Even here, into my center of repose,
The shady visions come to domineer,
Insult, and blind, and stifle up my pomp.—
Fall!—No, by Tellus and her briny robes!
Over the fiery frontier of my realms
I will advance a terrible right arm…
Hyperion; John Keats
January 30th, 2030
Changing Rooms, Maitrum
The day before the plan is to be enacted, the miner's outfits for the scavenging party finally break down. The birds issue replacements, of course: Barnes and Peter obtain a pair of alien, older, but underused hardsuits for their next - and hopefully last - assignment. All well and good, until the time comes to actually don them, because they turn out to be so… ill-fitting that Isabelle and Dah are called in to offer their…expertise.
Barnes is grimacing at his dark-brown breastplate. "I don't wanna say it, but I'm pretty sure this suit was built for a woman." His fingers, which had been adjusting the armor at his hips, goes towards his chest - intending no doubt to tug at it. But then they freeze before they can make contact, his face twisting into a myriad of emotions too fast to translate, and his hands drop as if burnt.
Isabelle looks away before her smile can betray her.
Jill Dah has no such compunctions. "Boob armor," she snickers, and smacks Barnes right where the aforementioned piece sits. Then she proceeds to make an obscene squeezing gesture that makes Isabelle wince.
A light dusting of pink scatters across his face, and he shoves her away. "Knock it off, Amazon."
She laughs. "Now you know how it feels, Boy Scout from Brooklyn."
"I'm an extremely dangerous Russian assassin."
"Not with that blush, you aren't."
"What I'm wondering is," Peter pipes up, in what is a valiant but unsubtle blatant attempt at changing the subject, " - how they have human-appropriate armor in the first place." He's shimmying into his own, obviously female-shaped suit; now that Isabelle is noticing, none of the collection available to them seem designed for a man. At best, the chestplate would be flat, but the hips are always too wide, almost sagging in places on the men.
The implications are… disturbing, but she hasn't seen any signs of this prison being… that kind of prison. The birds, as one, only seem to look at them with thinly-veiled disgust.
Peter's still talking. "I mean, they were definitely not fabricated for us - they're too old," he points to the peeled paint and the faint rust in the joints; nothing too dangerous, but obvious nonetheless. "And it's not as if the birds are gonna fit in."
Dah laughs again. "I'd pay to see that. Maybe once we get out of here, we'll make them."
Peter's head snaps up then. "You don't think… they couldn't have abducted our women before, right? Like, even before they fired on the Sokovia?"
The mood drops like an anchor at sea. Dah begins to scowl, her eyes flashing. "If they even try to…"
"No," Barnes says quietly. "If they'd picked up our women, it's likely then that this would be their armor, but it's not. Look at the designs. On the surface, sure, they resemble human armor. But, past the shape, it's completely different - the style of the seams, the flow of the joints. And this couldn't have been done by the fabricator here; it doesn't have the molds for it. The birds' knees don't bend our way."
"Then what…?"
"I don't know." He lowers his gaze. "I don't know. But don't forget… we've encountered plenty of humanoid aliens before."
"And why only women…?" Dah begins angrily. And a little bit afraid, Isabelle can tell. She's feeling much the same, after all.
"I don't know, Dah," Barnes murmurs, then his mouth pulls up in a smirk. "But God pity them if they try anything."
Dah snorts. "Why, you gonna be my knight in shinin' boob armor?"
"Me? Nah. I'll be curled up in a corner, munching on popcorn and watching as you both go to town on them." His tone turns dreamy. "It'll be a thing of beauty."
"You've got that right."
The jokes and the forced lightness only serves to underscore the terrible risk Barnes and Peter will be taking for them. Isabelle helps them secure their suits as comfortably as she can, despite how ridiculous they look. Her last exchange with Peter before he pulls on his helmet and walks out into the sun is uninspired - a hard hug and a simple 'good luck' and 'you too'. But Peter's always been easy to love.
Barnes, though, hadn't waited for her to take the initiative. "Don't give me a reason to come after you, Collins."
The same words she'd voiced, several years ago on Mars, when Barnes had been leaving to resume the fight against their mutual, eternal, multi-headed enemy. The callback yanks the response straight out of her mouth.
"Same to you."
That night, Barnes and Peter don't return to the cell. The wardens had interrogated their own prisoners at dinner-time, and Daskin had been close enough to translate. Apparently, a storm had come up unexpectedly while they were scavenging. The aliens had managed to find shelter, but Barnes and Peter had strayed too far from the facility for a chance at better loot.
Alone in her cell, Isabelle closes her eyes and smiles.
Ten days before the mass prison breakout…
Shower Room, Maximum Security Prison
In a regular, human prison, where the walls often have ears and even eyes, there's never much privacy to be found. But the birds have some sort of a sense of courtesy, because, as far as they've been able to figure out, there are no cameras in the shower rooms. There might be hidden receivers, listening to them plotting a mass prison breakout, but at least they can be reasonably assured none of it will be making much sense to the birds.
So far, Daskin, and by extension, his miners, seem unimpressed. "Maps are all well and good, Alliance," he's saying, presumably to Barnes, " - but we need an actual plan, or we won't make out of the facility, let alone the planet."
"You're right," Barnes says. "They bring in a new shipment every seven days. It takes about that long to carve up the asteroid and send it for purification. Best we use that time to have everyone's roles down cold, and break out with the next haul, where Collins will have the maximum amount of water to work with."
"No pressure," Isabelle murmurs. The sonic shower doesn't bother her today as much, now that she knows she'll soon be once again in close proximity to the ice. She can even afford to be charitable: there's an appeal to the sonic's efficiency at dirt removal.
January 31st, 2030
Ore Processing
Daskin's missing.
It's just Isabelle, Dah and the remaining miners at Processing, tense and silent. She's not entirely surprised by this turn of events - Daskin's task is, in some ways, the hardest, and the difficulties don't just lie with the language barrier.
Still, everything seems to go according to plan. Isabelle is partnered, yet again, with Dah, and they silently get to work extracting the ice, keeping an eye on the eezo core all the while. Seconds pass, then minutes, and then fifteen, until she's just about ready to vibrate out of her skin.
It's only at the twenty-five-minute mark that something changes.
A disturbance at the nearby entrance. Several miners crumple to the floor; stepping over their motionless bodies is a squad of aliens. Their eyes rove across the chamber, before honing in, predictably, on her.
Those facial markings… Isabelle stills. These were the birds that had presided over her writhing form in the Inquisition Facility. The shared malice in their gaze thrums like a heart ripped out of someone's chest. No pistols, though. Instead, they reach for the electric batons at their hips.
Isabelle turns to Dah. "Stay out of my way."
With that, she takes a running leap from the walkway railing. Grabbing onto the manipulator claw to break her fall into the void, she uses her momentum to swing around the thick column. The birds barely have time to react.
Isabelle slams into the squad, scattering and knocking them aside like bowling pins. Evading a baton's swipe, she takes out the offending bird's legs from under him. The rest of the birds regroup astonishingly fast.
The bird with the green markings, the one who she had spurned in the cargo hold and the leader of the Inquisition, launches into a whirlwind. The hits are enough to make her stagger. Her enemy makes it clear he is no easy prey - constantly on the move, keeping her off-balance, drawing her out with bug bites. It annoys her enough that she forgoes playing defense.
Green dances away from her strikes, his baton arcing out, electricity trailing in its wake. He leaps, and this time, she doesn't get away fast enough. The baton strikes true, and a scream rips through her throat as the shock drives her to her knees.
All of a sudden, the mining laser's there, scorching an arc on Green's armor, setting it on fire. His shriek is high-pitched and furious, as he frantically tries to escape his coffin before it cooks him alive.
Isabelle, panting, spares a glance for her savior. Dah, dark parts of her psyche flaring to life behind her eyes, her gloves clutching the console's joystick tightly. Other miners beyond are engaged in their own fights, buying time; the Inquisition squad is getting reinforcements. Her Terrigenesis strains at the asteroid, skittering and flailing against the unforgiving hold the eezo core has on it. Just where the hell are you, Peter? She wonders, as she leaps back into the fray.
