9. The Awkward Small Talk Phase

. . .

The card key worked on the elevator without actual incident, causing Loki a brief but visible moment of disappointment. The buttons showed significant wear on the one indicating the bottom floor, B3, as compared to the rest. "You know," said Loki as Phil slapped idly at the button a handful of times until it complied. The elevator kicked into slow motion. "This is rather reminding me a touch of the Captain's tale of Ms. Carter, as I relayed to you."

"Crappy guards on the entry floor, locked underground lair, probable genetic experiment weirdness going on inside. Yeah, I can see it, sorta. The bare bones of the situation." Phil watched Loki sway his weight seemingly in time to the hauntingly underwhelming elevator music version of George Michael's Careless Whisper, fairly sure it was a coincidence. "We set a van on fire, though. That was a little different."

"I set the van on fire. You watched. And, I add, you grinned."

"I did not grin."

"You smiled, then, and don't dare call me a liar here. A child at his birthday revels while the unloved neighbor's house burns down. Half expected you to go and nip a bag of marshmallows out of that atrocious rental. I don't often see this sort of fury from you." The words were idle banter but, buried in them, Coulson realized he was hearing a hint of actual concern. The once-rampaging alien was subtly reminding him to reflect on his decisions before going all the way off.

Okay, he thought. That happened. "Didn't pack any."

"Map said there was one of those miserable Target stores up a few miles." The elevator dinged for their destination. Loki arched an eyebrow at the reveal of an empty hall before him, about as excitingly decorated and painted the same dull near-white as the entry floor. "Could fix the matter."

"Maybe for the next burned-out van."

"Oh, so we expect another one?" Still with that mild caution buried under the surface of his voice as he stepped out, scanning the area with a pan of his head. "And here I thought Miss Johnson was jesting with me when she discussed pacing one's self when tossing Nazis around."

"She said what?"

"She indicated general support for the endeavor on principle, and suggested the former statement particularly in case there were a lot of such Nazis. Thoroughness seemed to be the watchword. I felt similar from Rogers. There are some… strong feelings about these particular fools."

"Yeah." It came out non-committal, by way of savage understatement. There was also the bit he didn't want to bring up, that he'd read about on some of the older after-reports from-

"Had an old man refer to me as one of these once. Expect you recall that from the Stuttgart papers. Didn't make much of an impression at the time, questions of scope and scale." Yeah. That. Loki was moving down the hall ahead of him now, idly checking doors with a wave of his hand as he walked. "I'm not going to pretend I'm suddenly perfectly empathetic and understand the totality of the matter as it pertains to human history, Coulson, but I have since grasped that it was damned well far from a compliment. I understand it matters greatly to you and the rest."

"It's something," Phil managed. He reached out and opened the door to a darkened bloodwork lab. Paper bibs and a handful of colorful rubbery tourniquets sat in a pile on the dusty chair. There was nothing else.

Loki's voice floated back to him, droll as he continued to look for complications laying in wait ahead. "Oh, so we've finally made it 'round to the awkward small talk phase of our trip. 'Oh yeah, remember back when you were an invading would-be overlord with passing similarity to the fascists that've got me all pissed off right now? Good times.'"

Coulson shut the door. "I don't sound like that." He paused with his hand on the knob, glancing at Loki's back. "Do I?"

"Not so much. I'm exaggerating for effect. It's very quiet down here despite the energy readings above. I mislike it."

"Is this bothering you?"

"What?" Loki shut another door and looked back at him, faux-innocent. "Haring off into the world, hunting the physical rebirth of yon Nazi Party via this abomination's womb forged of Hydra's cold corpse at your side and with your beloved Captain's blessing, wholly aware that I'm the wrong person to help spearhead something like this and quite possibly privately concerned that other and greater Gods mayhap do exist and might toast me for the sheer ludicrous hypocrisy of it all?" He grinned, turning manic. "Not in the least."

"Loki-"

He shrugged off whatever Phil was going to say next, light as a cat. "If you're going to upset such hidden outer powers, you might as well go all the way with bells a-jingling. Makes a better story." Then he jerked a thumb down towards an approaching intersection. "Do you hear that hum now? Left at the junction, I think."

He did, vaguely. Low and thrumming electric. The core of the power grid had to be under the floor somewhere close, running whatever was going on down here and tossing out just enough juice so that the regular crowd could read the latest from their crappy propaganda pamphlets without squinting. "You got any theories about what's down here?"

