УЧЕНЫЙ (THE SCIENTIST)
Being Hydra's prisoner wasn't so bad as long as you kept your head down.
That said, Dr. Irina Kretzskaya would regret moving west to Kiev for the rest of her days. She had left Moscow to visit a friend just in time for Operation Barbarossa, the German plan to invade Russia. The Germans failed in the end, but they had captured and killed plenty of Soviets.
That included Irina. A few Hydra operatives had assisted in the battle at Kiev, and they had kidnapped her along with several other scientists and engineers. The unfortunate group consisted of three other people:
Konstantin Obolensky, a chemist from St. Petersburg, who looked as though he had inhaled too many chemicals in his lab. Irina found him to be smart, but quite odd. He spoke fluent German, which was an enormous advantage. Obolensky didn't employ it much, though, only talking to the Germans when the others made him.
Dmitriy Artyomov was an engineer. He was a whiz with all forms of machinery and technology. Artyomov told some excellent jokes, and was quite charming. Though he spoke only rudimentary bits of their language, he got on the Germans' good side very quickly.
The psychologist Aleksander Zakharov was good company. Artyomov was funny and clever, but he was a bit much at times. Zakharov didn't talk much, which was a welcome change. He hadn't treated Irina disrespectfully and was willing to talk about his scientific experiments with her, a courtesy that was rarely given by male scientists.
She had a miserable time of it. They were taken to some secret base by three idiots named Pflüger, Bauer, and Fischer. Pflüger passed time by telling his captives about how wonderful and grandiose somebody named Johann Schmidt was, and probably wrote the man love sonnets in the shower. Bauer was as vain as the Evil Queen and twice as petty, preferring to examine his jawline in a pocket mirror instead of doing his job at the guard post. Fischer was competent enough but on the lower side of the intelligence spectrum. He was a Hydra fanatic, constantly singing the praises of Schmidt and the Führer.
"...Schmidt zog seine Waffe und schoss jedem britischen Soldaten eine Kugel direkt in den Kopf!" Pflüger waved his arms around, concluding the end of his dramatic retelling. "Doktor Obolensky, übersetzen Sie ihnen die Geschichte."
Obolensky sighed and looked up from his journal. "He says that Schmidt drew his gun and shot every British soldier right in the head. Then he told me to translate that for you."
Pflüger asked something eagerly, and Obolensky translated it. "He wants to know if he needs to clarify any part of his tale for you."
"No!" Irina, Artyomov, and Zakharov cried at once. Irina had had plenty enough of Pflüger's fairy tales about his precious Johann Schmidt.
Pflüger understood what they were saying and turned away from them. He leaned over his seat and said something to Fischer.
"Obolensky, ask them how long it will take us to reach our destination," Irina said.
Obolensky gave her a do-I-have-to? look but acquiesced with her request. "Wann werden wir dort ankommen?"
Pflüger checked his watch. "Ähm...ungefähr fünf Stunden."
"About five hours," Obolensky reported.
"Ask him where we're going."
"I already asked that, remember? He wouldn't tell us."
"Artyomov, can you ask?" Irina pleaded.
Artyomov sighed but painted on his most charming smile. "Wohin gehen wir also?"
Pflüger was engrossed in a conversation with Fischer, but Bauer glanced up from shaving his chin. "Sie müssen nichts wissen," he said sullenly.
"He says we don't need to know anything," Artyomov said with an irritated pout. "Guess we'll have to wait to find out."
Irina scowled and slumped back in her seat. The leather beneath her was worn and cracked. They had been driving for about a day and a half now, and it was an uncomfortable and boring trip. She had no idea where they were going, but figured it was somewhere in Germany.
The creaky old car pulled up in front of a bunker buried deep into the snowy base of a mountain. Irina and the other men were dragged out into the biting wind, teeth chattering. The soldiers wasted no time in handcuffing the men, though Irina was thankfully spared the restraints and instead nudged along impatiently by Bauer.