Barely a minute later, Green rejoins the fight, bereft of his armor, but faster for it. His mandibles are flared in a snarl as his baton descends. Isabelle guards against a punishing blow, so she doesn't see the other baton concealed in the shadow of Green's forearm until it's too late.
It lands on her abdomen with a smack.
Isabelle gasps as electricity arcs inside her. Weapons drop from suddenly nerveless fingers. A baton digs into her back, and then two more on her hips, until they're all that's holding her up.
Within, a heat that rivals the sun spreads outward from her core. The little water in her blood tries to counter the rapidly growing fire, but it has lodged its claws in far too deep. Once again, Isabelle drowns in a volcano's fury.
Eight days before the mass prison breakout…
Mess Hall
"It's alien tech," Daskin points out. "How do you even expect to control it?!"
"The data from Alec Ryder's omni-tool," Parker says, his voice brimming with satisfaction. "Back on Altahe, he set up an advanced algorithm to decrypt the schematics from a crashed bird ship. Captain Ahern sent over his effects, but I never bothered switching it off. It's been running all this time! If we can get to our gear, I know Barnes and I can get us out of here."
"Only problem will be finding it," Barnes says. "Assuming the birds would've kept all of our gear in one location and not just destroyed them or taken them off-planet…"
"They won't. Told you, they can't afford to throw away anything that might have the slightest chance of being useful, not in Maitrum. And human tech will give them a good read on us; the birds here won't want to give up that advantage."
January 31st, 2030
Beneath the Prison Facility
Maitrum
The pipes are smaller than in human sewage systems, but they make up for it by being surprisingly clean. Besides the obvious rust trails running down the sides, there's surprisingly little filth anywhere but the narrow trench gouged out at the base. Gravity directs the waste from the drains into the trench, where strong air pressure and minor amounts of eezo work together to carry it wherever it's meant to be processed.
Bucky hunches down the route in his map, until he's directly below a drain. It's smaller than his head, but that's one problem easily resolved. He just shoves a fist through it, ignoring the rain of tile shards and dirt, then clears out a hole big enough to pull himself out of.
Placing him right in the middle of the shower stalls.
It's empty, as predicted. Unless the aliens have special dispensations for their own criminals, their shower and bathroom timings are just as disciplined as for humans… and thus, extremely easy to track. The wardens themselves don't have the same restrictions, obviously, but they also clean up elsewhere, so for now, Bucky's alone.
Withdrawing the tools he'd secreted away in the strange armor's utility belt, he gets to work. Parker's really brilliant, he muses yet again, unscrewing all the shower heads, snipping some wires and crossing several others. Their entire escape plan hinges on getting their gear, from wherever it had been stowed. But they had no way to track it… except Parker had remembered a detail even Bucky himself had forgotten.
Bucky's missing, cybernetic arm is vibranium.
By simply linking the shower heads together, thereby amplifying the sonic waves enough to disperse it throughout the rest of the facility, Parker had theorized that one could detect the arm by tracking just where the sonic waves disappeared into the vibration-absorbing metal.
Working near-noiselessly, Bucky hooks up his rudimentary setup to a tiny, blurry screen Parker had salvaged from one of the more intact ships in the metal graveyard. The frequencies are lower than normal humans can detect, but it leaves goosebumps on his arms. Hopefully the birds would have the same underwhelming feeling and discount it.
On the screen, the echolocation-like trail left behind by the sonic waves shows up in green. He mentally compares it with Collins' pipeline map, and finds it unsurprisingly accurate. There's the mess hall, the cargo hold, the ore processing where hopefully she and Parker are doing their thing, and… there!
A black, depthless void the exact shape and proportions of his arm. Sonic waves seem to skitter around it, testing the vibranium's defenses but finding no purchase. Bucky feels a rush of triumph. Thank you, Shuri. Sure enough, the sonic seems to detect other items in the immediate surroundings, though their shapes are amorphous, indistinct.
It's in one of those rooms none of them had been able to identify. A bit of a way from here, but he can use what the sonic's already got him; avoid the cameras and the patrols. With the map frozen to the screen, Bucky gently unhooks the setup. The whole operation was planned to be behind the divider; even were a warden to come by for a random inspection, with luck he'd most likely just be satisfied with a cursory glance to the sink-line and won't think to check beyond.
He's not used to relying so much on luck.
Six days before the mass prison breakout…
Mess Hall
"That asteroid had a mass of, at best, fifty-thousand metric tons," Peter had said quietly. "Are you sure you want me to switch off the eezo core?"
"The core is stronger than the asteroid, Pete - otherwise it wouldn't have been able to hold it up." Isabelle works her jaw. "There will be a small window of time between when it switches off and the ice falls. That's when I'll have to fight the least number of forces to gain control."
"That's the part that I don't get," Barnes says. "What forces?"
"Gravity, for one. Might be less than half of Earth's, but it still has an impact. The mass effect fields, which might pull when I'm wanting to push. The ice, which will be wanting to melt when I want it to stay solid and not drown us all."
"Jesus."
"There's a reason you haven't seen me manipulating ice all that much, Barnes. Water has no shape so it's malleable. It still fights back, but I can leash it to an extent. Ice is… stubborn."
Daskin clears her throat. "So. Can you do it?"
"I don't know."
"You don't… that won't cut it, Alliance! You've gotta figure this out faster or we ain't gonna make it outta here!"
"I said I don't know! That ice will have isotopes, and all sorts of elements - methane, ammonia, carbon monoxide! At best, the water purity is gonna be at eighty percent. You know how pure Earth's oceans are? Ninety-six point five! I've never even attempted to manipulate water that wasn't at least ninety percent pure!"
"So you don't know that you can't do it," Peter points out.
She stares at him. "Sure. But do you really want me to figure that out in Processing, where one wrong move could chop anyone in half?"
January 31st, 2030
The Plains of Maitrum
The silo had been built mostly atop a small ledge jutting out near the southern face of the butte, out of sight of the ruins. Only the eezo core chamber had been built within a hollow dug out of the ledge, to better contain the radiation, presumably. With a careful application of rudimentary explosives cobbled together from Maitrum's shipwreck graveyard, Peter blows a hole in the rock, clearing a narrow tunnel directly to the vertical rise of the core.
A rush of cool wind follows the debris, sending a jolt of energy through his spine. The core's shedding heat, but the icy chill of the asteroid hovering directly above helps negate some of it. Its design is familiar: coils of reaction channels glowing blue, shielded by reinforced metal plates and a sheath of radiation shielding. All he has to do is cut or redirect the power from the main lines, which will force the core to go inert. Hopefully, Izzy will be able to grab the asteroid before it falls and crushes him.
Securing his ear protection against the core's humming, ignoring the heat and dehydration prickling at the edges of his exhaustion, Peter gets to work.
Processing Center
Isabelle Collins is a marionette on strings of agony.
Held up by four electric batons jammed into her back, her chest and on both hips, she shudders: head thrown back, limbs convulsing, screams soundless. Unleashing this brutality from each of the cardinal directions are four birds, their mandibles flared wide in savage glee. Like a perverse compass: pointing, not to the north, but to her.
A tableau that is an affront to the universe itself.
They aren't letting up. Not even to let her breathe. The Inquisition had come to kill her, rules be damned.
Well, then. Let the rules be damned.
The blue glow of the eezo core switches off abruptly, some large machine whirring down from its breakneck speed.
The compass doesn't so much as twitch. It's as if the world has stopped for them, and them alone. Their inattention proves fatal, because the birds, in their sadism, haven't yet realized a simple fact.
The asteroid is still floating.
Later, much later, when this is all just a faded memory, Isabelle Collins would swear on her brother's grave that the ice had moved on its own.
And she would be right.
From somewhere deep within the core of the frozen rock, an enormous trident-shaped construct explodes outward in a spray of ice chips and mist. Aiming straight for the compass, it impales all the figures involved in one, brutally aimed thrust.
The aliens on either side - East and West, if you will - of Collins have it easy. The smaller prongs had gone for their chests; they had barely even felt their deaths. But the center prong could go nowhere else, caught in the pull of the compass. Like iron filings to a magnet, it harpooned itself in three figures.
The bird in the North, the bird in the South… and the woman in the center.
The woman - who hadn't yet been allowed to even utter a sound of protest - audibly chokes in gratitude as her wish to be saved from an agonized death is granted by the gift of a swift one.
