SHIELD held its secrets dear. It had taken X23 precious hours to break into their earthbound headquarters, get the information she needed, escape, and make her preparations. She preferred to go into situations with nothing but herself - her body and her skills, honed to the same razor sharpness as the metal that laced her claws.
But this situation called for strategy. Planning. Analysis. Research. A half-billion-dollar miniature electro-magnetic pulse generator.
The last was the most difficult. She had known already where one could be found. And she had known that it would take almost as much work to get the EMP generator as it would to complete her main objective. She was also working under a strict time limit.
Unfortunately, Stark Industries held its secrets dear as well.
She had breached the perimeter easily, made it past the watchful human and electronic eyes, broke into the laboratory building proper using one of the devices she'd liberated from a now- defunct HYDRA base. Cool and quiet as a ghost against the chill desert night, she had slipped into the fifth-floor lab that held her prize, and there met her first true obstacle.
The EMP generator was roughly spheroid, slightly smaller than a basketball, a softly gleaming thing of silver metal and plastic in the shadow-choked room. It rested securely inside a massively thick containment unit that sat, square and stolid, in the middle of the lab. The metal containment unit had a tiny viewing window - a portal of armored glass too small to fit a hand through - but no obvious seams or lock mechanism. She suspected it responded to voice commands or the presence of specific DNA patterns, neither of which she was equipped to uncover.
Acutely aware of the rapidly vanishing time, she paced slowly around the containment unit, studying it with herself and with a small HYDRA device. It was an irony of her life that she still used the tools that her tormentors had given her, but she had yet to notice it. Her upbringing had not had much use for irony.
Beyond the walls, armed guards roamed the sprawling grounds of the grandly-named Southwest Divison Central Research and Development Complex. Stark Industries had always clung to the heels of the military, and this R&D facility was not far from the installations at Los Alamos. Like all others run by the weapons manufacturer, the facility specialized in creating machines that could devastate, if not the world, then at least large portions of a hemisphere. The EMP generator she was about to acquire was an exception to that; it had a blast radius of twenty miles. Small - but so was the machine.
She had a bag, folded and tucked into her belt at the small of her back, that would hold the generator perfectly well. Neither her senses nor equipment had discovered an easy way to breach the containment unit, however, and no way to breach it without setting off a suite of alarms. It would take her torch several hours to cut through the metal; a plasma cutter significantly less time, but she did not have one. The remaining options were explosives or the weapons lying much closer to her hands. She narrowed her eyes.
Having wiped herself off the face of the Earth, it would be risky to put herself on the map anew. And yet time was running short; she had five minutes until the guards came to inspect this lab.
She breathed, slowly and carefully, let the muscles of her hands and arms and shoulders relax, let herself be calm. She looked at the containment unit with a different sort of vision, a predator's vision, the sight that picked out weaknesses. Everything and everyone had a weak spot.
There.
She found it and in a single motion slashed out, tearing a fatal gash across one side of the the containment unit. Alarms instantly blared in a flashing red-light cacaphony. She slashed again, vertically this time, then spun on her heel and kicked at the damaged metal where the lines of her claws intersected. The side groaned and wrenched inward, making a gap just large enough for her to reach through and snatch the EMP generator from its resting place.
Guards burst through the door, shouting, weapons clicking, boots stomping. One of them wasted the breath to yell, "Don't move!"
She secured her grip on the generator, turned, and ran.
Always mindful of the need for a quick escape, she had chosen her potential exits the moment she set foot in the laboratory. Stark Industries had built this lab with a row of soaring windows that overlooked a sweeping desert vista. It was five stories off of the ground and therefore unlikely to be subject to internal escape attempts, so the windows were not barred. In any event, with a body throwing itself against them, the glass in the windows would shatter almost immediately.
Lasers cut through the air all around her, sending up the fried-ozone smell she knew as well as her own scent. One connected to her shoulder, punching through the top of her lung and out through her chest, cauterizing flesh as it went. She grunted and did not slow nor drop the generator. Pain was an old friend, and a welcome enemy that she knew how to conquer.
By the time she dove through one of the windows, the wound in her shoulder had healed over. The guards shouted behind her; a fresh barrage of lasers zipped by, but she was moving too quickly. Glass shattered in her face, slicing through the mask and into her skin. The night air bloomed fresh and cold. She could smell sand, sky, the cars in the parking lot, the mountains, a handful of desert flowers...