Masked guards surrounded them, hardly moving an inch. They all held machine guns in gloved hands and stared impassively into the distance. Irina made out a red octopus insignia on their uniforms, the exact same that was on Pflüger's, Bauer's, and Fischer's. It wasn't the Nazi swastika, but these men had been fighting alongside the Nazis in Kiev, so they were at least affiliated. Irina had never seen the symbol before, but it somehow instilled a foreboding feeling inside her.
Pflüger, Bauer, and Fischer were talking amongst themselves, nodding politely at the guards. They seemed happy to be out of the cramped car and back somewhere that could be loosely called civilization. Their prisoners couldn't say the same; they had food and shelter ahead of them but quite possibly death as well.
"They're calling it Elendberg," Obolensky whispered. "I think it's some kind of base."
"No shit, Sherlock," Artyomov hissed back. "Any word on whether or not they're going to kill us?"
"I believe we're going to be interrogated individually."
"Lovely," Zakharov muttered.
They reached the bunker's heavy steel door. Pflüger knocked sharply and announced their arrival in a loud voice.
The steel door slowly slid up, squeaking on rusted hinges. Two more soldiers, dressed head to toe in black, were waiting on the other side. One of them reached out and grabbed Irina, locking handcuffs on her wrist.
"Hey, that hurts!" she complained, trying to twist her hands into a more comfortable position.
The soldier ignored her and said something sharp to Bauer, probably scolding him for not cuffing her in the first place. The second soldier barked an order and gestured for them to follow him.
They were marched down a nondescript black hallway, occasionally passing by other guards or prisoners who cast them curious glances. Irina's eyes darted around but were unable to make out any landmarks or identifying features, other than signs in German that she couldn't read. Finally, they came to a side hallway filled with more of the same boring doors, but this time one was unlocked and Irina was unceremoniously shoved inside after a soldier quickly uncuffed her.
She landed hard on her left shoulder, probably bruising it. "Asshole," she spat at the closed door.
Irina pulled herself to her feet, rubbing her shoulder. The room, like the rest of the base, was almost entirely black. A flickering fluorescent lightbulb hung in the center of the room, illuminating the cot in one corner and the sink and toilet in another.
Yes, this was definitely a cell. Irina could expect to spend the foreseeable future in here—unless, of course, they decided to kill her.
The door to the cell opened, and two soldiers stepped inside. They were accompanied by Obolensky, who looked distinctly fearful.
Soldier #1 cleared his throat and spoke to her in a rough, deep voice.
"Sorry, don't speak German."
"He says his name is Amo Jäger, and his colleague is Carsten Becker. He's here to ask you some questions, and you are to answer them truthfully and concisely," Obolensky said, his voice trembling.
"Fine," Irina shrugged, though she knew she didn't have much of a choice. "Will you translate?"
Obolensky nodded, and the interrogation began.
"State your full name, birthplace, and birthday."
"My name is Irina Grigorevna Kretzskaya. I was born on October 13th, 1913, in Moscow."
"What is your occupation or expertise?"
"I'm a toxicologist. I study the effects of poisons and other dangerous biological materials in humans."
Jäger and Becker looked interested at that, and Irina had no idea if it was good interest or bad interest.
"What toxicology work have you been doing?"
"Well, before you motherfuckers kidnapped me, I was improving the sensitivity of carbon monoxide tests in corpses."
From the lack of reaction from the soldiers, it was a fair bet that Obolensky had only chosen to translate the carbon monoxide part.
"Do you have any connections to the Russian military or Secret Service?"
"My younger brother Nikolai is in training with the NKVD."
"When was the last contact you had with him?"
"I sent him a letter about two months ago."
"What has he told you about the workings of the NKVD?"
"Just that training is very hard and the people he's working with are dumb bastards."
They asked her a few more boring questions about her history of employment, education, all of that. At long last, the interrogation concluded, and the men left Irina's cell with no statement on what was going to happen to her next.
Irina spent the next three days in the cell with absolutely nothing to do but reflect on the poor decisions she had made that led her here. In her defense, she had gotten on the train to Kiev before Operation Barbarossa went into effect. She should have gotten the hell out of there at the first word of the invasion, but stayed because she was working on a two-week-long chemistry experiment. That unattended chemistry experiment had probably burned down the lab by now.
