by Alex Irvine
Pym shook his head. “Absolutely not.”
“I know the facility inside and out. I know how Cross thinks. I know this mission better than anybody here.”
That was all true, Scott thought. But this was turning into a father-daughter thing again, and he stayed out of it. “We need you close to Cross, otherwise this mission cannot work,” Pym said.
“We don’t have time to screw around,” she argued. Meaning, screw around getting some random thief up to speed.
Frustrated, Pym started to raise his voice again. “Hope, please, this is a—”
“He is a criminal. I’m your daughter.” She was getting hot, too.
“No!” Pym shouted. In the silence that followed, they glared at each other and Scott wished he was anywhere else. Even prison. Then Hope, the hurt and disappointment plain on her face, left the room.
“She’s right, Hank,” Scott said quietly. “I’m not your guy. Why don’t you wear the suit?”
“You think I don’t want to?” Pym answered. “I can’t. I spent years wearing it. It took a toll on me. You’re our only option.” He paused, his anger all gone and replaced with sadness. “Before Hope lost her mother, she used to look at me like I was the greatest man in the world. And now she looks at me and it’s just disappointment. It’s too late for me. But not for you. This is your chance. The chance to earn that look in your daughter’s eyes. To become the hero that she already thinks you are.” That echo of what Maggie had said to him the day before stung Scott. “It’s not about saving our world,” Pym finished. “It’s about saving theirs.”
“That was a good speech,” Scott said after a moment.
Pym didn’t care about the compliment. He cared about making his point. “Scott,” he said, “I need you to be the Ant-Man.”
And so Scott’s training began. An hour later he was wearing the suit while Pym prepped him and Hope stood by watching, angry but staying with her father because the threat from Darren Cross was bigger than their argument. Scott was at one end of a hallway, Hope and Pym at the other.
“In the right hands, the relationship between man and suit is symbiotic,” Pym said. “The suit has power, the man harnesses that power. You need to be skillful, agile, and above all, you need to be fast. You should be able to shrink and grow on a dime so your size always suits your needs.”
Pym shut the door between them. “Now dive through the keyhole, Scott. You charge big, you dive small, then you emerge big.”
Scott tried it. He mistimed the change and hit the door. “Ow!” He tried it again. “Ow!” And again. “Ow!”
Hope looked at her father as Scott hit the other side of the door one more time. “Useless,” she said.
But she took over part of his training, too, in another area of the basement they rigged up as a gym. “When you’re small, energy is compressed, so when you have the force of a two-hundred-pound man behind a fist a hundredth of an inch wide, you’re like a bullet. You punch too hard, you kill someone; too soft, it’s a love tap. In other words, you have to know how to punch.”
“I was in prison for three years,” Scott said. “I know how to punch.”
She held up a hand like a sparring glove. “Show me.” Scott did. “Terrible,” she commented.
Irritated, he said, “You want to show me how to punch?” He held up his hand like she had. “Show me.”
Faster than he could follow, her right hand snapped out and her fist caught Scott flush on the corner of his mouth. He staggered backward and sank down to the floor, eyes wide. She hit like Peachy.
“That’s how you punch,” she said.
“She’s been looking forward to this,” Pym said with a grin from nearby, where he was tinkering with the Ant-Man rig.
“No kidding,” Scott said. His head was clearing.
“Hope trained in martial arts at a, uh, difficult time,” Pym said.
She gave him an acid smile. “Oh, by ‘difficult time,’ he means when my mother died.”
“We lost her in a plane crash,” Pym explained to Scott.
“It’s bad enough you won’t tell me how she died,” Hope said. “Could you please stop telling me that lie? We’re working here.” She turned away from him and back to Scott. “All right, princess, let’s get back to work.”
Back on his feet and all the way upright, Scott held up his hand again. “Were you going for the hand?” he asked. She just smiled.
