It didn’t move at all until he landed. Then, once again, it tore toward him. Ready this time, he darted to the left. He nearly made it, but a loud clang filled his ears. The sphere had hit the armor’s right boot. Warning messages flashed across the control screen. The boot had been dented.
“It’s okay,” Tony said. “I’ve got it insured. I think. Y’know, I’m just going to have a spare suit send itself our way so I can… Oh—look out!”
This time, Rogers avoided it completely. When the sphere came at the suit yet again, he recognized the pattern of clicks and whirrs it made before it moved, and only had to twitch himself out of the way like a hummingbird. After dodging a fourth and fifth time, he realized that like the first Sleeper, it was caught in a programming loop.
“We’re closer to the English Channel than the Atlantic. Maybe I can lead it there.”
“Take it slow. You saw what happened when it lost track of the Helicarrier,” Fury said. “I’ll try to establish a corridor along the shortest route.”
The optimistic plan didn’t last. After a few hundred yards, the sphere came too close for comfort again, raking his heel.
“Steve, you’re thinking in two dimensions. Remember, you can also move up.”
Tony’s advice was good, but something else was going on. Had he mistimed his reaction, or was the Sleeper learning?
“I’m going to increase speed to—”
The final word never came out of his mouth. Without any clicks at all, the sphere bolted at the armor—and hit. Once again, it pressed the suit hard into the ground. Cap raised the thrusters to the halfway mark, but the sphere vibrated and held it in place.
The clanking mechanism inside it grew louder and faster. The gray surface lightened, then reddened with heat. More warning messages flashed on the HUD, tracking the rapidly rising temperature.
Rogers raised the thrust to 80 percent, but the sphere, smoldering now, was not letting the armor go. The heating technique reminded him of a different battle, one that had taken place years ago, against what he thought a more intelligent machine.
“The fourth Sleeper generated heat bursts, like a volcano.”
“I’m getting its schematics from the S.H.I.E.L.D. archives now,” Stark said. “Oh, yeah, some of the components match. Our new friend looks like an earlier effort. I don’t think it’s capable of volcanic temps, but it’s still not something you want to be around when it blows.”
Rogers pressed the lever all the way.
With a horrid scraping, the armor tore free. At the same moment, a wave of impossible heat burst from the orb. The air didn’t burn, but everything else did: Vines, fencing, and earth all turned to ash. Their monitors were reduced to blocky static; the sound from the speakers became a vague crackling. Rogers let go of the thrust, but had no way of knowing whether the autopilot still worked.
Long, deathly silent moments passed before the armor’s cameras came back online. It was hovering about 100 yards above the Sleeper, the suit’s surface clouded by a stream of coolant hissing along the armor’s surface. The sphere, not quite yet cool, was at the center of a flaming circle that stretched over a mile. In the distance, he saw blackened, smoking vehicles and several burning homes. He prayed they’d all been empty.
His mind had yet to take it all in before the dictator again spoke from beyond the grave:
“Sie sind nicht Kapitän Amerika.”
You are not Captain America.
Tony voiced what he’d already guessed. “It’s on to us. The blast fried the circuitry broadcasting your biometrics. We’ve got to do something before it engages a new routine.”
“Blast it?”
“Not right now. The beam weaponry was damaged, too. I can reroute the power, but it’ll take me a minute. See if you can keep it busy.”
“Okay. We know it’s hollow—let’s see if it can crack.”
“Uh, not exactly what I meant…”
Rogers pushed the thrusters to the max. As the suit careened toward the Sleeper, he wished it really was his shield. The sound it always made when it struck told him a lot about his foes. What the shield conveyed was wordless, informing not his mind, but his whole body, his muscle memory, allowing him to forge himself into a better weapon for the next strike.
The bright flash on the screen at the moment of impact gave him nothing. The suit’s camera continued functioning, but it only showed a swirling blur. He had to look to the monitor array and single out a drone’s distant feed to get even a slight sense of what had happened. There, he saw that Stark’s pride and joy, the cutting edge of the cutting edge, had bounced off the smooth, featureless sphere like a dented ping-pong ball.