A guard brought her three meals a day, though the "meals" were army rations that tasted like wet cardboard. Forget the fighting and the extreme weather, this food was definitely the worst part of the war.
Irina felt strangely numb at the thought of possibly dying. She should have been terrified out of her mind, but she had come to peace with the idea of being killed when the German army surrounded Kiev.
These soldiers didn't have very many reasons to keep her alive. Yes, she was fluent in Russian, but there wasn't much of a point if she couldn't speak German as well. There was no secret intelligence she could offer them. They would be slightly opposed to murdering a female civilian in cold blood, but as far as Irina knew, that was the only thing she had going for her.
After three agonizing days of boredom and bad food, the cell door swung open. Instead of breakfast, it was the soldier from the interrogation, Jäger.
"So are you going to kill me now?" asked Irina, forcing the fear out of her voice.
Jäger apparently didn't understand, because he said nothing in response. He grasped her arm and pulled her out of the cell, marching her down the hallway with a painfully tight grip.
"That hurts. You can loosen your grip a bit, you know. It's not like I have anywhere to run assuming I even could escape," Irina informed him, but Jäger didn't speak Russian and so ignored her. His hand didn't loosen one bit.
He brought her to another room that Irina concluded was another cell, but nicer. It was upgraded slightly, with better-quality furniture and a shelf that had a few German books on it.
"You stay here," Jäger told her in accented Russian. "You work for Hydra."
With that ominous statement, he threw her an army ration and a German dictionary and left.
Irina wasn't stupid enough to think that the dictionary was out of kindness. She couldn't really communicate with Jäger and having a translator for every single conversation was a pain in the ass. She decided to put her spare time to good use by learning some phrases in German. The most time-consuming part was translating the Cyrillic alphabet into the Latin alphabet and vice versa. A day of work later, Irina had a decent grasp of Latin letters and key German words. She sounded them out to herself in the privacy of her brand-new cell to make sure they didn't sound too awful.
She also took the time to go over the room's other contents. The four books she had were in German and therefore virtually useless. Fortunately, they had provided her with toiletries that included a toothbrush and toothpaste, soap, shampoo, and a hairbrush. (Somebody thankfully had the foresight to put a few tampons in the drawer as well.) Irina noticed that there were no beauty products of any kind, a blessing in disguise. Back in Russia, it was a daily chore to keep her hair in a socially acceptable style, but Hydra apparently didn't care. So Irina went for the simple and easy method of pulling her blonde hair into a tight bun.
The following day, a guard took Irina from her cell to a very small laboratory and left her there without a word. Someone had laid out a small setup of lab equipment that would suffice for basic chemical tests. There was a notebook opened to the first page, where someone had scrawled in German, Perform as many tests on this material as you can. Write down your results in here.
Irina scowled at the vague instructions that obviously came from someone who had no grasp of toxicology, but figured she had better get to work.
She slipped on gloves and goggles(though there was no lab coat) and picked up the vial of liquid that they wanted examined. She couldn't tell from appearance alone what it was, but the tests would hopefully reveal the right information.
Irina went about it as though she had extracted this material from a corpse and needed to find out what it was. It took many hours of testing(during which an impatient guard checked up on her twice), but when she finished the testing she concluded that the liquid was rattlesnake venom, and wrote it down. (She recorded all her results in Russian. The bastards could find a translator if her work was so important to them.)
After that, there was nothing to do but wait. Half an hour later, Jäger returned and asked her something, probably if she was done.
"I'm finished," she said in German.
He nodded and grabbed her arm to take her back to her cell. Before he could shut the door, she called out, "Wait! I have a question!"
Jäger turned around and raised an eyebrow, almost like he was daring her to ask.
"What exactly am I going to be doing here?" Irina asked in her best(i.e., very bad) German. "Why am I doing this vague lab work for you?"