"Doubt it's festive. Come on, let's sort it all out and be done with this place. I hate these semi-abandoned underground ex-SHIELD facilities, nothing good ever happens in them."

. . .

"Sample 4493, test is clear." Dave the lab tech muttered the words just loud enough for the mic in his workstation computer to hear and record the rote statement. He moved on to the next result with a tap of the mouse, taking in the visual information and making the exact same conclusion. "Sample 4494, test is clear." And again, until he broke Test 4500 and pretended the dull readouts he was studying flared the appropriate milestone fireworks instead. He leaned back against the old swivel chair he was slouched in and rubbed his eyes, the thing itself some mid-80's indestructible monstrosity he'd found in a storage excursion last year. He scratched at his chest under the mostly blank white ID card pinned to his coat. "Hey, Monty, what do you want to go out and get for breakfast today?"

The disembodied voice of Monty, the old guy in the only other occupied cube in this room, floated towards him through the darkness. Only their two cubes were ever lit. The number of times Dave had whacked an ankle on a cube corner fumbling towards his station on the regular was high. Very high. "I want a box of deep fried chicken nuggets the size of my ass, and a crisp romaine salad with a light wine vinaigrette from a French boulangerie."

"Boulangeries sell bread, asshole, not salads."

"We're playing pretend, Dave. In my mind, I'm up Raquel Welch's ass in 1967, with a french baguette big enough to kill God gripped in my sweaty hand, and I've got a crispy fresh salad and some chicken nuggets waiting for me on the marble tabletop previously occupied by the Pope's sweaty butt."

Dave started to honk ugly, wild laughter. He usually only physically saw Monty for five seconds every late evening as the lone security guard checked them into the creepy place for the midnight shift, the pair of them otherwise locked into a brain-meltingly mundane routine for ridiculously good money. He checked glucose and mineral readings on every test sample that headed his way, and Monty, he guessed based on a few scraps of paper left around once or twice, was doing plasma protein counts.

If they ever actually discussed their work, bye-bye ridiculously good money. The job was crap for his mental health, but having enough scratch to go berserk on the town every weekend helped. So they didn't talk about that. Nor about any irregularities that might pop in the system or in the morning messages. But the stupid banter kept them both sane in the cubes, meanwhile. Monty was good for vulgar, hearty additions to almost any statement.

Dave suspected just based on the decent but not high-tech IT system that there might be one other guy down the hall maintaining it, but if so, he was on an alternate shift. Probably saw actually got to see daylight instead of sleeping through it, lucky bastard. And what happened in the day around the place? No clue. "I just want a burger. A really, really crappy one."

Monty didn't add anything to that, for a wonder. Dave had been hoping for a good, gross crack about the digestive aftereffects of a bag of White Castle sliders. The man had a gift for those. Dave kept filling the silence, searching for the other guy in it. "I got two yogurts and a bagel in the bag today. Not even a good bagel. By the time I get out of here and take a nap, the store only has that asiago crap left in the bakery. Wind up with the bagged ones every damn time. I really need to start going on the weekend, pretend to be a normal person."

Still nothing. Maybe the old guy had wandered to the jakes. He moved pretty quietly sometimes. Dave shrugged, assuming that was it, and resumed mindlessly checking what could have been the same goddamn test result over and over, muttering his report into his machine.

A deeper shadow passed over him, then stayed.

Dave, the sad lab tech with a crappy job signed up for out of a batch of random Arizona Craigslist ads, looked up into a bone white face looming out of the darkness that enveloped his cube. Gray-green eyes glinted in the marble mask with terrifying sharpness.

"Hi!" chirped the demon.

Dave screamed his way up the vocal scale and scrabbled his keyboard into his fumbling hands to try and wield it like a lumber plank in his defense, teetering the heavy old CRT monitor and causing it to crash to its side as the cord between the two yanked itself free.

It could have gone better for Dave.

. . .

Loki reared his head back, surprised, as the man in the lab coat abruptly dropped the keyboard and began to claw at his chest instead. "I think he's having a medical event," he said.

"What did you do?" Coulson popped up next to him, peering over the particleboard wall of the cube at the gasping technician. A moment later, he had his hands dug under the man's pits and was helping him to the ground. The old guy hadn't been anywhere near that dramatic of a grab in comparison. The pair had snagged him on the way to a vending machine, locking him into a side room for questioning once they'd secured the small cube farm and its remaining occupant.

