Eminent Silence

by Tristan Carey

  I got close to the monitors. Monochrome, grainy. In the corner was a small bar of text. Camera number. Floor level.

  That's when I saw, for the first time, the words Cold Storage. A dim room filled with mist and large, strange-looking columns. I couldn't make out what they were before I was called back to my post.

  But now I knew. When the Crucible agents spoke of Cold Storage, I thought it was just a moniker for a morgue. Anyone who went there didn't come back.

  It didn't look like a morgue. But I had a feeling it wasn't much better.

  The last agent put up a stronger fight now that he knew what he was dealing with. I just wanted to tell him to run. But my mind was too busy processing fragmented memories and trying to keep myself alive than to operate any auxiliary functions.

  His weapon was out. Fired off a shot. I spun around just in time. A bullet meant for my back bounced off the shield.

  He kept firing, because it totally worked the first time. As he emptied his clip, I lowered to protect my legs. Then came the clicking of an empty clip.

  The agent swore, fumbling to unload. The empty clip hit the floor at the same time I threw my shield.

  It struck him in the chest, sent him back. The shield bounced off the wall and back to me. I caught it, grabbed the gun, bent it into a right angle, and threw it away as I turned and kept running.

  The agent, still conscious, didn't come after me.

  The timing was just right.

  The Winter Soldier had been sent away on a mission. I didn't know everything, but I knew enough. Libya. Uprisings. Unrest. International support. At least a week of tracking before the target was eliminated. Maybe longer if there was more than one.

  I wasn't expecting it. Just one day, I noticed he was gone. I overheard Brandt talking to one of the other Extremis soldiers. She was disappointed she couldn't take part. Extremis soldiers were good at faking suicide bombs.

  But a week was a godsend. I only needed a day.

  I had never been in Cold Storage. I wouldn't have even known it existed if it wasn't for Savin. If the Extremis soldiers hadn't gotten a kick out of tormenting me.

  Guess they were good for something after all.

  I found another staircase, threw myself down three steps at a time. There was an elevator, but it wasn't safe. The air was getting thick with dust. I kept going down. Past the fifth floor. Deeper, deeper into the Crucible.

  It happened at nighttime.

  My room was cement. It was oddly designed, the floorspace maybe twelve-feet square, but the ceiling reaching twenty-feet above my head. It was always cold and drafty. High up, there was a small vent with a tiny spinning fan - too small and too far away for me to reach The door didn't have a handle on the inside. I could only leave when they wanted me to.

  The solution to getting out was surprisingly simple.

  All I needed was a piece of tape.

  The memories kept flashing across my vision, haphazard and disjointed. I wasn't sure which ones were together or not. A headache pounded behind my temples. Still, I pushed on.

  I skidded to a stop on the landing of Sub-Level 10. Unlike before, these doors were locked. I imagined there would be guard postings here, if the guards hadn't abandoned everything in the ensuing destruction. There was no one to stop me from attaching one of Fitz' small mines to the door (I tried to kick it down — too thick, didn't work), before taking cover behind my shield twenty feet away.

  BOOM.

  Flames and metal shrapnel went everywhere. For a second, all the air was sucked out of my lungs, the explosion eating up all the oxygen in the cramped space. I had been cold before, but now I felt a little crispy. The fire had flash-dried everything.

  As soon as the air was clear (mostly), I got back up, and headed inside.

  The door operated on an analog system. It swung outward, and the lock was magnetic, activated whenever the latch fell into place. There was no way to hack it.

  But so long as the latch didn't fall, then the door wouldn't lock, and would swing open. It was a thick door, made of reinforced steel — not impossible for me to get through by force, but my plan (what little I could remember at any given point) required stealth. I couldn't go bashing my way out of the Crucible. I'd never make it ten feet.

  All I needed to keep the latch from falling was a good piece of duct tape, of which there was plenty to find in the Crucible.

  Remembering the tape was the hard part.

  In the Crucible, my own mind was working against me. I was constantly forgetting things that were non-essential — that is, anything I learned while fully conscious, not completely under Crucible control. I didn't even remember when I figured out the door mechanic to my cell. It had to be days, if not weeks, before I figured it out again.

  One day, I was lucid enough to sneak into a closet, rip off a strip of tape, and stick on the inside of my wrist, hidden under my sleeve.

  I'd later find it, three days later, unable to remember why I had tape on my arm or what it was for.

  It returned to me soon enough. That night, as I was shoved past the door into my cell, I stumbled. Grabbed the door for support. The guard didn't even notice as the black-painted tape covered the latch, and slammed the door shut behind me.

  The magnetic lock made a clicking noise, as it always did. But it was just the fault of the design, unable to tell when the latch was actually extended or not. As far as the guard knew, everything was in working order.

