by Alex Irvine
Scott was sitting in his cell and wondering how much of the rest of his life he would spend counting cinder blocks and seeing patterns in chipped paint. He’d really made a mess of this job, and it was killing him that he’d gone and tried to take the stupid suit back. Why not just throw it out? Go downtown somewhere, find a Dumpster when nobody was looking, forget about the whole thing. But no—he’d gotten scared and wanted that thing away from him.
Truth was he’d also been scared that anyone who had a suit like that might be able to find him. Either way, trying to give it back had turned out to be the dumbest thing he’d ever done.
He looked down at the floor for a change of scenery from the wall and saw something moving. Great, he thought. Jailhouse roaches.
But they weren’t roaches. They were ants.
Carrying a tiny, tiny version of the suit.
No way, Scott thought—and with a whoosh the suit expanded to full-size.
The old man had come through.
Now the ants were forming numbers on the floor. 10… 9… 8…
A message. A countdown. Now or never, Scott thought—and he got the suit on just as the cop who had processed him came down the hall. Scott hit the button and bam—he was a one-quarter inch tall and running as fast as he could under the bars, past the cop, and toward the door.
“Smart choice,” the old man said in his ear. “You actually listened for once. Under the door.”
Behind him, Scott heard the cops shouting at each other to set up a perimeter and start the search. He heard Paxton’s voice among them. Scott ran under the door and out into the parking lot. It was full of police cars. “Okay. Where to now?”
“Hang tight,” the old man said.
Ants appeared all around Scott, ringing him in and getting closer. He started shouting at them. “Get back, get back, get back!”
“Scott,” the old man said. “These are my associates.”
The lead ant had a camera attached to its thorax. “Huh? You got a camera on an ant?” Then Scott realized he was saying this while inside a suit that could change size. “Yeah, sure, why not? Where’s the car?”
“No car. We’ve got wings,” the old man said. “Incoming.”
A huge flying ant swooped over Scott’s head and landed next to him on the pavement. The beat of its wings sounded like a helicopter’s rotors. “Put your foot on the central node and not the thorax,” the old man said.
“Are you kidding? How safe is—”
“Get on the ant, Scott.”
He did, and a few seconds later found himself hitching a ride on the back of a flying ant… that was hitching a ride on a police car that roared down the street with lights and sirens at full blast.
“Why am I on a police car?” Scott shouted. “Shouldn’t I not be on a police car?”
“So they can give you a lift past their five-block perimeter,” the old man said.
That made sense, or at least as much sense as anything else right now. “All right. Now, what’s the next move?”
“Hang on tight.”
The ant crawled across the cop car’s roof toward the rack holding its lights. “Oh, this is easy,” Scott said. “I’m getting the hang of this. Yank up to go up. It’s like a horse.”
“You’re throwing 247 off balance,” the old man warned as the ant tipped to one side.
“Wait, his name is 247?”
“He doesn’t have a name. He has a number, Scott. Do you have any idea how many ants there are?”
“Whoa!” Scott cried out as the ant took off from the car in a sudden rush of wind, landing on one of the car’s side mirrors. Also upside down.
“Maybe it’s 248?” the old man wondered.
Scott was completely disoriented by seeing the world going backward and upside down. “No, no, no, no, no! Vertigo, vertigo!”
“No, I think it’s 247. Hang on,” the old man said. The ant took off from the car and skillfully rode the airstream from a passing motorcycle.
Scott kept pulling on the lines attached to the harness on its back. “I think I’m getting the hang of this,” Scott said. The ant seemed to be going where he wanted it to.
“I’m controlling 247. He is not listening to you.”
“What?” The ant buzzed into and through one of San Francisco’s famous streetcars, getting briefly tangled in a woman’s hair. She twitched and flicked it away. “Can I make one little request?”
“No.”
“Stop, 247,” Scott pleaded. “Time-out, time-out.” 247 skittered across a newspaper and out the back of the streetcar. “Just wait. Whoa!” The updraft from a manhole cover lifted them abruptly. “What happens if I throw up in this helmet?”
