury. "Are you kidding me? These—"

"We bought these ants, Doctor Pym. We will dispose of them as we see fit, when we see fit." Fury's expression and tone of voice suggested that he wanted to say much more. "Now. Kindly proceed."

"You people are sick," Hank said. He put on the headset. "Exploitative, manipulative, soulless... sick." As if to emphasize the last point, he checked the time and then popped a pill from a prescription bottle before tapping in a final touchscreen sequence. "All of you go to hell. On five, four... " Hank counted off the last three seconds on his fin-gers like a TV stage manager. At zero, he clenched his fist, and three of the ant farm doors rose smoothly until the inhabitants of each cell had a twelve-by-eighteen-inch portal to the world. Ants in tidy columns filed out of each, and then spread across the floor. When members of one species encountered another, they touched feelers briefly before continuing on their assigned errands. When all three species had intermingled on the floor, Tony gave up trying to follow what was going on and went over to a series of ant's-eye-view monitors installed along the back wall of the control island. Thor was already there.

"What's your take, O namesake of my favorite weekday?" Tony asked him.

"Really?" Thor said. "I would have figured a party boy like you would be partial to Friday."

"Where I went to college, Friday was retroactively extended to include Thursday. Made us all look forward to it a little more. How about you, Clint?"

"Agreed. Plus who had classes on Fridays, anyway?"

Thor shook his head, and Tony could see him thinking: Americans. Both of them watched the screens and saw mortal enemies passing each other by without more than a passing exchange of pheromone... which was also kind of like some of the undergrad weekends Tony remembered, but that was another story. "It really is pretty impressive," he said.

Thor shrugged. "It hasn't worked yet. If we could get them to detect my brother, now, that would be a science project I could get behind."

"Oh my God," Tony groaned. "Is anyone on this team sane?" He returned his attention to the ants, which on the monitors he could sort of distinguish by species. Not that he knew which of them were which, but he could see that one of them was smaller and browner than another, which was thicker through the thorax than the third, which was an odd reddish color with black legs.

Or at least, so it looked through the monitors. Each of the three species seemed to be forming a kind of scouts' perimeter, with more resources following right behind. Tony wished he had a way to tell which of them was looking for which sample, and said so.

"There's a real-time graphic on one of the monitors somewhere," Hank said. "Not sure where. But sure, you can see which of them is going where."

Tony looked around and found the graphic display. Sure enough, on it you could follow what was happening in terms of closing distance to each sample. From the looks of it, all three teams were closing on their samples, and there didn't appear to be much deviation or overlap. If that was the truth of the situation, then Hank had done some very good work indeed. "You feel like explaining this to me?" Thor asked over his shoulder. "I avoid these machines when I can."

Tony compiled, and about the time he'd finished with the explanation as he understood it, the first team of ants found its pot of Chitauri gold. So all Tony had to say was, "See? Where the glowing spot is, that's the target they found."

"Just like I planned it," Hank was crowing. "You just wait. Give it forty-five seconds. God, look at those deployment patterns. I'm too good."

That, Tony thought, was up for debate, but it was beyond question that within about forty-five seconds, just like Hank had said, both of the other species had tracked and located their targets as well.

"Whoo!" Hank shouted. "That's your ant for you, ladies and gentlemen! SKR TechEnt can... "

"Excellent result," Nick Fury cut in.

"Hell yes, it's an excellent result," Hank said. "Better than any machine. Life will find life." Well, Tony thought. I don't know if we need to turn this into an ant versus human machine ingenuity kind of grudge. The tech Steve Rogers had leaked to SKR was good. Very good. The only thing Tony had trouble swallowing, since he'd been on the wrong side of backroom political decisions before, was the question of where SKR was getting their Chitauri samples for calibration purposes. He surely hoped that SHIELD wasn't involved in it.

"And here, look at this," Hank went on, unfolding a piece of paper from the pocket of his lab coat. "I predicted the order."