At least he’d remembered to let go of the thrust lever.
The armor, leaving a long trail of puffy white smoke, nearly left the drone’s visual range before slowing. As it did, a piece tumbled from it like a bit of wreckage from a failed rocket. As the suit’s camera steadied, he trained it on the debris.
It was an arm. He’d broken it. He’d broken the suit.
Stark took it in stride, or seemed to. “I’d make a joke about you costing me an arm and a leg, but I’m too busy stabilizing what’s left to… Hold on. Crap! The Sleeper’s up to something new.”
Rogers snapped the armor’s head back to the ground. The orb was spinning. Far different from its lightning-quick strikes, this rotation started slowly, like a massive turbine moaning to life. Faster and faster it went, until it looked as if the centrifugal force might hurl it apart. All the while, it stayed in place, not kicking up so much as a clump of earth—as if the ground beneath it were air.
“Tony, any idea what’s it doing?”
“All that running in place could be converting one form of energy to another, maybe to power up for another heat blast, or…”
As Stark spoke, it moved again, advancing beyond the parched land toward a steep hill. Beyond it lay a rural village smaller than the perimeter of the last heat blast.
Rogers tensed. “It must have detected the civilians. It’s going for the town!”
“I’ll get the weapons back online. You get in close enough, and we can fry the sucker.”
Rogers sent the armor after the Sleeper. He cut it off easily and activated the targeting. The sundered arm joined in, zipping through the air to add its firepower.
The crack of the electric bolt was so sharp and deep, Rogers swore he felt it in his chest. Ionized by the discharge, the air between the suit and the Sleeper became a darker blue. The beam warped around the spinning surface, briefly covering it in a writhing second skin—and then the sphere absorbed it.
Rather than slow its advance, the attack had sped it up.
As it turned out, they didn’t have to worry about the citizens. When the sphere reached the crest of the hill, it passed straight into the air.
Even Stark was so stunned all he could do was state the obvious.
“And now, well…it’s flying. Yep. It’s flying. It was never headed for the town. It’s headed for us.”
14
IN THE END, WHAT’S WORTH MORE—ME, OR THE THINGS THAT MAKE ME FEEL ALIVE?
LAB 247 shuddered as the three sixth-generation fighter jets scrambled from the Helicarrier airstrip. Graceful as eagles—but four times faster—they sped toward their target.
Rogers maxed the thrust, but the armor lagged behind, its batteries recharging from the electric blast. Again, he wished he were out there facing the enemy head-on. The closer the sphere got, the more the safety of his quarantine chamber became an illusion, anyway.
But that kind of thinking was nothing more than a distraction. He had to focus on what he could do.
The armor began catching up, but not because it was going any faster. The Sleeper was slowing down. When the jet bays opened and deployed their missiles, it slowed even more.
Almost as if it was waiting for them.
“Nick, tell the jets to back off. Now!”
Fury didn’t ask why—he simply relayed the
command.
Two of the jets were already veering off when the sky filled with the light of a second sun. The heat wave hit the approaching missiles first. Their premature explosions rattled the jets. The pilots who were already turning rode out the concussive wave, skimming it as if surfing. The third pilot was not so lucky. The explosions hit head-on, scorching the fuselage and sending his craft into a spin. Recognizing engine failure, he ejected.
Seeing the pilot’s chute billow, Rogers was briefly relieved—until the fabric fluttered in the heat and burst into flames.
Rogers aimed the armor toward the falling pilot. As he neared, readouts warned that the suit’s metal surface was hot enough to sear flesh. Rather than grab the pilot, he snagged the paracords. They smoldered, but held. Tearing the burning chute free, he carried the airman to the Helicarrier deck.
He wasn’t sure whether he’d saved the pilot or merely condemned him to a different kind of death. No longer hindered by the jets, the Sleeper sped toward them. As soon as it was close enough for the Helicarrier’s forward guns to engage, the four 70mm electric cannons fired 200 rounds per second. All of them glanced off the sphere’s surface.