“It’s my helmet, Scott. Do not throw up.”
“Just set ’er down, all right? I’m getting light-headed.” Ahead of them was the Coit Tower. They were flying to the old man’s house, Scott thought. He didn’t feel like he was going to throw up anymore, but something was… he was getting dizzy, having trouble hanging on to the ant.
“Hang on, Scott,” the old man warned.
“Yeah, I’m getting a little light… it’s funny…” Scott tried to say something else, but his head was spinning, and in the next moment he felt himself start to fall.
CHAPTER 9
The next thing Scott remembered was waking up to a striking dark-haired woman tapping on her phone in the corner of a bedroom. “Hello,” he said uncertainly.
She ignored him. “Who are you?” he asked. “Have you been standing there watching me sleep this whole time?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because the last time you were here you stole something.” She put her phone away and looked at him.
“Oh.” Scott knew where he was now. In the old man’s house. The bed was nice, the room was nice, but he wanted to get out. He couldn’t stay there. “Hey, look,” he said, throwing back the covers and swinging his feet off the bed.
That’s when he noticed the carpet around the bed was crawling with ants. Huge ones. “Whoa!” He pulled his feet back and stared down at them.
“Paraponera clavata,” the woman said. “Giant tropical bullet ants ranked highest on the Schmidt pain index. They’re here to keep an eye on you when I can’t.” She paused to let that sink in. “Dr. Pym’s waiting for you downstairs.”
“Who?” She left without saying anything else. “Hey,” he called after her. “Um, whose pajamas are these?”
She didn’t come back, and the carpet was still covered in bullet ants. Scott didn’t know what the Schmidt pain index was, but if these ants rated highest on it, he was pretty sure he didn’t want them to bite him. “How am I supposed to do this?”
She’d said Dr. Pym was waiting. Then she’d left. Therefore, Scott reasoned, she must want him to follow. So the ants would…
Gingerly he lowered one foot to the carpet. The ants crawled out of the way. Scott put his other foot down. Same deal. “Just one step at a time,” he said. He walked slowly through the ants, talking to them on the way. “You don’t bite me, I don’t step on you—deal?”
He found the old man—Dr. Pym—sitting with coffee at his dining room table, reading the paper. The woman was there, too. “I could take down the servers and Cross wouldn’t even know,” she was arguing as Scott walked in. “We don’t need this guy.”
Pym saw Scott coming in. “I assume that you’ve already met my daughter, Hope,” he said.
So that was her name, Scott thought. “I did.” He paused, feeling like he should say something else. “She’s great.”
“She doesn’t think that we need you,” Pym said.
“We don’t,” she said. “We can do this ourselves.”
Scott sat as Pym said irritably, “I go to all this effort to let you steal my suit, and then Hope has you arrested.”
“Okay,” she said. “We can try this and when he fails I’ll do it myself.”
Fails at what? Scott wondered. He hadn’t had a c
hance to fail at anything yet, if you didn’t count trying to return the suit. “She’s a little bit anxious,” Pym said. “It has to do with this job, which, judging by the fact that you’re sitting opposite me, I take it you’re interested in.”
Whoa, Scott thought. Not so fast. “What job?”
Ignoring the question, Pym nodded at the cup in front of Scott on the table. “Would you like some tea?”
Oh. Not coffee. “Uh, sure,” Scott said.
“I was very impressed with how you managed to get past my security system. Freezing that metal was particularly clever.”
How far back did the setup go? Scott already knew the job wasn’t on the up and up, but Pym was basically saying he’d maneuvered Scott through the whole process. “Were you watching me?”
“Scott, I’ve been watching you for a while, ever since you robbed Vista Corp. Oh, excuse me, burgled Vista Corp.” He tapped one of the newspapers on the table. Scott saw his face under a headline about the Vista job. “Vista’s security system is one of the most advanced in the business. It’s supposed to be unbeatable but you beat it. Would you like some sugar?”
