The Ultimates: Against All Enemies (19 page)

"They did kill the screening tech," Nick said. "But it didn't stay dead, now, did it? Which is a good thing. I'm not a tremendous fan of leaks and other security breaches, but that one seems to have done the job. My point is that Washington is Washington. Sometimes they do the right thing, sometimes they don't. So when they don't, we need to be flexible enough and smart enough to figure out a way to do our jobs even when the people who are supposed to be helping just get in the way."

"So we are taking this to Washington," Steve said.

"No, we are certainly not," Nick said. "Officially, SHIELD doesn't know a goddamn thing about any ant project. Plank Pym is not a member of this team, and Stark Industries operates under all kinds of defense contracting protocols, very few of which have anything to do with me or with SHIELD." Nick cracked his big action-hero grin. "That, ladies and gentlemen, is what is known as plausible deniability." 28

Steve went straight from the unveiling of Tony's amplifier tech to a scheduled meeting with Garza, which was the last thing in the world he wanted to do right then. Didn't it just figure that General Fury would throw a monkey wrench into the whole works by doing the right thing? How was a guy supposed to move ahead when nobody around him would stay consistent?

Face it, he told himself Your real problem is that you thought you had everyone pegged, and now that they're not fitting into the holes you made for them, you're second-guessing yourself No time for that. The Chitauri aren't second-guessing themselves, you can bet on it.

So the thing to do was stick with what he knew. There was a threat; there was a way to deal with the threat. That was all anyone needed to know about the situation. The complicating factors—idiots in Washington and the bureaucratic self-preservation instinct that infected people who had to work with idiots in Washington—were part of the equation, but they weren't the primary factors. Stay focused, Steve thought, and got into the now-familiar black limousine waiting in Battery Park City. Before he could say anything, Admiral Garza said, 'We've got a problem, Steve." Tell me about it, Steve thought. But we've got a solution, too, if people would just stay out of the way.

"What is it, sir?"

"We've had to shut down production at SKR. In the past forty-eight hours we've discovered nine employees who were Chitauri." As he said it, Admiral Garza looked angry and embarrassed. "I don't have to tell you that this is a black eye for me. We have to assume the Chitauri know the location of every screener, and will plan to avoid them. There's a minimal benefit to knowing that they won't be going through security at La Guardia, but it's not nearly what it would have been if we could have had them believing they were free to move about. Goddammit," Admiral Garza said. "I'm furious at myself" What Admiral Garza hadn't mentioned was that Chitauri discovery of the screener tech was exactly the reason Ozzie Bright had given for not wanting the screeners publicized and privately manufactured in the first place. "I guess Ozzie Bright had the right idea," Steve said.

"Ozzie Bright can go to hell," Admiral Garza said. "You know the old saying. Even a blind hog finds an acorn once in a while."

"What do we do?" Steve asked. "You still have the handheld screeners. Do the Chitauri know about those?"

Admiral Garza shook his head. "We're building those in-house. Right now we're hammering out the interagency cooperation protocols to equip all Transportation Security Administration personnel with them, and also begin handing them out to federal law enforcement. You know these Beltway types, though. Anything that really needs doing takes forever, and is usually screwed up from the beginning." Looking at his watch. Admiral Garza opened Steve's door. "Listen, we're going to need to touch base again tomorrow. I've got an urgent meeting to get to, and I need you to do a little listening around SHIELD headquarters. Don't spy for me, Steve. You're not cut Out for it, and it's low work for a man of your beliefs and integrity. If anyone asks you anything, tell them. Don't keep secrets for me anymore, either But do tell me what people are asking you. I'm in a tight spot right now between Washington dumbasses and Triskelion paranoids. It's not an easy place to be. We know the aliens are out there, and we know how they

work. So what we need is enough resources and enough time to put that knowledge to use. I'll put together the resources. You help me gain the time to use them."

"Yes, sir," Steve said, although the truth was, he'd followed very little of what Admiral Garza had said. Everyone, it seemed, was having trouble being coherent and consistent today. His phone rang. "Go ahead and take that," Admiral Garza said. "I'll be in touch. And you can tell Nick about the SKR problem. I'd do it, but he and I haven't been getting along lately. Maybe you can soften the blow."

'Yes, sir," Steve said again, and got out of the car. He flipped open the phone and found Tony Stark on the other end.