The Sleeper’s trajectory made it clear where it was headed—the hull just outside the lab.
“Tony, please tell me you’ve figured out how it’s flying.”
Out of ideas, Stark stood and slapped his thighs. “If I did, all due respect, I’d stop studying these readings and ask for my armor back. Best guess is electrogravitics, an electrical effect discovered by Thomas Townsend Brown in the 1920s. It relies on a corona discharge to produce an ionic wind that can transfer its momentum to surrounding neutral particles—”
The orb’s impact seconds away, Steve cut him off. “Anti-gravity?”
“Yeah, okay, anti-gravity. But really, you could have said that.”
“How do we stop it?”
“There are drill bits in the armor’s fingertips tipped with boron nitride, harder than diamond,” Stark said, scrambling. “They might be able to dig into the sphere and mess with its innards, but not while it’s rotating like that. It’d take a million-to-one shot for the armor to latch on, let alone hold on long enough for the drills to get deep enough to—”
The sphere hit. The Helicarrier lurched sideways, and Stark, Rogers, and most of the crew were hurled off their feet. As the great ship listed, a horrible crunching erupted from beyond the hull.
It was trying to get inside.
First back on his feet, Fury screamed, “We’ve got a triple hull with a 5-inch hardened alloy, a 12-inch layer of high-speed fragment suppressor after that, and then another layer of hardened armor. Are you telling me that thing can get through all that?”
Stark pulled himself up next. “Not saying it can.” The lights flickered. “Not saying it can’t.”
Lifting a bruised Kade, Nia called out. “Steve?”
“I’m fine.” The controller in his hands, it didn’t matter where he was, so he’d stayed on the floor. He maneuvered the armor through a sideways rain of projectiles. The suit’s camera showed the spinning Sleeper ahead, digging wildly into the hull. Most of the debris generated by its efforts was shattered by the Helicarrier’s cannon fire, while the sphere itself remained unharmed.
The fingers on the armor’s remaining hand grew sharp. Their tips spun and whined, telling Rogers that Stark had activated the drill bits. The onboard computer offered a series of tactical suggestions, many contradictory. He ignored them, preferring to rely on the tentative feel he’d developed for the armor. He accelerated as he approached, trying to match the speed of the sphere’s rotation. At the last instant, he curved the suit along the top of the stony blur and caught hold.
The suit gripped the surface by its one hand; the whirring fingertips dug in. As the armor was carried round and round, it enlarged the hole in the Helicarrier that the Sleeper was making. The rest of the view was a useless blur, but an extrapolated 3D image told Cap he’d managed to hang on for 436 rotations before the armor went flying off.
Inside the lab, the flickering lights died. The vibrations increased. The sphere was getting through.
Fury drew his sidearm and aimed it at the shaking wall. “I’ll be damned if some crap Nazi tech is going to bring down my 21st-century Helicarrier!”
Matching his intensity, Rogers shouted back. “Nick, there’s no contest! It wants me. Get everyone else out of here, now!”
Fury snarled, but then slipped the gun back into his holster. “You heard the man.”
Glancing through the glass, Rogers saw him herd the others toward the door.
Kade staggered along, muttering. “If the heat blast destroys the virus, at least our problem will be solved.”
Steve doubted the doctor cared whether he was heard or not. Seeing N’Tomo’s reluctance to leave, he nodded her on. Stark refused to budge until Fury actually shoved the billionaire. “I’ll be back. My auxiliary suit will be here in 60 seconds. The gloves don’t have the same drill bits, but…”
He stopped short. Gloves. Plural. Both Rogers and Stark had the idea at the same time, but Cap said it first. “The arm. It’s smaller than the whole suit. It would have a lot less trouble hanging on while it drills.”
As Fury continued pushing him into the corridor, Stark hit some buttons. “Yes! The arm! Use the arm! I’m un-synching it from the rest of the suit!”
The door closed. Lit only by flashing red emergency lights, Cap sat with his back to the glass, refusing to look over his shoulder as the tearing and creaking grew louder. His focus had to be on the controls.
