That did it. He conceded. “Very well. I’ll head to my quarters. But wake me in twenty minutes, and don’t attempt to access any of my files. I don’t want anything I’ve written misinterpreted.”
“Power napping” restored some energy, so she agreed. “Twenty minutes, then.”
That was an hour ago. She would have waited longer, but they were scheduled to be on the next hover-flier down.
As she neared the guest quarters, her mind buzzed with the arguments she imagined they’d have. They’d probably agree to move Schmidt, but dither over the precautions. She expected Kade to insist Rogers be placed immediately in cryogenic suspension. Yet if another device like that rod attacked while Steve was unable to defend himself, he’d be dead.
She shivered at the thought that the cautious doctor might prefer it that way.
Kade’s comm was off, at her insistence, but the private quarters had the equivalent of a doorbell. Reaching his room, she pressed it a few times, but there was no response.
Having once slept through a four-alarm fire after a grueling shift in Swaziland during the AIDS epidemic, Nia assumed he was dead to the world. Taking the old-fashioned route, she knocked. Hearing some sleepy mumbling, she pressed her ear to it.
“Dr. Kade?”
There was more mumbling, equally indistinct. She glanced at her watch. The hover-flier was leaving in twenty minutes. She could either start banging or try to get inside some other way.
She spoke into her comm. “Security, this is Dr. N’Tomo. I’m outside door 546. Can you please override Dr. Kade’s privacy lock? He’s not responding.”
“Do you need any assistance?”
“No, he’s been napping. I only want to wake him gently as possible.”
“Roger.”
The red light on the panel turned green. The door slid open.
Were it not for Kade’s continued murmuring, she would have thought the lightless room empty. The bed was still made—it hadn’t been slept in at all. Following the sound, she found him on the floor. He was in a fetal ball, wrapped in a single blanket, whimpering like a frightened child in the throes of a night terror.
She’d struggled to sympathize with him since they’d met, forcing herself to swallow her pride and make excuses for his rudeness. But this was the first time she truly felt for the man.
She gently touched his shoulder. “Dr. Kade?”
He gripped the blanket tighter. His murmuring, still unintelligible, grew louder.
She’d seen this sort of thing before. Doctors sent to hot zones, whether for their first or thousandth time, might make it as far as the perimeter, perfectly calm—then find themselves frozen in fear. Despite their best intentions, their whole being just rebelled at the knowledge of what could happen if they were infected.
Her crisis training had taught her to admit, process, and express those fears in a way that maintained emotional balance. But those programs were recent, their value still questioned. She couldn’t imagine Kade submitting himself to anything that might be a waste of time. These dreams might be his way of dealing.
But his face, which showed mostly irritation in its waking state, looked so sad.
She shook him. “Doctor?”
“It’s Manfi all over again. Had to. Had to.”
Manfi was the village in Sierra Leone where he’d singlehandedly prevented an Ebola outbreak. It must have been horrific. No doubt there were difficult decisions. There always were in hot zones. But the reports described him as a hero. What was it he could possibly have done there that he wouldn’t remember with pride?
Kade’s eyes popped open. His pupils rolled around a moment, disoriented. Realizing he was holding onto the blanket like a terrified child, he pushed it away and sat up so suddenly he nearly knocked the kneeling Nia off her feet.
An uncharacteristic fragility haunted his face.
“What time is it? How long did you let me sleep?”
“Just a few hours. You needed it. We’re expected on the hover-flier shortly.”
The sad-boy demeanor vanished, leaving behind an agitated man.
“What? I’ll remember this next time you give me your word, N’Tomo. I’ll meet you in the hangar. Leave me alone so I can dress.”
She stepped back into the corridor. The door sealed shut, but rather than leave, she found herself staring at it. There was something odd about the torment in his voice, something that went beyond the delirium of dream—so much so that when she passed a sign for Signals Intelligence, she decided to stop.
