Chapter Four:
"Drop the weapon!" Coulson ordered May, still beyond angry at what was going on.
"Coulson—"
"—Drop the weapon and kick it over the stairs May! Now!" He cut the woman off.
May closed her eyes and sighed before slowly lowering her gun onto the ground, kicking it away from her.
"Now back up! Over there!" He pointed to Skye.
Skye pulled Selena from behind her and motioned for her to run to go to Fitz.
Selena didn't waste any time in running over to the scientist, grabbing his shirt in her small fists in preparation for the worst.
"Talk." Coulson continued once he saw the ten year old was safely planted next to Fitz. "Tell us where you rerouted the plane."
"I didn't set this new course, I swear!"
"Don't lie to me!" Coulson snapped, causing Selena to jump.
"Yeah, well, the plane just turned around, for goodness sake!" Fitz added his two-cents.
"How is this happening then?" Skye questioned.
"H.Q. can override automated control of the avionics, take us anywhere they want." May explained to them. "Let me check the instrument panel, and I'll be able to—"
"—No way!" Fitz cut her off.
"You're not going anywhere until you explain what—"
"—It's not me!" It was May's turn to cut Coulson off.
"Why did you have an encrypted hard line?"
"And try to shoot me when we found it?" Fitz questioned.
"Let's take a breath, huh?"
"A breath sounds nice." Selena piped up. She had been through way too much today for it to be deemed healthy. "A breath is good."
"Let's not!" Coulson shut it down right there and then.
May was shocked that Coulson was actually being so callous with her and decided to tell him the truth. "It was a dedicated channel…...to Director Fury. That's the truth."
"Directory Fury?" Coulson didn't believe her no matter how much he wanted to. "I haven't been able to get him on the line for weeks."
"You were reporting to him?" None of this made any sense to Skye.
"That's all I can tell you."
"That's all you can tell us?"
"I'm under orders! Fury will tell you."
"What? This was an order?" Fitz motioned to the broken glass door of the lab, where head just been shot at. "To shoot me in the bloody head?"
"Hold on." Coulson shook his head, as if he had just remembered something. "We're not headed to Fury anymore."
"I don't know where we're headed. And I can't get Fury on the line, because Fitz cut the line!"
"Skye told me to!"
"Someone was talking to The Clairvoyant. The real Clairvoyant." Skye offered her explanation.
"You were in the walls Fitz. You want to explain why you were tampering with the plane's sat cable?" May turned her attention towards Fitz, before she stared Selena down. "And you, what were you doing down there?"
Fitz and Selena looked at each other, deciding that the youngest of the pair would answer first, because those were the breaks.
"I wanted to be alone and that was the only place I could find, where there was no one else around!" Selena shrugged. "I wasn't doing anything."
Everyone seemed to believe her and she sighed in relief as they turned to to Fitz, waiting for his explanation.
"I was trying to speak to Simmons at The Hub." Fitz glared at May for ratting him out.
"And you needed an encrypted line? What's so secret that you—"
"—Well you tell me!" Fitz wiggled his finger at both Coulson and Skye. "Simmons and I know you two have been whispering, keeping things from us about the drug that saved your life. Simmons is just trying to figure out how the thing works!"
"Fitz, who is she talking to?' May questioned.
Still keeping his weapon trained on May, Coulson made his way over to the lab doors to keep talking to Fitz. "Fitz, open the door."
"No way, not until we sort this out." Fitz shook his head. "I'm not opening anything."
"Selena, open the door. Now." Coulson ordered the child.
That really caught Selena between a rock and a hard place. She knew that Fitz didn't want to open the door, but Coulson had just told her to do just that.
She didn't like being caught in the middle.
She had no idea what to do.
"Selena, do not open that door." Fitz warned her.
The ten year old just sighed and ran a tired hand over her face. Maybe if the situation was different, she'd laugh or crack a joke, but she knew this wasn't the time.
She wanted to listen and do as she was told, but she didn't want to betray Fitz either.
They needed to leave her out of this.
"Selena." Skye called. "Open the door Honey, it's important."
Selena made the executive decision to ignore everyone on the outside and hopped up onto a table, before crossing her arms and shaking her head. "No!"
"We can't get anything sorted until you open the door!"
