Chapter 4 - Stevie

January 9, 2014, 7:30 a.m.

Normally, Stevie loved walking into the Triskelion. The glass roof bathing the wide lobby in bars of sunlight, the huge SHIELD eagle, gunmetal gray, poised for flight. She loved the busyness, the grandness of the place. Greeting the agents, analysts, custodians. It made her feel like she was part of something. But this morning, she stormed from the landing pad to the elevators without even looking around herself.

Fury's office was large but spare – no keepsakes. No personal effects. The man himself sat in a high-backed leather chair, staring through a large bank of windows at the steely skies above the Potomac, chin in his hand as though deep in thought.

"Want to tell me why you lied to me?" She said, not bothering with preliminaries.

"I didn't lie," he responded calmly. Of course, he knew what she was talking about immediately. "Agent Romanoff had a different mission than yours."

"Which you didn't feel obliged to share."

The situation on the ship hadn't been as bad as she had feared. One of the STRIKE team had been shot in the thigh and a hostage had broken her wrist in the fracas. But Batroc had escaped, and Stevie was still full of unspent anger.

"I'm not obliged to do anything," Fury said, still facing the river.

Fury was never demonstrative, but this...iciness. This was unusual.

"The hostages could have died." She said.

Finally, Fury turned the chair toward her. His dark-skinned face was as impassive as a block of wood. He placed his elbows on his black, empty desk, forming a perfect diamond with his reflection.

"I sent the greatest soldier in history to make sure that didn't happen."

So now she was the figurehead again. Trotted out for appearances - too naive to be told the actual plan. Stevie's jaw tightened in irritation. The last person to keep mission secrets from her had been Bucky, and he at least had the decency not to do it while she was actually on a mission with him.

"Soldiers trust each other," she bit off the words. "That's what makes it an army."

Their voices had grown progressively louder with each reply, and now they were on the point of shouting at each other. Fury stood.

"Last time I trusted someone," he growled, "I lost an eye." He looked her dead in the face. His one remaining eye was hard as a chip of flint. "I didn't want you doing anything you weren't comfortable with. Romanoff is comfortable with everything."

Why had Romanoff been gathering intelligence – in secret - from SHIELD's own ship? Fury was the Director of SHIELD. What could be on those computers that he didn't already know about?

"I can't lead a mission when the people I'm leading have missions of their own."

"It's called compartmentalization. Nobody spills the secrets because nobody knows them all."

I know what compartmentalization is, you ass. She had been working with the French Resistance before Fury had even been born.

"Except you," she said.

Something flickered in in Fury's eye – an emotion she couldn't identify. Uncertainty?

"You're wrong about me." He said, more softly, but no less bitterly. "I do share. I'm nice like that."

"Insight Bay." Fury said when the doors of his personal office elevator had closed behind them.

A synthetic female voice answered. "Captain Rogers does not have clearance for Project Insight."

"Director override – Fury, Nicholas J."

"Confirmed."

The descent was smooth and silent. Fury and Stevie leaned against opposite walls, her arms crossed defensively over her chest. Outside the glass, the morning sun broke through the clouds to strike off the Potomac in a thousand bright splinters of light. Was Maggie already awake? Stevie hadn't even bothered to take a shower or change out of her uniform before barging into Fury's office – she'd been so full of righteous rage. I'll pick her up after this meeting. Stevie suddenly remembered – she'd forgotten to reclaim that singing doll from Rumlow. Ah well. There would be plenty of time later.

"You know," she said to break the silence. "They used to play music."

Fury chuckled. "I know. My grandfather operated one of these things for forty years."

Elevator operators. Another casualty of progress.

"My granddad worked in a nice building," Fury continued. "Got good tips. He'd walk home every night, roll of ones stuffed in his lunch bag. He'd say hi, people would say hi back."

He leaned back casually against the rail.

"Time went on, neighborhood got rougher. He'd say hi, they'd say "keep on steppin". Granddad got to gripping that lunch bag a little tighter."

Fury gave her that piercing, one-eyed stare again. Stevie had the distinct impression there was more to this story than idle reminiscence.

"He ever get mugged?" She asked.

Fury chuckled again. "Every week some punk would say 'what's in the bag?'"

There was another pause. He wanted her to draw him out. She obliged, not without irritation.

"What'd he do?"

"He'd show 'em." Fury smiled. "Bunch of crumpled ones...and a loaded .22 magnum."

Ah. And there it is. The point.

"Granddad loved people." The smile faded. "But he didn't trust 'em very much."

