Chapter 131 - Sixth Attempt

Chapter 131: Chapter 131 - Sixth Attempt

Back at Alkali Lake, Lucius had reduced a flaw in his synthetic soldier-upgrade programme to a rubber ball.

Twelve feet from the laboratory wall, Gary waited with his broad shoulders square and his hands loose at his sides. According to the conditioning lattice, he remained obedient, attentive and undamaged by the last integration cycle. Lucius threw the ball past his left shoulder anyway.

After striking the hardened wall, it crossed the floor twice and rolled beneath a surgical frame. Gary only watched.

Lucius held out one hand. "Well?"

"No order was given, sir."

That was unfortunately true. It was also the problem.

The next generation of soldiers needed enough initiative to exploit an opening without developing opinions about who owned them. Lucius had considered intelligence an expensive source of disobedience and reduced it accordingly. Now Gary could supervise a Nexus integration cycle and maintain a patrol, but a bouncing ball defeated him unless someone supplied paperwork.

Lucius retrieved it with Telekinesis. "Catch."

The second throw went directly at Gary’s face. He caught it without blinking.

"Bring it here."

Gary obeyed. Lucius took the ball and frowned. Synthetic improvements to reflex, judgement and initiative should not have been difficult for a genius of his stature. The difficulty lay in producing judgement without curiosity, initiative without ambition and competence without the tiresome desire for wages.

His Nokia rang before he could decide which part of the human mind deserved removal.

Tony’s name appeared on the screen. Ungrateful, jealous and still refusing to correct the tower’s exterior lettering, Tony usually called when he wanted something too expensive to request honestly.

Lucius answered on the second ring.

-

Tony had reached his private laboratory before Lucius picked up. A replacement suit existed across three workbenches as a chest assembly, two incomplete legs and several arguments with JARVIS. Fury’s request had moved its completion schedule from unreasonable to abusive.

Tony put the call on speaker and continued fitting a power-routing plate.

"Lucius, my dear friend, fellow genius and second-largest shareholder after me."

"Tony, my jealous partner who remains obsessed with writing his name across a building. What can I refuse to do for you?"

"Good afternoon to you too."

"Before you explain your request, I should warn you that I am extremely busy with psychological conditioning."

Tony stopped working. "Who are you gaslighting?"

"How absurd. I would never stoop to such levels."

Lucius generally reserved elaborate punishment for people he had convicted inside his own head. Tony had once considered that a moral line. Experience had corrected it into something closer to a private court run by a vindictive lunatic who owned a big axe.

"You’re experimenting on people again, aren’t you?"

"I am improving employees."

After a short pause, Tony decided to leave it.

"Look, Fury is putting a team together. The new information gave us more HYDRA sites than anyone can hit before they empty them, so the plan is to clear the bases, seize the files and keep the Nazis from relocating whatever they’re growing. We can use someone with your abilities."

"No."

Lucius answered so quickly that Tony checked the call display.

"I hadn’t finished."

"Tell Fury I would not consider a proposal from him if the world were burning down. He could stand inside the fire with my money in one hand and a written apology in the other. I would wait for the ink to ignite. Good luck to you all."

"Fury didn’t ask me to call you."

The disconnect tone did not come. Tony returned to the routing plate. "Rogers, Faclon and Romanoff are in; Barton is being pulled out of whatever cover swallowed him for the last few months, and Banner agreed after making Fury define the word containment three times. I’m going. This is me asking, not Fury."

For several seconds, Lucius said nothing.

Tony hated using sincerity when money could perform the same labour. Fortunately, an unpaid debt remained available.

"I’ll deliver the fucking yacht."

Only the laboratory fans reached Tony through the call. Lucius had stopped trying to leave.

"The superyacht you already owe me?"

"The superyacht I have been carefully preventing you from weaponising. I deliver it, you join me, and you reinforce the suit with that hocus-pocus shell."

"You make it difficult to refuse a friend."

Tony closed his eyes.

"In the name of our undying friendship, I accept. Tell the one-eyed bitch I am not joining his team or any other. I will remain mostly with you. If someone shoots at me, I may defend myself with a degree of enthusiasm appropriate to the insult."

