XXXIX
Excerpt from Distortions in Spacetime: Theory and Relevance to S.H.I.E.L.D. Operations in the Future, a report compiled by Agent Leo Fitz for Supervisory Agent Philip Coulson with additional commentary by Agent Jemma Simmons
The analysis of the genetic composition, undertaken by Agent Simmons and detailed in Report YL-280, provides compelling evidence to support the theory of extraterrestrial origin for the specimen recovered from Mexico. Given this report and the far-reaching consequences of such a theory, it is prudent to review several hypotheses of interdimensional travel and the fabric of spacetime. Such subjects are no longer in the realm of thought experiments - they hold unforeseen relevance to S.H.I.E.L.D.'s current and future operations, and must be examined to assist in the compilation of a thorough threat assessment.
Much of the current work in the field of theoretical physics seeks to link the theory of general relativity to that of quantum mechanics. From the macroscopic point of view, the curvature of spacetime in the presence of mass is well-documented. Quantum mechanics generally considers particles and matter from a much, much more microscopic perspective, the subatomic realm.
[continued]
Models of quantum entanglement in four-dimensional space have posited that two receding particles can be connected by an instantaneous wormhole - flickering into and out of existence in picoseconds, if not less. If quantum entanglement links two particles and their electromagnetic states to one another, perhaps two temporary points of spacetime can be similarly linked - the precise configuration of their spacetime geometry aligned. If so, an exchange of mass between these very far distant worlds has a non-zero probability.
This conjecture could potentially explain the arrival of an unidentified extraterrestrial biological specimen to Earth without the corresponding astronomical phenomena observed, as in New Mexico (reference AAR 352708, New Mexico Incident, Hawkeye CL-7 for details).
If we accept the assumption that this is a workable explanation of this most recent contact, many salient questions regarding the nature of these entanglements are raised. Can they be induced in a laboratory setting? Can the endpoint be fixed? Will this phenomena be observed on Earth again, and if so, is safe travel possible for humans to the other side? Or will more extraterrestrial life forms survive the trip?
XL
Clint leans on the doorjamb and tries not to smile. He'd decided to swing past the main caf to grab a bag of chips and a sandwich before he heads out to Jersey. His plane from Southeast Asia had only rolled in last night, and already Coulson's sending him on a mini road trip, out to some little-used facility on a county road east of Toms River, out in the boonies. Apparently, he's too busy with some other operation. Bug-catching, he'd called it.
When he'd drawn closer to the propped-open double doors, he noticed gaggles of S.H.I.E.L.D. recruits whispering, craning their necks to peer into the cafeteria area.
For a second, he'd thought Nat was in there, carving an apple with a hunting knife and a menacing smile again. But no, she's on assignment in Manhattan. The new agents had scattered out of his way when they caught sight of his bow, slung casually over his shoulder. He hadn't worn his tactical suit. Not to go out to Jersey and peek around in some glorified storage closet.
It feels pretty good to be recognized - and feared, maybe. Just a little bit. God knows it's hard to strike fear into the hearts any of the people he usually hangs around with. Captain America could pop his skull like an egg. And Natasha? Forget it. He'd have more luck scaring off a rabid, hundred-and-fifty pound guard dog.
It's with this thought in his head that Clint arrived at the entrance. So he can't help but grin at the sight of Steve Rogers, trapped in the corner of the main caf, an extremely uncomfortable expression on his face. Captain America's not scared of Nazis, or aliens, and most definitely not Clint Barton, but apparently he's frightened of the giggling scrutiny of lower level probies.
Steve has to be able to feel the hundred-odd sideways glances. He's hunched over a half-eaten burger and fries, shoulders up around his ears, fair cheeks tinted pink. There's at least three agents hovering nearby his table, obviously egging each other on to go and sit down with him.
For one of the most famous soldiers of the century, he's pretty shy.