If she so chooses to accept it.
A breathless pause as the universe awaits her decision.
Then the side prongs shatter into mist, abandoning their cargo like so much trash. Only the single, large spike remains, lodged deep inside the three still-twitching victims. Blue and red blood gushes into the ice, mingling within and staining it a deep, odd purple.
Slowly, the spike begins to retract into the asteroid. The gentleness isn't for the birds; they're just there along for the ride because they were ignorant of the forces conspiring against them. But pulled along they do get, until each one has sunk into the mass of the ice, completely disappearing from view when the hole seals itself over.
A cracking, grinding sound echoes in the silo as the asteroid then begins to crumple in on itself. Not all at once, and not everywhere: thick spikes thrust inwards along the radius, as though unable to fight the pull of its own center. Only faceted, column-sized pits remain behind on the surface, until it resembles nothing so much as the crystalline head of a morning star.
The constantly shifting weight makes the asteroid twist and writhe as though in an attempt to break free, but the forces within are running on pure instinct now. From somewhere in the ice, two alien, utterly dehydrated husks plummet and land on the eezo core with uneventful thuds. And then, finally, with one last, deafening crunch, the last of the asteroid dissolves into a thick outpouring of mist.
What emerges isn't the same creature James Barnes had once fought in Niganda. Not even close. Back then, Isabelle Stark had armored herself with cloudy ice, tainted by the red sand's influence. The very fact that she was there at all, waiting to kill him, had bled through to the exoskeleton.
Here and now, though, Aquamarine is like a pure, icy lake: the deepest and the clearest of blues. Cracks spider web across her sharply sculpted body - the exact color and shade of those electric sparks in the batons. A reminder of her torment, one she will never suffer again.
With a hoarse shout, she arcs her body and unleashes the chaos within.
The Ore Processing silo resembles a crystal cave Isabelle had once had the misfortune to experience.
Giant beams of ice jut out of the walls, crisscrossing the entire width of the silo in a manner that at first glance shows no rhyme or reason. Her instincts had aimed unerringly for every bird on the walkway, slamming them against the walls with huge bolts of water that had instantly frozen, suspending them in place within a semi-cocoon of glittering, icy crystals.
Not a stray drop had fallen on the miners, and yet each one of them look at her with expressions of terror identical, if slightly diluted, to those she'd seen on avian features.
It unnerves her in a way it wouldn't have before. She has little to be ashamed of: the birds aren't dead, and even the enormous pressure of those huge crystals is cosmetic: they're just being held still by a firm, unyielding grip that will automatically sublimate when she puts enough distance between herself and the silo. It would've been easier to have them melt and flood the place, leaving the bastards to drown. But honestly, she's quite thoroughly sick of the taste of death - hers or otherwise.
She puts it out of her mind. She has a job to do, and if that requires taking credit for something she very much knows wasn't entirely her doing…
Well then, hopefully, there'll be time enough for that later.
Maitrum Prison
Huge waves of water rush through the hallways, knocking aside the birds. Hard-hitting slugs with various ammo upgrades - shredder, inferno, even armor-piercing - chip away at Isabelle's icy exoskeleton, but she barely even feels them. She'd discharged most of the bloat from the asteroid in the silo, but the birds are coming to the belated realization that she still has quite a lot left to give.
They put up a fairly effective defense. She might have a map in her head, but they know how to navigate this facility better, which they're capitalizing on to cut her off - slipping past her defenses to lock down hallways, setting up traps on the way to her presumed destination, targeting the miners so she'll be forced to divide her focus. Anything and everything to buy just a little bit more time.
Regardless, it's a very lopsided fight… up until some squad gets the bright idea to use flamethrowers.
Isabelle rounds a corner only to run into a wall of fire. Crying out, she stumbles back, instinctively throwing up a wave of water to counter that terrible heat. The ice armoring her body begins to melt immediately, rolling down her body in rivulets that feel like sweat and blood and tears. She can barely even concentrate enough to regenerate it, because most of her focus is aimed at maintaining her own rapidly evaporating screen of water and hosing down the screaming, horrified humans behind her, seconds away from being cooked in their own undersuits.
Blinking through the blur in her sight, Isabelle can just make out the bird leading the charge: the six-petaled marked one who had, apparently, brought her back to the cell after the Chair. His features are grim, steady as his squad advances, shoving her back inch by fiery inch - all traces of sympathy wiped away after she had revealed her true colors.
A large puddle is forming at her feet - evidence of the rapid thaw of her form - before it, too, evaporates in the wake of that monstrous conflagration. The hallway walls themselves are beginning to crack and peel, with entire blocks of concrete tumbling down to shatter on the floor, revealing rows of pipes that squeal as the heat passes them by. She's running out of space: the miners have their backs against a wall - a cringing, terrified crowd, held back by Jill Dah's snarling protectiveness in the face of their inevitable demise.
And then, just as her concentration is about to fatally falter, something barrels through the wall adjacent to her in a shower of plaster and grime, lifts a familiar metallic arm and unleashes an area-wide Sabotage at the flamethrowers.
The resulting backlash would've turned their own inferno upon the birds, if Isabelle hadn't grabbed that moment to shove back and let her own wall of icy water slam down upon them. They crumple under the weight, faintly steaming limbs and singed flesh scattered in a carpet of blue blood.
Breathing heavily, she arches an eyebrow at her savior. "Took you long enough, Barnes."
Barnes frowns as he hands over her omni-tool, which she slips gratefully over her wrist, where it disappears under the new layer of regenerating ice. He's torn off an arm from his brown alien armor, and jammed the vibranium back into its socket. Some of the sand-like particles have even shifted around to plug the hole and seal it off against any possible exposure to hostile atmospheres.
"You shouldn't have needed my help at all." He silently gestures to Jill Dah, points to the hole he'd just bowled through. Nodding, she ushers the shell-shocked crew of miners into the yellow-fogged interior of a large, open space.
Isabelle nods tiredly. Smoke is thick enough in the air to become a serious choking hazard, and the entire hallway has become dangerously unstable in the wake of a battle between two opposing, destructive forces. "We were compromised," she says in Italian.
Barnes whirls sharply. "How do you know?" Fluent German.
"Birds targeted me at the silo. Peter managed to shut down the core just in time," she says shortly, in accented French. No need to go into details; it's none of his business, plus she wouldn't know where to go about explaining anyway. "Hope he's sticking to the plan." She nods at the hole where all the miners have disappeared into, switching back to English. "What have you got for us, then?"
"A shortcut. Close off the hole, we need to…!" He jerks, but she's been expecting something like this, so her fist had already raised and shot a bolt of blue, icy stream before the bird even manages to raise the flamethrower. "Someone's trying to be a hero, Collins."
"Right behind you," she says, retreating just as the six-petaled leader leaps to his feet with a few of his men and an abandoned rifle. Slugs slam into the wave of water that barricades the hole they duck through, encountering an unassailable resistance as it ices over. She makes it deliberately thick, seeping the water into the cracks in the concrete and ice-reinforcing them for additional traction… up until the water erodes the concrete anyhow.
Still, there's one last addition she makes: a frivolous waste of time, but she needs to send a message.
The ice wall darkens slightly, dulling to a specific shade of semi-transparency. Bubbles coalesce in unnatural organization, stirring and shifting to crystallize a very familiar herringbone-pattern across the entire structure. The six-pedaled bird jerks sharply as her creation, and their respective positions, calls to mind a similar circumstance they both once found themselves in.
She meets his gaze and holds it. "I will remember," she says, knowing he'll understand despite the linguistic and literal barrier between them. Just as she had once acknowledged his own honor-bound oath once, in a cargo hold, where she'd given him something precious.
With that, she turns away and follows Barnes and the miners deeper into the heart of the facility.
Maitrum Hallway
"East's gone dark! No survivors expected."
Victus is still standing in front of the ice barrier the female pyjak had created, and then laced with the same rectangular fish-scale pattern of the prison cells. As though it was a callback, a reminder, when Victus had been on the other side of the cell.
He'd felt in power then, in control - even while running on fumes. His world had made sense with rules he could follow and enact and sometimes, when necessary, defy. There was an order, even to the madness of Maitrum.