"I’ll put that on the safety card."

"The yacht will require two swimming pools. One inside and one outside."

"It gets one pool."

"Do not make our friendship look cheap. It also needs two landing pads."

Tony stared at the unfinished armour. "How many helicopters do you own?"

"I own none because I dislike preventable limitations. One pad is for arriving; the second is for guests I have not decided to welcome."

"You are getting one pad."

"Then the whole vessel must hover."

Tony put the routing plate down before he damaged it. "That answer is still no."

"The Helicarrier managed it, and SHIELD employed people who thought three armed carriers linked to a murder algorithm were sensible. You have no excuse."

"A yacht is a boat, Lucius."

"A poor yacht is a boat. Mine should rise above traffic, governments and other boats."

"You want a flying aircraft carrier with teak flooring."

"At last, the genius returns. Add a submersible hull in case the hovering fails."

Tony saw his own jaw tighten in the dark display.

"You get an outdoor pool, one landing pad and a hull that remains in the water."

"Make it an indoor pool with two pads and limited hovering. I will supply the offensive systems myself."

"There were no offensive systems in this conversation."

"That is why I excluded them from your workload."

Tony took a slow breath. "I’ll send you the first target when Fury finalises the route."

"You will send it. Not Fury."

"He’ll love that."

"No, he will not. That is why the arrangement is acceptable."

The call ended.

JARVIS waited a respectful two seconds. "Shall I add marine engineering to the current project queue, sir?"

"Add therapy. Put it above the yacht."

-

Fury had prepared one plan with Noctis, one without him and four for the possibility that Noctis arrived halfway through, stole the objective and declared that help. Tony’s report allowed him to discard none of them.

"He stays with Stark," Fury said. "He takes target coordinates from Stark, not us. No command access, no personnel files and no one points a weapon at him unless they want the operation to become their autopsy."

Maria Hill stood on the other side of the safe-house table, reading the list of known bases. Project Insight had left her with a SHIELD that existed mostly as evidence in federal warehouses. Fury had dismantled the institution, announced none of his retirement plans and somehow acquired another table around which to issue orders.

"Does he remember Barton and Romanoff were involved in his attempted assassination?"

"I’m sure he was aware..."

"Then I admire the plan’s commitment to avoidable tension."

Noctis had once locked her body in place and described what he could do to her spine. Hill had spent enough years around enhanced people to distinguish a threat from theatre. Noctis enjoyed both and did not always separate them.

She opened a blank document on her laptop.

Fury saw the title appear. "SHIELD is gone. You can’t resign from an agency that doesn’t exist."

Hill typed `Sixth Attempt` and began the first paragraph. "I’m resigning from you."

"Not accepted."

"I haven’t sent it."

"Saves time."

Fury looked back at the base map. Noctis would ignore orders, insult the team, appropriate anything interesting and become violent if a HYDRA guard mistook seven feet of arrogance for a target. He would also turn walls, armour, distance and superior numbers into administrative inconveniences.

As long as Stark kept him moving in the correct direction, the operation had become as close to guaranteed as Fury permitted himself to believe.

Hill continued typing.

-

At Kamar-Taj, the Ancient One opened the Eye of Agamotto and again found paths intersecting where none had before.

From the fall of SHIELD came familiar branches. Rogers searched for the friend who no longer knew him, Romanoff disappeared into the consequences of the files she had released, and Fury abandoned his old name and authority while Stark built answers as building was easier than waiting.

Those paths should have separated. Instead, they bent toward the same HYDRA facilities. Bases that had survived in earlier possibilities emptied, burned or fell under attacks that had not existed when she last looked. The order changed whenever she followed it, but the pressure remained.

Five people could be traced. The soldier, the spy, the archer, the scientist and the engineer each carried a history into the coming violence. Around them moved a sixth influence whose consequences appeared without an origin.

Turning the Eye’s rings back, the Ancient One watched Tony Stark make a phone call. The call connected, but its other participant had no place in the sequence before her.