"You proving worth," said Jäger in Russian that was plainly half-assed from a dictionary. "Other commanders, they think you bad scientist. I think you smart. You need prove worth to stay alive."
Irina swallowed uncomfortably. "Stay alive. Got it."
That night, she lay awake thinking over Jäger's comments. It seemed like he was advocating for her skill and intelligence to the other officers, which would have been almost heartwarming if he didn't probably just want her to create fancy evil poisons for him.
Oh well. Nothing she could do about it for now...until she got her hands on an opportunity and some real toxins.
Six months crawled by. Every few days, Irina was called to the lab to do some work on random toxins. They must have been pleased with what she was doing, because most of the time she was left alone and allowed to modify tests and experiments when necessary.
In between testing, Irina devoted her time to learning German. This was accomplished in four ways. The first was reading through the dictionary and writing down everything she could remember, including sentences and grammatical structure. Painful and boring, but there wasn't much else to do. The second was reading the German books on the bookshelves, and translating every word she didn't know. (Six months of that, and she was only about thirty pages into a book.) The third way was listening to guards chatting outside her door. That was good for learning everyday conversational German.
The fourth way was speaking to Jäger. Their conversations were rarely longer than a hundred words every five days, but it was something. Mostly she pestered him with prying questions and he evaded them, occasionally providing useful nuggets of information when the mood struck him.
After Lab Experiment #45(that was on Day #183), Irina had had enough of her tedious schedule.
"I'm bored," she informed Jäger while he was walking her back to her cell.
"Read a book," he suggested.
"I can barely understand them, and what I do understand is incredibly dull."
"Well, your German has improved, hasn't it?"
"What, so now I can talk to you about international economic policies? My lab work would improve too if you would give me something interesting to do."
Jäger got a look in his eyes that Irina didn't trust one bit. "Interesting experiments? I can arrange that."
Jäger's interesting experiment didn't show itself for several weeks. In the meantime, Irina tried to get some practical information out of him. She talked him into playing chess with her during his spare time to both alleviate her boredom and get him to reveal something she could work with.
"Where are we?" she asked him.
"Germany." Okay, so he was going to be difficult.
"Where are we in Germany?"
"A Hydra base called Elendberg." Jäger moved a rook three spaces forward. "Your move."
"What's Hydra?"
"An organization dedicated to the overthrow of the West's oppressive democracies. We mostly work as a science branch of Adolf Hitler's military."
These people have a few screws loose, Irina thought, but she moved her pawn to capture Jäger's bishop and continued. "For a science division, your lab equipment isn't what I'd call state-of-the-art."
"Elendberg's funding is limited."
"What happened to Zakharov, Obolensky, and Artyomov?"
"That's none of your concern," Jäger said coldly.
"I want to know what happened," Irina said stubbornly.
Jäger looked up at the ceiling with a long-suffering sigh. "Fine. I'll tell you if you do a good job on your next experiment."
"Not a problem," Irina said. It was only after the words left her mouth that she realized it might in fact be a problem.
Experiment #46 on Day #187 was, to be fair, interesting.
That was the best thing that Irina could say about it.
When she walked into the lab, she was met with the sight of another prisoner. He was blindfolded and shivering in his threadbare clothes, handcuffed to a chair. On a small table next to him were three syringes plus sterilizing and safety equipment. Irina immediately knew it wouldn't be good.
The notebook's instructions went as follows: Inject each liquid in syringes 1, 2, and 3 into the prisoner's arm. Record the physical effects of each liquid. After fifteen minutes of observation, inject the antidote in syringes A, B, and C. (Syringe 1's antidote is Syringe A, and vice versa.) Wait five minutes for the antidote to take effect, then move on to the next syringe. This experiment should take you no more than an hour.
Irina mentally cursed herself. When she said she had experimented with humans, she had meant dead humans! Corpses, not this absurd human experimentation!
But she knew she didn't have a choice. It was either cause pain to this prisoner, or refuse and cause pain to both of them.
The man heard her footsteps and his head jerked up. "Proszę pomóż mi! Nie zrobiłem nic złego!" he begged and babbled. Irina didn't understand a word of what he was saying or what language it was. Polish, maybe?
