“Wonderfully intricate, is it not? A mesh of the pragmatic and the beautiful, made years before Werner Jacobi took credit for inventing the integrated circuit.” He raised an eyebrow at the android. “Do you recognize it, Arnim? Speak plainly. I will not be angry.”
“From its appearance, it was part of the Reich’s secret weapons program. I was intimately familiar with all those projects. My memory of them is photographic, enhanced by my form. Therefore I should know what it is, but…” Zola’s avatar made a rare frown. “…this is not something I’ve ever seen.”
The answer satisfied any suspicions the Skull had. “It is called the Sonikey, and you were not meant to recognize it. Nor was I. Had we not lost so many secrets to treacherous spies and the cretins of the All-Winners Squad, any one of our technological breakthroughs would have turned the course of the war. So, for this project, der Führer trusted no one. Even the designers and builders were executed upon the project’s completion.”
“In that case, I suppose I should be thankful I don’t recognize it.”
“He even had this key surgically implanted in his body,” Schmidt said with a chuckle, “which made retrieving it…interesting.”
Zola turned his scanners on the device. “It appears to be a crude version of the soni-crystal, the device used to awaken der Schläfer, the Sleepers. An earlier effort at the same goal?”
The Skull regarded the object with a sort of grudging fascination. “Close, but not entirely correct. The Sleepers were the ultimate expression of Hitler’s scorched-earth policy. They were built to destroy the world if he could not conquer it. One humanoid, one winged, one an enormous bomb—the first three were to join together, dig their way close to the Earth’s core, and detonate. The fourth was a living volcano, meant to speed the planet’s geologic destruction. The fifth, an unstoppable tank intended to overwhelm any who tried to stop the others. Had they been used that way, they might have fulfilled their purpose.”
The recitation kept them both entranced, conjuring images of a giant’s riveted feet; of vast metallic wings that blocked out the sun, darkening the sky; and the bomb that prefigured, yet exceeded, the first nuclear weapons.
Only Schmidt’s loud tsk brought them back into the room. “But instead I tried to use them piecemeal for my own plans. After all, one needs the world intact in order to conquer it.”
Seeing no need to mention the blur of red, white, and blue that had prevailed against the enormous machines, he fell silent.
Zola’s question, by dint of his nature, was pragmatic. “If you knew there were more Sleepers, why keep them hidden? There were countless times you could have used such power.”
Resentment flashed in Schmidt’s eyes. “Because their very existence is an insult. They were built based on the notion that I might fail to destroy Captain America. At the time, Hitler was unable to imagine his own defeat, but he did consider the possibility he might be driven into hiding. These, the very first Sleepers, were intended to seek out democracy’s most powerful propaganda symbol, analyze his weaknesses, and assemble into a fearsome battle suit designed solely to obliterate him. And would Hitler give that honor to me, his right hand? No. He intended to wear it himself. Captain America’s death at his hands would show the world the Reich had risen again.” He closed his fingers around the object and squeezed until it was lost from sight. “But destroying Rogers was my mission, you see. And I have no idea where the pieces were hidden, or even what they look like!”
For a moment, Schmidt worried his hand had seized again. With some effort, he opened his fist and stared at what it held. “Wounded pride may have blinded me to other opportunities, yet I still have the Sonikey today as a result.”
The Skull squinted at a dried fleck on its edge. “A bit of dried intestine, I believe. Useful for your experiments?”
“No, thank you. I have plenty of those DNA samples. I was thinking that splicing them with the genes of a house cat might make for an interesting, if obstinate, pet. But let me say I admire your choice to die in battle with your greatest foe.”
“Didn’t you hear me? I do not plan to die at all. I admit not knowing all the project details—the power source is particularly mysterious—but I do know the battle suit was designed to keep its occupant alive under the most extreme circumstances imaginable. Apparently our former leader was concerned that when the time came he might be quite old, even ill.”
Zola remained dubious. “The Nazi researchers could imagine quite a few human extremes, given the experiments they conducted in the camps, but I’m afraid even they could not stop this virus.”
