The Ultimates: Against All Enemies (18 page)

"Captain," Nick said. "This isn't the war college. You can write your dissertation after we've taken care of the Chitauri. Unless you're trying to make a specific point about SHIELD operations?"
How interesting,
Loki said.
I believe we're witnessing a proxy battle here. On the one hand, the
intrepid Steven Rogers; on the other, the indomitable Nicholas Fury. Both of them too stupidly
proud to focus on what's really happening. I love this.
.

"Can you put one of those paper clips in his eye?" Thor whispered.

"Sure," Clint said. "But he wouldn't be able to pretend he was sneezing." Too bad, Thor thought.

"I don't think any more needs to be said about this." Nick held out a hand toward Tony Stark. "And now Tony's going to show us the latest Stark Industries toy. Before he does, I'll just say that we are all indebted to the work done by Henry Pym. Pym will not be returning to the team, but his independent research has proved very useful, so credit where credit is due."

Thor looked around the room, and saw that Loki was still sitting, still watching. As if he felt Thor's gaze, Loki looked over and gave his half brother a little wink. His new paper clip earring showed through the dark fall of his hair.

This isn't over, Thor thought.

27

"Okay," Tony said, standing up and looking around the room. "I'm going to try this one more time. And Nick, this time I promise I won't use you as a guinea pig." He caught the eye of his lead tech. "Carlo. We ready to go here?"

At the thumbs-up from Carlo, Tony said, "This is another case of me getting a little far afield from the initial purpose of a contract. At one point in the not-too-distant past, Stark Industries was asked by parties who shall remain nameless to investigate the possibilities of using wireless-enabled consumer products as a kind of distributed surveillance or information-gathering network. I worked on that for a while, but I'll tell you the truth. The Chitauri problem makes it difficult to focus on basic research, and it also makes it difficult to stay within the parameters of a research contract when I see a possibility that might have application elsewhere." He grinned and shrugged. "Call me scatterbrained, I guess. Carlo, start the movie."

The lights in the conference room dimmed as a projector started up. A map of the United States appeared. "After Arizona," Tony said, "we all decided to believe the Chitauri were gone. But in the last couple of weeks, we've had confirmed sightings in Illinois and New Ybrk."

"And Washington, D.C.," Steve said.

There was a moment of silence.

"Is that so?" Tony said. "Hmm. Seems our intelligence sharing isn't what it could be. Okay, and Washington, D.C. Carlo, next time we show this, bring a Sharpie in case anyone else has a Chitauri sighting to add."

Nobody laughed. Oh well, Tony thought. There are occasions when even I can't lighten up a situation with a joke. Keeps me humble.

"In any case, confirmed sightings, and in situations that indicated they weren't just hanging around. They were tracking us. They infiltrated Hank Pym's lab, they carried out a suicide bombing on the Triskelion after figuring out exactly how our freight intake was handled, they tried to get into Janet's apartment, and they even assimilated a dog to keep an eye on Steve. Last time around, they went for big clusters and grandiose gestures. This time, it looks like they're taking a much more subtle approach... focused on us." As Tony listed each Chitauri action, the projector showed a related image: Hank's wrecked lab, the aftermath of the Triskelion bombing, the recovery team in the breezeway next to Janet's building, the destroyed Monte Carlo where Hank had been shot. That final image remained as Tony went on. "And especially focused on Hank, even though he's not on the team anymore," Tony said. "Why?

Because—and this is hard for me to admit—Hank found the silver bullet." The screen image flickered and became an ant.

"Bullet ant, I should say. Chitauri under great physical stress begin to lose their shape-shifting ability. This ant packs possibly the most painful sting in the insect kingdom, and a little cluster of them can ruin a Chitauri's disguise in no time flat. How do we know this? Because Hank Pym figured out how to tell ants to search for and attack Chitauri."

Tony paused for just long enough to let that sink in, and then he said, "Kind of makes me wish I'd never wasted my time on those screeners. They'll do some good, but if the Chitauri don't want to be spotted that way, they'll just avoid airports and the other places where screeners like that get installed." On the screen, a reproduced newspaper headline, clearly from a small-town weekly:
Local Woman
Attacked by Fire Ants
. More headlines followed, all variations on the same theme.