"How many other pieces of paper do you have in there, Doctor Pym?" Clint asked politely. Thor suppressed a grin; of any of them, Tony thought, he was the one used to having his motives questioned. Hank just rolled his eyes. It looked like he was on the manic side of one of his typical swings. Time to ensure that the whole thing stays civil, Tony thought. He was the last person who wanted to make nice with Plank Pym, but if Washington was going to step on his innovations and then farm them out to a bunch of yokels, the situation demanded a little extra effort. "It's good work, Hank," he said.

"It sure is, Doctor Pym," Fury agreed, and Tony saw a shift in his torso, as if Fury had almost shaken Hank's hand, which might have caused Tony to faint dead away from surprise. But Fury's discipline held.

"SHIELD extends both congratulations and thanks," he went on. "We'll gladly accept records of your experiments so we can continue on our own."

There was a moment of stunned silence.

Whoa, Tony thought. So much for civility.

Hank's jaw literally dropped. "Nick," he said. "I thought... I mean... "

"And we'll be dismantling this lab," Fury said. He dipped into his pocket and came up with a check. "I think you'll find this is a generous consulting fee. Good luck in your work, Doctor Pym." As they filed off the command platform and out the front door, the tech team was already bringing in boxes and tools. Tony glanced back at Hank, just once, and wished he hadn't when he saw the devastating expression of betrayal and dashed hope on Hank's face.

19

"They did what?" Steve said. He couldn't believe it

"Wrote him a check and then took his lab apart." Clint was tearing off pieces of a pencil eraser and idly flipping them across the room, where they stuck in a bulletin board, finding creases even Steve couldn't see. "I've seen some dirty shit in my time, Cap, but that was about the coldest thing I'd ever seen someone do face to face. At least people who were supposedly on the same side." The pieces of eraser embedded in the bulletin board formed a pink connect-the-dots outline of an ant. Clint had gone through five erasers.

"Dirty stuff, huh?" Steve said.

"You don't even want to know."

Except Steve did. He was no babe in the woods, despite what all of these turn-of-the-millennium types seemed to think. He'd been in Europe during World War II, for Pete's sake. Still, there was a whole world of black-ops stuff that he didn't know much about, and something about his recent Washington experience made him want to know more. A good soldier learned everything he could about his enemy. Clint Barton would know about this kind of enemy: not the Chitauri, but the kind of enemy who worked through apathy and betrayal and perversion of the ideals that Steve held dear.

"What made you get out of it?" he asked Clint.

After a pause, Clint said, "Truth? I wanted to have a kid. And I wanted to be able to get up in the morning and feed my kid his Cheerios and know that I wasn't going to go off and spend the next two days doing things that would disgust him if he knew about them."

"You didn't get out of black ops before you had kids, though."

"No," Clint said. "No, I didn't. But I wanted to even then, and I wish I had. Not all of us have super-soldier serum in our consciences, Cap. Sometimes it takes a while for the doing to catch up with the wishing." He flicked his wrist and stuck his latest pencil in the ant's head. "Listen, why don't we have this conversation over pizza instead of in the office, you know?"

The next thing Steve said was one of the hardest things to say he'd ever encountered. "Truth?" He looked at Clint to see if Clint had picked up on the copying, but couldn't tell. "I think someone's listening at my apartment."

"Whoa," Clint said, and sat up straight. "You don't think they're listening here? Or are we talking about a different someone?"

"You know what? I think you're right about the pizza. Let's get out of here," Steve said. An hour later, they were munching on slices in Tompkins Square Park, surrounded by remnant freaks and moms with strollers. "You know what happened with the screener Tony invented," Steve said.

"I know he didn't get to make it," Clint mumbled around a mouthful of crust. "I try not to pay attention to political stuff. It's never paid off for me."

Wish I'd learned that lesson, Steve thought, and then realized that for a long time, he hadn't had to learn that lesson. He'd never been interested. But then came the long freeze, and the reawakening into this time when he was Captain America instead of the freak who was the butt of paratroopers'jokes... until they saw him in action. "Yeah," he said. "I don't know if it's paying off for me, either, but when that happened, I thought I had to do something."