A young, buff, level one probie starts edging toward the seat opposite Steve. Clint decides to quit enjoying this and go help him out.
"Hey, Cap, there you are!" he calls. Half of the cafeteria turns to look at him. Clint struts over. He's used to putting on a show. Winking at the disappointed probie, he flops down across from Steve. "Been looking for you."
"You have?" Steve asks, a touch too eager.
"I'm about to head out on a little road trip, an' I could use some company. Wanted to see if you'd tag along."
"Sure, of course. I'm in." Steve swallows a couple hefty bites of his burger. "Uh - where are we going?"
"New Jersey."
"Uh… really?" He winces slightly. "Okay. Why?"
"I'll explain on the way. We've gotta go grab a car from the garage," Clint says.
"We could take my bike, if you wanted," Steve offers.
Clint perks up. "Really?" He's been itching to take that baby for a spin since he saw Steve pull up to a restaurant astride the low-slung frame, engine idling at a bass roar. It's vintage, Steve had said, rebuilt by a guy in Queens, who had let Steve help with the assembly. Clint could tell he loved the thing. "You'd wanna take it out there? We'd be on some country roads."
"Don't get much of a chance to ride it outside the city." Steve shrugs. "I'm told you've got highways everywhere now."
"Alright," Clint says. Now he's the eager one. "Let's blow this popsicle stand."
"Popsicle stand?"
"Joint," Clint amends. "Let's blow this joint."
Steve cracks a smile. "After you."
Clint follows him to a wayward spot of the dark, underground garage. "You don't get a premium parking spot?"
"I don't mind the walk."
He rolls his eyes. "If I were you, I'd be milking this war hero thing. But I 'spose that's why you're Captain America and I'm just a guy with a bow."
Steve's mouth twists. "I'm not anything special. The guys I knew in the war would do the same as me any day. It's just the serum." He tosses Clint a helmet from his bike's storage.
Clint bumps his shoulder. "It's not, you know. Just the serum." Steve looks at him, but Clint puts on his helmet and leaves it at that. "Rev' her up, Cap."
They cross the river, head south on 95, hit the Garden State Parkway. It's early afternoon, so traffic isn't too congested. Clint watches the asphalt disappear beneath his feet, and once they get out of the city, the green of the trees that whip by.
He signals for Steve to take the next exit, follows the instructions Coulson gave him, until they turn off on a bumpy, neglected county road. They coast to a halt in front of a rundown concrete installment, at the foot of a fallow field.
Steve hops off the bike, stows his helmet and looks around. "Nice place," he comments, nudging a broken-off slab of the tiny parking lot with his toe.
"Old S.H.I.E.L.D. storage facility," Clint reveals. "They've got newer and nicer ones elsewhere. Still, you know what they say. No point fixing what ain't broke."
"Did you piss off Coulson?" Steve asks.
Clint chuckles. "Nah. Wasn't me who pissed him off." He answers Steve's unspoken question. "One of the guys I used to do wetwork with. Had a messy, public divorce with another agent. Started slacking off, fucking around on the job. Bein' a general asshole. Got demoted a few times. Eventually, Coulson had him down to doing building security, visiting a bunch of out-of-the-way facilities to do checks every few months. This is one of the places."
"So where is this guy now?"
"Dunno." Clint meets his eyes. "Mike Martinez went AWOL a few weeks ago. Everyone just kinda figured he'd turn back up eventually. No one really missed him. Coupla people said he run off to South America with a new girlfriend, but I don't buy it. Guy's an asshole, but he did his job, you know?"
"Yeah, okay," Steve nods. "I get the picture. But what's brought us out here now?"
"Maintenance crew comes round once a month. Last night, the custodian found Martinez's jacket, with his wallet in it. Couldn't've got far without that."
Steve frowns, studying the squat building. "No. No, he couldn't. Unless - fake ID?"
Clint considers, but shakes his head. "Most of that got confiscated when he got demoted. He mighta had a spare. Most of us do, but… I dunno. He never really liked travelling abroad."
