Kade threw up his hands in disgust. “Well, this is just perfect, isn’t it?”
Rogers gave Fury a meaningful look.
“Okay, Cap, okay. Don’t let your head swell. That ain’t live—it’s just some recording from the good old days. The whole thing is probably just an antique weapon the Nazis forgot about that accidentally activated, like those unexploded bombs we used to find all over London.”
“Maybe, but I’d recognize that voice anywhere.”
Fury nodded. “Adolf Hitler. Yeah, we’ve already confirmed that it’s him.”
“Wo ist Kapitän Amerika?”
Steve was on his feet so suddenly, Nia couldn’t help but remember that he was not a normal man. “And you weren’t planning to mention that it’s asking for me?”
Fury crossed his arms over his chest. “No, I wasn’t, and you know damn well why. That thing can knock all it wants, but Captain America can’t come out to play.”
Seeing the director’s determination, Kade receded to the back of the lab, and his work. Steve, however, looked as if he might actually pace.
Nia had seen many patients stuck in isolation for weeks, even months. Construction workers, farmers—anyone accustomed to being on the move had the hardest time with it. And here was Captain America. Disciplined as he was, it had to be terribly challenging for him to remain in that small space.
Doubly so when there was a threat calling him out by name.
She turned to Fury. “Colonel, could Captain Rogers act as an adviser to the ground team?”
He nodded instantly. “I usually call the shots, but hell, yeah. I can have the feeds pumped in here.”
Steve’s face remained stoic, but Nia saw his shoulders relax a bit. “I’ll do what I can.”
Kade—listening in and apparently still not recovered from his confrontation with Fury—shook as he started to speak. “I’d rather…”
But he didn’t finish. He spun back to his desk. “Never mind. It’s a good idea, Dr. N’Tomo. At least no one’s trying to send him into combat.”
Ignoring him, Fury grinned widely at Steve, forcing him to ask, “What?”
“Never thought of you as an armchair general.”
Nia smiled with them until her gaze returned to Kade, hunched over the computers, shifting images of proteins, capsids, and nucleic acids. She respected him incredibly, but instead of expressing her admiration, she’d interfered with his role with the CDC. And now, in minutes, she’d stepped on his toes twice more.
She should speak with him privately, clear the air, as soon as the situation allowed. If he allowed.
She imagined him bristling at the thought, arguing that her foolish social concerns would rob precious minutes from saving the world.
And…he was probably right.
7
HISTORY IS ALSO WRITTEN BY THE WINNER.
BY THE time the Helicarrier arrived in Paris airspace, the conference table crowding the lab had been replaced with an equally large monitor array, mounted in front of the quarantine chamber. There was one screen for each of the twelve field agents, three for onsite security-camera feeds, and a sixteenth for a free-flying drone.
Rogers stood pressed against the glass, watching with mixed feelings. Good as it was to be able to do something, studying the drone’s distant overhead image made him wish he was on the ground.
Nia and Kade kept their distance, both from the operation and each other. Cap and Fury were essentially free to talk.
“It started as a single triangle that just came out of some stone?”
Fury, leaning heavily against a nearby wall, nodded. “Not just any stone. The Nazis used the Louvre as a clearinghouse for their stolen artwork. After the liberation, that museum came under a lot of scrutiny, so we’ve got the records. Turns out they were planning to erect a new vault with stones shipped direct from Berlin. It never got built, but one of the blocks wound up being used to carve that little pyramid. Apparently, it already had one side cut at the appropriate angle.”
So far, any destruction was an incidental result of the robot’s shifting shape. Whenever it changed, the triangles shredded anything in their path, rendering the pavilion too dangerous for local enforcement to do more than evacuate civilians and establish a perimeter.
After configuring itself a dozen ways, the triangles had settled into a headless double-diamond with rising peaks on either side. It spread out so widely, so quickly, that at times it looked as if the Nazis, having once failed to hold Paris, were determined to cover it completely.
Rogers concentrated on the overhead view. “It’s been testing itself, trying out its full capacities.”