One agent sat alone at a massive array of screens and monitors. Despite the low-volume cacophony they produced and the headphones covering her ears, the slight woman somehow heard Nia at the door.
She spun, revealing a wan but cherubic face and a name tag that read “Velez.”
“Dr. N’Tomo. On your way to the hangar, I assume? They’re changing an intake filter, so you’ve got extra five minutes.”
Recognizing the name mentioned so glowingly in Fury’s briefings, she brightened. “Agent Velez, am I interrupting?”
“Not right this second. Next second, who knows?” Velez’s big eyes went up with her shoulders. “I’ve finally got the system fine-tuned to alert me of any anomalies, so I’ve managed to make my job either completely boring or suddenly life-and-death. Who doesn’t like a roller coaster, right? Something starts flashing, I’ll have to cut you off. Otherwise, what can I do you for?”
Nia lowered her voice. “I have a delicate matter I’d like to take care of, uh…off the books?”
Velez raised a disapproving eyebrow. “I don’t do off-the-books.”
“It’s important.”
“If it’s important, why is it off the books?”
“It’s about Dr. Kade, something he said. If it turns out to be nothing, I wouldn’t want to embarrass him, or myself. We’re having enough trouble getting along. At the same time, I want to be sure that it is nothing. I’d like you to…look into his background.”
“Spy on him?”
“Yes.”
“Can you be more specific? I’m not comfortable poking around someone’s private life. Not that he seems to have a private life.”
“This would be more about his professional behavior. In 2004, Dr. Kade was part of a team in Sierra Leone, near Marapa in the tribal areas. He identified a new Ebola strain that had taken hold in a remote village called Manfi. Thanks to his identification, it was sealed off, limiting the spread and saving countless lives.”
“Sounds like he made a tough decision that worked out for the best.”
“It does. It was a pivotal event in his career, which makes it odd that I can’t find any details about it. He’s also made some strange references to it that make me wonder if there was anything crucial omitted from the official record. I’m not a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent, so I’m not even asking that you share any details with me, but is there any way you might be able to find out?”
She grinned, showing perfect, pearly teeth. “Down there, it’s still the 21st century. Up here? More like the 23rd. There’s always a way to find out. We store two years’ worth of sat data on the servers. I can probably get the exact location from the official report and review the sat imagery at the time of the incident.”
“That would be…amazing. And you don’t have a problem with this?”
“Checking out the response to an Ebola outbreak by an international organization isn’t exactly reading his emails. Anything about that incident that isn’t part of the official record should be, so ethically I’m cool. I’ll let you know if I find anything.” She tilted her head, listening to something. “They’ve just about got that filter in. Dr. Kade is already strapped in and waiting. You should get going.”
“Thank you.”
“A pleasure.” Her mischievous wink took Nia slightly off-guard. She left feeling as if she’d had a visit with a magical, wish-granting pixie.
In less than a minute, she was in the hangar. The crew was still boarding, but Kade, sitt
ing with his hands folded in his lap, eyed her as if she was the one holding them up. Feeling guilty, she strapped in beside him; he said nothing and turned away.
As the piece of desert rolled away, revealing the cavern, Nia again got a bit of a thrill. Something about the way the appearance of the entrance interrupted the terrain’s natural flow fascinated her.
She wasn’t sure where the rod was being kept until she spotted a group of lab-coated personnel below surrounding a complicated apparatus. Despite the variety of equipment, the rod stood out—looking more like something drawn in forced perspective than anything occupying real, three-dimensional space.
The cavern floor crowded, the hover-flier swooped past the sealed storage containers that held the wrecked Sleepers. Once a center of attention, they were practically ignored in the face of the more immediate threats from viruses and god-machines.
En route to the landing zone, they passed the drone hover-flier where Steve waited alone. A tent-like plastic corridor, known as a transit isolator, had already been set up between it and the entrance to his restored isolation chamber. Once she and Kade oversaw Steve’s return, they’d use the corridor to transport the Skull out.