Clint very carefully wiped his mouth and set his napkin on the paper plate he'd carried all the way from the place he'd suggested up on Avenue A and 14th. "Cap, I have the feeling you're about to tell me something I don't want to know," he said.

"Maybe," Steve said, and waited.

Clint leaned back on the bench and closed his eyes. "Oh, well," he said.

"I hate this," Steve said. "I hate that it happened, and I hate that I did it, but you know what? I try and I try, but I can't figure out a way to think that it was the wrong thing to do."

"You leaked it," Clint said.

"I leaked it," Steve said, and told him the rest of the story. When he was done, Clint cracked his knuckles and sailed the paper plate twenty-five feet into a trash can. Steve watched the long, sweeping arc, and thought: we all have roles to play. Then he remembered Fury, last week, saying that there were some things people didn't want to know.

"Why'd you tell me that?" Clint asked.

"Because you've seen people at their dirtiest," Steve said. "I—I need to know that I'm not one of those people. I did what was right, Clint. The Chitauri are out there. I killed one at Andrews. Andrews Air Force Base. And nobody wants to do what needs to be done."

"Oh, man," Clint said.

"What?"

"Nothing. Keep going," Clint said. "Tell me."

"When the people who should be trusted with these problems can't be trusted," Steve said, biting hard on every word, "what do you do? What does a soldier do?"

Clint shrugged. "I don't know. It's been a long time since I was any kind of soldier, really. Are you asking me about chain of command and manuals and that kind of crap?"

"No. Well, maybe. What I'm asking you," Steve said, "is what do you do when you know you have to do something wrong to do something right?"

Standing and stretching, Clint said, "Steve. I've heard this argument before. Usually when someone makes it, bad things happen not too long after."

"Sometimes they're right, though," Steve said. "The people who make those arguments." Clint shrugged and started walking back toward Avenue A. "Sometimes. I guess you'll find out." Steve sat there, thinking. Ten minutes later, he got a call from Admiral Garza. Ten minutes after that, he was in a limousine heading up the FDR while Garza briefed him on a new threat.

"The Chitauri have gone after the Triskelion, Pym's lab, and they've infiltrated Andrews," Garza was saying. He leaned forward and tapped on the window that partitioned off the driver's seat. The window whirred open, and Garza said, "Go ahead and hop on the Harlem River Drive, Kyle. We'll just do a circle while Captain Rogers and I talk."

"Yes, sir," the driver said, and the window whirred shut again.

"Anyway," Garza went on, "we've deployed surveillance teams on individual Ultimates, as well as some other SHIELD assets, and we've seen a couple of things that we wanted to pass along. I don't guess I have to tell you, Steve, that you're the one we trust right now."

"Yes, sir," Steve said.

"So we're going to take a little ride. Oh, and before we get there, I should tell you that the first screeners are coming out of the factory tomorrow. SKR's done a hell of a job." Garza clapped Steve on the shoulder. "I hope you're not having conscience troubles, Captain. What you did was difficult, but the right thing often is."

Exactly what I was just telling Clint, Steve thought.

The limo cruised along the Harlem River and looped around onto the West Side Highway. "Who's buying the screeners, sir?" Steve asked.

"Well, there's a couple of markets. There's some interest from airports, of course, and the primary market for this tech will be existing places that have screeners and think of these as an upgrade. But I'm sure you've already figured that there's a more hush-hush angle on the enterprise as well. We've got CIA and NSA networks arranging for installations at various targets we think the Chitauri might be interested in. Military facilities, government offices, and so forth."

"What about the Triskelion?" Steve asked. "After what happened... "

"Already in process," Admiral Garza said. "In fact, I'd be surprised if there wasn't a heap of those screeners already sitting around in the Triskelion's basement."

