The Ultimates: Against All Enemies (22 page)

The next time Nick woke up, he was in bed, and he could hear. Two improvements over his previous attempt at consciousness. A doctor came in and informed him that he'd be able to go home the next day.

"I will be leaving here in one hour," Nick said, "and I'm only giving you that long because I know you'll never get the paperwork done sooner."

One hour later he was leaving the hospital. One hour after that he was back in his office in the Triskelion, going over mission reports. The first thing he did upon sitting down at his desk was put in a call to Tony Stark. He got voice mail, and said, "Tony. I'm expecting an explanation of your last comment, and I mean soon." Then he hung up and started poring over initial results of Homeland Security tracking to see if there had been an unexpected influx of new residents into any of the populated areas of Earth's landmass where ants didn't live. Nothing showed up in the numbers, and Nick leaned back, thinking the situation over. The Chitauri had clearly put all they had into the attack on Stark Industries, which meant they still thought they had something to fight for... which in turn meant that they didn't think the ants were going to be decisive.

Nick went back over the reasoning. An alternate possibility was that this had been an all-or-nothing attack because the Chitauri knew they were already beat, and Stark Industries had been a Hail Mary. Nick couldn't quite make himself believe that, though. They were too cautious, and too good at planning for the long haul. If that hadn't been a last-ditch effort at something, though, the waste of manpower was huge... which meant the Chitauri had lots of bodies to waste.

Each line of thought turned itself into its opposite, and Nick gave up after spending the afternoon plowing the same furrows through his mind. He checked in at the lab downstairs to see if any of the Chitauri had survived, and could be interrogated, but according to Janet there had been no survivors. "And, Nick," she added, "just how the hell am I supposed to interpret the fact that everyone on the team was called in except me?"

"I sent out an APB to all team members," Nick'said. "You're on the list. I'm not going to take responsibility for anything beyond that."

Over her shoulder he could see Banner looking out of his glassed-in cell with keen interest. Wonder if anyone's doing the kind of psych profiling on him that could tell whether his isolation is changing the way he gets interested in other people, Nick thought. Not that it mattered. Looking back at Janet, he saw that she didn't believe him. "Janet," he said. "I was damn close to calling Hank there at the end of that fight. I mean, look at me. You think I'd have just left you out?"

Wrong thing to say, Nick thought as her soon-to-be-ex-husband's name left his mouth. "Oh, you were," Janet said. "Funny. Does the SHIELD moralizing have some kind of emergency threshold? When the chips get down, we call back in the abusers that we cashiered even though we ignored all of the other things other members of the team had done? That must be one of those situational ethics things they teach you when you're in military college."

"It was a joke, Janet. An exaggeration. We were never going to call Hank," Nick said.

"Go to hell, Nick."

Janet turned and walked off and Nick saw that Banner was still looking at him. When Banner noticed Nick's attention, he shifted his gaze to Janet and followed her all the way to a specimen locker at the other end of the lab. Psych people would have no trouble figuring that out, Nick thought. He sighed, went back upstairs, and put in a work order for a tech team to figure out if there was something wrong with Janet's phone or SHIELD comm, if she'd had it available.

It was five o'clock, his head was killing him, he had stitches all over his arms and shoulders from a menagerie of shrapnel, and he still hadn't begun to deal with the biggest problem of yesterday. Some combination of Ozzie Bright, Vince Altobelli, and Esteban Garza was Chitauri. Nick's guess was all three, but he wasn't sure about Altobelli. He also wasn't sure how the Chitauri would be reacting to Bright's outing as one of them. They had to know that SHIELD would realize that Bright had been assimilated, and they had to know that Steve would put together the relationship between Bright and Garza. Bright played bad cop. Garza played good cop, and Nick Fury bought it hook, line and sinker. So had Steve, until Tony laid out for him the impossibility of a handheld screener. It was all elementary misdirection, exposed as soon as Steve started telling even a fraction of the truth to his nominal superiors. Emphasis, Nick thought, on the nominal. Time to put that to rest. He put in a call to Steve, just to run through the facts one more time, and then made one of the most difficult decisions of his service life.

"Steve," he said for the second time in a month, "how about we get us a beer together?"

"You know I don't drink, General," came Steve's response.

"I also know that you've been lying to me, that you don't trust me, and that this team is going to fly apart if you and I don't clear the air. So you will meet me at the same place as last time, and we will have a beer, and by the end of the night we will understand each other better than we do now."

"Is that an order, sir?"

"All of it's an order. Meeting, drinking, understanding. You are ordered to do all three." Fury hung up and started contemplating what a pain in the ass it was going to be to get to Brooklyn. He hated taxicabs. On the train, the ride was fairly short, but that was only because it left you with quite a ways to walk. Nick didn't know if other people felt this way, but if he was going to walk somewhere, he'd just as soon walk there; if he was going to take wheeled transportation, he wanted it to drop him off within sight—preferably within arm's reach—of his destination. Mixing the two was not his style. And thinking about it was starting to make his battered body feel worse. Here I am with a building full of engineers and geniuses, man, Nick thought, and all I really want is one of them to teleport me to a bar. What the hell good is science, anyway?

The only good thing to come out of the day so far was that SHIELD'S news-culling service was starting to spit out increasing numbers of headlines about ant attacks. Somewhere out there, Hank Pym was doing his thing, and the Chitauri were responding. This led to a new set of problems, since there was no mission coordination. Hank wasn't answering Nick's calls, which Nick could understand on a personal level, but this was no damn situation to let feelings get in the way of what needed to be done. Hank was a liability, team-wise, and he knew it; he also must know that the ant research could be done faster at Triskelion laboratories than at whatever thrown-together facility he could get together. None of that would make any difference to Hank, because he carried around an inferiority complex big enough to make anyone paranoid—even if that anyone wasn't bipolar to begin with. So Hank was at the mercy of his brain chemistry. All of them were.