Rather than set down, the hover-flier—normally a reliably smooth ride—trembled, as if passing through turbulent air. The passengers and crew snapped to attention. Nia’s gaze shot to the window. A dull purple glow rose from below. She craned her head to get a better view, but was held in place by the restraining straps. She was fighting an urge to release the harness when the hover-flier lurched sideways.
It felt like the smooth tilt of a wild amusement park ride—until they slammed into the basalt wall with a crash. With the hover-flier briefly held sideways from the impact, the stunned doctor had the better view she craved.
Below, she saw the source of the glow: The rod stood alone in the center of a cleared circle, its scintillating light illuminating the devastation it had just caused. Everything that had it surrounded—equipment, scientists, half-assembled walls—had been hurled out of the way. The hover-flier must have been similarly tossed aside.
All that, she took in the instant the hover-flier remained pressed against the cavern wall. As the craft began falling, she also saw the storage containers. A series of amethyst rays from the rod made the containers buckle, tearing the three wrecked Sleepers free.
Just before gravity brought the hover-flier hard to the ground and everything became smoke and fire, an odd thought struck her:
Viruses and god-machines. A million deaths above us, a million deaths below.
26
I’D STILL REMEMBER THEM, THOUGH.
SHORTLY before the hover-flier crashed, Steve Rogers was on the drone ship, allowing himself the luxury of some calisthenics. Believing Nia and Kade would arrive shortly to supervise his transfer to the restored containment facility, he wanted to use the extra space to work off some excess energy. It felt good to be back in the uniform, even over the membrane. It was as much a part of him as his skin, and he’d requested to wear it when he was placed in cryogenic suspension.
No one thought to object.
Everyone at the base was doing their best to make him feel comfortable, which only managed to make him feel more antsy.
At the same time, anyone from the outside world, even those closest to him, had been asked to stay away to avoid any risk of spreading the virus. The first time he was frozen, he’d been robbed of any chance to say goodbye. Now, he treasured the time he’d spent video-conferencing with friends and comrades, from his fellow Avengers to Sam Wilson. It had been difficult, to be sure—especially when his first love, Peggy Carter—now in her eighties—said through her tears, “At least this time, I’ll know where you are, that you’re alive.”
But feeling their presence, hearing their words, sharing their feelings, reminded him that, despite how much he’d left behind, embracing life in the modern world had been worthwhile.
A century was the rough maximum that current cryonics could preserve the human body without cellular damage. Steve wondered what the world might be like 100 years from now. He’d already seen so many changes. The media’s natural focus was on what was broken, but there were fewer wars now than when he’d been younger, fewer casualties; fewer violent crimes; longer, healthier lives. He hoped that trend would continue, but there was no way to guess. What seemed inevitable wasn’t always, and even the smallest innovation might bring an unexpected tidal wave of revolution—for good or ill.
He’d barely hit 500 push-ups when the roar of multiple explosions, like shelling on a battlefield, sent him rushing for the exit. He braced, expecting to face a fifth Sleeper, but the lowering ramp revealed that nothing new had arrived; the attackers were already among them. The rod—active and armed—hovered above the wrecked storage containers. Thin lines of blinding purple light extended like marionette strings to the exposed Sleepers. As the rod tilted and turned as though held by a mad puppeteer, each line hummed at a different frequency, manipulating the dormant robots toward one another.
He sped closer, not at all knowing what he would do when he got there.
“Seeing this, Nick?”
“As if I could miss it. It’s like old times, when the first Sleepers combined.”
“Your engineers said it would take something like the Cosmic Cube to reassemble that wreckage. Looks like that’s what we’ve got.”
He could hear Fury’s teeth grind through the comm. “Whatever it’s building, I’ve got a hunch it’s not going to be a robot puppy, happy and peppy and bursting with love. I owe Kade another apology. We should have obliterated those things when we had a chance.”