“Yeah, thanks.” Ants started pushing sugar cubes across the table and Scott changed his mind. “You know what, I’m okay.” The ants turned around and pushed the cubes back the way they’d come. “How do you make them do that?”
“Ants can lift objects fifty times their weight. They build, farm, they cooperate with each other.” Clearly this Dr. Pym had a thing for ants.
“Right. But how do you make them do that?” The ants were putting the sugar cubes back in the little cup. Scott figured this trick had a name, but he didn’t know what it was.
Pym tapped a little earpiece Scott hadn’t seen until just then. “I use electromagnetic waves to stimulate their olfactory nerve center. I speak to them. I can go anywhere, hear anything, and see everything.”
“And still know absolutely nothing,” Hope said. Man, Scott thought. This is not a close father-daughter relationship. “I’m late to meet Cross,” she added, standing to leave.
Scott raised his hand. “Uh… Dr. Pym?”
“You don’t need to raise your hand, Scott.”
“Sorry, I just have one question. Who are you, who is she, what the heck’s going on, and can I go back to jail now?” That was four questions, but the last one was the most important. Scott had been played like a fish up to this point, and he felt like he was in way over his head. He wanted out while he could still get out, and before someone got mad at him and sent a horde of telepathically controlled bullet ants after him or something. Jail had to be better than that.
Pym looked at Scott for a long moment without answering any of his questions. Then he simply said, “Come with me.”
CHAPTER 10
Down in the basement, across from the safe Scott had cracked, Pym tapped a code into a hidden door. It opened with a series of beeps, exposing a large lab space. Scott couldn’t help but wonder how he’d built it. They must have been out under the street. “Twenty years ago I created a formula that altered atomic relative distance,” Pym said.
“Huh?” Scott had no idea what that meant.
“I learned how to change the distance between atoms. That’s what powers the suit, that’s why it works.” Pym led Scott into the lab, which was full of electronic gizmos that made Scott’s engineer-trained fingers twitch.
“Wow,” he said. He’d always wanted a lab like this. Then he saw there were ants everywhere in here, too.
“It was dangerous,” Pym went on. “Too dangerous. So I hid it from the world. And that’s when I switched gears and I started my own company.”
“Pym Tech.”
“Yes.” Pym was digging around in a duffel bag he’d taken out of a locker. “I took on a young protégé called Darren Cross.”
“Darren Cross.” Scott knew the name. “He’s a big deal.”
Pym had vials of the red fluid in his hands. “But before he was a big deal he was my assistant. I thought I saw something in him, a son I never had, perhaps.” He set up the vials on a work table next to a glass case full of ants crawling through tunnels they’d made in some kind of white substance. “He was brilliant, but as we became close he began to suspect that I wasn’t telling him everything. He heard rumors about what were called the Pym Particles, and he became obsessed with re-creating my formula.” Pym held up one of the vials. Scott guessed they had Pym Particles in them. That’s what gave the suit its shrinking ability. “But I wouldn’t help him, so he conspired against me and he voted me out of my own company.”
Scott didn’t know much about how big corporations worked, but that sounded weird to him. “How could he do that?”
“The board’s chairman is my daughter, Hope. She was the deciding vote.” It hurt Pym to remember this; Scott could see that. He didn’t stop, though. “But she came back to me when she saw how close Cross was to cracking my formula.”
Scott took all this in as Pym set the suit’s helmet on the table. “The process is highly volatile. What isn’t protected by a specialized helmet can affect the brain’s chemistry. I don’t think Darren realizes this, and, you know, he’s not the most stable guy to begin with.”
This was all useful information, Scott thought. But it wasn’t telling him what he really wanted to know. “So, what do you want from me?”
Pym looked up from his work. “Scott, I believe that everyone deserves a shot at redemption. Do you?”
“I do,” Scott said. He meant it, too. He wanted that shot more than anything.
