Red America: Western Front
Chapter Seven: Blood Trails
Commissar-Colonel Elisabeth Braddock stood in the area of the Soviet base that had been previously set aside for Dr Pym's test subjects, watching the Crimson Commando swinging and flipping gracefully from the training equipment that had been set up for him. She watched as he propelled himself off one set of handholds with a powerful leap, grabbing the closest support bar with one hand and using that as a pivot to shift himself up onto the highest level of the equipment. Without pausing for breath, he somersaulted off the platform's edge and landed on the padded mat on the exercise area's floor, finding his balance in a fraction of an instant. Casually, he walked over to where a towel had been set out for him, and wiped off the light sheen of sweat that clung to his sleekly-toned muscles. Elisabeth turned to Dr Pym, who had been watching their mutual experiment with equal fascination, and said "So, Doctor… do you think Mr Barton is ready to be sent out into the field again?"
"More than ready, I'd say," Dr Pym replied. "His wound is almost completely healed – and my medical scans have shown me that large areas of his body are enhanced with what looks like… well, like machinery. In fact, there are some parts of him that look like they'd be better fixed by an engineer rather than a doctor."
"Yes, I know," Elisabeth said with a thin smile, enjoying Dr Pym's look of total disbelief. "Oh, don't look so surprised, Doctor – I'm a Commissar; I can look at virtually anything in the Red Army's database, whenever I choose. According to my research, the Crimson Commando project was intended to give an ordinary human endurance beyond any normal biological limits. He was engineered to be able to stay in the same spot for hours – even days, if necessary – so that he would always be in the best spot to eliminate a target. His blood-flow and metabolism can be consciously slowed to a sufficient degree that he can survive for days without food or water in one single sniping position, and his muscles are laced with cybernetic filaments that minimise the release of lactic acid. Essentially, he's able to keep going almost indefinitely, or until he accomplishes his mission." She smiled again, wolfishly enjoying Dr Pym's involuntary shudder. "Whichever comes sooner."
"But… if that's the case," Dr Pym began, confused, "why am I carrying out my research here? Surely the results of that project speak for themselves?"
"The Crimson Commando role was always defined as a solo counter-espionage operative," Elisabeth explained. "Besides which, all that miniaturised hardware is prohibitively expensive – far too expensive for mass production, I assure you. That's why Mr Barton there has always been frozen in between assignments; it was far more economical to do that than keep him around for any longer than necessary. Your research, on the other hand, is both less expensive and far easier to produce on a large scale. Trust me, Doctor… this is a far better option."
"I see," Dr Pym said, before he looked over his notes again, briefly. He cleared his throat and continued "The initial recipients of the combination serum are ready for a field test within the next forty-eight hours. I've asked for them to be equipped with medical kits just in case something goes wrong, but I don't see any need for them. The serum performed well enough that most minor injuries were healed within a few seconds, with larger and more complex wounds taking only a fraction of the time that they normally would."
"Example," Elisabeth said in a short tone, glancing impatiently over a clipboard that was laid on top of a table in front of her. Dr Pym cleared his throat again and pointed to a flow chart that he had drawn onto a board in green marker-pen. It gave details of wounds suffered by the trainees during their exercises, and the corresponding time it had taken the serum in their bloodstream to fix the damage. It astonished even her: broken bones were setting themselves in around ten minutes at the most, with ruptured organs being repaired in under a fraction of that time. Inwardly, she thanked her sense of good judgement for having killed General Von Doom while she'd had the chance – because according to the chart, he'd have been up and charging at her before she could have blinked twice, his snapped spinal cord and shattered ribcage completely healed. She raised her eyebrows, and then picked up her peaked cap and set it on her tightly-bound hair. "I'd like to talk to him, if I may," she said, indicating Clint Barton with a single thumb.
"Go right ahead," Dr Pym said, spreading his hands wide, as if granting her permission. Elisabeth turned on her heel without saying another word and then stalked silently towards where Clint was still resting after his workout, alternately drinking cold water from a plastic bottle and eating some pieces of dried fruit, as well as splashing water over his sweat-caked, scar-streaked torso. She stood behind him, intending to wait for him to notice that she was there, but instead of seeing him turn to face her, she saw him simply turn his head a little and look at her out of the corner of his left eye as he continued to towel himself off.