"You knew him well?"
"Kinda. I knew him for a while, just working buddies, you know. Shot the shit on downtime and all that. I was around when Coulson got word, so he figured he'd send me to take a look around. He's busy. An op in New York City. Some dumb suit who thought he'd get into weapons dealing." Clint strides up to the door. Even for an outpost of its age, a rusted old keypad sits next to the door. He punches in the code, and the door pops open with a strangled beep.
The first few rooms contain file cabinets. Spider webs are strung haphazardly from all surfaces, forcing Clint to duck and weave. He finds another set of rooms behind the south wall and sighs. Tossing an extra comm to Steve, he says, "Let's split up and cover ground faster." He doesn't have to put his own in - his hearing aids are special S.H.I.E.L.D. issue, commissioned for him personally. Everything's built in.
Steve takes the top floor. Clint heads to the basement, the entrance part of a closet concealed behind the wall. His boots clang on the metal grates of the stairs. Down here is more storage - more valuable storage. Lab equipment, outdated, but what must have been expensive in its day. Clint finds yellowed accounting records from the seventies and eighties, flight manifests and receipts and personnel files. Mostly peripheral staff, the paper pushers and technical experts and caf cooks. Nothing about agents or handlers or assets.
Clint pokes his head out into the hallway, trying to decide which way to go next. A few of the lights are burnt out on his left, leaving the end of the hall in darkness. To his right, he can see three more grey metal doors.
There's a flicker of static in his ear. "Cap?" he asks.
"What?"
Just feedback, then. "Anything interesting up there?"
"Mostly office supplies and cabinets. You?"
"Pretty much the same. There's a little server room down here. Coulson said that's where the custodian found the jacket. I'll go check it out."
Clint heads to the right. The server rack blinks at him, blue LEDS flickering like lightning bugs in the gloom. Nothing in here.
His comm buzzes again. Clint waits, but Steve doesn't say anything. He backs out of the room and glances down the left leg of the corridor.
Static hisses, longer and louder. "Is that you?"
"Is what me?" Steve asks, after a pause.
"I'm getting some white noise in my comm down here. You copy me?"
"Yeah. Loud and clear."
"Okay." Clint decides to abandon this end, and pulls a flashlight out of his back pocket. He always carries a pocket knife, a flashlight and a length of rope. And a lockpicking set, depending on his plans for the night. Be prepared for the unexpected, or however that motto goes. He'd never been a goddamned Boy Scout, he doesn't know.
As he draws closer to the left hall, he notices a sliver of a crack in the cement surface of the basement foundation. Clint traces it with his Maglite. It continues along, branching out into a fine web.
"Do you -" His comm crackles. "- read - base?"
"You havin' trouble up there too?" Clint says.
"Uh, no. Everything's coming in fine." Steve's voice is loud and crystal clear on the channel. Not staticky at all.
Clint's stomach drops. "That wasn't you?"
"What wasn't me?"
"There was - I just heard a voice."
Steve is silent for a moment. "I'm coming down."
Clint hangs back at first, but it feels kind of stupid, to wait for Captain America to come rescue him from a disembodied voice. He inches forward. Touching a hand to his ear, he says, "Is anyone else on this frequency? This is Hawkeye." No response. "This is Agent Clint Barton, with the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division. Do you read me?"
He bites his tongue and waits.
"- some kind of - need to get - maintenance -"
Clint can hear the voice better this time. Male. Not Steve. But he can't hear an echo of anyone speaking in the basement with him. How far away are they?
The beam of his flashlight falls on the ground as he stops to think. Clint glances and sees another crack just before the tip of his boot. "What the hell…"
He bends down and surveys as much of the hall as he can with the small light. His stomach starts to churn in earnest. It's just like the ship. Only smaller.
Steve bursts through the stairway. "Clint?"
"Here."