  I wasn't sure what to expect in Cold Storage.

  I began my search through a series of interconnected rooms, with short, narrow hallways, dimly lit. There were exposed pipes across the walls and ceilings, and my breath visibly clouded in front of me. Frost covered the walls and floors. Icicles formed where leaks had occurred, leaving shivering, dangling icy daggers everywhere.

  The floor was so cold that the rubber soles of my boots kept sticking to it. It made noises every time I had to pull away, and I couldn't help but wince each time. Well, this was certainly going to kill any facade of stealth I had now.

  Like in the medical bay, there were gurneys here, only these ones were reinforced with heavy straps and manacles. I had the distinct feeling whoever ended up in cold storage did it unwillingly.

  It was more stable down here. I only noticed small cracks in the wall from the destruction of the Crucible. Maybe the Chairman wanted this particular floor to last. But why? There was no one down here.

  Then I burst into the largest room yet. The temperature dropped at least ten degrees as soon as I entered. Above me, the cold blue lights flickered, fighting to maintain enough heat to conduct electricity in an environment directly adverse to it. About the size of cafeteria, the floor space was covered in rows upon rows of upstanding vessels.

  The room I had seen on the security feed.

  Each column had its own series of pipes feeding into it. There were periodic releases of freezing gases. They were round, tube-shaped, and stretched from floor to ceiling, and each had one pneumatic door, just low enough to reach on foot.

  I still had no idea what they were.

  In each door there was a little glass window, about five inches over my head. Approaching one, I stood on tip-toe, using my hand to clean off the half-inch thick layer of soft ice that had formed on top.

  A pair of white, staring eyes met mine.

  I yelped, stumbled back. But the eyes didn't follow me. They kept staring ahead, the face behind the glass unmoving.

  He was frozen.

  That's when I noticed a screen at about waist-height, with data filtering across. Now that my heart had stopped pounding, I stepped back again to read it.

  Experiment: Longterm Cryogenic Hibernation

  Date: 3/12/1952

  Test: 23

  Result: FAILURE. Patient 23 suffered from asphyxiation four hours after being interred in capsule.

  Conclusion: Life support systems need retooling. Review oxygen-nitrogen levels in blo
odstream of subjects before interring.

  I read it over twice, before looking back up at the frozen face. 1952. This man had been trapped, dead, in here for over sixty years. Why did they keep him? As some sort of example?

  Well, of course. As a scientist, you don't throw away your experiments. Even failed tests were of value, perhaps even more so than successful ones — they always told you how something could be improved. As that saying goes, Edison discovered a thousand ways how not to make a lightbulb, and one way he could.

  I doubted Edison would be into something like this, though. I shuddered, backing away, looking down at the dozens of other capsules. I had to make myself move, glance at the reports, the dates. More failures. More deaths.

  The Crucible had been looking for ways to successfully engineer cryogenic preservation. Even today, I wasn't sure that was possible.

  Maybe this was what would have happened to me, if I had ever failed, ever proven myself too weak for the Crucible. The scientists would just use me as a guinea pig, fodder for their experiments. Whether I lived or died was inconsequential, as long as my existence provided some scientific purpose.

  As I continued to my search, I kept glancing at the dates labeled on the capsules. Organized chronologically, it gave me some idea how this place was set-up. Recent victims would be in the far back of the room. If there were empty capsules, that's where the twins would be.

  I had just exited the first row when I tripped over a body.

  There was a guard patrol every twenty minutes. I could hear them through the walls.

  That night, I crouched, ear against the door, counting down the minutes in my head. Making sure the pattern stayed the same, that this wasn't the one day that routine would be cast aside on an unlucky whim.

  I heard them approach down the hall. A set of bootsteps, four guards total. If it came down to it, I could take them out. The guards here were regular humans, remarkable only in their training and who they allied themselves with. Compared to agents like the Extremis or the Winter Soldier, they were hardly a challenge.

  But to the key to my escape was silence. Was stealth. Was all the things the Winter Soldier taught me. Know your environment. Know the threats, the weaknesses. Exploit them. Treat everything as a danger to you.

  I waited until the patrol's footsteps faded. And then, with a light touch of my fingers, I gently pushed open the door.

  It swung silently. I did only an inch at first, just in case there was someone around I wasn't aware of. But there was no one down the hall. I pushed the door open a little farther, glanced in the opposite direction. The hallway was completely empty.

  'Damn,' I cursed under my breath, turning around to examine what I just tripped on. Judging from the armor, and the thin layer of ice now accumulating on him, this guy looked a lot more recent than the ones in the capsules. It wasn't the cold that killed him, though. The guard's face was covered in blood, from his mouth and nose. Something had attacked him.