Another part of his training was fiddling with the electronics in the Ant-Man suit, and the next day he was resoldering some of the connections in the regulator. He’d started to figure out how it all worked. Pym walked in and Scott said, “You know, I think this regulator is holding me back.”
“Do not screw with the regulator,” Pym said immediately. “If that regulator is compromised you would go subatomic.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that you would enter a quantum realm.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that you would enter a reality where all concepts of time and space become irrelevant as you shrink for all eternity.” Pym spoke slowly, with deep emotion. This wasn’t just a description to him. “Everything that you know, and love, gone forever.”
Scott considered this. “Cool. Yeah. I’m…” He shrugged. “If it ain’t broke…”
Pym had come in to show him the next training stage according to the plan he’d worked out with Hope.
“You’ve learned about the suit, but you’ve yet to learn about your greatest allies.” He pointed at the wall lined with ant farms, each labeled with a different species name. “The ants. Loyal, brave, and your partners on this job.” Pym had Scott suit up and head outside. While they sat on the porch, Scott shrank and entered an anthill in Pym’s backyard. The first ant he got to know was Paratrechina longicornis. “Commonly known as crazy ants,” Hope said over the suit’s headset. “They’re lightning fast and can conduct electricity, which makes them useful to fry out enemy electronics.”
Scott saw one of them in the tunnel. Yellow and orange with a striped abdomen. It came right up to him, and when he knelt it climbed into his lap like a puppy. “Oh, you’re not so crazy,” he said, petting it. “You’re cute.”
A split second later he was covered in hundreds of them. “Aaah!” he screamed, exploding back to normal size and erupting up through Pym’s lawn.
Hope and Pym stared at him.
“That was a lot scarier a second ago,” he said, but he could tell they didn’t believe him. They sent him right back down.
“Okay. Who’s next?” he asked when he was back underground and shrank again.
“Paraponera clavata.”
Those he recognized. They loomed over him in the tunnel, twenty times the size of the crazy ants. “I know. Bullet ants, right? Number one on the Schmidt pain index.” Scott decided he might as well talk to them. “Hey, guys! Remember me from the bedroom?”
When they came after him, he couldn’t help it. He exploded through the lawn again.
Pym and Hope brought him inside for the next introduction. “Camponotus pennsylvanicus,” Pym said as Scott looked through a magnifying glass at the ant in question, which was crawling over an open book on the coffee table. “Alternatively known as a carpenter ant. Ideal for ground and air transport.”
“Wait a minute, I know this guy,” Scott said. He was pretty sure it was the ant he’d ridden on the police car. 247. But now he needed a name. “I’m going to call him Ant-thony.”
“That’s good,” Pym said. Scott couldn’t tell if he was joking. “That’s very good, because this time you’re really going to have to learn how to control him.” He set Scott up with some ants and some sugar cubes. “Tell them to put the sugar in the teacup.”
Scott got to work.
CHAPTER 12
Hope kept up Scott’s martial arts training, and he got better fast. She could still have kicked his butt if she’d wanted to, but at least he wasn’t completely outclassed. Meanwhile he a
nd Hope also analyzed the layout of the Pym Tech Futures Lab, where Darren Cross housed the Yellowjacket project.
“It looks like the lab has its own isolated power supply,” Scott said, looking over a blueprint. That meant he wouldn’t be able to cut the alarms from outside like he had with Pym’s house.
“There’s a security guard posted around the clock,” she said. “We need you to take him out to deactivate the security systems.”
Shouldn’t be too hard, he thought, as long as the guard didn’t see him coming.
Hope pulled up a schematic drawing of the case holding the prototype Yellowjacket suit. “The Yellowjacket pod is hermetically sealed and the only access point is a tube we estimate to be about five millimeters in diameter,” she said.
Ah, Scott thought. This is where it gets hairy. “Why do I have a sick feeling in my stomach?”
Hope pulled up another view, this one showing the security on the pod itself. “The tube is protected by a laser grid and we can only power that down for fifteen seconds.”