"What is it? What have you found?"
"You should probably come see this for yourself." Before Steve can do more than start toward him, his comm lights up with activity again. The hearing aids are supposed to alter the decibel level to help him distinguish individual sounds, and in this case they work too well, sending a piercing pain through his head. "Ow!"
"- on this line? Supp- to be monitoring-"
Steve claps a hand to his left ear. "What on earth? Who is that?"
Clint shakes his head. "I thought it was feedback… but what's down here to interfere? It's not like these things pick up the local radio stations."
Crouching next to him in the dimness, Steve studies the crack by Clint's foot. Wordlessly, he hands over the flashlight. Steve arcs the light above their head and curses softly. "Is this - how is this still standing?"
There are hairline fractures bisecting the walls, the floor, the ceiling. Meeting each other, forming wider cracks, crumbling crevasses deep in the stone. The entire hallway looks as if it's about to collapse in on itself. Steve trains the light on something farther down, a few feet off the ground.
"Is that -"
"A hole," Clint replies flatly.
Steve shoots him a sharp glance. "You don't seem surprised to find a gaping hole in a loadbearing structure that's inexplicably still standing."
"I've seen this once before." Steve opens his mouth and Clint decides to tell him as much as he knows. He'll get the info one way or another. "That mission I went on. A week ago, to Southeast Asia. I just got back. Formally, the mission objective was to go investigate an anomaly in the South China Sea. A ship, stalled in the middle of the ocean, not responding to hails."
"Why send S.H.I.E.L.D.?"
"Fuzzy international border round those parts. Lotsa different agencies with different agendas." Clint sighs. "Plus… the ship had disappeared from radar. Sonar. You name it, it wasn't showing up. Except on satellite pictures taken of the area. And on a special S.H.I.E.L.D. device. One that's finely tuned to detect fluctuations of some kinda radiation in the lower atmosphere."
Clint holds up hand. "Don't ask me. I dunno the details. The long and short of it is, the vessel's invisible to most ways people got of finding it. S.H.I.E.L.D. figures this is the kinda thing they wanna know more about - some cloaking tech or big secret project by a foreign government? So, they send me in with a recon team."
His thighs are starting to ache, so he stands up and leans against the wall. Steve remains crouched, splitting his attention between Clint's story and what should be the rubble left of the hallway, instead of what looks like a jigsaw puzzle that's been glued back together with a few pieces missing.
"We drop into the ocean, right, and hop in our inflatable. Motor out to the site where the ship's supposed to be. And she's there, all right. Big ole transport. This is all after dark, mind you, so we weren't spotted. But it ends up there's no point. No one's there when we get on the deck."
"No one at all?" Steve asks softly.
"Nope. We head lower, trying to figure out what happened, and that's when we see it."
"What?" He's nearly whispering now.
"A hole. And I'm not talking the size of this one. This one's a crack in a sidewalk compared to the thing we found. It covered three of the lower decks, like it just sucked them all in. And at the edges, it looked like the metal hull of the ship was shattered. But it was all holding together. The damned boat's floating on the ocean, easy as can be, bottom of it still intact, but there's a giant sinkhole in the interior." His head thuds into the wall behind him. "I dunno how else to explain it, Steve. It just felt… weird."
"But - there couldn't be a sinkhole in a boat that's still floating. I mean, sinkholes open up in the ground. You know, there's water under the surface or something…"
"How could it be floating if there's a hole in it? It should be sunk, right?"
"Exactly."
Clint meets his eyes. "I know. It shoulda been. But it wasn't."
Steve slumps against the far wall himself. "And there was no one there."
"No one. I guess they all fell in or something. I couldn't see the bottom of it. I dunno if there was a bottom to it."
Clint's never been afraid of heights. Give him a perch on a high rise, a cliffside, hell, even a trapeze bar. But he remembers looking down, far down, into the endless dark, and shivering. He'd stepped back. There was no way he'd wanted to fall down there. It was wrong. His instincts told him that, and Clint hadn't survived so long in life without paying attention to his gut.