And in just a short amount of time, the female had upended his every understanding of how the universe worked. What in the spirits' name is she?
"South sector's falling! We need immediate reinforcements! The female's on a warpath!"
"Sir? What are our orders?"
Why had she done this? Why bring this up - this moment of weakness on his part, the moment of intimacy that he'd been almost called to enact? Was it, like his men suspected, mockery? Or was it accurate to his true beliefs: that it was a rudimentary, yet shared understanding; the same understanding that had led him to hand over the Throne's schematics to her allies so they could save her life?
"Sir!"
Victus closes his eyes. "Open up the cells. Arm our prisoners and deploy to the west wing while we wait for the reinforcements."
"What?"
"They're the closest. And while they are the very worst of our kind, and hate us just as much as we hate them… they hate the pyjaks more. They won't shirk their duty, not now."
"Lieutenant, the rules…"
Victus whirls, enraged. "Damn the rules! There's no handbook for this situation, and if we're to defeat our enemy, we must work smart. You asked for orders, Chief. You have them."
Four days before the mass prison breakout…
Shower Room, Maximum Security Prison
"And what's my role in all of this?" Daskin folds his arms across his chest. "Because I'm not waitin' on Aquamarine to bust us out of the silo."
"No," Isabelle murmurs. "No, we've got something else for you; something only you can pull off. And… I'm sorry."
"I'm not afraid of a little risk."
"We need you to secure the dead miners and Dr. Selvig," Barnes says. To her surprise, he'd agreed without any argument when she'd made her stipulations for the jailbreak clear. She knows he doesn't regret what he was forced to do aboard the Finch, which is something she hasn't bothered dealing with.
A myriad of expressions flicker across Daskin' face, before finally settling into a dark, stormy thundercloud. "And you expect me to do this by… what, havin' me finally cremate my brother as an excuse?" He's trembling, helpless with rage. "Alliance trains some cold sons-of-bitches, huh?"
"We wouldn't ask this of you…"
"Save it." He looks around at his miners, then at Dah, his eyes softening infinitesimally. "An unworthy end for one of mine in exchange for the freedom of many. I know how this works, Alliance, but you'll be explaining this to my sister-in-law."
January 31st, 2030
Boiler Room
Barnes' shortcut turns out to be a truly humongous boiler room. Massive pipes - big enough for several miners to walk abreast - run in every direction, connecting to various different parts of the facility. Looping wires hang from electrical conduits, and steam occasionally erupts in geyser-like bursts from hundreds of different valves, making the path slightly treacherous and the atmosphere uncomfortably warm and humid.
Isabelle knows the route, but she chooses to bring to the rear while Barnes guides them unerringly through the labyrinthian construction to yet another wall that he punches his way through, dropping them right in the middle of a dimly lit hallway that looks terrifyingly familiar.
An anguished cry jars her out of the unexpected rush of traumatic memories. Jill Dah hurtles past her, skidding to her knees next to a figure crumpled against the wall, sitting in a fatally sizable pool of his own blood.
Daskin.
With heavy limbs, Isabelle makes her way over. He's still alive, somehow clinging on despite the spray of shotgun rounds riddled across his torso. The birds had consigned him to a slow death. He's smiling with bloody lips at Dah, who doesn't seem to know just where to press down and stop the bleeding.
"M'brother," he whispers without preamble, " - was always such a picky eater. Had… a mini-war with almost every meal my sister-in-law hadn't cooked." He coughs, and blood splatters against Dah's face, who ignores it, sobbing near-silently. "Figures food would be the thing that'd do him in."
Isabelle kneels. "Why?" She asks simply, quietly. She doesn't elaborate. He doesn't need her to.
His sorrow and regret are genuine. "Didn't believe you could do it," he gasps. "Didn't want… my men to suffer." He gestures to his shredded, gushing belly. "My reward for sellin' you out."
"No, no, no!" Dah cries.
"You indicated that I was the lynchpin of the plan," Isabelle says slowly. "But you didn't tell them about the hydrokinesis."
"M'not that good at talking bird."
She smiles regretfully. "If you really wanted to, you'd have found a way."
With a sudden burst of strength, he grabs her wrist. "Reinforcements," he gasps. "New aliens."
And then, with a last, rattling breath, the light goes out of Lawrence Daskin's eyes.
"Collins," Barnes calls sharply. Isabelle leaves a grieving Dah behind, and follows him through the open doorway of the morgue she'd glimpsed what seems like a lifetime ago.
It's empty.
No covered bodies on the autopsy tables, or within the gaping holes of the cabinet. And, most importantly, no Alliance coffin.
There's a numbness spreading throughout her, much like a baseline human would experience when holding onto an ice cube for too long. Is that what's happening to her? Has she absorbed too much of the asteroid, held onto this form for so long that it has anesthetized the soft, human parts of her? "He was here," she says, her voice distant, almost unconcerned. "He was here, Barnes, I saw him."
A vibranium grip around her ice forearm. A gentle tug. "I believe you, Collins. But we're running out of time. We can't…," he swallows roughly. "There's no time to search."
"No. No, I suppose there isn't."
With that, Isabelle turns her back and strides out into the hallway.
Her eyes fall on Dah, who's still clutching onto Daskin's corpse - the other miners having failed to pull her away. As Barnes strides forward and drags her away kicking and screaming, the miner's words run through Isabelle's mind.
An unworthy end for one of mine in exchange for the freedom of many.
One day before the mass prison breakout…
Mess Hall
Daskin's uncomfortable with the amount of assumptions the plan is hinging upon. She can't blame him: not everyone is used to ICT's necessary tactics of 'make it up as we go along'. "And what about after the breakout? Unless Aquamarine's gonna bust us out of here on the asteroid, we need a ship."
Barnes cocks his head. "What a sight that would make," he muses. "Like one of those vintage sci-fi book covers: zooming across space on a comet skateboard."
Isabelle tucks her unbidden smile into her shoulder.
Daskin's frigid silence makes his opinion of the joke crystal clear.
Barnes sighs. "We have a ship," he explains. "The hauler is our escape plan. It's automated, its route scheduled: lift off from the silo, head to a prefab in the west, stay awhile before escaping atmo. Best guess - prefab's a fueling center. The ship probably sucks up the asteroid's fuel supply dry."
"Automation also gives us another advantage," Parker continues, " - we won't have to forcibly board and eject anyone out of the thing. After bringing down the eezo core, I'll get to the roof and disable the AA guns. Clear skies ahead."
January 31st, 2030
Fueling Center
They burst into the fueling center, chased in by ammo and the shouts of the bird inmates chasing them. Isabelle - the last in - twists to sweep up a block of water against the entrance that freezes into place just as Barnes slams the large doors shut. Then, just for good measure, she freezes the hinges too.
It's only then that she allows herself to see if she has led her people to salvation... or death.
The space before her is vast, shrouded in darkness but for the few dim lights on the walls. Dust carpets the floor in a thick layer, marred by the footprints of the miners who have darted up ahead. The hangar is big enough to hold several frigates, but there's only one ship that's currently present.
The hauler. Isabelle bites down on a sigh of exhaustion and finally allows the ice to sink back into her bones. She's running on fumes now; the counterblast at the silo had cost her far more than she'd initially assumed.
The paint has peeled off in various places, but otherwise the hull looks intact, ready to fly. It's parked at an angle for better access to the fuel lines still pumping into the ship's bowels; hopefully there'll be enough for the grand exit. Barnes has roped in a couple of the miners and is running a scanner down it, no doubt looking for any surprises the birds might've planted.
There is a surprise, but it doesn't come from the birds. "It's clear, Barnes; I already went through it," Peter ducks out from under a wing's shadow, casually tossing the bulky contraption in his arms. "You got me the omni-tool?"
A wave of relief prods at the numbness. Barnes grins as he tosses a translucent, polymer wristband into the air. "Clear skies, Parker?"
"Not exactly," Parker hacks open the cargo bay ramp. "AA guns are down, but I saw reinforcements breaching atmo. Alien ships, unfamiliar design. Now let's see what Ryder's got for us." And he rushes into the ship.
"How did you get in, Pete?" Isabelle asks.