She reached out with the arm not holding the generator and dug her claws into the face of the building, shedding momentum; it dislocated her newly-healed shoulder but slowed her down, and that was all that mattered. To get distance from the guards, she sheathed her claws and kicked off hard from the building in the same motion. That was somewhere around the third floor. Her new arc, coupled with the remaining distance, would take her nearly two dozen meters from the building - but she no longer had the choice of a good touchdown, a landing which would allow her to escape with minimal damage. It was going to hurt.
She curled around the generator and landed on her back in the hard-packed, rocky earth. The impact knocked the breath from her and ruptured her spleen, tore a few tendons and ligaments, wrenched her spine, bruised muscles, snapped her clavicle and ribs on both sides of her sternum, rattled her brain in its bone shell. The cuts on her face and upper body leaked blood, and her mask and leather jacket stuck to her skin in those places.
But the generator was undamaged. She checked it even as she was trying to force oxygen into her partially deflated lungs; the curving silver surface was not so much as scratched. She lay motionless in the dirt for a handful of seconds, coughing up frothy blood against the mask, waiting impatiently for her body to knit itself back together. The guards would not rush, she knew. They would not expect her to get back up after falling four stories.
No one ever did.
She grunted again and pushed herself to her feet before the healing was completely finished, feeling her vertebrae pop back into place one by one. With the pops came a fresh rush of sensation from her legs as nerves reconnected. She set the generator in the dirt for a moment and pulled the folded bag out, brushing sand and gravel from it while her fractured ribs screamed in protest. Klaxons were shattering the peaceful night, and she heard one sharp-eyed guard high above her shouting, "It's a mutant!"
Alerted to her true nature, Stark Industries' heavy guards would soon be out in their exosuits - a Stark speciality - to hunt her down. Now she didn't have very much time at all. Seconds. But seconds were more than she needed.
She took one of those seconds to force her shoulder back into its socket; the pain cut out immediately, as it always did. She carefully placed the EMP generator into the bag, tugged the zipper closed, slung the strap across her chest and shoulder, and, with the round weight of the machine thumping against her healing spine, sprinted into the fathomless darkness of the night. Behind her mask she grinned a fierce predator's grin; if she could have put the feeling into words, they would have been: There was no secret beyond her reach.
But this situation called for strategy. Planning. Analysis. Research. A half-billion-dollar miniature electro-magnetic pulse generator.
The last was the most difficult. She had known already where one could be found. And she had known that it would take almost as much work to get the EMP generator as it would to complete her main objective. She was also working under a strict time limit.
Unfortunately, Stark Industries held its secrets dear as well.
She had breached the perimeter easily, made it past the watchful human and electronic eyes, broke into the laboratory building proper using one of the devices she'd liberated from a now- defunct HYDRA base. Cool and quiet as a ghost against the chill desert night, she had slipped into the fifth-floor lab that held her prize, and there met her first true obstacle.
The EMP generator was roughly spheroid, slightly smaller than a basketball, a softly gleaming thing of silver metal and plastic in the shadow-choked room. It rested securely inside a massively thick containment unit that sat, square and stolid, in the middle of the lab. The metal containment unit had a tiny viewing window - a portal of armored glass too small to fit a hand through - but no obvious seams or lock mechanism. She suspected it responded to voice commands or the presence of specific DNA patterns, neither of which she was equipped to uncover.
Acutely aware of the rapidly vanishing time, she paced slowly around the containment unit, studying it with herself and with a small HYDRA device. It was an irony of her life that she still used the tools that her tormentors had given her, but she had yet to notice it. Her upbringing had not had much use for irony.
Beyond the walls, armed guards roamed the sprawling grounds of the grandly-named Southwest Divison Central Research and Development Complex. Stark Industries had always clung to the heels of the military, and this R&D facility was not far from the installations at Los Alamos. Like all others run by the weapons manufacturer, the facility specialized in creating machines that could devastate, if not the world, then at least large portions of a hemisphere. The EMP generator she was about to acquire was an exception to that; it had a blast radius of twenty miles. Small - but so was the machine.
She had a bag, folded and tucked into her belt at the small of her back, that would hold the generator perfectly well. Neither her senses nor equipment had discovered an easy way to breach the containment unit, however, and no way to breach it without setting off a suite of alarms. It would take her torch several hours to cut through the metal; a plasma cutter significantly less time, but she did not have one. The remaining options were explosives or the weapons lying much closer to her hands. She narrowed her eyes.