“On the lighter side, unless someone’s controlling it remotely, that may be all it ever does,” Fury said.
Cap shook his head grimly. “I’ve fought Nazi robots before. Remember the Sleepers? They didn’t need a remote control. They were entombed in a crypt at the bottom of the ocean until the Skull woke them. After that, they acted on their own.”
“Sue me for being an optimist, but yeah, you got me there.”
“The Nazis made some incredible breakthroughs. The Sleepers may not have had true A.I., but their programming routines were highly sophisticated. Even with an Army unit helping, I couldn’t keep the first three from combining. If I hadn’t managed to detonate the bomb it carried before it could dig into the earth, it actually might have destroyed the planet.” He tapped the glass. “Not that this thing isn’t impressive in its own right. How did all that fit into one three-foot pyramid?”
“Some kind of compression. Each piece is thousands of times thinner than the original, making them all razor-sharp and a lot less dense. Even so, that little pyramid should’ve weighed 100 tons. Not only that, resonance imagery is telling us about 10 percent of them are hollow. They’re puffed up with some kind of gas, probably created by a chemical reaction when it was activated.”
“Gas?”
Before Fury responded, two large shadows appeared on the pavilion. “There are the hover-fliers. Any luck, and a few blasts of good ol’ fashioned, unintelligent flying lead will shred the thing.”
The familiar voice of the team leader, Agent Jacobs, came over the comm. “Thirty seconds to landing. Good to work with you again, Captain. Kinda the opposite of last time, huh? Can we get a zoom on that overhead?”
Rogers agreed. “Good idea. Move the drone in.”
As the drone descended toward the gray metal sea, its high-res image confirmed what the inferior security cameras saw: Each triangle was featureless, perfectly flat. There were no markings, no patterns, no visible variations at all.
As the craft steadied some 10 yards up, the voice boomed out again.
“Wo ist Kapitän Amerika?”
A tendril composed of triangles snapped up toward the drone.
“Evasive action,” Rogers said. His order was redundant. The pilot, sitting safely at the controls somewhere on the Helicarrier, was way ahead of him. Its small vertical turbines whining, the drone rose up and away. In comparison, the metallic limb was awkward, clunky in its movements. It looked like an easy escape for the drone—until, as if suddenly realizing its true abilities, the ad-hoc limb shot up.
The screen was briefly covered in dull gray, then went dead.
Dawson tsked. “Not the view I was hoping for, but now we know it’s responsive to its environment.”
Rogers frowned. He didn’t like this. The fact that it reacted to the drone and not the civilians meant it was making targeting distinctions. Things could escalate. If he couldn’t be there himself, someone like him needed to be.
“Nick, have you contacted any big guns yet?”
“Yeah. Part of protocol. Most of the Avengers are engaged elsewhere, to put it mildly, but someone’s on the way. We were just close enough to arrive on scene first.”
“Ready to disembark,” Jacobs reported.
“Take up positions, but do not engage.” That felt as useless as his last command to the drone. He was
a relative newcomer to watching a set of screens with his hands tied. Fury, his gaze dancing from monitor to monitor, was the professional.
Rogers decided to focus on Jacobs’ feed. Keeping the team leader in mind might make him feel more like he was there.
It did, but as the twelve agents in body armor exited the hover-fliers, he didn’t like what he was feeling at all. Having fought dozens of impossible foes, Rogers wanted to treat this like any other unknown. You don’t charge in—you probe for reactions, for strengths, for weaknesses, trying to get as much information as possible in exchange for the least risk.
But his gut was telling him different. It was telling him the risk was already too high.
“Let’s try the nets.”
“All of them?” Jacobs asked.
It was a reasonable question. The S.H.I.E.L.D. electronets delivered 10 times the charge required to knock out a bull elephant. Six could put down the Hulk for a good five minutes; among them, the field agents had twice that number. Unless the construct was purely mechanical, like some kind of giant wind-up toy, the nets wouldn’t just fry its wiring—they would melt it.