"Managed to pry open the takeoff doors just a smidge," is the reply through her omni-tool. "There's a forcefield that maintains pressurization but doesn't prevent exit… or entry."
She looks up, squinting into the dust shimmer hovering in the air, trailing the seam of the huge, reinforced doors. "We need to hack it open; no way I can force those apart," she says.
But Barnes is already ahead, crossing to the far end of the massive chamber in great, loping strides. "Found a terminal. Northeast corner, under the nose of the ship!"
"Izzy, I'm forwarding an alien code segment," Peter says. "No do-overs, so don't miss."
Her omni-tool pings. "Got it. Boot it up in the meantime, run through pre-flight checks." She sprints along the port side of the ship, passing beneath the shadow of the hauler's nose. Barnes is there, pulling up a holographic interface on a pedestal - incomprehensible symbols already running through it.
She links her omni-tool to the terminal. 'TARGET CODE SEGMENT' flashes across her scanner, along with an isolated block filled with colorful lines of illegible code. On the terminal, three columns of yet more code blocks scroll down the length of the screen.
Barnes peers over her shoulder. "How do you hack into an alien terminal anyway?"
"By brute-forcing it," Isabelle explains, eyes flickering over the columns. "Ryder got several code segments linked to various alien electronic signatures when he hacked the beacon at Altahe." Suddenly, she jabs at the terminal, selecting a code block. Green flashes across her omni-tool as the code segments successfully match up. "Each can be used only once before security protocols kick in."
"So… match the pattern of colorful lines then, since you can't actually, you know, read the code?"
Before she can answer, there's a horrific metal screech, and something loud clangs behind them. Instantly, Isabelle and Barnes twist, mist-covered fist and assault rifle raised simultaneously.
A heavy, long metal slab now rests against the adjacent wall. Frost covers one side of it in thick, uneven patches, and beneath it lies shattered shards of ice. With a start, Isabelle recognizes it as the door.
The reinforced metal door they'd barred shut, and then further fortified with a thick block of ice. Nothing could've gotten through that in one go, and certainly not before they were well underway.
Her omni-tool buzzes, its vibration harsh in the silence that had fallen in the wake of… whatever that was. Peter's whisper is loud. "What the hell was that?"
She jerks into action, swallows a curse as she sees her cursor has encountered a bad line of code and reversed her earlier win. Grabbing Barnes, she yanks him close and shoves her omni-tool at him. Then, with a series of furious, ASL hand-gestures, she explains to him what he has to do. 'Avoid the crossed-off code blocks,' she signs, ' - finish the hack, quick. Then flank them from the starboard side. I'll take port.'
He nods, turns back to the thermal with his mouth set in a grim line. Absently, she raises her hands and signs to the pilot's viewscreen, trusting that Parker will interpret her intentions to deal with the latest threat while he preps for take-off.
"Acknowledged," he whispers before his comms shut off.
Passing beneath the nose again, she runs her fingers across the door as she squints into the fog near the entrance. She encounters dents, huge ones - like someone with fists bigger than the Hulk's had smashed into the metal, tearing it off its hinges before tossing it almost six-hundred feet across the hangar.
Shadows move in the fog.
None of them is a bird.
Too humanoid, too female - wearing those brown hardsuits Barnes had so griped about less than a day ago. But then the murk clears, and her fists tighten. These armors are clean, tightly sealed and immensely form-fitting, highlighting the generous curves of the women even through the gloom. All but one are outfitted with assault rifles, sweeping them across the room, completely ignoring the gaping ramp to the ship's cargo bay and its motley group of traumatized miners.
Hunting for her, she realizes suddenly, just as the tallest one of the lot - clearly the leader - steps forward, her gaze unerringly finding and holding Isabelle's.
There's a breathless pause as the other females follow her sight line.
Then Isabelle metamorphs into her liquid form just as a barrage of rounds shatter the silence of the fueling center.
Millions of ice shards glitter like knife-points in the air, before hurtling forward with a powerful thrust of an arm. The force of their forward momentum is so great that it shatters quite a lot of them into a thick flood of mist halfway through.
The aliens are no longer visible, but Isabelle is still one with those shards, her mind split along each one's trajectory, so she feels the exact moment the fragments encounter a watertight resistance.
She stumbles with the blowback, a migraine immediately blooming in her temporal lobe. The resistance had felt oddly… familiar. But while her memory teases of something sick but solid, this had been springy, almost - as though the ice had bounced off of something large.
Under her silent command, the mist dissipates to reveal a blue orb-shaped shield surrounding the aliens. Energy ripples and swirls on its surface like electricity, almost as if it's alive. Telekinesis. Isabelle's tongue echoes with the bitter taste of red sand. It's the leader's doing, that's immediately apparent from the way she's holding herself - left arm thrust out at a higher angle, as though she's bracing herself. But her posture itself is completely relaxed, almost bored.
And then, she curls the fingers of her right hand into a fist, draws it back, and punches outward.
The spherical barrier cascades outward and onto Isabelle with such speed she barely even has the time to think of evading. She goes slamming into the wall, the water immediately sinking inwards to heal whatever had sent that burst of agony shooting down her spine and the ominous crack of several of her ribs.
Crumpling to the floor on all fours, she spits out blood. "Enhanced on the field," she warns, rather redundantly, before pushing herself to her feet.
Considerate of the aliens not to have finished her off while she was so vulnerable.
They'll regret that.
Leader though she might, combatant she's definitely not. The woman relies solely on defense and lets her bodyguards do the rest of the work. Their abilities have a bit more range, but, unlike their initial attack, they eschew guns and try to close in with their abilities alone. Leader's orders, Isabelle imagines - the aliens want her subdued, not dead. Despite the fact that it's crippling them, though, she still has a fight on her hands.
Half a minute into this tele-hydro-kinetic brawl, the takeoff doors finally open with a grind. The rectangular forcefield - stretched like a trampoline across the hole and of a similar design to the overhead barriers in her prison block - holds, maintaining the atmosphere of the fueling center and preventing her, the only unarmored organic, from suffocating painfully.
It's midday though, and Maitrum beats down upon her with its hostile heat. She immediately shifts into her ice form. But this planet is relentless, and she's almost through the water she'd absorbed from the asteroid, so she needs to wrap this up, fast. "Barnes, get to the ramp!"
Before she's even finished the sentence, mass effect fields toss her against the cylindrical fuel tanks lining the east wall. It's a gentle throw, all things considered, but she nevertheless stills as her eyes fall on the multiple hoses running to the undercarriage of the ship.
Observations fire rapid-fast through her mind, each barely lingering long enough for any conscious, deliberate attention.
The cargo hold of the hauler, where halfway through a bulkhead has descended from the ceiling, locking in the defenseless miners and preventing them from dying-via-alien.
Barnes, who has leapt to the fray, buying himself a few seconds of confusion among the enemy's ranks, who are no doubt wondering why exactly someone wearing their armor is fighting them so fiercely. Then the vibranium arm registers, and Barnes loses every ounce of advantage he has gained, getting hammered by otherworldly forces no super-soldier can combat on his own.
And then, finally, back to those hoses, swollen and pulsing as liquid H2/O2 is still getting pumped into the hauler's fuel cells, to be eventually be used up in powering the adjacent thrusters required to lift off and eventually escape atmo. Thrusters… that will fire a burst of superheated exhaust right next to a row full of extremely volatile fuel tanks.
"Operative Parker," she says calmly. "The fuel lines are still connected to the ship."
The kid expels a stream of curses that would make the foulest of pirates blush.
Isabelle tosses out a blast of water, scattering the females. "Barnes, you're on disengage and unplug."
He nods and dashes back. Isabelle takes over, but she's on the defensive now, stray currents of water reinforcing, not any barriers for herself, but Barnes, who's shutting down the fuel flow and using his enhanced strength to disconnect the thick, powerful hoses from the ship. A few streams even ice over the H2/O2 tanks, though not enough to prevent them from blowing up the entire facility if this goes wrong.
"Parker," Barnes shouts as he unplugs the last of the fuel lines and secures the cells. "Ramp!"
Immediately, the ramp begins to close. A hum as the ship boots up, the tell-tale glow of a thruster firing up. Safely away from the tanks.