“Careful, doctor. Your pragmatism begins to border on pessimism. I don’t imagine the Sleepers will provide a cure—just a way to outlive your prognosis. If the suit keeps me alive an extra month, there may be a way to extend that even further. Do you think you could find a cure in a year?”
“I don’t know.”
Perhaps Schmidt should have expected the robotically neutral answer. Instead, he found himself wondering how much an android interested in “correcting” evolution would genuinely care if he, or all humanity for that matter, perished.
But he had to trust someone.
“Now, now.” Schmidt nodded again toward the pile of broken crystal. “That glass was half full, why not another?”
“Very well. If I don’t know that I will fail, it’s possible I will succeed.”
Schmidt pressed a button on the base of the Sonikey. Low lights danced along its surface—thin lines traveling an intricate copper path, growing thicker and stronger as they moved faster and faster.
The Red Skull sneered. “And if nothing else, at least I will destroy Rogers.”
6
HISTORY DOESN’T EXIST WITHOUT SOMEONE READING IT.
VACATIONING in Paris to celebrate her new linguistics degree, Pennsylvania-born Sabine Fertig had already taken her photo with the large metal and glass Pyramide du Louvre at the main entrance to the famous museum. Now she was in the nearby mall, hoping to do the same with La Pyramide Inversée, a smaller, upside-down version that acted as a magnificent skylight.
Like millions of others, she’d read the famous 2003 novel in which the little solid pyramid beneath the skylight was secretly the tip of a full-size, buried tomb containing the remains of Mary Magdalene. But that was just a book. Having seen videos of its installation, she knew the stone shape was as it appeared: just three feet tall.
She still wanted a photo, though.
Unable to find an obliging shopper, she was holding her new digital camera out in front of herself and her six-month-old daughter, Irma, when something tiny landed in her eye.
After blinking it out, she looked up, thinking it had fallen from the skylight. When another small object hit her cheek, she pushed Irma and her stroller to a safe distance before looking again.
The sunlight streaming through the faceted glass was bright enough to illuminate a few specks of floating dust, but nothing seemed loose or falling. Chalking up her concern to motherly paranoia, Sabine was about to leave—then rubbed her cheek.
Whatever hit her was still on her skin. Afraid it might be glass, she gingerly plucked it off. Curious, she rubbed it between her thumb and forefinger. It felt like rough stone or concrete. Looking back at the small pyramid on the floor, she noticed a tiny crack along one of its faces.
She pushed the stroller closer. As she did, something too small to make out clearly popped out from one end of the crack and arced to the tiled floor, leaving a tiny cloud of particles hanging in the air along its path.
She backed up, but kept watching.
Was it an insect? Maybe, but it was so tiny—smaller than any insect had a right to be. Did they have especially small insects in Paris? Could it just be a piece of stone? Was the little pyramid crumbling?
She searched her new camera for the video setting. If she caught the crack getting bigger, a clip might be worth something. Another pop—not loud enough to turn heads, but louder than the first�
��made her decide it was more important to put some distance between Irma and whatever was going on.
A stone wall on the opposite side of the space seemed far enough for safety’s sake. Once she reached it, Sabine felt she should tell someone. It was a famous landmark, after all, and she had come to Europe to try out her new degree. A mall guard, bobbing on the balls of his feet with his hands clasped behind his back, stood nearby.
Gamely, she walked up with the stroller. When he looked at her, she smiled and gave him her best French:
“Il ya une fissure dans la petite pyramide.”
She was pretty sure she’d said, “There’s a crack in the little pyramid.”
But the guard only seemed puzzled. “Une fissure?”
She nodded enthusiastically. “Oui, une fissure dans la petite pyramide.”
When this didn’t clear things up, she added, “Je pense que ce pourrait être des ânes.”
She’d hoped to say, “I think it might be insects,” but worried she’d used the word for donkeys instead. Judging from the guard’s reaction, she had. If anything, he seemed a little offended.