They stew over Clint's testimony in silence. He wouldn't blame Steve if he didn't believe him - he wouldn't believe it if someone tried to feed him such obvious bullshit. But that's what he saw, and he doesn't know how else to explain.
When Steve speaks again, it's not to question Clint, and a knot he didn't know was in his chest loosens. "So, you think this is related?"
"Well, I kinda hope it is. I don't wanna think there's two separate explanations for shit like this."
Steve pulls himself to his feet. "Let's -"
"- to be here," the voice from the comm blares again. "- so goddamn ridiculous."
Clint has a sudden suspicion. He creeps closer to the crack in the wall. The earpiece whines. "- get stuck out here in the first place."
He's right. The sound is getting clearer, the closer he gets to it. Steve glances between the crack and himself, and Clint can see when the lightbulb goes off for him too. They come as close as they dare. A chill air seeps from it, raising goosebumps on Clint's uncovered forearms.
"C'mon, you assholes. Do you copy?"
They exchange glances. "Uh, copy," Clint says.
Steve repeats him, louder. "Copy. Who is this?"
Dead air. Then, "- fine. I'll get you all fired when I come back to HQ. Lazy motherfuckers."
The cadence of the voice - the turn of phrase - Clint knows who's speaking. "That's Martinez," he hisses at Steve. "I know it."
Both of them look around, stupidly, like he's gonna pop out of the floor. He doesn't. "Martinez?" Clint says. "You there? It's Barton. You copy?"
"- iculous. This shit place needs a contractor, not a security check."
They turn toward the crack in the wall, synchronized and slow. "He must have seen it," Steve whispers. He goes to step closer, and Clint grabs his sleeve.
"Don't. I just - don't get too close to it."
Steve peers at him, but to his relief, nods. As he goes to turn, to come back toward Clint, something catches his eye around the corner, in the deep shadows of the farthest end of the hall. Clint hears his soft exhalation.
"What?" he demands. Clint crowds in close, near Steve, craning his neck. He sees the dim but recognizable shape in the gloom.
A shoe. Attached to a leg, and the rest of a body.
"Who is that?" Clint says urgently. Steve directs the light, illuminating the body's face. It has short, buzzed black hair, a crooked nose. Olive skin that looks leached and pale, with an unhealthy, almost greenish tinge. His eyes are closed, lips sealed shut.
Clint staggers back a step. "But - that can't be -"
"What?" Steve demands. "Who is it?"
"That's Martinez," he says slowly. "But if that's Martinez - who's talking to us over the comms?"
Steve has no answer. They hesitate there, in the dim silence of the hall, until their ear buds screech again. "- all fired when I come back to HQ. Lazy -"
"He's repeating himself. Maybe it's a recording," Steve points out. He tiptoes over to Martinez's body.
"But why would he record himself saying that? And how is it playing over the comms -"
Steve cuts him off with a shout. "He's alive! Clint, he's breathing! Look!"
Rushing over, he skids to a stop on his knees. Steve's right. His chest is barely moving, but he's taking breaths. Shallow, so shallow, but they're breaths alright.
Clint taps out a pattern on his comm. Emergency. Send medical attention to my location. Thirty seconds later, there's another click on the line.
"Barton? What's your status?" Coulson's voice is clipped and urgent.
"Found Martinez, boss. We need a med team. I dunno how long he's been out here."
"You're clear?"
"Yep. Cap's okay too."
"Captain Rogers is there?" Coulson says quickly.
"Oh, yeah, we took his bike." Clint nearly smiles at the quiet jealous fuming that somehow comes just fine over the connection. He clears his throat. Not the time.
"And Coulson? You're gonna want to get your X-Files team out here too, when you've wrapped it up in New York. We've got another one of 'em. Just like in the South China Sea."