It happens like this, almost too fast for her to comprehend, let alone react: Barnes turns to Isabelle, eyes widening as he sees an incoming attack beyond her shoulder. Isabelle, instinctively, side steps for a classic evade that always works on the bodyguards' now predictable telekinetic attacks.
But her attacker isn't a bodyguard.
A mass effect field of jelly-like consistency lifts off her feet and locks her in mid-air. She's completely frozen, in more ways than one: her every limb rigid, her muscles straining against an unyielding pressure. Terrigenesis is still active, but the rippling field seems to work both ways, as no amount of water or ice battering at it makes so much as a dent. She's invulnerable, but immobile.
Isabelle had forgotten the very first rule of combat: never take your eye off the leader. The tall woman had pulled back, letting her bodyguards deal with the errant prisoners, watching and waiting and analyzing all the while, noting down their strengths and weaknesses. And, at the most critical of moments, she struck.
Isabelle would applaud her… if the ramp hadn't been about to close.
There are times in life when the world forces a choice. One might anticipate these occasions, even wonder or predict what choice they might make in the moment, but those theoretical exercises never quite manage to paint the true reality of the situation.
No way to move. No power. No time.
Locked in stasis, her auricular nerve straining to compensate for the lack of physical mnemonic gestures that usually direct her abilities, Isabelle manages to somehow twist the very last of the water from the asteroid into a swirling bolt, and sends it charging, not at the aliens, but at Barnes.
It hits him right in the chest, hard enough to toss him into the hauler's cargo hold and out of sight just as the ramp door closes.
"No!"
Sand and dust billows in a whirlpool as the thrusters fire up, lifting the ship towards the open takeoff doors. Isabelle crashes to the floor as the stasis field partially dissolves around her head to instead fuel yet another telekinetic orb-shield. Alien bodyguards surround her, all identical in their brown armor, and the sight makes Isabelle laugh as the realization hits.
She had always been the target. Unlike the birds, these aliens couldn't care less about the prison break.
A shudder reverberates through the ramp as a vibranium fist slams against it. "Collins!" Barnes' voice crackles through her omni-tool. "Parker, she's still down there!"
She licks her lips. "Barnes."
"Fly the hell out of there, Izzy!" Peter shouts. "What the hell are you waiting for?!"
"They've got me tied down, Pete." The ship shudders and wobbles in the wake of yet another super-powered punch. Some of the bodyguards look up in apparent worry, but the leader's pose, armored as it is, communicates an expression of curious serenity. With a start, Isabelle realizes the leader wants them to have this conversation… an alien variation of the terrifying phrase 'any last words?' "Stop that, Barnes," she growls, " - do you want to bring down the whole ship and kill everyone aboard?"
"I'm not leaving you behind! Parker, turn this ship around, now!"
Isabelle goes for the kill. "HYDRA didn't create the Winter Soldier, Barnes. You did."
"What?"
"They tortured you for so long your mind shut down. Your core self - the original Bucky Barnes, Steve Rogers' best buddy, Howling Commando - retreated deep inside, while an artificial personality took its place." The ship is half-in, half-out; stuck right in the middle of the flickering, jittering forcefield. "The Soldier protected you. The triggers were implanted to activate what already existed."
"What the hell does that…?!"
"He's still in there, Barnes! Even before the triggers, zimniy soldat was brought forth only by one thing - intense physical trauma!" The stasis field isn't constricting; it adjusts as she breathes, and she knows she shouldn't look too much into it, but she can't help but see it as some sort of consideration, at the very least. "If you don't get out of here, the aliens will finish what HYDRA started."
"You don't know that!"
"The Spider-Sense does. It's why Peter stopped you from coming after me, isn't that right, Pete?" The silence that follows is an answer all by itself. "And I know that the others need you to lead them out of here. Peter needs a co-pilot. While I…," Isabelle blinks as the ice retreats into her bones to repair her copious injuries. "You can't help me."
"Don't do this. I won't have your blood on my hands too, Collins, you hear me?! Open this fucking ramp!"
"Peter Benjamin Parker," she whispers. "I gave you an order."
"Go."
SYSTEMS ALLIANCE PARLIAMENTARY HEARING - TRANSCRIPT
The following excerpts have been extracted from the recorded transcript of Systems Alliance Parliamentary Hearing held on the 21st of April, 2030, to analyze the actions and decisions made by General Thaddeus Ross, commanding officer of the Shanxi Garrison during the conflict known as the First Contact War.
General Ross: My decisions saved the lives of thousands of non-combatants!
Brigadier General James Rhodes: Your history makes it very clear just how much you value civilian lives, General.
General Ross: I won't apologize for trying to save my country and the world from legitimate threats, Rhodes. Not something I expect an alien-lover to understand.
Honorable Member Anita Goyle: You overstep your bounds, General.
Honorable Member Inez Simmons: Perhaps my esteemed colleague's history with General Ross renders him… compromised for this hearing?
Honorable Member Anita Goyle: Your affiliation with Terra Firma ensures the same logic applies to you too, Ms. Simmons. General Rhodes' presence balances it out, as far as I'm concerned.
Honorable Member Tirath Gujir: Speaking of compromised agents, you mentioned being forced to relegate a not-insignificant portion of your troops, General Ross. Would you concur that this eventually resulted in your defeat by the turian occupation?
General Ross: I had fucking traitors in my ranks, Honorable Members. Captain Ahern's decisions ensured I could no longer trust him or his squadron to have my back.
Honorable Member Inez Simmons: How did you discover his treachery?
General Ross: I didn't. That credit goes to Dr. Elizabeth Ross, the second-in-command of Terra Firma… and my daughter.
January 31st, 2030
Command Center, Forward Operating Base (FOB), Shanxi
LOCATION: CLASSIFIED
Thaddeus is flipping through reports when the prefab's door chimes open and someone slips in. "Keep it open," he tells his daughter absently. No one else would have the balls to enter without asking first.
"Sure about that? Might not want your men to hear us."
"It's not a secret you don't have any respect for me, Betty. They know how to become selectively deaf. Now, what do you want?"
Betty tosses a datapad on his holo-desk, squashing all his careful formations. "For you to admit this is why you haven't yet sent a distress signal to the Alliance."
"What are you on…?" Thaddeus' eyes still on the text displayed on the screen. 'Mission complete. Probe payload auto-process interrupted at parse point TN7388216. Unregistered user or record damaged. Status of system operator is unknown.'
Probe payload? The Shanxi fleet had never launched probes; they'd deemed the entire operation too risky, especially without a way to nullify the tech.
But then it hits him: the warning. The Alliance ships stationed at the Rift's relay had been warned just before the birds' fleet had poured through. It had allowed them to prepare, if only for a few seconds - seconds that no doubt saved lives, both in space and on the ground.
He hadn't really thought about it, just thanked his lucky stars that there had been at least a few ships to limp back through the Shanxi-Theta and put up a token defense in the colony's orbit. But he should have. TN. The alphanumeric identifier for Terra Nova. "What is this?"
"Evidence of you being a liar and a hypocrite, General," she spits. "Tell me, did it take the ground war to change your tune, or had you decided to distribute alien armaments as soon as you saw Lawson's crates?"
Thaddeus' head snaps up. "You've seen them? In the hands of our soldiers?"
"Did you expect me to be so blinded by your leadership that I wouldn't question you?"
He grabs her arm, hard enough to bruise. "Have you seen them?!"
Betty flinches at his roar, taking in his enraged expression for the first time. "You… you haven't?" Realization slackens her features. "Because you didn't know. But the entirety of Pinnacle Squadron…."
Thaddeus' face grows dark with anger as puzzle pieces come together. The Worthington had left awfully quickly after he'd dispatched Captain Tadius Ahern to deal with them. And he had, hadn't he? Made a deal.
Lawson's parting words echo in his mind. Some men understand the necessity of doing what needs to be done.
"They're Asgardian weapons!" Thaddeus thunders.
Ahern's fist slams on the table. "But fired by human hands! Aimed by human skill! And there's no one I'd trust more than my squadron to overcome that disadvantage!"
"The fact that you consider baseline humanity a disadvantage says a lot about you, Captain."
"I consider baseless racial hatred a disadvantage, General. Without Asgardians, without Thor… we wouldn't have won the Battle of New York, let alone the Battle of Earth."