"Calm down," she said in German.
The prisoner paused. "You German?" he asked.
"No, Russian."
"Russian? Why you here?" he asked, clearly perplexed.
"I was captured."
"You prisoner too?"
"Yes." Irina reached for the first syringe. "I'm sorry, this will hurt a little."
She injected the syringe into his arm, pushing down the plunger until every drop was inside his bloodstream.
It only took four minutes for the toxin to take effect. The man started sweating profusely and his eyes went bloodshot.
"What are you feeling?" Irina asked him.
"Uncomfortable. Bad," he whimpered.
"Any pain?"
"Little bit."
Luckily for him, that was the extent of the effects. As soon as the fifteen minutes were up(she counted with the clock on the wall), Irina stuck the antidote syringe into him.
Next was syringe 2. It wasn't pleasant. A rash spread over the man's body, and he managed to struggle out that it was painful. Jäger came into the room about halfway through syringe 2's time, probably to make sure she was doing her job.
"Let me see what you've written so far." Jäger held out his hand for the notebook and Irina handed it to him. He frowned when he saw it was in Russian and gave it back. "What are you doing right now?"
"Monitoring the effects of syringe 2."
"Good," he nodded.
Six minutes later, time was up and Irina injected the antidote. Five minutes passed far too quickly.
"Time for syringe 3," she told the prisoner. He didn't really understand what she was saying but his violent trembling was answer enough.
Irina was expecting something like horrible convulsions or seizures. Instead the prisoner reported headaches and nausea before falling unconscious. She frowned and checked the man's pulse. It was slow and faint, but there.
She turned to Jäger with narrowed eyes. "What was in that syringe?"
"You don't need to know."
"I'm doing the damn experiment, and I'd like to know what I'm experimenting with!"
"It's carbon monoxide in liquid form."
"Carbon fucking monoxide?!" she screamed at Jäger. "That could kill him!"
"Stop it. You have the antidote, don't you?" Jäger remained infuriatingly calm.
"You're a psychopath," Irina spat.
"I'm not the one who set up this experiment, and I'm not the one who requested a more interesting experiment in the first place."
Irina turned away from Jäger, resisting the urge to grab his gun and shoot him where he stood. The second fifteen minutes were finished, she gave the prisoner the antidote and scribbled the results down in her notebook. She slammed it into Jäger's chest as hard as she could.
"There," Irina snarled. "Done. Now you tell me what happened to Zakharov, Obolensky, and Artyomov!"
Jäger took her back to her cell and gestured for her to sit down in the room's single chair. He was much taller as it was, but sitting down he towered above her.
"Dr. Zakharov is no longer at Elendberg," he said, pulling a cigarette out from his pocket. "We moved him to headquarters in the Alps."
"The Alps? What's he doing there?"
"He is working at Erfrierungberg with our head scientist, Dr. Arnim Zola." Jäger lit the cigarette and brought it to his mouth. "Before you ask, it's a top-secret project that I will not tell you anything about."
"What about Obolensky?"
"Obolensky occasionally translates for us. The majority of his time he spends in a cell. Much less nice than your current room," he said, gesturing around at the walls.
Well, at least he was safe, but how long his usefulness would last remained to be seen. "And Artyomov?"
Jäger took another drag at his cigarette, blowing strands of smoke out into the room. "He was not of use to us."
Irina's heart jumped into her throat. "What did you do to him?!"
"I recommended we send him to janitorial duty at another base."
"What did you do to him?!"
"Sergeant Schäfer had him executed."
Executed.
Executed.
She felt faint, and swayed slightly.
"See, this is why I had you sit down." Jäger's voice penetrated the haze of shock. "Don't get too sad over that man, you barely knew him. Did he even matter all that much?"
Irina was not a sentimental person and didn't have a huge attachment to Artyomov, but these Hydra bastards had him murdered for no reason. A prisoner, killed in cold blood.
It all hit her at once: her confusion and terror at Elendberg, the Polish prisoner's pain, the murder of Artyomov. Irina, however, did not cry as one might have expected her to.