Steve nodded. "Good." Remembering the carnage on the loading dock, he felt a flush of the fury he'd experienced then. However Tony's tech got out into the world, if it choked off the Chitauri until every last one of them had been hunted down and killed and preserved in ajar, the methods were justified. The limo turned off the West Side Highway and rolled through side streets before coming to a stop in front of a turn-of-the-century apartment building on 81 st Street. Looking out through the windshield, Steve could see straight down to the bulk of the American Museum of Natural History, and beyond that into the cool green of Central Park. "We're here," Garza said. "What I'm about to show you is... well, you're going to have to use your best judgment."

Garza opened a small drawer set under the front seats and took out a rectangular case of polished metal. It looked like the kind of box used to ship handguns on airplanes. Opening it, Garza removed a small machine that bore a resemblance to a gun. It had a handle and a trigger, but where the muzzle of a gun would have been was what looked like a microphone head.

'We've had our own geniuses working over the Stark tech," Garza said. "This is a handheld version. It's only a prototype, but lab results are promising. Let's go see how it performs in the field." They got out of the car, Admiral Garza stowing the handheld sensor in his coat pocket. All at once Steve realized where they were: in the next block, around the corner, was the apartment Janet had moved into after Hank Pym's last assault. Steve had only been there twice; Janet was still clearing things out of the old place, and the two of them were busy enough that they usually met up for dinner or a night out. Thinking of Janet reminded Steve that he hadn't spoken to her in a while. He'd been distracted, the good soldier leaving his girl behind when he went off to fight a battle. But he needed to keep in mind that Janet was a soldier in this battle, too. Not an easy trick when you'd grown up in the nineteen-thirties. Layered over his swirl of emotions about his relationship with Janet was a rising unease about why Admiral Garza had brought him here to show him how the new sensor worked. Reflexively Steve began scanning the surroundings for things that could be used as weapons. Most trash can lids nowadays were plastic.

Garza stopped at the corner and leaned in close to Steve. "How this works is, the lab boys have isolated a protein they think is the catalyst for the Chitauri ability to change shape. There's nothing like it in any human species, and this little toy is specifically designed to recognize and discard results that match up with terrestrial species that can mutate or regenerate. So it's not going to freak out if it runs across frog DNA, or a sign that a skink somewhere is regrowing its tail. Watch." He took the sensor out of his pocket and swept it in a semicircle on the corner. Passersby glanced over and then kept walking; this was New York, after all.

"Nothing," Garza said. "Right?"

Steve looked at the sensor. "I don't know, sir. What does it do when it gets a hit?"

"We've designed it for a quiet response, so a possible subject won't immediately know he's been tagged," Garza said. He started walking toward Janet's building, and Steve felt a rush of adrenaline start to flow through him. "When you see a little green light go on, right here, that's a hit." He pointed to a small LED

display about where the hammer on a gun would be.

"Admiral Garza," Steve said. "It's not an accident that we're walking toward Janet's building, is it?" Garza looked grim. "I'm afraid not, Captain. We've tagged one bogey around here. It's been disposed of, but I'm guessing it wasn't working alone." They had reached the building's front steps. "Look at this," Garza said. He pointed the sensor at the front door, near the knob. The little green light glowed. Dear God, Steve thought. Had they gotten in?

"That's the one we took out," Admiral Garza said. "We swept the area afterward, and traced it back to a bus stop over on Central Park West. We're still running down the bus." Steve had his phone out to call Janet, but Admiral Garza stopped him. "We're keeping a close eye on her, son. Right now she's at the Triskelion lab. I just wanted to bring you into the loop on this." Realizing he'd been holding his breath, Steve sighed. "I appreciate it, Admiral. Can we get more of those made? SHIELD sure could put them to good use."

"I'll see what we can do," Admiral Garza said. They turned away from the door and went back down the steps, Garza a step ahead of Steve. Right as Garza put a foot on the sidewalk, he said, "Captain." The light on the sensor was on. Steve looked up and down the street. There were no pedestrians on the block. Every nerve in his body on high alert, he watched Garza sweep the sensor out toward the street; the light went off When Garza turned the sensor back toward the building, it came on again, well before it was pointed near the doorknob.