Thaddeus nods briskly. "The true army of Shanxi is not the place for your hero worship, Ahern. By my authority as the commanding officer of this garrison, I hereby strip you of your rank and relegate your entire squadron to the farthest reaches of this colony, until such a time that you can be judged for your actions."
Ahern's face pales to chalk-white. "I won't apologize for using every tool in our toolbox to win the war."
"I don't expect you to. Take the Veteran Task Force with you. I have no doubt Chief Saunders was right beside you when you decided to disobey direct orders."
SYSTEMS ALLIANCE PARLIAMENTARY HEARING - TRANSCRIPT
General Ross: I might've lost the battle, but at least I bowed out with grace and honor. Ahern can't even claim that much.
Brigadier General James Rhodes: And yet you claim credit for his actions to alert the Alliance of the war and the subsequent liberation of Shanxi.
General Ross: Of course I do. I couldn't waste what little manpower I had on the ground just because of one man's insubordination. Even his exile served a purpose. My purpose.
January 31st, 2030
The Voiceless Rise
Their last hope stands atop a steep cliff in the snow-clad mountain range that translates to 'The Voiceless Rise'. So called because it's quite nearly impossible to hear anything past the howling, dagger-sharp winds - not comms, and certainly not screams or yells. It's a desolate place, not fit for man - barely even fit for nature.
Which was what made it so perfect for an off-the-network comm tower.
If there was one smart thing Ross did, Daniel has to admit, it was this. His paranoia had ensured that the frankly enormous cost of construction on Terra Firma's backers had been more than worth it.
But as with everything the good General has been doing lately, the birds just turned out to be one step ahead.
The whole place is crawling with aliens. Infrared confirmed at least hundred, packed to the gills within the comm tower. "And you're sure we've got nowhere else to go?" Daniel asks.
"I don't make Plan Bs, Saunders," Ahern says tersely. "That just guarantees we'll lose. We do this, or we die."
"Might just do that anyway. Even if we don't, who knows what they've done to the comm system? Or even if it is reversible?"
"One problem at a time. We need to clear out the tower first."
The men behind them shuffle, and Daniel spares them a glance. Armor can only do so much to keep the weather out, and they've been rationing their supplies for days now. Their entire group is flagging, and they lost far too many on their forced exile halfway across the planet. But not once had they complained.
A fierce surge of pride wars with protectiveness. When his shoulder twinges in warning, he reluctantly tamps down on the sentimentality and turns back to Ahern. "We could use the shuttle."
"And risk damage to the tower? Or worse, get reinforcements called on top of us? Their ships will smear us against the mountains in a heartbeat, and you know that."
He does. It's why they'd even chosen to come so far north - and so very high for that matter; there's nothing here. Not even Shanxi's native fauna has evolved to the brutal conditions present at its highest altitude regions. And if there are no humans here, then there would be no need for debris dropping starships to linger in the orbit immediately above them. And yet…
"Could they be monitoring our communications?" Daniel asks, staring at the comm tower.
"Doubtful. No, this was coincidence, pure and simple. It does happen, believe it or not. We break out the champagne if luck's on our side and endure it if it's not."
"So. How do we do this?"
Ahern brandishes his omni-tool. The holographic blueprints are white, blending with the snow so well even they're having trouble seeing it. "We need to get to that control deck, over there." The structure he's pointing to is at the top of the tower, just below the radome-covered satellite and in the shadow of the massive radar antenna. "There's a catwalk around it. We're going to have to split up."
"What are those foil-like things on the outside of the engine room?" He gestures to the silvery, slightly bent structures layered halfway down the southern wall. Supported by large struts, they look nothing so much as incomplete construction.
It's Alec Ryder who replies. "Radiation blinds," he says. "For shielding."
Daniel rotates the holo, frowning. "Blueprints show only one entrance to the tower. That's practically a suicide mission."
"One conventional entrance. A distraction team will barge in through the front and clear the tower, room by room. Extraordinarily difficult, yeah, but it can be done."
"Distraction for what? And for whom?"
Ahern zooms in on a shadow-drenched outer wall on the eastern section of the station, framed on either side by tall support struts. Like the rest of the prefabs, it is hammered with tiny ledges and lined by the aerial drums and the repeater antenna which lead straight to the control deck. "For someone to scale the tower and reach the catwalk from the outside, while the birds are distracted."
You sure you've thought this through?" Ahern asks, casting a critical glance at Daniel's jetpack.
Daniel snorts. "I'm trying very hard not to. But I'll just be a liability inside. I'm a cop, not a Marine."
"You just don't want to get shot at."
"At least you're gonna be able to shoot back."
Even with the howling winds, the distraction team doesn't dare go without sound suppressors on their sniper rifles. Shots carve out streaks through the gale, visible only because he's been looking for it. From the pre-fab buildings attached to the southwest corner of the comm station, three bodies fall and are immediately covered by snow.
Daniel's shoulder aches as he clambers aboard the next aerial drum on the eastern corner. It's times like these that he really doubts his psychiatrist's insistence that the pain is psychosomatic, aggravated by the reminder of when he'd been shot down by a Chitauri right when he'd been in the midst of trying to save a civilian.
That pulse rifle hadn't managed to kill him, but it had stalled his career dead at the NYPD. Private security wasn't much better, and after he'd been Snapped away, he'd been barely able to make ends meet. Until the day he arrived home to find a one-eyed, trench-coated pirate on his ratty couch, with an offer to show him the universe.
He still doesn't know how he'd fallen in on Nick Fury's radar.
Swinging around to the ladder-like extrusions of the repeater antenna, he swiftly climbs to the top and cranes for the base of the catwalk's railing with his arm.
Only to be greeted by an armored bird who leans over and starts firing.
Daniel doesn't hesitate. Ignoring his shattered shields, he reaches out, grabs the alien's jutting chestplate and yanks him over. Then dives over to the right and plasters himself against the wall as the screaming bird plummets to the endless expanse of white below.
His heart's racing, and his shoulder's wrenched something awful. There are searing lines across his armor where the rounds had scraped by. There's a ringing in his ears, whether from the proximity of the gunshots or just panic, he can't tell.
Ahern breaks radio silence. "Saunders. You still alive?"
"Like I have a choice," Daniel mutters. Once again securing his grip on the repeater, he climbs it, pulls himself up and over the railing, drawing his gun with one smooth motion. He needn't have bothered. "Control deck's empty. Where are you?"
"Almost there. Got a few wounded - nothing serious - but they're guarding our backs in case of reinforcements."
An incendiary takes care of the locked door. The switchboard for the satellite controls involves a lot of buttons and switches, but the floating holograms tell him everything he needs to know. A quick look outside the control deck's windows justifies his sinking stomach. "Ahern, the radar antenna is misaligned."
"We haven't come so far just to lose, Saunders!"
Daniel works his jaw, retreats to the catwalk and strides over to the opposite edge from where he'd climbed, just a few leaps away from the huge installation - too long for the jetpack. Fingers curled tightly on the railing, he peers through the howling winds, hoping against hope to find what he's looking for.
There, near the main arms of the radar antenna! Climbing over the railing, he gingerly makes his way to the makeshift walkway jutting out of the northern wall."There are manual controls at the hydraulics. I can move the arm from up there, but someone's got to direct me from the control deck."
"On it." Daniel turns to find Ahern waving at him from the switchboard, his troops having cleared the tower. "No Plan Bs, Chief, so don't fall and don't fail."
"I'll take it under advisement," is the dry reply, even as Daniel clears the walkway and crawls through a duct into the shielded base of the antenna. The wind is quieter here, and he can hear Ahern's muttered words as he records the message for their outbound distress beacon. "Mayday mayday mayday. This is Captain Tadius Ahern, formerly of the SSV Geneva."
The steady, monotonous rendition accompanies him past the roller bearings and the gigantic, conveniently groove-furnished axle, and finally onto the hydraulics platform. Tugging at the controls, he keeps his eye on the massive antenna, even as Ahern calls out bearings and angles. With creaking and groaning slowness, it finally aligns itself to their desired direction - away from the patrolling alien fleet and a straight shot to the nearest mass relay.