The arm had been keeping pace with the rest of the body. Now it flew free. It was also much easier to maneuver than the whole suit.
Bits of fragmented metal sprayed the glass. The Sleeper had breached the hull. If it was a little smaller, it would have gotten to him already. Its 15-foot diameter forced it to eat through both ceiling and floor to reach the quarantine chamber.
Zeroing in on the controls, Cap tried to hook the arm into the side of the sphere that was still spinning in the open air. The first time, it bounced off—but the second time, it grabbed hold. Unlike the larger suit, the arm was able to cling to the surface as it whipped around and around.
The drill bits were working, boring five holes into the strange material, but the arm lacked the power of the whole, slowing their progress. As the sphere tore through the lab, the holes deepened. In a game of inches, each edged closer to its goal.
If the sphere breached the isolation glass, Rogers figured he’d have to try to get around it. Maybe he could head for the hole it left behind, lead it away. Thousands of feet up, he might be able to get the suit to catch him—but he would not, under any circumstances, further endanger the Helicarrier crew.
The finger holes widened and became one. The metal hand disappeared inside the sphere. He thought it might actually work... until the edge of the sphere touched the glass.
Then, Cap briefly wondered what that date with Nia would have been like.
But the sphere stopped.
A gentle smoke trail twirled from the hole left by the burrowing glove. The concave shape gouged in the glass told him how close the Sleeper had come. The wall seemed intact, but when he held his bare fingers up to it, he felt the coolness of the outside air.
15
IF I TRY TO BE OBJECTIVE, IT’S LIKE TRYING TO PICK ONE SNOWFLAKE OVER ANOTHER.
ONCE the remotely operated hydraulic lifters removed the second Sleeper, Dr. Kade insisted on resealing the chamber himself. His hazmat suit making the process cumbersome, he struggled to position the heavy vacuum seal over the indentation. Rogers could only watch.
Once the suction disk was in place, Kade straightened. “This is temporary. With hull integrity compromised, we have to move you.” In a rare show of sympathy, he added, “I’m afraid the secondary containment area will be less comfortable.”
Rogers raised an eyebrow. “Is there a window?”
Kade shrugged. “One. And
it’s a bit smaller. There’s something else I want to talk to you about.”
“Of course. I admit I don’t know a lot about your career, doctor, but Nia told me that you prevented an Ebola outbreak on your own. That’s impressive work, and I’m sure you faced some tough choices.”
“Thank you.” Kade’s face twitched, as if he were briefly struggling with the memory. In a way, it made the gaunt, fragile figure remind Rogers of himself before the Super-Soldier serum. Whatever Kade was feeling, he quickly put it aside. “That exactly the sort of situation I came to discuss. I’ve seen many hot-zone workers expose themselves to lethal diseases to comfort patients who are already dying and contagious. That strikes me as callous. If the workers sicken, they won’t be able to help others who could be saved. Yet when they surrender to this base communal instinct, something that even canines have, they’re called brave. Do you think those same instincts motivate you?”
Rogers frowned. They were more different than he realized. “If providing comfort to the dying means acting like a dog, maybe you underestimate dogs. Me, I’ve spent my life following the soldier’s creed, nemo resideo: leave no one behind. Risking my life on behalf of people otherwise considered lost may seem callous to you, but there’d be a lot of men and women dead right now if I hadn’t done just that. Any time I risk my life, I suppose I create the possibility I won’t be able to save anyone else in the future, but it comes with the territory.”
Not satisfied, Kade tried to explain further. “Let me give you a hypothetical. A train carrying 100 adults is headed for a cliff. You can activate a switch to change its course and save them. If you do, though, the train will kill a single child standing on the other track. Do you save the 100 adults or the single child?”
“I’d try to save both.”
He shook his head. “You can’t. You have to decide, don’t you see? You’re the one carrying the virus. When it comes down to it, you are the one responsible. How much I can trust you to make the right decisions is crucial to making my own.”
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