Instead, she got up on her feet, and slapped Jäger across the face.
There was a brief second of suspended silence. Jäger froze, stunned that she would even think of hitting him. Irina froze as well, knowing that she had done something incredibly stupid but not completely regretting the bruise forming on his cheek.
The soldier composed himself, and straightened up to his full height. "Given your instability at the shock of this news," he hissed, ice penetrating every syllable, "I will excuse this and not mention it to my superiors. I suggest that you refrain from striking an officer ever again."
With that, he stormed out of the cell and locked the door behind him.
"You're being transferred," Jäger informed her a few months later. Transferred, he said, like she was a willing employee and not a civilian prisoner of war.
"Where to?"
"Erfrierungberg, where Aleksander Zakharov is currently working. You will be doing more toxicology experiments, but you will have better equipment and perhaps a few assistants."
"What are you going to make me do?"
"You'll have to speak to the commanders of Erfrierungberg about that."
"Fine," Irina sighed. Ever since that awful incident with the Polish prisoner, she had been doing mostly testings, occasionally on corpses. Most of the tests were quite advanced; it seemed that Hydra had figured out she was very useful. "Will I get to see Zakharov?"
"Probably not. They don't want any conspiring among prisoners." A note of a threat entered Jäger's tone.
"Jäger, wait. One more question...what day is it?"
One of Jäger's eyebrows jolted up at the unexpected question. "It's July 7th, 1942."
"So I've been here for...almost a year?"
"That's correct. Now, if you're finished with your annoying questions, can I go and get some rest?"
"Need your beauty sleep? I think a beauty coma might be more effective," Irina sniped at him. Jäger just rolled his eyes and left. It got under her skin that she could never get a good reaction out of him.
СОЛДАТ (THE SOLDIER)
The Winter Soldier remembered precious little besides the unyielding metal of the conditioning chair and the icy blackness of the cryofreeze chamber. It seemed his life was an endless cycle of cryo-mission-chair, cryo-mission-chair, cryo-mission-chair...
The Soldier vaguely recalled going on missions. Missions, that's what they were, weren't they? He left the compound and went to destroy Hydra's enemies. That was his job, what he had been designed to do. Take out a target, come back home, that was it. Despite feeling fairly neutral towards Hydra's cause, whatever it was, the Soldier still enjoyed his missions. They were time outside, a brief reprieve from the pain of the chair and the oblivion of cryofreeze.
Floating somewhere in his unreliable memory were the brutal training sessions as well. Training was run by a man named Martin Ambroz, who spoke to the Soldier in Sokovian with the occasional snippet of German. That was how he learned Sokovian, by obeying Lieutenant Ambroz's commands. He needed to keep up his strength, improve his fighting skills. The more work he put into training, the easier his missions were, and completing missions was very important to Dr. Zola.
Dr. Zola was the most familiar face to the Winter Soldier, but also the most unpleasant. 90% of the time, when he saw Zola's face, it meant he was in for a great deal of pain in the conditioning chair. The Soldier knew to keep his mouth shut about the chair, but that didn't mean he had to like it.
He had heard the chair called many things, from "electroconvulsive therapy" to "memory-suppressing machine" to "Zola's magic torture device." The most common he heard was "conditioning chair."
The only man among Zola's team who showed a modicum of kindness to the Soldier was some Russian named Dr. Zakharov. Whenever the screaming agony of a conditioning session got too long, Zakharov would stroke his hair and murmur soothing things in Russian that the Soldier didn't understand a single word of. Dr. Zola would usually shoo Zakharov away from the chair, but the Soldier appreciated the brief moments of affection. The only other praise or warmth he got was after successful completion of a mission or task.
Dr. Zola loved to run experiments on him, and would even bring in other scientists to help. Sometimes those scientists would conduct tests of their own. Those tests often involved testing his resilience in some way, whether it was exposure to the elements, stamina, or the strength of his enhanced body. The one consistent thing among all the tests was that they were painful. The Soldier obeyed, though; it would be even more painful if he resisted.