“You’re going to need to signal the crazy ants to blow the servers, retrieve the suit, and exit the vaults before the backup power comes on,” Pym said.
Scott nodded. It was possible. Not an easy job—a long way from it. But possible.
He was still thinking about that and dabbing some alcohol on the mat burns from his latest sparring session, when Hope stuck her head into the room and said, “Hank wants you outside for target practice.”
When Scott got outside, Hank was holding two little discs, one in each hand. They looked like something a kid would shoot out of a toy gun. One was red and one blue. “The suit has no weapons, so I made you these discs,” Hank said. “Red shrinks. Blue enlarges.”
They practiced throwing them for a while, growing and shrinking various things out in Pym’s yard, until Scott was reasonably sure he could hit something with them if he had to. Then it was back to meeting the various species of ants Pym kept, so Scott suited up and headed underground one more time. “Solenopsis mandibularis. Known for their bite, the fire ants have evolved into remarkable architects. They are handy to get you in and out of difficult places.” While Pym said this, Scott ordered the fire ants to turn themselves into a bridge, and then ran across it. He had that down pretty good, but he was still having a hard time with the carpenter ants. They didn’t want to put the sugar cubes in the teacup, even after days of effort.
“You can do it, Scott,” Pym encouraged him. “Come on.”
Scott stared at the ants on the table. They didn’t do anything. Come on, ants, he thought. Move the sugar cube!
They still didn’t do anything. He sat back and tossed the earpiece on the table in frustration. “They’re not listening to me.”
“You have to commit,” Hope said. “You have to mean it. No shortcuts, no lies.”
“Throwing insults into the mix will not do anyone any good, Hope,” Pym commented.
“We don’t have time for coddling,” she pointed out. Cross was going to sell the Yellowjacket prototype any day now.
Pym knew this, which was why he wanted to avoid the conflicts with his daughter. “Our focus should be on helping Scott.”
“Really? Is that where our focus should be?” Pym saw he’d wounded her. Scott saw it, too.
She picked up the earpiece and in seconds had an army of ants moving the sugar cubes… but she didn’t stop there. Ants swarmed through the dining room. Columns marched up the wall, covering the chandelier and dimming the room. Scott got nervous. What was she going to do next? Her anger was kind of running away with her.
“Hope!” Pym barked.
She blinked and looked from Scott to Hank as if to say, See? I’m better at this than either of you. Then she started walking toward the door. On the way she stopped next to Pym and said, “I don’t know why I came to you in the first place.”
After she was gone, Pym was silent for a long moment. Then he said, “We can’t do this without her.”
Scott decided someone had to do something, and it wasn’t going to be either of them. That meant it had to be him.
“Oh, God,” she said when he found her sitting in her car, and got in. She was in the middle of removing the earpiece she’d used to control the ants.
“You gotta lock your doors,” he said, trying to break the ice. “I mean, really. There’s some weird folks in this neighborhood.”
“Do you think this is a joke?” she snapped. “Do you have any idea what he’s asking you to risk? You have a daughter.”
“I’m doing this for her,” Scott said. Didn’t she already know that?
“You know when my mother died I didn’t see him for two weeks?”
“He was in grief.”
“Yeah, so was I, and I was seven. And he never came back, not in any way that counted. He just sent me off to boarding school.” Ouch, Scott thought. “You know, I thought with all that’s at stake, just maybe we might have a chance at making peace. But even now he still wants to shut me out.”
That’s where she was wrong, and Scott needed her to know it. Pym was right. They weren’t going to get this job done without Hope, and she wasn’t going to be able to help them if she couldn’t get some kind of handle on the reasons for why her father did what he did. “He doesn’t want to shut you out. He trusts you.”
“Then why are you here?” she scoffed.