They sank below the level of the river, sunlight replaced by harsh floodlights. Stevie looked behind her, and her mouth dropped open. In an immense machine bay, a massive shadow loomed up out of the darkness. Stevie had a disorienting moment of double consciousness, her memory of the Red Skull's base in the Alps, the Valkyrie in its hangar, overlaying what she saw.

But this was not the Valkyrie. No. God – it must be a hundred times that size.

It looked like a helicarrier, but the lines were different from the last SHIELD carrier Stevie had seen, back before the Battle of New York. Sleeker. Predatory. The scale was incredible. She hadn't realized how big it was until she saw the workers scuttling around it, like fleas on a dog's back. And still the elevator sank down and down and down.

Fury must have noticed her gaping.

"Yeah I know," he said, a little smugly. "It's a bit bigger than a .22."

One of the side panels of the drone had been slid open, and four workers were using a crane to maneuver something like a torpedo with wings inside.

A drone.

The carrier must be able to hold hundreds, thousands.

What threat could this possibly be designed to face?

As if her read the question in her face, Fury spoke again.

"This is Project Insight. Three advanced helicarriers controlled by a next-generation AI connected to a network of targeting satellites. The other two are off LA and NYC. Distributed warfare."

She had done her homework about the new ways of waging war. Drones like this weren't used to engage armies. They were for "surgical strikes" - assassination by any other name.

"Targeting satellites launched from the Lemurian Star." Stevie felt stupid for not thinking of it sooner. But the revelation only raised a bigger question. Why was Fury secretly collecting intelligence on his own project?

The elevator had finally stopped and they emerged onto the concrete floor, wending their way around workers and machines, the bulk of the Insight carrier like a mountain above them.

"Once we get them in the air, they never need to come down. Continuous suborbital flight, courtesy of our new repulsor engines." Fury pointed at a turbine. Stevie had thought they looked different. No blades.

"Tony?"

"He had a few suggestions after he got an up close look at our old turbines."

Up close – he had almost been shredded by one, back when Loki attacked the original SHIELD carrier.

Fury led her on, down the huge machine. Stevie could see the cannons sprouting from its flank, each the length of a diesel submarine. Fury didn't seem to find them worth mentioning.

"The Insight carriers are loaded with seven hundred drones, each drone equipped with eight Stark Hellfire missiles. They're fully automated - the drones can reload at the carrier without any human oversight. They're even equipped with 3D printers for on-site repair and replacement."

"I thought Tony stopped making weapons." Stevie said. Fury arched an eyebrow at her.

"Does his suit shoot flowers and rainbows?"

As they walked, a hemisphere of tinted glass became visible, set into the belly of the craft like a huge ball turret without the gun. Its mirror surface turned the bay into a warped, topsy-turvey dreamscape in which her own white face floated like a drowned ghost.

"The computer is the real beauty," Fury said, jolting her out of her thoughts. "The most advanced artificial intelligence ever designed, hooked up to a network of satellites that can practically read a terrorist's DNA before he steps out of his spider hole. Gonna neutralize a lot of threats before they even start."

That was a euphemism if she'd ever heard one.

"I thought the punishment usually came after the crime," she said.

"We can't afford to wait that long."

"Who's we?"

"After New York, I convinced the World Security Council we needed a quantum surge in threat analysis. For once, we're way ahead of the curve."

The thought echoed in Stevie's head in a voice that was not hers. You're not ready for what's coming.

"You're holding a gun to everyone on Earth and calling it protection."

"You know, I read those SSR files. Greatest Generation? You guys did some nasty stuff."

Stevie's neck flushed. I'm getting real tired of being condescended to today.

"Yeah," she said. "We compromised. Sometimes in ways that made us not sleep so well. But we did it so that people could be free."

She imagined the carrier looming above the Earth, a shadow in the sky with its great, glass eye always watching.

"This isn't freedom. This is fear."

"SHIELD takes the world as it is, not as we'd like it to be. It's getting damn near past time for you to get with that program, Cap."

Fury was staring at her fixedly. That was a threat. She felt cold, then hot. Why is he showing me this? What is this? Not for the first time in her life, she felt as if she was walking into a situation of which she understood only the barest shadow. Like being on rotten ice, she thought. Waiting for the cracks to show. Whatever game he was playing – she wanted no part of it.

"Don't hold your breath," she said. As she strode away down the floor of the bay, the Insight carrier watched her with its huge, dead eye.

This chapter also follows the canon closely - with some minor changes that will become relevant later.

Thank you all.