Moving forward instead showed her a door opening before anyone crossed the space, followed by men dropping their weapons without an attacker entering. One laboratory vanished from a possibility and stood empty in the next.

Whenever she got close to finding the reason for the changes, something prevented her. She was the Sorcerer Supreme, and she was wise enough to understand a warning, so she closed the Eye. Whatever had bent the timeline did not yet threaten the Sanctums, and tearing at a protection strong enough to deny the Time Stone would announce her interest without guaranteeing an answer or safety.

For now, she would watch what the missing man chose to leave behind.

-

The public rooms of the Hellfire Club still admitted politicians, heirs and industrialists who believed membership meant excellent wine and discreet company. The Inner Circle met below them and considered belief a useful entrance fee.

Natasha Romanoff’s release of SHIELD’s files had exposed HYDRA holdings across the world. Some were bunkers. Others were laboratories, banks, charities and manufacturers whose boards had never realised which private office approved their losses.

Fury’s coming purge turned all of them into distressed assets. Three members sat around the long table while an analyst moved shell companies across the display. No names appeared beside the chairs. Titles were safer, and the Club had survived more than one person who mistook a title for ownership.

The White Bishop tapped the patent column. "The patents will be frozen when the first arrests begin."

The woman seated opposite him shifted the debt through another holding company. "Then acquire it before the arrests. Use four intermediaries, none based in the United States."

The analyst shifted another set of files. HYDRA’s records identified detained mutants, failed enhancement subjects and scientists who had continued working after learning what the restraints were for.

"Do we warn them?"

"We do not rescue competitors."

The woman marked seven laboratories for immediate action. Their financial records were valuable. The captive lists were more so, and a rescued mutant with nowhere safe to return could become loyal, employable or indebted. The distinction could be negotiated later.

Above them, someone laughed at a joke told by a senator whose campaign had accepted money from two HYDRA fronts.

The Inner Circle began buying the remains before Fury destroyed the body.

-

In Sokovia, Baron Strucker watched safe channels close one at a time.

Pierce no longer answered. Zola’s machinery had gone silent after the missile strike. Three North American sites had abandoned their archives, a European weapons store had burned, and two laboratories were requesting transport that no longer existed.

Then a surviving contact reported that Stark was assembling armour and Barton had been recalled from cover.

Strucker read the message twice. "Who else?"

"Rogers, Romanoff and Banner are confirmed. Fury may be directing them. There is one additional contact we cannot identify. Stark called him personally."

The laboratory beyond the glass remained active. Wanda and Pietro waited in separate rooms, the sceptre secured between them and every dead subject reduced to figures in the programme record. Strucker had refused to release it when Pierce promised Noctis temporary use. Refusal had preserved the work. It had also created a debt to a man HYDRA’s own models could neither abduct nor contain.

Strucker’s thumb stopped against the edge of the display. "Noctis."

The officer did not ask how he knew.

Running would mean moving the Maximoffs, the sceptre and years of research through routes Fury was already cutting apart. Remaining meant waiting behind walls that would not stop Noctis long enough to qualify.

Strucker chose the only asset that might change the approach. "Prepare the sceptre for transport."

"Where are we sending it?"

"Nowhere yet. First, we remind Mr Noctis that HYDRA owes him a delivery."

-

Erik Lehnsherr read the same collapsing network from the Carpathian compound and found less cause for concern.

HYDRA had hidden inside the authority that registered mutants, raided homes and built cells for people whose crime was surviving the wrong parents. The released files named only part of the machinery. Fury’s teams would seize what remained, governments would classify it, and within a year respectable officials would describe the whole affair as an unfortunate period of inadequate oversight.

Metal pins slid from a paper map and settled over the nearest HYDRA sites.

Mystique waited beside the table. "What do you want taken?"

"Names and research records. Leave their money for the Hellfire vultures."

"And the prisoners?"

"Anyone held for being born different comes with us. The scientists may explain their work before we decide whether they deserve the same courtesy."

She studied the marked routes. "Fury’s people may reach them first."

"Do not fight Rogers for a ruined building."

"And if Noctis is there?"

Erik lifted the remaining pins from the map and placed them in her palm.

"Then it is already ruined."