"Apparently Hank couldn't always get bullet ants, so he practiced with whatever species he had around. But his results, ladies and gentlemen, are impeccable. Hank Pym has designed broadcast commands for twenty-odd different species of ant, all of which can now be made to hunt and attack Chitauri on command. How are we doing so far? Questions?"

"What about—" Steve started to say.

Fury shot out of his seat. "Captain Rogers. You will not waste Tony's time. Is that understood?" Steve looked straight ahead at nothing and folded his hands on the tabletop. "Yes, sir," he said.

"Good. Tony, please continue."

My goodness, Tony thought. A more obvious bitch-slap has probably never occurred in this room, or at least not between members of the team. Wonder what that's all about. "Okay, well, the great thing about what Hank did is that ants live nearly everywhere in the world that people do. So we could see a solution: put the world's ants on high alert for Chitauri presence, and have rapid-response teams in place to act whenever the ants turned one up. The problem, as you have all doubtless already figured out, is that Hank Pym doesn't work for SHIELD anymore, and anyway, how is one guy going to run around the world with his ant-controlling helmet on all the time?"

The image changed back to the map of the United States. After five seconds, splotches of color began to cover it. "These are maps of cell-phone coverage," Tony said. "All the major companies, including mine." Most of the map was covered, but there were large empty spots, mostly in the Rocky Mountain West.

"This is pretty good, right? But not good enough. So we kept looking, and I even tried to buy a couple of AM radio stations to fill in some of the holes, but the FCC doesn't move that fast for any man. I tried to pick up an XM satellite frequency, but it turns out that none of the ones that are available would work for the ants. Then I had an idea. What if we could piggyback on consumer electronic devices? GPS

handsets, cell phones, PDAs, everything. They all send out signals to their networks, just to keep in touch, and if we can add just a little packet of data to those signals, we can suddenly have literally trillions of sentinels on the lookout for Chitauri everywhere. All the time."

"I'm going to step in real quick and ask a question, Tony," Nick said. "Which is: but how does this work?

I mean, you can't wave a sample in front of the ants and tell them to go look for something, right?"

"No, but you don't have to. One of the smart things Hank did was figure out how to turn one chemical signature of Chitauri tissue into a set of electrical impulses. It's like talking on a phone. Sound becomes electricity becomes sound. In this case, an odor becomes a kind of algorithm, which when broadcast into the ant's brain becomes the sense of an odor together with the pheromonal signal to attack. Put another way, Hank figured out how to actually broadcast thoughts into ants' heads. I've got to tip my hat to Hank on that one. It's good stuff. Stark Industries is stealing it without shame. And the best thing about the whole project is that it works like SETI@Home, or any one of those other geek-nirvana projects," Tony said. "It'll broadcast on any wireless router, and pretty much any other Bluetooth device. If you're driving across the Mojave and there's not an Internet cafe within a hundred miles... as long as you've got cell service, you'll be helping us out. Or if your car has GPS, or whatever. Carlo, we ready?"

"We sure are," Carlo said.

"Okay, everyone," Tony said. "Turn around so you can see where Carlo is, and let's watch." Amid the shuffle and scrape of chair legs, Tony thought he'd talked too much. Always better to let people come in once in a while, and use their responses to drive things forward in a way that made them feel like they'd contributed. Nick had kind of put everyone on alert with his takedown of Steve, though; no wonder the room had been so quiet afterward. What the hell was going on with those two, he wondered? Was this still about the leak? Did Nick think—or know—that Steve was the culprit? Was that why he was keeping Steve on a short leash?

Spare me the intrigue, Tony thought. I've got brain cancer, and there are aliens among us. Let's get this done.

Carlo uncovered a large Lucite terrarium, approximately one-third filled with earth. The rest of it was filled with a standard assortment of leaf litter, pieces of fallen trees, and so forth. Your typical pocket ecosystem ant farm. "In there are about twelve thousand average harvester ants," Tony said, "and a single half-gram sample of Chitauri tissue. And this," he went on as he held up a small black rectangle about the size of a remote-entry car key, "is a little voice that will speak to the ants. Everybody turn your cell phones off"

When everyone had done so, Tony set the black rectangle on the table in front of him. He switched it on and said, "Now look at the ants."