“La pyramide est la pierre solide. Il ne peut pas simplement se fissurer.”
Something about the pyramid being solid stone, unable to crack. Sabine was about to try to show him the darn crack, but Irma started squealing.
The guard smiled and made a baby face. “Peut-être que votre enfant a besoin de ses couches changé?”
But it wasn’t a soiled-diaper squeal, a sound Sabine knew well. This was more like Irma’s cooing when she’d seen giraffes for the first time, at the Parc Zoologique de Paris that morning.
The guard bent over the carriage, smiled, and waved, but Irma ignored him.
Sabine realized Irma was staring at the pyramid.
The crack wasn’t simply widening—chunks of stone were falling from it.
Sabine was frozen just long enough to see a flat metal triangle, three feet tall, flop out of the little pyramid as if hatching from a stone egg. By the time other shoppers began to notice, she was already pushing Irma and the carriage toward the nearest exit.
The last she saw of the metal triangle, it was unfolding. Still flat, it was making itself larger, one triangle at a time. After that, she didn’t bother looking back. She’d done her duty. It was the guard’s problem now.
At first she trotted. When she heard the screams and racing steps behind her, she ran, pushing a now-sobbing Irma as quickly as she could.
“It’s all right, it’s all right,” she said to the carriage.
But a booming voice turned Irma’s cries into a wail:
“Wo ist Kapitän Amerika?”
Sabine only assumed the voice was coming from the triangles, but she wasn’t about to check. The exit still seemed a million miles away when the voice came again:
“Wo ist Kapitän Amerika?”
It was mechanical, crackly, as if recorded a hundred years ago and played back through poorly connected speakers. At least it didn’t sound any closer. It spoke German, another language she knew, but the rush to get her child to safety made her mind a muddle.
Who? Why? What?
Scores of fleeing shoppers on either side, she burst through the exit onto the pavilion outside the Louvre. Once in the open air, it came to her.
Where.
It was saying, over and over: “WHERE IS CAPTAIN AMERICA?”
* * *
EVEN before Nia N’Tomo reached the huge cargo bay, she’d been feeling small. Nia had ample experience with the sense of dread nearly all hot-zone workers encounter in the presence of deadly pathogens, but she’d never seen anything remotely like this virus. Though awed by its intricate beauty, she was equally terrified by the implications of its design—and struggling against a growing sense of helplessness.
Contributing to a solution would help, but so far, Dr. Kade had second-guessed her every thought. She’d suggested using the same model he’d used to predict the symptoms to simulate the virus’s interactions with known vaccines, only to learn he already had half the Helicarrier’s mainframes devoted to the task. There was some comfort in believing a potential “hit” could happen any time, but all the variables made it a roulette game with nearly infinite odds.
There had to be some other path. But like S.H.I.E.L.D., the immune system could only respond to threats it was able to recognize. The T and B lymphocytes that kept viroids from replicating, even tagged them for destruction, relied on known patterns. A vaccine could “teach” the body to destroy a new virus—but something unfamiliar, causing no symptoms, was essentially invisible.
She had left the lab to help Dr. Dawson supervise the arrival of the third scanner. Updating it with the latest viroid model would enable faster detection and give her time to follow the flow of her own instincts.
After all, Kade was brilliant, not omniscient. Not that the mainstream press would have you believe otherwise. Hoping to ease their collaboration by being more knowledgeable about his work, Nia briefly looked him up. Scores of news hubs listed his accomplishments, especially in Manfi, but even the few medical sites she had time to check failed to turn up any details that might help her get a better handle on his style.
With the Helicarrier still under quarantine, the delivery from Stark Industries Napoli was made by a drone hover-flier. Watching the pilotless vehicle swoop into its assigned landing spot so effortlessly reminded her how much humanity could achieve. That helped. And though it wasn’t a high bar to reach, Dr. Dawson proved far more genial than Kade.
But while the large crate was being loaded on a pallet, the cargo bay erupted with flashing red lights. As klaxons brayed, N’Tomo instinctively grabbed a handrail. Just in time, too. The floor tilted under their feet, and she found herself steadying Dr. Dawson to keep him from falling.