One of the Soldier's least favorite scientists was the Sokovian toxicologist named Ludek Kolar. He loved to inject different toxins into the Soldier's bloodstream to see how he reacted. Most of the time, there was a brief period of extremely unpleasant symptoms before his immune system overpowered the poison. Kolar was amazed by this effect, begging Dr. Zola to add even more dangerous materials into the Soldier. Zola was rarely convinced. He didn't want his precious weapon to be damaged.
Dr. Kolar's tests weren't as painful as the average electroconvulsive therapy session, but it was Kolar's sadistic eagerness that put the Soldier off. With the exception of Zola, Hydra's other scientists were blank and impersonal, and minimized the damage if they could. Not Kolar.
The Soldier's memory was very hazy, but one other person that stood out was a woman who worked with Dr. Kolar. He didn't remember her name, but he remembered her face since she was one of the only women working at Erfrierungberg, and the only female doctor. She would occasionally perform blood tests on him, but it seemed that the majority of her work was done elsewhere. The Soldier wouldn't mind if she worked on him more often; her tests rarely involved serious pain.
Then came one of the rare days when the woman showed up along with Dr. Kolar. Kolar seemed excited(probably a bad sign), and he was practically jumping on Zola to let him work on the Soldier.
When the conditioning session was finally finished, Zola turned to Kolar. "What do you want?" he snapped.
"I need to test a toxin on the Soldier." Kolar held up a vial filled with red liquid. "I've been working on it for some time."
"Yes, wonderful, Ludek. If you could tell me what it is..."
Kolar leaned forward conspiratorily, his grin flashing like a tiger. "It's formulated to take down super soldiers. Super soldiers like your hated Captain America."
Dr. Zola froze, along with everyone else in the lab. Their eyes went wide, and whispering immediately started to accumulate. "Ludek, assuming what you say is true, why in the name of Johann Schmidt would I allow you to damage my Soldier?"
"We can test it on a sample of his blood if necessary. Miss Kretzskaya..."
The woman stepped forward. "Dr. Kretzskaya," she corrected in a voice more frigid than Zola on his worst days.
"Yes, yes, whatever. Take a blood sample from the Soldier."
Dr. Kretzskaya—the Soldier resolved to commit her name to memory—picked up a syringe and began to sterilize it. She pulled on a pair of disposable gloves and rubbed at the needle with a wipe. "Dr. Zola, it's probably best that we don't test this poison on the man himself," she suggested. "It's very dangerous and we don't know the list of effects for sure." He noticed that she spoke German with a strong Russian accent.
"Exactly what I was thinking." Zola threw a look at Kolar. "Hurry up with your samples so I can go back to work."
Dr. Kretzskaya slid the needle into one of the Soldier's veins and pulled out a small amount of scarlet blood. She handed the syringe back to Dr. Kolar.
"Let's get a skin sample too," Kolar said.
Kretzskaya picked up a scalpel and began scrubbing it clean. "This is going to hurt. I'm sorry."
"Who cares if it hurts? He's going to follow orders and ignore the pain," Zola cut in. To the Soldier, he said, "Don't fight Dr. Kretzskaya and don't make her work difficult."
I wasn't planning on it, the Soldier thought, but he gave Zola a quick nod in response.
The scalpel cut deep into the Soldier's skin, and he winced. "What do you need this sample for?" he asked.
"We're testing some toxins on your cells and don't want to hurt you," Kretzskaya responded at the same time Zola said, "Why do you need to know that, Soldier?"
"No reason, Dr. Zola," the Soldier apologized.
Dr. Kretzskaya finished with her sample and dropped it into a tube. "I'm done, Dr. Kolar."
"Very good." Kolar turned to the Winter Soldier with a cruel, slightly unhinged look in his eyes. "Thank you for your cooperation, Soldier. You will be instrumental in helping us take down Captain America."
My grammar checker says that the German(and sparse bits of Russian and Polish) is correct, but I don't fully trust it. Anybody who knows what they're talking about is welcome to tell me.