Recruitment Drive: Reaching an Accord
Chapter 3
Hank Thompson leaned back in his chair. It would only be another half hour before he could close his business for the day and head home. Welding wasn't exactly a glamorous or exciting job, but he wouldn't give up his life with his family for anything.
The phone rang. Hank picked it up. "Thompson Welding."
"Hello, Mr. Thompson," A woman's voice said. "A friend of mine said that he could always count on you if he needed a welder."
"It's nice to have recommendations like that." He admitted.
"My friend's name is Coulson."
Hank froze. When he told the Director of SHIELD that they always count on him if they needed a welder, he hadn't expected that the need would actually come up.
"We need you to build a special container for us. I'm faxing the details to you now."
The fax machine started printing out a set of specifications. They described a small metal box. A box with rather thick sides that could be hermetically sealed and made from a rather exotic alloy, which he noted was non-ferrous.
"What in the world are you planning to put in this thing?"
"If your name was still Cameron Klein, I'd tell you that you don't need to know. Since you're now called Hank Thompson, I'll just say that you don't WANT to know."
Agent Bobbi Morse watched as her partner was carted off the Quinjet towards the infirmary, the foot-long splinter of wood still sticking from his shoulder.
"Do you still think that Skye isn't a weapon?" Agent Weaver asked.
"She's a lot closer than she was," Bobbi admitted. "She can now aim her powers, and turn them on at will. But I think she was just as surprised at how big that blast was as we were. So she can't really control the power level yet. Of course, if Coulson just wants to use her as a breaching tool, she's ready to go right now."
If anything, that was an understatement. The newly Enhanced SHIELD agent had managed to reduce several dozen rather large trees into splinters with a gesture. That much power could probably blow a hole through any wall ever built, unless someone was willing to spend the GDP of a small country to build said wall out of vibranium.
"But Tomas wouldn't have been injured if he hadn't disobeyed orders and used lethal ammunition when I explicitly said to use ICERs only. And there's also what he did that got us thrown out of Chicago."
"I see nothing wrong with Agent Calderon's actions," Commander Gonzales said. "We needed to demonstrate SHIELD's authority in the Enhanced subcommunity, and Agent Skye needed to be contained by any means."
There was another agent who overheard the conversation as Calderon's gurney was wheeled to the infirmary.
"What happened in Chicago?" Agent Melinda May asked.
Bobbi gave her a brief explanation of what had happened at PENTAGRAM's headquarters and what she knew of the incident in the pub. The other agent grimaced.
"I hope you people are willing to go over every operation Coulson had in the field or was planning to launch. Agent Murphy isn't going to lend her agents to you people now, and without PENTAGRAM and their Way-walkers, a lot of insertion and extraction plans will have to be completely rewritten."
"Way-walkers?" Bobbi inquired.
"One of PENTAGRAM's tricks, and one that justifies everything we've spent on them. Murphy has people who can travel just about anywhere in the world, bypassing all border checkpoints, ports and airports in the process. They can literally cross oceans in a matter of hours, without using any boats or aircraft."
"That's a useful trick," Weaver admitted "If they can take people with them, they could insert or extract a team anywhere in the world within a day."
"And since PENTAGRAM has sided with Coulson, he can use that to send teams against us." Gonzales added.
"Add you'll never see them coming into they're in position to strike." May confirmed with a slight smirk. "Calderon made an enemy for you that he didn't have to. Possibly more than one. You might want to think on that."
With that, the Coulson loyalist turned and walked away.
Agents Fitz, Simmons, and House were eating together. As part of the decided minority of Coulson loyalists in the Playground, they tended to stick together, no matter how irritating the physician was.
"Will you two just make out already?" House grumbled. "Everyone's sick of watching you two dance around each other."
Fitz and Simmons deliberately avoided at each other. Everyone else in the room tried to avoid looking at the deliberately tactless doctor.
"So…" Fitz said hurriedly in an effort to change the subject, "What's going on in the medical wing? The newcomers in our section are all busy trying to open Fury's Toolbox."
"The surgeons are all busy trying to patch up some idiot who managed to get a tree branch blown through his shoulder. I have no idea how he managed to do that."
"He tried to shoot Skye, and she shot back," May said as she sat down at the table, carrying a partially empty six-pack of beer. "You might want to be politer the next time you ask her for a blood sample, doctor. She's apparently gotten enough control over her powers that she could do the same to you if she wants to."
House considered that as May distributed the beer around the table.
"Is Skye alright?" Simmons asked.
"From what I heard, she wasn't hurt. She blew up several trees, skewered Calderon with one of the splinters, knocked Bobbi on her ass, and then fled. I don't where she is right now, but I don't think anyone else knows either."
"Is that the Director's private stock?" Fitz asked, noting the label on the bottles.
"What's the occasion?" Simmons wondered.
"The same guy who tried to kill Skye also caused a major incident in Chicago, in the worst possible location." May said. "Agent Murphy said that violating neutral ground would be punished by becoming the enemy of everyone who signs onto the Accords, and losing access to the proprietor's beer.
"I'm not sure what the people Calderon offended are going to try to do, but since the Council has ensured that we're not going to be able to get any more of this until the incident is resolved, they shouldn't be allowed to enjoy any of it."
"I think I can agree with that logic," House chimed in.
The four agents each opened a bottle, clinked them together and drank them.
Then Fitz shivered and looked around. "Is it just me, or is it getting cold in here?"