“Are we under attack?” she asked him. “Have we been hit?”
After regaining his balance, he pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose and focused on what she thought was a sleek wristwatch—but along with the time, it projected a wealth of real-time data along the white sleeve of his lab coat.
“No, it’s a priority-one course change,” he said with some relief. “We’re responding to an alert in Paris. ETA is about an hour.”
An hour? Paris was at least 4,000 kilometers away. How fast could the Helicarrier move?
Before she could ask, Fury’s voice was in her ear. “Dr. N’Tomo, you’re needed in Lab 247 stat. I gotta clear some agents for field work, and your colleague’s giving me a heaping ton of—”
A loud beeping drowned him out. Once the carrier steadied, she headed for the nearest corridor, but hesitated at the sight of the bustling crew.
Dawson called after her. “Do you need help?”
“I’ll find it, thanks.”
The hurried crew racing to their stations didn’t slow her down—she already knew a shortcut. She opened the lab door to find an unsurprising argument in progress: the gaunt Kade holding steady against a freely reddening Col. Fury. Steve Rogers, meanwhile, politely sat in his isolation chamber looking unsure whether to be concerned or amused.
“It would be advisable to allow the local authorities to handle this!”
Fury stepped closer, intentionally invading Kade’s personal space. “I keep tellin’ you they don’t have the training or the equipment to handle a freakin’ giant killer robot!” Kade’s lack of reaction only made him angrier. “Which of the three words don’t you get? Giant, killer, or robot?”
Whatever the threat in Paris actually was, Nia was pleased to think she had an easy compromise. “Why not just use the field agents we’ve already cleared?”
Kade gritted his teeth. Fury beamed. “THANK you! That’s all I’ve been asking.”
Realizing she’d accidentally sided against the world’s best epidemiologist, Nia tried to mitigate her tone.
“Which is not to say I don’t appreciate the need for caution—”
Fury didn’t give her a chance to fi
nish. “But you don’t agree.”
She thought a moment. The scanner that cleared the agents was the same one that had identified the virus in the first place. If they couldn’t trust the scanner, there was no basis to believe the virus existed at all. It was the right call.
“No. I don’t.”
Giving her a thumbs up, the colonel headed for the door, barking into his comm. “Tell CDC we’ve got approval to scramble teams one through four. Jacobs is on point. On my way to monitor from the bridge.”
Dr. Kade didn’t so much as look at her. He just sighed deeply and stepped pointedly back to his work. She was debating whether to approach him, to better explain, when Steve’s voice stopped Fury from leaving.
“Nick, from what I’m seeing on the news, this thing is World War II-era Nazi tech.”
“What’s on the news?” Nia asked.
Still eyeing Fury, Steve held up the laptop for her to see.
Her French was fluent, but she had to look twice before believing the crawl did in fact say giant killer robot. Mouth open, she glanced at the director. “I assumed you were using a metaphor.”
Fury hadn’t moved from the door. “Nah. When you got a giant killer robot, who needs metaphors?”
The rest of the screen showed a shaky feed from a helicopter above the Louvre. Part of the pavilion was covered by what looked like rubble from a huge bomb blast—only the rubble was animate. The dull metal collection took on a variety of hard geometric shapes—but in between, it seemed fluid, like an amoeba.
Newly agitated, Dr. Kade shook a bony finger at the director. “We shouldn’t even be discussing this in front of him! And didn’t we agree it would be best if he didn’t receive any alerts?”
Fury grimaced. “He hasn’t. Not from me or my crew. But I guess we both forgot he can stream CNN in there.”
Steve ignored them. “Nick, Nazi tech. So…the Skull?”
“Maybe. You, uh…must be getting sound, too, right?”
“Oh, yeah.” Steve raised the volume.
A voice, rendered tinny by the small speakers, floated into the lab: “Wo ist Kapitän Amerika?”
Marvel Novels--Captain America Page 5