The ants weren't doing anything unusual. "Here's the good part," Tony said. "Someone—ah, how about you, Janet?—turn your cell phone on."

Janet looked annoyed, but she got her phone out of her coat pocket again and turned it on. "The phone is going to start looking for its network," Tony said. "When it does that... hey, look at those ants." Everyone turned, and it was perfect. The ants came churning up out of the earth and converged on a spot near the end of a length of decomposing birch. Almost instantly, the birch disappeared under the swarming ants. "Anyone care to guess where I put the sample?" Tony asked.

"And this would have worked no matter which of us turned on a phone?" Janet asked.

"It would have worked no matter who turned on a phone, or any other personal accessory that broadcasts its presence to a network," Tony said. "There's one other thing, too. Stark Industries owns a number of communications satellites, and I believe I'm going to be able to slip this message into their signals. If that works, then we'll have coverage of the entire world, just like that. But if it doesn't, I still have this."

The projector showed a roughly cylindrical metal machine sitting on a tripod, with antennas fanning out around its midsection. It looked like a satellite, but the framing of the image made clear that it was small enough to sit on a table. "I thought you said you hadn't gotten the satellites up yet," Janet said.

"Janet, my darling, getting things up is never my problem. I said I hadn't worked out the signal yet, and this isn't a satellite. This is an amplifier, which if attached to an aircraft at a sufficient height should be able to bounce a signal to the ants all over a line-of-sight area. Say, a time zone at a time. If I can get a dozen old U-2s, or even a secondhand fleet of Airbus 320s, these amplifiers will give what we call blanket coverage."

"Meaning," Nick said, "that there's nowhere in the world—-or at least the parts of the world inhabited by ants—that a Chitauri will be able to hide."

"And without them, we'll have to rely on one phone, one BlackBerry, one GPS at a time. The amplifiers are the trump card."

"So what, we get the amplifiers deployed and the Chitauri just pull up stakes and head for the North Pole or the Himalayas or somewhere?" Clint asked.

"Well, this is where Homeland Security's data-mining operations are going to be very useful," Nick said.

"Some of you have made no secret of your distaste for how closely SHIELD has to work with Washington, but in this case that cooperation is going to come in handy. We'll have access to everything they know about sudden movements of population, and we've already got surveillance satellites on the lookout for new populations in areas unoccupied by ants."

"Already?" Clint repeated.

Nick looked a little less confident when he answered. "In the event that the Chitauri have already figured out what Hank has been up to. If their agent in Hank's Illinois lab was able to report back, then the Chitauri might already have gone to a worst-case scenario and figured that they should head for the hills. I don't think that's the case, but we've got to include it as a possibility."

"And if they have, then what?" Thor boomed suddenly. "Another little incursion into a sovereign nation?

Will we be nationalizing any oil assets along the way?"

"Keep your pinko politics out of this room, mister," Steve growled. "You're not even American. We're under attack. They want to kill us. If you don't want to fight back, then there's the door."

"Captain Rogers," Nick said. "Team unity is very important here. When the enemy is not obviously identifiable, it's natural to start suspecting everyone's motives. But we don't need that. What we need is everyone on-board. You can fight about multinational corporate hegemony some other time."

"As much as we'd all love to talk about it now," said Tony with a roll of his eyes. "Being a hegemonic corporate presence myself, I can't wait to have that conversation."

"Are we going to be clearing this project with people in Washington? The ant part of it, I mean." Steve glanced over at Nick, but for once Nick let him run. Curiouser and curiouser, Tony thought. "Is Homeland Security just mining data and taking pictures for us, or are we supposed to be working together? They killed the screening tech, remember."

In the silence that followed, Tony looked around the room, just sort of to take everyone's temperature. A serious confrontation was brewing between Steve and Nick, that was clear. As far as Tony was concerned, the two of them deserved each other, but everything needed to be kept on less than a full boil until this little problem with the alien invasion was taken care of.