"If you've come to thank me for not killing you, Commissar," he said, without letting any expression into his voice, "you're welcome."
Elisabeth raised an eyebrow. "I think Natasha must have damaged more than just your left lung when she brought you in, Mr Barton. Remember who it is you're talking to."
"Oh, right. I forgot," Clint muttered, before he stood up to face her and offered her a lazy salute. With that done, he was just in the middle of sitting down again when Elisabeth smashed into him from behind, locking his left arm painfully up between his shoulder blades and driving a knee into the small of his back. As he lay coughing and wheezing in a shocked heap, Elisabeth lowered her mouth close to his ear.
"Disrespect me like that again, Crimson Commando," she hissed, "and I will not be so gentle next time. You may be a special soldier and a hero of the Revolution, but I think I just proved that you are not invincible, or indispensable. And unless you give me the respect a Commissar of the Soviet Union warrants, I will not hesitate to prove it again. With this." She drew her automatic pistol with her free hand and jammed it against the back of his skull. "Dodge that, if you can." Having made her point, Elisabeth released him and holstered her pistol. "Now… I think you owe me something, don't you?"
"Yes… sir." Clint gave her a look that could have seared a hole through solid granite, simultaneously rolling his shoulder to try and get some feeling back into it and rubbing the nascent bruise on his cheek, but he still managed to stand up straight and offer Elisabeth a far crisper salute than his first had been. Elisabeth returned the salute and then put her hands behind her back, looking satisfied now that she had made her point.
"Good," she said, walking over to where her cap had fallen and tucking it under her arm. "Now then… I have a job for you. How do you feel like doing some hunting?"
Clint raised an eyebrow. "Excuse me?"
"One of my tank crews radioed in a curious message just before we lost contact with them," Elisabeth explained, folding her arms across her chest after placing her cap on the bench where Clint was sitting. "They mentioned that some kind of… robot was attacking them, a robot with a human pilot. The wreckage of the tank we found earlier today seemed to support that statement, as the armour looked like it had been torn apart by hand as well as by weapons fire – and as far as we can determine, the only kind of person in this city with the kind of mechanical expertise to build such a thing is one Tony Stark. My troops have been looking for him for some time now, but have come up short every time." She extended a finger towards Clint. "I was rather hoping you could assist us in achieving that goal."
"Sure." Clint smiled then, his previous irritation vanishing in the space of a single breath, and he picked up his sniper rifle, which had been laid lovingly on the bench next to him. "When should I get started?"
"Fuck!" Kitty cursed through gritted teeth. Madrox moved up beside her in a running crouch and squatted down beside her, putting his rifle down on the dirty ground as he did so.
"What is it?" he asked. Kitty pointed off to the left of the alleyway, where a small knot of Russian soldiers was standing guard outside a run-down building that nonetheless apparently had a great deal of significance, as Soviet troops were moving in and out of it with almost clockwork regularity. Madrox looked at Kitty again, his face pale. "Probably an ammo store," he muttered, before turning in place and pointing a finger at Stark. "You – tin man. Stay out of sight, or we're all dead." He looked back at Kitty again. "What do you want to do?"
Kitty gave him a contemptuous look through the slitted corner of one eye. "What do I want to do? What I want to do is sit down and smoke cigarettes until I pass out from a nicotine overdose. What I'm going to do is something else entirely." She paused, and then nodded back down the alleyway. "Turn around, all of you – we've got to find another way through this area of town. I'm not attracting any more attention than necessary, and that means not trying to go through a bunch of Russkies with far more ammunition than us – even if we do have Robbie the Robot to back us up, all it'd take is one rocket-launcher round to that thing's leg and we'd be all out of options." She saw Stark begin to protest, and shook her head. "No, Stark. I'm not risking you getting your head blown off just to prove a point about how tough your little toy is. Got it?" Stark pondered the point for a moment, scowling, and then raised his suit's three-fingered fist, dropping the first and third fingers defiantly. Kitty smiled in a thin, threadbare way. "Glad to see you understand. First time I've ever had a toaster flip me off, that's for sure. Now come on, guys, time's a-wasting." She led her squad back down the alleyway, leaving Stark as a rearguard, and then started creeping along the pathway that she'd cleared only minutes before, before a muffled shriek erupted from the rear of her column of rebels. She swung round in the blink of an eye, to see Hank clamping his hand down over Jubilation's mouth as she frantically tried to run back towards the Russian base. Immediately, she saw that Stark was missing.