Around the south side of the building was a narrow breezeway that ended in an eight-foot concrete wall. New York City was notoriously without alleyways, but here and there quirks of gas-main placement or lot shape had left these kinds of gaps. Steve and Admiral Garza moved slowly down the breezeway, Garza moving the sensor in a slow arc. "Right there," Garza said softly, as the sensor's light went on. He pointed at a metal grille covering a basement window, and went to the next grille. "Here, too." As the words left Admiral Garza's mouth, another sound almost drowned them out. From the courtyard behind the building, Steve heard the unmistakable rusty groan of a fire-escape ladder being dragged down to vertical. Before Garza could say another word, Steve had cleared the wall with a running jump, using his hands to pivot on the top of the wall so he landed beyond a row of flower pots against the inside. The world slowed and dilated into combat time, and on the second-floor landing of the fire escape he saw a human form just taking its first step up toward the third floor. Janet's floor. 20

Steve caught the Chitauri before it had gotten to the third-floor landing by vaulting up from the second floor and driving the alien down under his weight. "All, Jesus, man! Okay!" the Chitauri said. Its voice was muffled from Steve's forearm mashing its face into the iron stairs.

"They must send you to acting school," Steve said. He turned the Chitauri over and pinned it on its back. It looked like a kid, maybe nineteen years old, Puerto Rican if the T-shirt of the Virgin Mary was anything to go by. Leaning in close and putting his full weight on the Chitauri's collarbones, Steve growled, "Who'd you kill to take this form? What was his name? Did he have a family?"

"I don't know what you're talking about, man," the Chitauri said. "You want my name? It's Eddie Guzman. You a cop? Arrest me, then, fine, okay, but let me get up." Some of the tension went out of its body.

"One chance," Steve said, not because he was uncertain but because he wanted to learn something about this adversary. When you could look your enemy in the eye before you killed him, you could learn something about the next time you would have to fight.

"One chance what?" the Chitauri said.

"Live or die," Steve said. "Which floor were you headed for?" Something changed around its eyes. "Third floor," it said, and spat in Steve's face. He blinked reflexively—not even the super-soldier serum could eliminate that response—but the Chitauri's saliva was already in his eyes, and they burned like they were going to melt out of his head. The Chitauri twisted out from under him. Steve took a blind swing at it, and connected, but he could barely see, and he felt the fire escape tremble as the Chitauri jumped. Swiping at his eyes, he saw as if through a hundred feet of water. The alien was on the ground and running.

Steve was about to jump after it, but with its head start... wait. He looked up, at the cat's cradle of phone and cable lines strung from a line of telephone poles to the buildings on both sides. Good thing they haven't gotten around to putting all of them underground yet, he thought, as the geometry did itself in his head. Steve jumped up and caught the cable-TV line going into the fourth-floor apartment, jerking it out of the wall box and swinging down and across the courtyard like Tarzan. The pain in his eyes wasn't going away, but through their watering he could see the Chitauri had already gotten to a high brick wall that divided the courtyard from a basketball court on the other side. In the three or four seconds it took Steve to cover the length of the courtyard, the Chitauri had already gotten its hands on top of the wall. Steve hit the Chitauri square in the back with both feet, feeling its spine crack in the split second before his momentum crushed it into the brick wall. Letting go of the cable, Steve got the Chitauri in a chokehold and broke its neck as they fell together into a tangle of morning glory and some kind of bamboo that lined most of the courtyard's interior. The Chitauri was dead before they hit the ground, but Steve made sure, holding its face pressed into the soft earth while his vision slowly cleared and the pain in his eye sockets lessened to a minor irritation. When the Chitauri hadn't moved for a full minute, Steve picked it up in a fireman's carry and walked back across the courtyard. He threw it over the wall into the breezeway and vaulted over after it.