"So," Gonzales asked. "What did you learn from this PENTAGRAM agency before they threw you out of Chicago?"
"Well, for starters, Agent Murphy denied all knowledge of Theta Protocol, and disputed that we had sufficient grounds to move against Coulson when we did." Bobbi reported.
"That's easy to say when you don't have much direct contact with his operations." Mack said.
"What about the Warden?" Gonzales asked.
"He's apparently not affiliated with SHIELD or PENTAGRAM."
"And Coulson trusts him with the Obelisk?"
"If Murphy's to believed, his facility has been securing things worse than that for longer than SHIELD's existed."
"And where is this facility?" Weaver joined in.
"Murphy called it Demonreach. It's apparently located on an island, or possibly takes up the entire island. She also implied that it's got a perfect security record, a top-notch sensor system, and a self-destruct that could vaporize the entire island."
"If the Warden didn't get that stuff from SHIELD, where did he get it from? That kind of gear isn't easy to come by." Mack wondered.
"I haven't a clue, and that worries me. I'm pretty sure the island is somewhere in the Great Lakes. Once we can narrow it down, we can try sending someone there to investigate."
Just then, an agent came in with something. "Sir, we just intercepted a transmission from the Chicago branch. It seems that they were trying to send it out to various other SHIELD bases around the world." He handed a copy of the transmission to Gonzales.
"Hmm… it seems that Agent Murphy is looking for a certain sixth century dagger. And Coulson appears to have signed off on this as well. What's this code that they're mentioning here?"
Mack walked over and looked over the Commander's shoulder. "Oh, that. Over the summer Coulson brought in a consultant – a really tall guy in a leather duster - to lecture us on how to assess the possible danger of unknown artifacts and how to handle them afterwards. Those codes were derived from that lecture."
"So what does this code mean?" Bobbi asked.
"Really bad. Under that system, something like Thor's hammer would be pretty low – no matter how much Thor can do with the thing, if you or I tried to lift it, the worst that's likely to happen is that we'd pull something while trying to get it off the ground. The Obelisk would be much higher up – if we tried to pick it up, it would kill us, but we'd probably be dead before anyone else got hurt. This is much higher – basically, it says to treat the knife as if it's contaminated with something nasty and highly contagious."
"That would explain why the instructions say not to even attempt to retrieve the dagger, just to find it. Murphy apparently is prepping a special team to handle the retrieval personally. I wonder what Coulson wants with it."
"At least we now know where Coulson is." Weaver said.
"Not if May was telling the truth about those Way-walkers," Bobbi pointed out. "If they can really transport people that quickly, he could have left Chicago after drafting the message and be in Sweden by now. And we wouldn't know it unless he decided to send us a selfie from Stockholm to mock our inability to catch him."
"Still, at least it's a data point showing where he's been." Gonzales said. "Try to narrow down where Demonreach is, and let's keep tabs on Murphy's search for that dagger. We need to know what they're planning to do with it." Then he shivered. "And somebody turn up the heat."
It wasn't just people's imagination. It was getting colder in the Playground. Even when they set the thermostat to full blast, the temperature still dropped. After a day of gradually dropping temperature, Gonzales sent Mackenzie to take a look at the building's furnace.
The engineer found that the furnace had gone cold. Very cold. The exterior of the furnace was almost freezing to the touch. He tried to restart the furnace. Nothing happened. He tried again. Again, nothing happened.
For the next half hour, Agent Mackenzie tried to use the furnace controls to get it to restart. No matter what he did, the device remained inert. Resigning himself to the fact that it would take more effort to repair, he got out a wrench and started opening it up. And then he stared.
"What the..."
The interior of the furnace was a block of solid ice.
"How does ice spontaneously form in a furnace? Especially one that is running at the time?" Weaver demanded.
"I don't know," Mack admitted. "It wasn't normal ice, either. Hitting it with an axe barely chipped it. We had to use a thermite charge to get the stuff to melt. And when it finally did melt, it dissolved into this funny goop that evaporated a few minutes later."
"Strange," Gonzales mused. "Very strange."
The Council was still thinking on what could possibly have shut off the heat when another agent entered.
"Excuse me, but we just got a communication from the Iliad. They say it's snowing."
"They called just to give us a weather report?" Bobbi asked, then paused. "Wait a minute, unless they've moved a lot further north than they were when I was last on board, they shouldn't be seeing snow at this time of year. And every weather service on the planet would be tracking an unseasonable snowfall like that. How did they not see it coming?"
"That's just it, ma'am. The clouds just formed without warning. There is only snow falling within a few miles of the Iliad. The snowstorm is centered around the ship, and is matching its course whenever they try sailing out of it."
A/N: Thompson/Klein only appeared in one episode of AoS, and isn't likely to appear in this story again. But Murphy needs something to safely carry the knife once she finds it, and he did say that SHIELD could call on him if they ever needed a welder...
Way-walking would be an invaluable service that PENTAGRAM could provide to SHIELD in general (And already has in earlier Recruitment Drive stories). Even if they can't take large teams or equipment that isn't man-portable with them, being able to insert or remove people anywhere in the world in a manner that cannot be detected by any security checkpoint between the team's home base and the place where they exit the Way in a matter of hours would be priceless. This is the primary way that PENTAGRAM helps SHIELD in non-occult matters.
This is not the entirety of Molly's revenge; it is just the opening salvo.