"Scared him half to death, I thought. Unfortunately, I may have scared him whole to death." Loki looked up, then pinpointed the rest area. "Be right back."

He returned with the first aid kit and a plastic glass of water as Coulson was still checking the guy's heart rate. "Is it cardiac? I found aspirin. I read a thing about that once."

The guy was heaving for air, and his skin was ice cold. Coulson patted him, at a loss of what else to do. He reached up for the water, at least. "Honestly, I think you just threw him into the worst panic attack of his life."

"Feels… like a heart attack." The tech gasped the words as he fumbled towards the glass being offered. His face was drained of blood.

"Yeah, they do that. The real good ones." Coulson settled himself on the ground, pulling himself into a cross-legged position. He reached out to snap free the keycard on the guy's chest, noticing that this one had no logos of any kind on its back and only that black bar on the front. That told him a few things, and resolutely popped the lab guy into the non-combatant category. "Okay, just look at me for a few and breathe."

The lab tech absolutely did not do that, continuing to shake, struggle for air, and glancing with sheer terror at Loki, who looked calmly back. "I think I'm having a flashback," said Loki, sounding bemused.

"Tell me about it." Coulson snapped his fingers for attention, dragging the guy's stare from the looming terror-stick back to him. "He's not going to hurt you. Look at me. Breathe. Just… just kind of roll with it for a few. Lean into the panic. Focus on your breathing, and you'll calm down. I mean, not immediately. But you will. Breathe in. Feel it. Focus on it. Breathe out. Tell me your name."

"Dave," said the tech, shakily.

"Alright, Dave. The other guy from this room is fine. We locked him in a room and he's probably kinda ticked at us, but he's fine. Is there anyone else on this floor?"

Deep breath. "Maybe."

"Okay. You don't know." Coulson watched him shake his head, then fly his eyes open wide again. "The lightheaded thing is normal. You're fine, believe me. If I thought you were actually gonna pop, I got a heavy duty kit out on the other side of the lot, the creep moves real fast, and we'd keep you stable till EMS got here. I promise. Okay?"

Eyes flicked up towards Loki, still far too wide.

"Creep?" asked Loki, visibly pretending to be wounded. The theatricality of it seemed to soothe the tech a very tiny bit.

"You're not going to get hurt by us. I can already see you don't know hardly anything about what you're into. But we are investigating some trouble." Coulson flapped the keycard. "You ever see any logos around for this place? Names. Anything?"

"N-no. All I do every day is check these blood samples for any abnormalities."

"Other fellow did plasma, we note. Found some other systems running automated processes. It's all compartmentalized now," said Loki, sticking his hip against the side of the cubicle. He leaned down with a long arm and set the monitor back upright with a finger. "Causes fewer problems this way, no doubt. Loyalty via paycheck. Cheaper, really."

"It's a good paycheck." Dave hicked his way through the words, not feeling vindicated by being right about Monty's part of the job. "Paid off my student loans."

"You work for Nazis, as it happens." Loki dropped the bombshell on the guy with the cheerful candor of someone explaining to a small child what the shellac on their candy was made out of. Coulson twitched. 'Helpful' Loki was sometimes questionably effective. "Still good?"

"Uh…" Dave was pale again, wide eyes flickering between the two. He decided to stay fixated on Coulson, who was now rubbing at the headache growing rapidly behind his eyebrows. "I think there's an IT guy in here. We get mail in the morning, batch sizes and some other technical crap. Someone strips them of all the sender info except for the in-house information, pretty much turns everything into plain text notes and adds local updates. I've never seen him, though."

"Okay." Coulson dropped his hand, mentally grabbing onto that information. "Sorry to tell you this, but you just lost your job."

"Is he serious?"

"About the Nazi thing?" Coulson sighed. "Yeah, he is."

"Shit." Dave's face fell. "Yeah, I lost my job."

Coulson leaned back, then made a snap decision. "We locked the other guy in 223. Door's got an external deadbolt. Grab him and get out of here."

Dave scrambled upright, still visibly woozy as he found his balance. Then he got, with remarkable speed.

Coulson glared at Loki in the emptiness of the dark cube farm. "Why do you pick the crappiest moments to stop being subtle?"

Loki shrugged at him. "By my perspective, it was quite a good moment."

"How the hell do you figure?"

"I enjoyed it more."

Coulson started to get up, then rocked on his heels and blurted the question. "Are you like this on the road with everyone?"

"Essentially." Loki smirked at his exasperated noise. "Don't think you get special treatment just because you used to lead the place."