Rogers crouched into a ready stance, watching the energy lines trigger the cube to repair itself. The sphere moved toward the cube, the holes drilled in it by Iron Man’s glove already sealed. It didn’t roll so much as it was dragged, scratching a white line in the black basalt of the floor. The sundered top of the cube, meanwhile, was maneuvered back into place by the rays.
Thinking to interrupt the connection between the rod and the Sleepers, he sent his shield sailing at the indigo lines. The flying disc passed through them as if it was a ghost.
“Cap, Stark just patched in from Avengers Mansion. Shell-Head, you get ahold of Thor yet?”
“No, goldilocks must be off in Asgard drinking mead or stopping some interstellar war. But listen, I’ve been thinking about those readings and Dr. N’Tomo’s question about Thanos, and I don’t like what I’ve been thinking at all.”
Seeing no point in hurling the shield again, Cap snapped. “Tony, get to it!”
“Okay, kinda obvious by now, but maybe it’s not just like an Infinity Gem—maybe it’s a piece of one. If they once formed a whole, that means they can break, right? Maybe a sliver came off during one of those galactic battles. If one gem had even a small piece missing, that could explain Thanos’s defeat. Now, imagine a mid-20th-century German scientist gets ahold of that shard. Whatever its power, his designs would be limited by what he could imagine as possible. That may be why the Sleepers are these crazy variations on old tech. What we’re seeing as programming might be a kind of intelligence informed by the gem. Creepy to think of the gem as conscious, but that’s another question for another day. Right now, to see if it’s a true piece of gem, I’ve recalibrated your sensors for a tighter read and should have those results…any…second…now…”
Steve didn’t wait. He tried slamming the shield into the rod—but the impact was absorbed. Lacking even the momentum to return, the disc tumbled to the ground. He had to use the magnets in his glove to retrieve it.
Stark’s voice shot up an octave. “Really? Well, that’s just great. The rod’s energy readings? Off the charts. The new charts.”
The smell of smoke turned Cap toward the crashed hover-flier. One wing was shorn off and burning. A rescue crew struggled to pry open the hatch, but they weren’t making much progress.
“Nia!”
“Go,” Fury said. “The
y need the help, and we need some kind of plan before we can tackle this thing, anyway.”
He sprinted, bounding over or around fallen debris and volcanic rock exactly as he would battlefield obstacles. Reaching the broken wing, he leapt through the licking flames, feet and arms forward, to find the hatch.
The workers moved aside, revealing that the frame had been bent, pinning the door. S.H.I.E.L.D.’s high-powered version of the Jaws of Life had barely pierced the hull. The smoke from fires, inside and out, slowed their progress even more.
It was pointless to try to cut farther along the highly resistant hull. Relying on his Super-Soldier strength, Rogers wrapped both hands around the Jaws’ handles and pushed. If the laser-assisted blades were dug in deep enough, they could act as a lever.
His muscles tightened, but the metal didn’t budge. Hearing muffled cries from within, he braced his feet and pushed harder. When he thought he’d reached his limit, Captain America willed himself through it and pushed harder still.
The composite metal surrendered. The Jaws moved inches at first, but then the frame collapsed with a loud squeal. The hatch rose freely. Releasing the Jaws, he hurled the hatch aside and hopped into a sea of smoke.
The shadowy figures of Nia and Kade were still strapped in their seats. The pilot, bruised and bleeding, was trying to get them loose, hacking at Nia’s harness with a bowie knife. Rogers pulled the man to safety, then turned back to the passengers. Kade’s head was bobbing—he was disoriented, but alive. Nia wasn’t conscious. Unsure whether she was breathing, he used the knife to slice her free first.
Once he lifted her to the waiting hands of the emergency-response team, he worked on Kade. As he cut through the nylon shoulder straps, the doctor’s rolling eyes settled on his rescuer. Recognizing him, a horrified scowl overtook his face.
“No! You have to be in quarantine!”
He was probably in shock, not thinking clearly. “That’s not possible right now,” Cap said calmly. “We’re under attack.”
Marvel Novels--Captain America Page 18