Fitz made no move to open the door and Selena was pretending like she couldn't hear anything that was going on around her, so Coulson tried a different method. "Skye, get your laptop hooked up to our system. See if you can pull up any S.H.I.E.L.D. communications. I want to know where this plane is headed and why."
"Coulson—"
May had tried to move closer to him to state her case, but he kept his weapon on her. "—You stay put!"
Skye lowered her gun and stood in front of the lab doors, giving Fitz a look to see if he would open the doors or not.
And when he refused to make eye contact with her, she glared at her sister. "Open the door Selena. This is childish."
"I am a child." Selena stuck her tongue out at her, but opened the door anyway, not wanting this to go on any longer.
All she got in return was a smack on the back of her head, that made her glare at her sister.
So much for doing the right thing.
"Now tell me who Simmons is talking to." Coulson addressed Fitz. "Cause if it isn't someone we trust, she's in serious danger.
"Agent Simmons." Trip startled the young bio-chemist as he entered the room she was occupying by her lonesome. "I was wondering where you snuck off to. You busy?"
"Yes, but that's okay."
"It's noisy here today. A lot of guys in action mode."
"I asked around. Guess it's a Level Eight operation of some sort." Jemma supplied. "I was surprised to have this room to myself."
"So what are you working on?" Trip moved to stand beside her, noticing her attempt to quickly shut her monitor off. "Wow. Coulson's team is awfully secretive, even for this organization. Are you hiding something Agent?"
"No." Jemma lied poorly. "It's just nothing important."
"I hope not." Trip looked at her. "Because I remember us tracking down a drug that brought a girl back from the brink, and that was real important."
"Yes, I know." Jemma didn't know how much longer she could keep this up.
"Come to think of it." Trip continued. "I don't remember seeing it in the dispatches, or you mentioning it when Agent Blake got his ribs caved in."
"I wasn't in a position—" Jemma stopped herself, succumbing to a tense period of silence as a group soldier passed by the room. Trip followed her line of vision and quickly closed the door before turning back to her. "I'm trying. Look, men died to keep this secret. We don't understand why so we wanted to keep our research in-house for safety."
"Research?"
"That's hit a dead-end." Jemma told him. "I'm uploading Skye's blood scans. I would like to contact Agent Weaver at S.H.I.E.L.D. Academy covertly."
"For a little help." Trip concluded.
"But we must keep this between us. Please? I don't want any…...trouble."
"You're Level Five?" Trip continued when he got confirmation of the fact. "Well, Level Six clearance gives me access to the Holobox, secure line."
"But we can't sneak that in here, can we?"
"Agent Hand seems to be keeping everyone busy. We'll be good." The gentleman walked towards the door, before turning around to face Jemma once again. "But hey, we get questioned, let me talk. You're a surprisingly bad liar Agent Simmons."
"I know." Jemma watched him leave with an almost guilty look on her face. "But I'm getting better at it."
"What do you mean, noise?" Coulson asked Skye from his place inside the lab.
"I mean literally noise across every S.H.I.E.L.D. communication channel." Skye looked at her laptop. "Some sort of blanket signal."
"Encoded data maybe." Fitz guessed.
"I think so."
"You want to fill us in?" Coulson looked back at May. "We root you out, a mole, suddenly our plane shuts down, our communication jammed."
"I don't know." May was sick and tired of whatever this was. "I wish I did. You have to believe me."
"No, I don't."
"Do you read? Do you read 6-1-6?" Garrett's voice crackled through the feed.
"Where's that coming from?" Fitz asked, looking at the monitor of Skye's laptop.
"Close."
"Enemy aircraft on my tail." Garrett continued. "Over."
"Garrett?" Coulson tried to see if the man could hear him.
"Coulson?" Garrett responded quickly. "I'm under attack. Drones. Repeat, S.H.I.E.L.D. drones are on my tail. We're not getting along. Do you copy?"
"Copy." Coulson nodded. "Garrett, what's happening? We've lost control of our aircraft."
"I don't know! Tell me you've got guns on that thing. I'm coming to you."
"Selena, Honey?" Coulson spoke sweetly, but his voice was very tense.
"Yes?" Selena sat up from her place by her sister.
"Listen to me carefully, okay?" Coulson waited for her full attention before continuing. "Turn around, close your eyes, and cover your ears. Can you do that for me?"
"What? Why?" Selena grew a little nervous.