Oh, no…
Horrified, she ran back to the alleyway's mouth, and watched as Stark charged towards the base as quickly as his suit allowed, the suit's weapon arm vomiting lead and chopping down Soviet troops like winnowed wheat. One of the rocket pods on his suit's shoulder flipped up and sent a full spread of missiles flashing through the air into the front of the building, smashing the brickwork and setting off secondary explosions in the tightly-stacked ammunition boxes, bullets and grenades cooking off as the missiles detonated in their midst. Those Soviet soldiers not caught by Stark's brutal barrage of machine-gun fire screeched in pain as flame clawed hungrily at clothes and ragged chunks of metal stabbed themselves deeply into flesh and bone. The building almost sagged as the explosions died out, and Stark turned his suit at the waist and gave Kitty a thumbs-up, as if that would excuse his disobeying a direct order. Kitty clenched her fists and stormed closer to the robot, her eyes burning with rage.
"And just the holy fuck was that, Stark?" she spat, furiously, gesturing at the carnage that Stark had caused. "I said we were going to find another way around. You don't think that the Ivans might just notice that one of their big arms depots just got totalled? What the fuck were you thinking?"
Stark raised an eyebrow, his expression cut off from the rest of the world by his cockpit-glass. "I was clearing us a path, Miss Pryde," he said, without a trace of smugness or arrogance. "This is the quickest way out of San Francisco. I don't want to spend any more time looking out for Russkie patrols than I have to, and if this gets me that wish, then I'll do what I have to do."
"Is that right?" Kitty snarled, and then leapt at Stark's cockpit, phasing herself through its glass just enough that she could grab hold of his shirt and shove her face right into his. "I'm in command here, Stark, not you – so when I tell you to do something, you do it without question. Do you get it?"
"Absolutely," Stark said, keeping his voice even and calm. Kitty was about to launch into another tirade when she heard some blood-choked gurgles coming from the wreckage of the building. She cursed, realising what they would have to do now.
"Hear that?" she said, jerking a thumb at the wrecked armoury. "Those are casualties of war. We can't afford to leave them here because they'll tell the Russkies what happened here. We can't afford to take them with us, because they'll just slow us down. The only option we've got is to kill them so they can't talk." She scowled. "Since you got us into this shitstorm in the first place, you're the one that's going to clean it up." Stark started to walk over to the building, his suit's hydraulic joints hissing, when Kitty shook her head. "Not like that, Stark. Get out of that thing." Stark's suit pivoted at the waist, so that she could see his expression of total disbelief. "You heard me. Get out. Now." Stark hesitated for a moment, but then the cockpit flipped up slowly and he stepped down onto the cracked sidewalk, looking like a child deprived of his favourite comfort blanket. Kitty stepped up to him and handed him one of her automatic pistols. "I want you to understand what this war is like, Stark. I want you to look at what you're killing, instead of just pushing buttons. You want to be a soldier? Now's your chance."
Stark looked like he might be sick then, but he went over to the building's ruins, pistol in hand. Kitty followed closely behind him, clutching her other pistol in case Stark didn't follow through with his assigned task, and watched him as he walked up to the first easily visible Russian soldier. The man was young, possibly only just out of his teens, and had been hit in the stomach and left shoulder. He was barely conscious, blood still pulsing steadily from his wounds, but he was alert enough to see Stark walking up to him with a gun pointing straight at his head. "Nyet!" he gurgled. "Please – I swear I will tell nobody what I have seen here! Please don't kill me!" Stark glanced back desperately to see Kitty standing with her arms folded, giving him a stony-faced look.