That would make it harder to study what was left and source its construction, but it would be safer.
“Yes, all of them.”
Fury gave him a look, but said nothing.
Swapping sidearms for launchers, the agents took aim. With any luck, the thing would crumple and collapse.
“On my mark. Three…two…one.”
Twelve nets soared over the gray field, reaching their apex at nearly the same time. Each fanned into a 10-foot web, pulled down by weights at each corner, as visible energy arced along the strands. The execution was textbook-perfect.
But 12 tendrils rose in response, one beneath each net. Rather than knock them out of the sky as it had the drone, the thing sent more triangles sliding up the tendrils, encasing each net in a crude geodesic dome.
The flash as the nets made contact briefly turned the domes a lighter gray. The powerful charge had some effect: The domes collapsed, and the triangles fluttered downward—but then they were absorbed into the wide surface, seemingly none the worse for wear.
What was left of the nets, charred black, hit the ground soon after.
But the giant killer robot wasn’t done. Like a lake responding to a boulder dropped in its center, a large wave headed toward the twelve agents, rending the pavilion as it moved.
“Wo ist Kapitän Amerika?”
It was a recording, yes—but for the first time, Rogers wondered whether the words had any meaning for the machine. If it could respond so quickly to their attacks, how much else did it understand about its environment, and its mission?
Fury grunted. “Last I checked, we won that war, didn’t we?”
“Break formation!” Rogers barked. “Give it as many targets as you can! Get to cover, but don’t fire! It may not react if it doesn’t sense a threat!”
Obeying, the agents scattered, moving away from each other and the quickening metal wave. At first it continued dead ahead. But then it split in pieces, twelve in all, each gaining in speed what had been lost in mass. It was still hard to tell whether they moved by momentum or were being directed—until each curved toward one of the fleeing figures.
Fury tensed and leaned forward. “Damn.”
The triangles would reach the slower agents in seconds. A second later, all of them.
Rogers ached to be there, where his enhanced body would make the lag between thought and deed irrelevant. From here, by the time he issued an order, it might be too late.
“We have to distract it with a larger threat. Hover-Flier 1, prepare to fire—”
Before he could finish, the image from Jacobs’ feed turned to face the oncoming wall. Close up, the sharp, slashing edges looked like anything but a wave.
“Jacobs, what are you doing?”
“Creating a larger threat.”
The barrel of Jacobs’ sidearm came into view.
Rogers screamed. “Get out of there!”
There were flashes as the bullets fired, pings and sparks as they bounced off the metal. As if learning, the thing reacted faster this time. The remaining eleven waves turned toward the twelfth, giving the other agents a breather.
Not so Jacobs.
He kept firing. The bullets had no effect. Rogers watched the wall of flashing edges draw closer and closer to Jacobs’ open position. The hover-flier was just beginning to rise when Jacobs’ screen went black.
Jacobs was down, his condition unknown. The threat gone, the robot was already turning back toward the others. Rogers kept barking orders. “Don’t waste this! Evac Plan 2B.”
Seeing his pained expression, Fury covered his comm and said, “You’d have done the same.”
Rogers covered his. “I might have survived.”
Eyes back on the monitors, he watched as the remaining agents began to reach the hover-fliers. “Do not lift off! You saw what happened to the drone. Get the pilots out and head for the perimeter.”
The teams all but tore the pilots from their seats. The robot reassembled, its pieces quivering, ready for another attack. But, as if it had proven its point, it didn’t move.
Rogers switched off his mic again. “If I was there, I could—”
“Infect the world? Imagine how you’d feel then.”
“Right. Of course. But this, Fury—watching it all through screens instead of being there—how do you do this every day?”
“Because I have to. Gives you an idea why I don’t much care for breaches in the command structure.” A loud beeping turned them back to the screens. “Speaking of which, things just might be looking up. Old friend of yours just arrived. I bet you he’s not going to listen to orders, either.”
A familiar voice came through the comm. “Hey, old man. Heard you got some kind of flu or something, so I figured I’d pitch in.”