“It proves that he loves you.” He wasn’t getting through to her. She looked away. “Hope,” he said, trying one last time. “Look at me. I’m expendable. That’s why I’m here. You must’ve realized that by now. I mean, that’s why I’m in the suit and you’re not. He’d rather lose the fight than lose you.”
That was it. That’s all he could do. Pym was a jerk, and he’d never be a Father of the Year candidate, but he was trying to protect Hope now. Maybe make up for lost time a little. If she didn’t see it… “Anyway,” he said, and started to open the car door.
“You know, I didn’t know you had a daughter when I called the cops on you,” she said. Scott had the feeling there was an apology in there somewhere. “What’s her name?”
“Cassie.”
“It’s a pretty name.” Okay. Now they were getting somewhere. They might even start to develop a rapport that didn’t involve her beating him up in the martial arts drills. “You have to clear your mind, Scott. You have to make your thoughts precise. That’s how it works.” She handed him the earpiece. “Think about Cassie, about how badly you want to see her, and use that to focus.”
Scott closed his eyes and concentrated. Nothing.
“Open your eyes,” she said. “And just think about what you want the ants to do.”
He did. Hope had put a penny on the dashboard. Just think, Scott told himself. He let his mind wander out, looking for the ants, and some of them appeared around the penny. Two of them picked it up and held it on end. Hey, Scott thought. I’m doing it!
“Good,” she said. For the first time since he’d known her, she had a real smile on her face.
He felt so good about it that he had the ants spin the penny like a top. Just for fun.
CHAPTER 13
Later that afternoon, Pym asked Scott and Hope to come into his study. He was standing, looking at some pictures on the shelves when they got there. “Your mother convinced me to let her join me on my missions,” he said. “They called her the Wasp. She was born to it. And there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t regret having said yes.” Hope walked toward him, hearing for the first time the truth she’d always wanted to know.
“It was 1987. Separatists had hijacked a Soviet missile silo in Kursk and launched an ICBM at the United States. The only way to the internal mechanics was through solid titanium. I knew I had to shrink between the molecules to disarm the missile, but my regulator had sustained too much damage.” Pym paused, reliving the events in his mind. There was wonder and admiration on his face—sadness, too—as he went on. “Your mother, she didn’t hesitate. She turned off her reg
ulator and went subatomic to deactivate the bomb. She was gone.”
Pym turned to his daughter, who had barely moved a muscle while he told the story. “Your mom died a hero,” he told her. “And I spent the next ten years trying to learn all I could about the quantum realm.”
“You were trying to bring her back.” There were tears in Hope’s eyes.
Pym slumped a little. “But all I learned was we know nothing.” It wouldn’t bring back the lost time, Scott knew, but they were starting to understand each other. He hadn’t abandoned his daughter; Pym had spent her childhood trying to find her mother, who had saved the United States from a nuclear bomb.
“It’s not your fault,” Hope said. “She made her choice. But why didn’t you tell me this sooner?” she asked, and really started to cry.
“I was trying to protect you. I lost your mother. I didn’t mean to lose you, too.”
“I’m sorry,” Hope whispered.
Scott broke the silence. “This is awesome. It’s awesome. Y’know. You guys are breaking down walls, you’re healing. It’s important.” Scott saw the way they were both looking at him and wished he hadn’t said anything. “I ruined the moment, didn’t I?”
“Yes, you did, yes,” Pym said.
Scott could tell they needed some alone time. “I’m going to make some tea,” he said.
Later that day Scott made the dive through the keyhole in the doorknob for the first time.
Over the next couple of days, Pym worked feverishly, creating and miniaturizing the gear that the ants would need to overload and disable the lab’s power and security systems. Scott spent every waking moment with the ants, learning what they could and couldn’t do. He got to know Ant-thony better than the rest of them, since Ant-thony was going to be his main ride in and out of the lab. He ran with the ants, taught them how to build things, learned their little behaviors, and figured out how they worked together.
Then he was ready for the last test before the real show.