Having wiped herself off the face of the Earth, it would be risky to put herself on the map anew. And yet time was running short; she had five minutes until the guards came to inspect this lab.
She breathed, slowly and carefully, let the muscles of her hands and arms and shoulders relax, let herself be calm. She looked at the containment unit with a different sort of vision, a predator's vision, the sight that picked out weaknesses. Everything and everyone had a weak spot.
There.
She found it and in a single motion slashed out, tearing a fatal gash across one side of the the containment unit. Alarms instantly blared in a flashing red-light cacaphony. She slashed again, vertically this time, then spun on her heel and kicked at the damaged metal where the lines of her claws intersected. The side groaned and wrenched inward, making a gap just large enough for her to reach through and snatch the EMP generator from its resting place.
Guards burst through the door, shouting, weapons clicking, boots stomping. One of them wasted the breath to yell, "Don't move!"
She secured her grip on the generator, turned, and ran.
Always mindful of the need for a quick escape, she had chosen her potential exits the moment she set foot in the laboratory. Stark Industries had built this lab with a row of soaring windows that overlooked a sweeping desert vista. It was five stories off of the ground and therefore unlikely to be subject to internal escape attempts, so the windows were not barred. In any event, with a body throwing itself against them, the glass in the windows would shatter almost immediately.
Lasers cut through the air all around her, sending up the fried-ozone smell she knew as well as her own scent. One connected to her shoulder, punching through the top of her lung and out through her chest, cauterizing flesh as it went. She grunted and did not slow nor drop the generator. Pain was an old friend, and a welcome enemy that she knew how to conquer.
By the time she dove through one of the windows, the wound in her shoulder had healed over. The guards shouted behind her; a fresh barrage of lasers zipped by, but she was moving too quickly. Glass shattered in her face, slicing through the mask and into her skin. The night air bloomed fresh and cold. She could smell sand, sky, the cars in the parking lot, the mountains, a handful of desert flowers...
She reached out with the arm not holding the generator and dug her claws into the face of the building, shedding momentum; it dislocated her newly-healed shoulder but slowed her down, and that was all that mattered. To get distance from the guards, she sheathed her claws and kicked off hard from the building in the same motion. That was somewhere around the third floor. Her new arc, coupled with the remaining distance, would take her nearly two dozen meters from the building - but she no longer had the choice of a good touchdown, a landing which would allow her to escape with minimal damage. It was going to hurt.
She curled around the generator and landed on her back in the hard-packed, rocky earth. The impact knocked the breath from her and ruptured her spleen, tore a few tendons and ligaments, wrenched her spine, bruised muscles, snapped her clavicle and ribs on both sides of her sternum, rattled her brain in its bone shell. The cuts on her face and upper body leaked blood, and her mask and leather jacket stuck to her skin in those places.
But the generator was undamaged. She checked it even as she was trying to force oxygen into her partially deflated lungs; the curving silver surface was not so much as scratched. She lay motionless in the dirt for a handful of seconds, coughing up frothy blood against the mask, waiting impatiently for her body to knit itself back together. The guards would not rush, she knew. They would not expect her to get back up after falling four stories.
No one ever did.
She grunted again and pushed herself to her feet before the healing was completely finished, feeling her vertebrae pop back into place one by one. With the pops came a fresh rush of sensation from her legs as nerves reconnected. She set the generator in the dirt for a moment and pulled the folded bag out, brushing sand and gravel from it while her fractured ribs screamed in protest. Klaxons were shattering the peaceful night, and she heard one sharp-eyed guard high above her shouting, "It's a mutant!"
Alerted to her true nature, Stark Industries' heavy guards would soon be out in their exosuits - a Stark speciality - to hunt her down. Now she didn't have very much time at all. Seconds. But seconds were more than she needed.
She took one of those seconds to force her shoulder back into its socket; the pain cut out immediately, as it always did. She carefully placed the EMP generator into the bag, tugged the zipper closed, slung the strap across her chest and shoulder, and, with the round weight of the machine thumping against her healing spine, sprinted into the fathomless darkness of the night. Behind her mask she grinned a fierce predator's grin; if she could have put the feeling into words, they would have been: There was no secret beyond her reach.