. . .

"Well. We're not questioning this one." Loki held the door open with a finger, wrinkling his nose at the smell of death filling the cold air of the small server room. He could see the still figure slumped in the chair before a flickering system, picking out the details of the colored foam on his lips. "Poisoned himself."

Coulson pushed past him, coughing once. "Terrific."

"At least an hour down. By the look and smell of things, I think he got wind of what happened upstairs. Some signal, or a feed I didn't spot in the security room." Loki looked along the walls not seeing a camera hooked up. He moved in as Coulson started examining paper strewn across the room. He himself glided in, absently swiveling the body out of his way as he studied the monitor. "He tried to wipe the system, along with himself."

"Did he succeed?"

"Mm. Left a mess. In more ways than one, obviously. Give me a moment." Coulson heard him tapping idly around, then the unmistakeable chime of a reboot. "He was in a hurry, and possibly not as good at this as he thought. I expect for vulnerable tech they chose between competent anonymity and mindless loyalty, and they chose poorly."

"Safe mode?"

"Safe mode." Loki yawned, tapping again. A moment later he started thrumming his fingers on the desk as he thought. "That said… they've been mangling and destroying digital mail regularly. Can't get at much of that. What I can get… that's interesting… yes, they're bouncing off a specific host to muddy the actual traceroute. No doubt that host is coded to further hide the routers used. Odd, they could have just run a damned VPN and wiped that instead. Fortunate for us, anyways. Perhaps their internet technician was cloned from the 40's as well. Or is in fact operating off an outdated iPod, after all." Loki lifted his chin, frowning. He didn't elaborate on the odd remark. "I've found a deleted documents cache that I think I can recover."

Coulson came over to look at the monitor with him. "Mails before editing?"

"Looks like it." More tapping. A moment later, they were scrolling through a backup cache of emails, all within the last few weeks. Most were the batch-files bounced from somewhere, containing the digital files the two in the cubes had been working on. Another portion was the ever-present spam. And then - "Ah. Well. That's intriguing."

"What the hell am I looking at?" Coulson frowned. "Is that code?"

"It looks like gibberish entirely." Loki leaned back, sounding satisfied.

"How is that interesting?"

"Because it's the sort of gibberish you might wind up with when trying to force a message through a secure system. Said system caused an automated scramble to prevent it getting out." Loki arched an eyebrow, scrolling through the hundreds of emails until he found another. And another. All told, there were eight such mails recently. Now there were patterns he could see. "All eight bounced from that same point. Similarities in the sending code say it's likely the same computer, and the rest tell me it's probably the same author. Someone was trying something silly. I'm at the limit of what I can do with this, however, including discovering where that route initiated."

"What if we find the router?"

Loki shrugged. "Might well be possible to uncover the actual traceroute there. For most of these files, really. Miss Johnson left an entire suite of such tools behind that I can access."

"And she taught you how to use them."

"Please, Coulson." Loki shot him a dour look. "It's a Midgardian computer, not a crystallized semi-sentient vessel with a plasma bomb strapped to its ether-core in case of pirates."

The headache was coming back. "Do I want to know?"

"About the time I 'carjacked' an experimental Kree brain-skiff so that Thor and I could sneak less than a dozen warriors behind the frontline when they decided to be charmingly hostile with us about seven hundred years ago? It's not a very interesting story." Loki ignored the look he got. "The router is located in a southeastern Colorado server farm. Not all that far from here."

"Oh, God." Phil saw it coming and closed his eyes.

"Mm. The location itself is in the middle of nowhere, but I think it's piggybacking off of Cheyenne Mountain's secondary external network."

"Of course." He flung his hands in the air. "Let's just tool off in the car and hack into an internet line going to an active top secret military facility. Where, again, we probably put it there."

"This was your idea of a good time, Coulson. Do you want to return that absolutely worthless pile of a car and go home?"

"No."

"Then we go splice into their network, then get back into the absolute pile of a car and leave before unhappy men in camouflage come in much faster cars to ask us awkward questions about the matter. I don't think you want to hang about and fight them, anyway, they're technically on your side." Loki stood up, then looked back down at the corpse, as if suddenly remembering it. He jerked a thumb at the body. "Do we do anything about this?"

"I'll handle it." Phil sighed. "You drive."

"Do I have to do the speed limit?"

"If you go more than ten over, that car is going to fall apart."

Loki grinned like liquid threat. "Not on my watch, it won't."