I got a guerrilla ant army out there, Nick thought, but no way to control it until Tony gets his voice of God networking thingamajig set up. I sure hope he didn't blow the shit out of his own building to the extent that he can't go ahead with that little project, which might save all of us. Be just my luck if suddenly there's some kind of continent-wide spraying program that wipes out all the ants. If Steve was right about Bright and Garza, it wasn't out of the question. They had to move fast.

Life, Nick thought, would be easier if I was as stone-cold a human being as Janet appears to think I am. Since he wasn't, he was going to go have a beer.

33

Status Report

The technology begins to cause consistent asset loss, and has resulted in difficult curtailment of standard surveillance activity and regular mobility. At this time no viable countermeasure is available. Frequency jamming fails due to the constant band-switching of signals, and the limitless number of possible sources of such signals now that the modification to the

technology is operational.

Planned elimination of the modification by means of assault on manufacturing and design facility in proved unsuccessful. Mission timeline and analysis follow. Due to mission results, retrenchment will occur as of receipt of this transmission.

Mission Timeline

-.010954 solar year: Initial reports that has developed a device capable of tremendously enhancing human detection and counter-infiltration activities.

-.010713 solar year: Preparation of mission plans. Reconceptualization of possibilities for success of human ordering project. Selection of mission plan according to primary objective of eliminating or delaying deployment of amplifier technology.

-.005422 solar year: Mobilization of assets. Planning for redeployment of assets to minimize impact of

technology for control of . Two plans constructed, one subsequent to planned

mission success and another envisioned as retrenchment in the event of mission failure.

-.002825 solar year: Assets within secure laboratory where amplifier is believed to be designed and where prototypes are believed to be housed. Penetration of headquarters by means of subterranean demolition.

-.002813 solar year: Destruction of utility and network lines in and out of headquarters. Reserve power systems prove resilient and problematic.

-.002795 solar year: Laboratory in which designs exoskeletons provisionally secured. Forces moving through to next mission objectives.

-.002793 solar year: Unexpected (and believed coincidental) arrival of in lab. Consequent failure to deliver full amount of assets to next set of objectives. Unexpectedly high losses of assets.

-.002754 solaryear: Penetration of laboratory previously secured by assets within . Thorough destruction of laboratory, penetration of attached facilities on adjacent floors.

-.002749 solaryear: Intelligence of rapid-response team. Preparation for counterattack. Continued degradation of laboratory capabilities. Numerous amplifier prototypes destroyed.

-.002733 solar year: Arrival of through ingress previously believed controlled by rearguard assets. Near-simultaneous penetration of laboratory by rapid-response team, including .

-.002723 solar year: Degradation of rapid-response team, with exception of .

-.002720 solaryear: Arrival of , in exoskeleton previously believed secured. Near-total destruction of amplifier laboratory and adjacent floors.

-.002711 solaryear: Loss of mission assets reaches 85 percent. Retreat executed. Egress controlled by

. Near-total loss of mission assets.

Analysis of Mission

Mission failures included redeployment of assets away from surveillance of team members. Lack of surveillance resulted in unexpected combat circumstances and unsustainable losses of assets. Retrospective analysis indicates that mission planning was reactive and too narrowly focused, as well as insufficiently respectful of alternatives and possible consequences of asset redeployment. A more decisive shortcoming was failure to credit possibility that the amplifier was a decoy, of similar nature to the operation carried out against forces with notable success in the previous solar year. Available evidence indicates that alone among the knew that the amplifiers were fabricated; the only possible conclusion is that deliberately endangered his comrades and engineered the partial destruction of his headquarters in order to inflict heavy asset loss. The irrationality of this initiative needs no explication. Its success demands consideration.

The entrapment appears to have been made possible by the human tendency toward strong personal identity, without which a single individual—in this case himself—would have been unable to conceive of and execute an operation in which his colleagues and superiors were deceived to the same degree as our assets. A heterodox possibility presents itself: perhaps, due to ecological quirks on a local scale,

is better served by individualism, traceable to primate ancestry, than other dominant species have been by the more common trait in successful civilizations of mass identification. Millennia of documented ordering projects militate against this possibility, but the human ordering project has been unusual in a number of ways. A flexible and committed project guidance hierarchy would take into consideration this strong variance from the norm when future ordering projects are being planned.

At this time, prospects for success of the human ordering project are highly uncertain. Arrival of reinforcements from other sectors would positively influence the equation; however, lack of consistent communication with other sectors would seem to indicate that events elsewhere are unfolding in a manner unlikely to yield significant asset redeployment to .

Given results of mission, existing redeployment plans for minimizing impact of

technology are to be implemented as of receipt of this transmission. 34

The Boulevard was a little more lively than it had been, if by lively you meant more populated by the kind of noisy freaks that could make you second-guess your life's dedication to protecting American citizens. The hairy bartender was behind the bar again, wearing his German soccer jersey that probably hadn't been washed since the last time Steve had been there. At least this time the other guy behind the bar, a long-haired Chinese, had on a Mets cap. The Mets still didn't seem like a real baseball team to Steve, but then again, neither did the Los Angeles Dodgers or San Francisco Giants. In some ways, he thought, he'd never catch up to the fifty-seven years he'd missed. He ordered a ginger ale from the Chinese bartender, whose name—Steve discovered when the other bartender asked him where something was—turned out to be Steve.