A glow crackles down from the edges of the installation, across the metal rods to finally coalesce at the center. A narrow beam of light flares up, shooting into the stormy sky, before dying down. "Distress drone launched," Ahern says tiredly.
"No way the birds didn't see that."
"They did. We've got incoming debris. Get the hell out of there!"
Clouds on fire have become a terrifyingly regular occurrence, Daniel thinks absently, even as he eschews backtracking to make a running jump straight from the hydraulics platform. The wind almost blasts him away, but a burst from his jetpack keeps him on course for the catwalk. Knees crumple beneath him as he slams down on the metal, but Ahern is there, dragging him away, past the deck and into the stairwell of the tower just before the debris hits.
The impact slams him against the wall, and he ducks beneath a wall of fire that roars after them. Ahern is screaming into his comms - retreat, retreat! - as they scram past the data storage and the engine room, which explodes, tossing them out a nearby window and into the wide open.
Daniel endures only a moment of free fall before something grabs him and slams him against a hard, cold surface. He's dangling helplessly from Ahern's tight, unrelenting grip, and his other hand's grip - this time around a large combat knife - has found purchase in the radiation blinds they'd observed only hours ago.
The leverage is imperfect, though, and they soon find themselves careening down the structures, buffeted by the harsh, screaming wind and the shockwaves from debris impacts. All too soon, the blinds run out, logging them once again into nothingness, but this time Daniel's prepared.
In sync, they activate their jetpacks, which carry them over to the final few feet to the base of the tower. Rolling to break their fall, they hurtle past their fleeing comrades and clear the area just before the whole building comes crashing down into a pile of rubble and ash.
SYSTEMS ALLIANCE PARLIAMENTARY HEARING - TRANSCRIPT
Honorable Member Tirath Gujir: General Ross. You were holding out even though the turians had been conducting orbital bombardment operations for quite a while. What were the specific circumstances that led you to believe a surrender was necessary?
General Ross: The attack on New Changzhi. Orbital debris mostly failed to directly impact the colony, but atmospheric entry of a frigate's drive core caused it to explode. Dust-form element zero is mutagenic, so I deployed some of my troops to provide medical assistance and evacuate the population.
January 31st, 2030
New Changzhi, Shanxi
The sun set almost three hours ago, and yet the sky is blindingly bright. Smoke from the debris field spews upward, barely visible at this distance. It's quiet, too quiet; there's none of the natural sounds he's gotten used to hearing in Shanxi - no birdsong, no small animals rustling in the undergrowth. Even the water is ominously still, its surface dull and covered with a faint, brown sludge.
One of his engineers had assured him that the glow wasn't because of the eezo fallout in the air, but just dust - ordinary dust - thrown up by the blast. At such high altitudes, the suspended particles iced over, reflecting sunlight at all hours, providing enough illumination to read a newspaper by even at midnight.
Thaddeus activates his comms. "Betty?"
His daughter's voice comes through, remote and distracted. "The infirmary here is short-staffed, Thaddeus, so I can't talk long. Is this urgent?"
"Was this what it was like? Back on Earth? After the Snap?"
There's a short silence, then a sigh. "Worse," she murmurs, hard-earned wisdom audible over the comms. "Much worse. There was just… so much ash. Not just from you… not just from the victims, but also those who died in the immediate aftermath from accidents, plane crashes, building collapses. For months, there was ash. For months, we didn't see the sun. Thought we were gonna starve."
Thaddeus says nothing, weary and sorrowful.
"We got used to… not thinking about what we were breathing in." She breaks off, but not before Thaddeus' craning ears hear what she'd mumbled last. "Or whom."
SYSTEMS ALLIANCE PARLIAMENTARY HEARING - TRANSCRIPT
Honorable Member Anita Goyle: Which was when the turian platoons ambushed you, correct? In your after-action report, you mention having an epiphany when engaging with enemy forces, one that strongly influenced the decisions you took in the aftermath. Please elaborate.
General Ross: I realized that the birds are polar opposites to the Chitauri. In the Battle of New York, the aliens were mindless attack dogs, only there to cause destruction and to presumably clear a path for Thanos to swoop down and obtain his prize. When it comes down to it, the Chitauri Invasion… had nothing to do with us, not really.
January 31st, 2030
New Changzhi, Shanxi
In the Alliance, soldiers are strongly discouraged from assigning motivations to an enemy. That goes doubly mid-combat, and triply while engaged with an unknowable, incomprehensible entity.
But Thaddeus has been a General long enough that he can't quite manage to suppress the desire to understand, nor does he want to. To know your enemy, you must become your enemy. Sun Tzu's advice, however, isn't easy to follow without a specific mindset, one that needs to be maintained even when and especially in the midst of high-pitched, bloody, screaming battle.
So he slips into a cold analysis mode, distancing himself from any possible sympathy he might develop for the enemy, as well as the vengeance that has consumed his troops on the ground.
Vengeance that, oddly enough, seems mirrored in the birds as well.
They're angry, Thaddeus thinks as his assault rifle wears down the kinetic barriers of a target. Unlike the Alliance's justified rage that lashes out in a wide arc against those that had destroyed the Sokovia and so much of Shanxi, the aliens' fury is sharp, focused, concentrated. Almost disciplined.
Old rage. As though it's been allowed to simmer for years and only now are they allowing it to come out to play. And suddenly, Thaddeus is utterly, absolutely certain that the true target of that extraterrestrial ire is humanity itself.
Strange, for a species Earth has never encountered before.
SYSTEMS ALLIANCE PARLIAMENTARY HEARING - TRANSCRIPT
Brigadier General James Rhodes: And yet, it wasn't the eezo fallout or the epiphany that finally drove you to surrender, did they?
General Ross: We were outnumbered and outgunned. The birds had reinforcements pouring in from the other side of the colony. My forces were surrounded, and the civilians inside were in danger.
Brigadier General James Rhodes: Relevant factors, definitely. But what was the trigger, General? What was it that finally drove you to the edge?
General Ross: You want me to admit it? Fine, Rhodes, you win. No, it wasn't pragmatism, it wasn't a sudden concern for the civilians! It was the same reason I agreed to fight in the first place! It was the same reason why Shanxi held out as long as it did! Two words, Rhodes, that to me signaled the start and the end of the war. My daughter!
January 31st, 2030
New Changzhi, Shanxi
A harsh beam of sunlight escapes from the prison of clouds overhead, illuminating an odd archway before them. A fighter's broken wing, cracked open like a granola bar, both halves forming the shape of an irregular 'A' in the middle of the wide, charred street.
And in the shadow of the archway, a sight that just about makes Thaddeus' heart stop.
The silhouette of a bird, brandishing his pistol and then aiming it at a kneeling, helpless, devastatingly familiar figure kneeling on the ground.
They say, at the moment of death, memories of life flash behind the eyelids. But in that instant - just before he makes the most important decision of his life - it's the memories of his only child that make an appearance.
Betty in pigtails, laughing and wriggling away from his bristly beard as he blows raspberries on her cheeks. Betty in black, silent tears mingling with the rain as her mother is lowered into the ground. Betty, eyes flashing, telling him to never speak to her as his daughter again.
His assault rifle tumbles to the ground. Alien eyes and guns snap to him, but most importantly, away from his daughter.
"I surrender!"
It's his voice, but it doesn't sound like him, because it has never echoed like this, across the colony and into the hearts of every living thing nearby. Try as he might, charisma has never been his forte, so he'd bitterly replaced it with force, with might, with ruthlessness in an attempt to gain what he's due. What humanity's due.
And with a single choice, a career built upon a lifetime of cold, hard willingness to do whatever's necessary, sacrifice whomever is necessary… crumbles to nothing.
As the birds handcuff him and shove him to the hard, packed asphalt, he meets his daughter's gaze from across the field. And finds, in the soundlessness of her terrified sobs, that he can't quite bring himself to regret it.
SYSTEMS ALLIANCE PARLIAMENTARY HEARING - TRANSCRIPT
General Ross: Ask yourselves before you make your final judgment: would you have done it differently? And if so, what does that make you?
Honorable Member Inez Simmons: Thank you, General Ross, for your testimony. I'm certain the committee will thoroughly consider the circumstances surrounding your decisions. This parliamentary hearing is adjourned.