Rogers’ relief was palpable. “Tony?”
8
IF THEY’RE GONE, NO ONE WILL FRET THEIR QUESTIONS OR PONDER THEIR EXISTENCE. NO ONE EXCEPT ME.
TWO NEW feeds appeared on the monitor array. One showed a line of explosions forming a hot wall between the robot and the fleeing agents. The second showed the face of Tony Stark, the no-longer-a-boy genius who’d inherited his father’s looks, brains, company, and wealth. Eyes dancing from point to point to point at his armor’s readouts, he occasionally paused to look at the camera.
“Gotta hand it to those Nazi scientists. They really—” he cut himself off. “Nah, on second thought, I don’t have to hand them anything. Well, maybe their posthumous ass. Asses? What’s the proper grammatical construct here?”
The helter-skelter way he spoke made him seem self-involved and unfocused. Stark was certainly self-involved, but Rogers had figured out long ago that his fellow Avenger was far from unfocused. He was focused on everything.
It was just that his mouth had trouble keeping up.
Even his armor’s red-and-yellow color scheme had been a careful choice: Iron Man looked like a hurtling flame. The security cameras showed that flame streaking low across the pavilion, firing scores of miniature missiles at the undulating bed of triangles.
Rogers was about to tell him to check on the fallen agent, but Stark beat him to the punch: “Don’t contact Mrs. Jacobs just yet. That body armor is better than we thought. He still has a pulse. On it. Hey, Fury, if he pulls through, are you going to reprimand him for disobeying orders or give him a bonus for saving lives?”
“Both,” Fury answered, unable to suppress a grin at the news. “Stark, remind me again why you’re the only guy who always has a second camera pointed at his kisser?”
As Iron Man snagged Jacobs’ still form, his response came quick and easy. “Because I’m that handsome? Nah, plenty of posed photos for that.”
Rogers voiced the answer they all knew. “Visual intelligence for life support. The suit can practically move on its own, so it’s a way to tell if you’re still alive in there
if the other data feeds fail.”
Stark beamed. “See? Ol’ Cap gets me.”
He hovered to better scan the metal field. The thing still didn’t attack, but its pieces gnashed like a thousand metal teeth. When Iron Man drifted lower, Rogers got that feeling in his gut again.
“Careful. It can be pretty quick.”
A tendril shot out, still awkward, but faster. Not nearly fast enough, though. Stark slipped to the side so suddenly he seemed to vanish from one spot and reappear in another.
“Like that? Hakuna matata. I was hoping to get that reaction. I couldn’t snag the whole thing at once, but now, I can do this.”
A stream of energy shot from his palm. Caught in a stasis beam, the triangles creaked and strained against the resistance.
“Not going to hold hands for long, but maybe long enough for my scanners to get a better idea of what makes it tick.” After a beat, he spoke again. “Huh. Answer unclear, ask again later. Maybe a Stone Age version of swarm robotics? Here in 2005, we use algorithms to synchronize a swarm, but these puppies seem to operate organically, like the way all those molecules in your eye somehow know they’re supposed to be shaped like an eye.”
The tendril suddenly lost its form, the pieces tumbling back into the body.
“Oh. Okay. I meant for that to happen. While we’re waiting like two seconds for my onboard system to fully process the scans, do we have a name yet for our big isosceles buddy?”
Fury shrugged. “I’m good with ‘giant killer robot.’”
“I’ll stick with ‘the thing,’ then. Can’t get a handle on the power source, but it’s definitely a lot more pianola than microprocessor. All its actions and reactions are a set of predetermined routines.”
Tony was the A.I. expert, but Rogers still felt an intelligence present. Maybe it was the designer’s intelligence, reflected in crude programming, but it was still an intelligence.
“Just…don’t underestimate it. We have to be careful. We need a plan.”
Stark rolled his eyes. “Fine. Here’s a plan: Blast it to smithereens. I can do a lot better than those nets. They’re so last year—I know because I designed them.”
Marvel Novels--Captain America Page 6