“If you can help me, I promise I can help you be with your daughter again.” Scott believed he could. A guy with Pym’s money and clout could be a big help with the court. “Now, are you ready to redeem yourself?”
“Absolutely,” Scott said. Whatever he’d gotten himself into here, he knew one thing for certain. “My days of breaking into places and stealing stuff are done. What do you want me to do?”
Pym cracked a little smile. “I want you to break into a place and steal some stuff.”
Maggie, Paxton, and Cassie were sitting at breakfast when Paxton’s phone chimed. “You going to be home for dinner tonight?” Maggie asked him at the same time.
“Uh, yeah,” he said, distracted by the phone. It was a text from his partner, Gale: Lang’s “LAWYER” is Dr. Hank Pym, as in Pym Tech. Below it was a picture of Pym. Whoa, Paxton thought. This puts a new spin on things. “I’ll pick something up, okay?” He got up, suddenly anxious to be back on the case.
“Okay.” She nodded at the phone still in his hand. “Good news?”
“Uh, I don’t know.” How did a guy like Scott Lang get Hank Pym’s attention? And why was Pym lying about being Lang’s lawyer, especially when Lang had been caught coming out of Pym’s house? “It’s news.”
“Are you trying to find my daddy?” Cassie asked.
“Yeah, I am, sweetheart.” He wasn’t sure what to say, so he went with a half-truth. “I just want your daddy to be safe.”
“Hope you don’t catch him.” She dug back into her cereal. Maggie and Paxton exchanged a look. The situation, they knew, was going to get more difficult before it got easier—if it ever did.
In a lab deep inside the Pym Tech complex, Darren Cross hit the switch that would test the miniaturization beam on another experiment in a long line of living subjects. None of them had yet survived. Mice, sheep… the beam had killed them all. But Cross was not going to quit. Not ever. He was close, and when he had the miniaturization down, the Yellowjacket system wasn’t just going to make him rich—it was going to make him one of the most powerful men on earth. Not even the Avengers had tech like this.
The yellow fluid in the feeder tubes compressed and the beam flashed out into a glass box holding a three-month-old lamb. Cross held his breath, waiting for the afterimage of the flash to leave his eyes.
He looked at the table and at first saw nothing. Then his eyes registered a tiny version of the glass box… and inside it, a tiny
version of the lamb.
I did it, he thought. At last, I did it.
From an observation room next to the lab, Hope Pym watched.
CHAPTER 11
Pym sat Scott down at a big video screen and started explaining the importance of the job he wanted Scott to do. “This isn’t the first time these guys have tried to get their hands on game-changing weaponry,” he said, pointing out a particular person on the screen. “That’s Mitchell Carson, ex–head of defense at S.H.I.E.L.D., presently in the business of toppling governments. He always wanted my tech. And now, unless we break in and steal the Yellowjacket and destroy all the data, Darren Cross is gonna unleash chaos upon the world.” Scott gathered that Cross was planning to sell the Yellowjacket thing—which was a version of Pym’s original suit, only with weapons—to this Carson guy. It didn’t sound good.
But it was a problem with an obvious solution that maybe hadn’t occurred to Pym. “I think our first move should be calling the Avengers,” Scott said.
Pym stood up and paced the room. “I’ve spent half my life trying to keep this technology out of the hands of a Stark. I’m not going to hand deliver it to one now. This is not some cute technology like the Iron Man suit. This could change the texture of reality. Besides, they’re probably too busy dropping cities out of the sky.”
“Okay, then, why don’t you just send the ants?”
“Scott, they are ants. Ants, they can do a lot of things, but they still need a leader. Somebody that can infiltrate a place that’s designed to prevent infiltration.”
“Hank, I’m a thief,” Scott said. “All right, I’m a good thief. But this is insane.” The last guy in the world Scott wanted to rely on to save the world was himself.
“He’s right, Hank, and you know it,” Hope said from the doorway. Neither of them had heard her come in. “You’ve seen the footage; you know what Cross is capable of. I was against using him when we had months; now we have days. I’m wearing the suit.”