  I spotted three other bodies as I glanced down the next row. One was slumped against a capsule, the other two sprawled across the floor. Their weapons lying next to them, mangled into useless knots of metal.

  I caught the faint whiff of ozone in the air now. Could it be…?

  I spun on my heel, looking around. Deciding to risk it, I called out, 'Wanda? Pietro? Are you here?'

  I didn't hear a reply. Instead, the ground started shaking beneath me, so sudden and so hard that I fell, unbalanced.

  The capsules, in their metal and glass structures, groaned and cracked under the stress of structural collapse. A loud pop echoed down the room, followed by a hissing noise - a pipe burst. Then another. A third one. A chorus of small

  The room was still shaking. I couldn't even stand up straight long enough to move. I'd never been in an earthquake before, but I was starting to get an idea of one.

  A support beam fell with an almighty crash. Then, a long, ear-piercing shriek. The crack of concrete breaking. Metal tearing. Gas exploding. A capsule in front of me had been dislodged, snapped from its supports.

  It leaned forward, like a tree cut from its stump. At first, slow and looming. Then gravity caught up, and it dropped with terrifying speed.

  Straight on top of me.

  I glanced up, to where I knew the security camera was. I'd accounted for that, too.

  It's red light was blinking, but the aperture didn't shift when I fell into its line of sight. All the cameras were closed circuit, and each floor had its own command center for security. That way someone on floor seven couldn't tamper with cameras on floor three. But I was considered a part of security now. No one batted an eye when I was sent from one end of the Crucible to another. They certainly didn't mind when I was on duty in the same room.

  The guards had no problems leaving me alone in the room with all those computer monitors when they went on a coffee break. It only took me five minutes to loop the feeds of the evening patrol. Turning off the cameras themselves would be too risky, too noticeable. Nonfunctioning cameras would be quickly interpreted as sabotage. Looped feeds take a while to notice. Maybe its a glitch. Maybe you're just tired. The long intervals between patrols make it even harder to tell.

  And that's what I needed. Time.

  With only the tiniest of smiles, I slipped out of my cell.

  For the first time in months, I was where I wasn't supposed to be.

  The giant capsule came rushing down on me.

  Unable to get on my feet, I threw myself forward and rolled out of the way. The capsule crashed behind me, the impact making the floor jump and sending me into the air. I landed on threes, my right arm raised with the shield, protecting me from a section of pipes that dropped from the ceiling.

  The room, once before almost deathly quiet, was now pandemonium as the ultimately delicate design of the cryogenic capsules shattered and fell under the Crucible's self-destruction.

  And it only got colder. The pipes that fell on me leaked a white gas that froze everything it touched. The vibranium shield had become so cold that I could feel it through my gloves. WHen I stood up, I found myself stuck — the shield had frozen to the pipes. Dammit!

  With one good heave, I wrenched away, ice shattering. Thankfully, the shield didn't. Metal usually became very brittle when cold, but vibranium had proven an exception.

  Realizing that if I didn't get out of here now, I'd turn into a human popsicle myself, I charged ahead, trying to stay upright as best as I could, leaping over another collapsed capsule. Another one fell, and I had just enough time to raise my shield before it landed, forcing me against the side wall.

  The capsule left a long gouge in the cement, but it held, and debris rained over my head. But I kept pushing forward, slipping out underneath in a stream of curses. That would've hurt a lot worse if I hadn't been wearing a helmet.

  I had reached the back end of the room in seconds. As was before, there was no one here. No one alive, anyways.

  Breathing hard, getting colder and more desperate by the second, I called out, 'Wanda! Pietro!'

  But it became clear to me that they weren't here. The last of the capsules were empty, or were too old. Somehow, the twins had managed to escape on their own.

  It was a small relief. But I still had to find them. There was no way to know if they managed to get out of here alive.

  My cell was only on the seventh floor, two floors away from escape.

  I'd only tampered with the Floor Seven cameras. After that, I was on my own. I already knew all the camera locations, of course. I'd memorized the guard patterns. And the one person I feared the most — the Winter Soldier — wasn't even here. Honestly, the odds could never be better.

  I had just risen to my feet, had walked not twenty feet from my cell towards the stairwell, when something occurred to me.

  I'd forgotten something.

  But what?

  That's when I spotted a small archway to my left. Aha!

  I s
crambled out of the capsule room just in time. The mantle over the side exit was already crumbling as I passed under. It crashed down on my heels, picking up dust and sending a current of cold air after me.

  Thanks to my momentum, I hit the wall on the other side. The walls were still shaking. I took quick stock of the area before continuing. A short hallway stretched out ahead of me. A wall at my back. There was only one direction to head in.