"Can you do that for me?" Coulson wasn't going to give her a reason. He just wanted his orders followed.
"Uh huh." Selena nodded, turning herself around carefully, not to cause herself to fall off the table, before squeezing her eyes shut and plugging her ears with her index fingers.
"Good girl. Don't turn around until I tell you to." Coulson acknowledged that she had done what he asked before shooting May directly in the shoulder.
Selena, of course, flinched harshly at the sound of his gun going off, but she didn't dare move.
On impact, May groaned in pain and slid to the ground beneath her, gaining no sympathy from Coulson.
"Fitz, can you manually wire the guns to weapons control, bypass our systems?" Coulson was well aware of the way Skye and Fitz were looking at him, but he kept his focus on the task at hand.
"If I have cables long enough, yeah." Fitz answered, completely flabbergasted by what he had just witnessed.
"Skye, decode the signal." Coulson instructed her. "Selena? Honey, watch your sister work and do not look away from the monitor." He wanted to spare her from seeing another person gunned down for the day.
"Okay." Selena turned around and looked over Skye's shoulder to see what she was doing, clearly still rattled by recent events.
"We need to get ahead of this. I don't want any more surprises today."
"It's a simple message repeated. Semantic encoding." Skye started talking as she noticed Coulson and Fitz hurrying towards her. "I needed to find the mnemonic key. It should only take me a minute more to decipher."
As she was explaining what she found, Garrett had made his way down the staircase to join them. "Can I ask the obvious question; what the heck?!"
"We don't know." Coulson replied. "We don't even know where our plane is headed."
"Oh, I saw your trajectory. You're being tractor-beamed straight to The Hub." Garrett divulged that piece of info. "Those drones were launched out of there for sure."
"Victoria Hand."
"Hand? Can't be." Fitz didn't believe that.
"Can't be what now?" Garrett questioned.
"The Clairvoyant." Skye filled him in, taking a bite of the cookie she had given Selena to hopefully take her mind off of things
"Hey!" Selena pushed her face and took a bite of her own.
"I thought Ward capped that guy."
"I don't believe the man Ward killed was The Clairvoyant." Coulson told Garrett honestly. "I think he was an unwitting decoy meant to end our investigation."
"That's a lot of trouble to go through for a red herring, don't you think?"
"Because the Clairvoyant is a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent. Using high-level clearance to stay ahead of us, makes it seem like she's got psychic powers."
Now that got Garrett's attention. "She? You think Victoria Hand's The Clairvoyant?" He scoffed at the thought. "I don't mean to be pee in the punchbowl, but that doesn't make a lot of sense. I was stationed with Vic in Lisbon. She's cold and a buzzkill at parties, I grant you, but do you really think she's capable of that?"
"Excuse me?" Selena shyly raised her hand, not yet comfortable around Garrett. "But didn't she just try to knock you out of the sky?"
"Eat your cookie." Skye shushed her.
"Kid's got a point."
"Don't get me wrong, she's definitely gone nuts, but her actions prove she's not The Clairvoyant, right?" Garrett grasped at straws. "I mean, if she's been hiding in plain sight all this time…why reveal herself now?"
"Guys." Skye caught everyone's attention as she looked at her monitor.
"Out of the shadows, into the light." Coulson read what was on the screen.
"Well, I'll be." Garrett guessed he was wrong as they all watched the final word appear on the screen.
HYDRA.
"I thought Hydra was defeated after World War II." Fitz spoke.
"It was. S.H.I.E.L.D. was founded in the wake of that victory."
"And now they're back?"
"Hydra always comes back." Garret told him.
"Cut off one head, two more will take its place." Coulson recited Hydra's weird motto.
"Is it a head?" Garrett was utterly confused. "I thought it was a limb."
"No, no, no." Fitz shook his head. "Cut off a head."
"Cut off a limb."
"It's a head." Coulson ended the argument before it started, turning to Skye as she began talking.
"But it was sent from a S.H.I.E.L.D. source. It's got to be some sort of activation signal, to Hydra members within S.H.I.E.L.D."
"Hand must be one of them."
"Okay. Stop. Stop." Fitz didn't want to hear any of this. It was ridiculous. "W—What does that mean? In S.H.I.E.L.D.?"
"Targeting Level Eight agents, seizing power." Garrett shrugged. "Wonder how deep it goes."