"Dammit, Captain Rogers," Admiral Garza said, "you almost hit me with that thing."

"Sorry, Admiral," Steve said. He pinched his eyes shut for a second, then blinked away the last of the Chitauri's saliva. He was starting to feel normal again. "I didn't want to say too much out loud in case that little fracas drew some attention."

He looked around as he said it, and noticed Kyle, Garza's driver, standing sentinel at the head of the breezeway. On the concrete between them, the Chitauri was already starting to lose the cohesion of its human shape. "God Almighty, but they're hideous," Admiral Garza said. "What the hell happened to your eyes?"

Steve looked up from the body of the dead Chitauri. Ignoring Garza's question, he said, "Admiral Garza. Let me take this to General Fury. He'll do the right thing, sir, once he can really see what's happening."

"Are you sure of that, Captain?" Garza responded. "Seems to me that General Fury's had more than enough chances."

"Sir. You've said it, I've said it, General Fury has said it. Uniforms have to stick together. Request permission to inform General Fury and mobilize a SHIELD team to perform recovery." Admiral Garza stowed the sensor and scratched at the back of his neck. "Reluctantly granted. But under no circumstances will you tell Fury about this sensor, and only if it is unavoidable will you inform him that I was present when this happened. Understood?"

"Understood, sir."

"I'll be in touch, Captain. I've got a feeling this whole situation's about to come to a head." With that, Admiral Garza walked back down the breezeway, Kyle falling in step with him as they turned the corner out of sight.

When Nick Fury heard that Steve had killed a disguised Chitauri in Janet Pym's backyard, his first thought was God, I hope it wasn't just a burglar. The way Steve had been acting lately, it wasn't impossible that he could have gone off half-cocked. Between his worry about that and Thor's tendency to see Loki everywhere, Nick was starting to get jumpy himself. Pretty soon he'd be seeing Viet Cong lying in wait for him at the grocery store.

But he got his ass to the Upper West Side so he could manage the recovery team, and he let Janet know that she probably shouldn't go home until all the loose ends related to this particular incident had been cleared up.

"Fine," she said archly. "The way you want reports every five minutes, I'll never be able to go home again anyway."

"You're welcome to return to the private sector, Miz Pym," Fury said, and hung up. He was going to have to do something about her and Cap, who shouldn't have had to be told about why you didn't fraternize with comrades. That was a conversation he wasn't looking forward to having. I would be a much happier man, Fury reflected, if the members of my team did not have emotions. Maybe Janet and Bruce can build that into the next generation of super-soldiers.

Janet called him back thirty seconds later. "Don't ever call me Pym again," she said, and hungup on him. Fury chuckled to himself about that all the way to the scene. By the time he got there, NYPD had showed up to see why a big van and a bunch of people in bio-hazard suits were cluttering up the sidewalk. Fury gave them the old national-security spiel, and they took it with their usual lack of grace, and then he found Steve down at the end of a narrow walkway between two apartment buildings. The recovery team had already bagged and removed the body, and was now sterilizing the area. A SHIELD

field medic was washing Steve's eyes out with saline solution.

"You okay there, soldier?" Fury asked.

Steve wiped away the solution that had run down his cheeks. "Just about, sir. The Chitauri spat in my eyes. Stung some for a while."

"Doc, take Captain Rogers and run a full workup on him," Fury said. "Head to toe. We need to make sure all he's got is red eyes."

"I'm fine, General," Steve protested.

"You look fine and you sound fine," Fury agreed. "But we're both going to leave it up to the docs to decide whether you are fine. Can we agree on that?"

Steve didn't look happy about it, but he started to walk back toward the street with the medic. "And call your girlfriend," Fury said as he passed.

"She's not my girlfriend," Steve said.

"Oh no?"

Steve turned to face Nick. "General," he said. "With all due respect, I would like to keep my private life private."

Nick looked him in the eye for a long moment, and then said, "I think the doctors can wait a minute. Let's you and I have a talk."