"If you don't do it, Stark, I will," she hissed. "You think we can trust a Russkie to keep a secret? I don't." Stark took a deep breath and tightened his finger on the trigger of his pistol, watching the fear in the other man's eyes growing with each passing second. He could feel tears beginning to form at the corner of his eyes, and the he could feel the pistol starting to shake in his hand, until he raised the gun and turned back towards Kitty.
"I… I can't do it," he said, his voice a thin echo of what it had been previously. "He's just a boy. I –"
Kitty raised her pistol and planted a bullet straight between the soldier's eyes, splashing his brains all over the bare concrete floor and silencing his pleas for mercy. She looked over at Stark, who was regarding her with a mixture of shock and horror. "Next time, Stark, follow your fucking orders." Turning, she signalled for the rest of the squad to join her. When they had crossed the street, she nodded at the interior of the building. "Clean this place up – and do it quickly. We can't afford to stay here any longer than we have to." Hank and Cecilia nodded and raised their weapons, followed by the rest of her squad.
It took less than five minutes to wipe out the last vestiges of the force that once occupied the building. Nobody spoke for a long time afterwards.
The gymnasium had been cleared of all the equipment that the Crimson Commando had requested, and was bare again, save for a pair of soft mats and a vaulting horse. Elisabeth Braddock hefted her sabre in her right hand and aimed a punishing slash at the left calf of her opponent, the heavy blade howling through the air and missing flesh by a whisper. Undaunted by her miss, Elisabeth grinned broadly and fended off her opponent's return strike with the edge of her sword, sparks igniting for an instant as metal scraped on metal. Combat was always more fun, she decided, if she didn't use her telepathy to predict what her opponent was going to do next. That way everything that happened was a new experience – and it was that which she really enjoyed the most, if she was honest with herself.
Her opponent thrust the heel of his palm at her, aiming to trick her off-balance, but Elisabeth simply ghosted out of its path and slapped it away with her own free hand. "You can do better than that!" she laughed, licking her lips in a predatory fashion. "Stop holding back!"
"Maybe I'm just lulling you into a false sense of security?" Clint chuckled as he swung his sword towards her body in a broad arc, forcing Elisabeth to throw herself abruptly backwards to avoid its lethally-sharp edge. Dropping to one knee she lashed out with her booted foot, chopping at Clint's calf as if she were aiming to cut down a tree. Clint saw it too late and had to try and stay upright as his leg began to fold underneath him, fending off Elisabeth's hacking strikes as she sprang to her full height and pressed her advantage with relish. Holding his sword horizontally, Clint parried as many blows as he could before one found his shoulder, slicing deeply into the meat and making him howl in pain.
"Or maybe you're just not as good as you thought?" Elisabeth gloated, touching her bare fingers to the bloodied surface of her blade and licking them clean. "The propaganda people would love to see this, wouldn't they?"
"I'm sure they would," Clint grunted, the pain of his torn shoulder etching itself on his face, "but not for the reasons you think they would." With that, he pushed himself off his knees with an almost supernatural speed, lancing towards Elisabeth and catching her at the waist, driving her to the floor and sucking all the air out of her lungs. Before she could register what had happened, he was already up and moving, his blade pressing itself against her throat. "I think this means you lose, Commissar." He raised his sabre and then offered her his hand, which Elisabeth took with a mild scowl, annoyed that she had been bested. Clint noticed her expression and smiled despite the wound in his shoulder (which Elisabeth had noticed had already stopped bleeding despite the depth and severity of the cut). "Looks like we're even, doesn't it?"
Elisabeth paused for a moment, before she sheathed her sabre and then offered Clint a rudimentary smile. "I suppose we are, yes," she said rather grudgingly. "You're a good swordsman – there aren't many people on my staff who I can spar with like that."
"I got trained in a lot of things when I was being prepared for this," Clint replied with a shrug. "If you want to play bows and arrows, I could do that, too."
"I see," Elisabeth said thoughtfully, before she stepped closer to him and put her arms around his waist. "That's an interesting thought, Crimson Commando… but I prefer contact sports. Can you oblige me there, as well?"
"Totally," Clint replied, with a wry smile. "I might be a little out of practice, but I think I could give it a shot."
Good, Elisabeth told him telepathically as she kissed him. Consider this a good luck charm…