"The signal is everywhere." Skye found. "Deep."
"You know what this means?" Coulson asked them.
"Yeah. We're doomed."
"We can't change course, and we have no idea what's waiting for us at The Hub."
Fitz suddenly began to wrack his brain and become lost in his own thoughts. "The Hub."
"I say we blow a hole in the side of this puppy and parachute out. Live to fight another day."
"We can't." Coulson shook his head.
"It's a cherry ride. I'll give you that, but let's not just hand over the keys."
"Simmons is at The Hub." Fitz spoke. "We have to save her."
"Oh, right, yeah. Trip's there too. I don't mind saying I don't like the odds on this one. We should let your specialists out of their cage. We can use every weapon we can get."
"So we'll fly in there, face the music…...even if it is Hydra's theme song."
"Get Director Fury on the line or I'll march you out there first." Coulson instructed May from inside of the cockpit.
May locked eyes with him for a split second before she did as she was told.
Ward made his way over to everyone else who was currently standing just outside of the cockpit, watching everything unfold. "Sir? What's going on?" He asked, lifting a tired looking Selena onto his hip.
Selena was so sleepy, she didn't even care about who was holding her, as long as she was off of her feet.
"A whole lot." Garrett answered.
"Who's shooting at us?" Ward took the rest of Selena's cookie from her tired hands and set it down, so she wouldn't drop crumbs all over the floor if she dropped it.
"Let me catch you up." Garrett began to fill him in. "Apparently, Agent Hand is The Clairvoyant, so chew on that first."
Ward's eyes widened as he was given the news, but he was still ready to take in more intel as Coulson and May stayed in the cockpit.
"Agent Melinda May. Voice command: Emergency Protocol One. Emergency Protocol One."
"Hello?" A voice answered her.
"This is an X10 straight connection to Director Fury's personal line. Where is he?"
"Director Fury is dead."
Coulson and May looked at each other in complete and utter shock.
Fury was dead?
What was going on?
But before either one of them could open their mouths, a shot rang out and hit May, prompting Coulson to forget about how angry he was at her as he grabbed her and took cover.
Grant immediately pulled Selena, who had been very good at keeping her mouth shut, off his hip and shoved her into Skye's arms, pushing the both of them down to take cover, before throwing his body over them.
Fitz and Garrett scrambled to find cover, in hopes to dodge the flying bullets.
They all managed to take cover by a table and waited for all of this to blow over. And truthfully, it ended sooner than they thought it would.
As quickly as the bullets starting flying, they just….stopped.
Everyone waited for a minute before they crawled out of their hiding places to assess the damager that had been done.
Coulson carefully led May out of the cockpit while she nursed an injured arm, as they left the area with Skye and Fitz following, eventually breaking off to go to a locker.
What a day.
"Can that be true about Fury?" Ward asked Garrett from directly outside the room as they watched Fitz and Skye.
So not creepy.
"Man was my S.O., Coulson's too. Proved himself more than once to be a hard man to kill."
Their voices caught Selena's attention, but she didn't let on that she had heard anything. She just sat close to the door in a place where they wouldn't notice her, and listened.
Okay, eavesdropped.
But it wasn't like she wanted to! She had never really warmed up to Ward and she definitely knew that she didn't like Garrett.
They acted strange.
Like they were hiding something from everyone else.
Selena wanted to know what that something was, not that anyone would even believe her.
She was just a kid and she definitely wasn't an agent.
"That sound outside doesn't bode well though." Garrett commented on the noise coming from outside The Bus. "Is there anything on this plane you don't want them to get their hands on?"
Ward nodded and looked at Skye.
No harm would come to her if he could help it.
Selena's eye widened as she listened in. What did Garrett mean by 'them'? She knew they knew something!
Were they Hydra? She didn't really know for sure, but it was definitely a possibility. But she couldn't say anything without proof. That was a serious accusation.
Besides, she could just very well be paranoid.
Who knows?
A/N: Okay lovelies, that's it for this chapter! It seems like Selena is catching onto something that could very well put her in danger? I don't know? All I know is, she's iffy about Ward and she can't stand Garrett. What do you think? Will she accuse them of being Hydra? Or will she keep her mouth shut (the smartest decision to make, because well...she's ten) and watch everything unfold? More coming soon...