"Listen, my friend," Tony said. "I was just downstairs in the lab with Janet and she said you told her something about a handheld alien detector. Is that right?"

"I'm not at liberty to tell you about that," Steve said.

"Okay, so you did say it. Don't pussyfoot around with security and chain-of-command crap, Steve. Where were you when you saw it, and who was using it?"

"I'm not at liberty to tell you—"

Tony exploded. "Goddammit, Steve! It was Janet's building, in the breezeway around the side, and you were with some of the goddamn spooks you spend all your time with! You're a terrible liar, Steve. Even when you're not trying to tell a lie, you might as well be walking around wearing a sign that says I Have Secrets. You can't bullshit a bullshitter, and you're talking to the best. Now are we going to have a conversation here, or do I have to go and tell Nick about all the time you're spending with Esteban Garza?"

"We had a word for people like you," Steve said.

"You had a lot of words for people like me," Tony shot back. "
Fink, stool pigeon, snitch
. I don't care.
Drunk? Lush
? Whatever. Call me whatever you want. Just tell me about this supposed miniature screener."

"If you know I talk to Garza, General Fury does, too," Steve said.

"Could be. You want to find out for sure?"

I can't risk it, Steve thought. If Janet told him, Tony's got no reason to think she's lying, and he's right. I've got a lousy poker face.

"I saw one of the people I was there with use it," Steve said.

"Ah. Honesty. How refreshing. Well, let me tell you something. I optimized that design, size-wise. It doesn't work any smaller because you need too many sniffer points for the processor to come up with a faultless result. If the screener doesn't have enough different sources for its samplers, the computer doesn't get enough data fast enough to figure out where the source of a particular odor or chemical signature is. So they're spaced out along the frame."

"Tony," Steve said. "I saw this thing work."

"Steve, if a handheld version of this thing was possible, I'd have invented it already and I would also have made sure that it was in every cereal box in the country by this week. I know you're not going to believe this, but you're being suckered. Plain and simple."

"You think you know everything? Maybe someone just figured out something that you couldn't."

"About this? Yes, I do know just about everything. One of the things that I know is that miniaturization has serious limits when you're talking about screening tech that has to pick out and process something as small as DNA within an operationally meaningful time frame. It's not possible. It's like someone was telling you that they invented a perpetual-motion machine."

"I'm telling you, I saw it work."

"Steve, don't take this the wrong way, but you're not a scientist. You saw what, exactly? You saw someone wave something around and then you saw a little light go on. That's how Janet described it. Pretty accurate?"

'You're leaving out the part about bow there really was a Chitauri in the backyard about to climb into Janet's window. The thing worked, Tony."

"My God, are you gullible," Tony said. "They sent suicide bombers to the Triskelion, and you don't think they'd throw one soldier under the bus if it meant they could keep you barking up the wrong tree pretty much forever?"

Steve hung up the phone. He had a country to defend, and he didn't need Tony Stark's alcoholic ramblings to distract him. Three minutes later, someone called back from Tony's number, but Steve didn't pick up. Three minutes after that, he got—of all things—a text message. "Oh, for Pete's sake," he said, hating text messages and the whole of youth culture. But he opened it. GET TO A TV WATCH CNN, it said. It was from Tony.

Battery Park City was crammed with chain restaurants, all of which had TVs on in their bar areas. Steve walked into the first one he saw and glanced around for news. What he found was mostly baseball games, but there was one TV in the back of the bar tuned to National Geographic, and nobody seemed to be watching it. "Mind putting on CNN?" Steve asked a passing waiter. It took the waiter a couple of minutes to find the remote and get the channel changed, and then a seeming eternity of dumb celebrity news that Hedda Hopper would have been ashamed to print... and then Steve figured out what Tony had meant.

A news anchor was saying, "Early indications are that Undersecretary of Defense Ozzie Bright went into anaphylactic shock upon being stung by fire ants while walking across the Mall to get a hot dog." The image cut to a full screen of the Washington Mall, full of people taking in the summer sun, the white obelisk of the Washington Monument in the middle distance. "Hospital staff are being very closemouthed about details of Bright's condition, but witnesses report seeing him being stung by a large number of the ants."

Steve watched in shock. Ozzie Bright, he thought. A Chitauri. How does it all fit? Variations ran through his mind. Bright a Chitauri, so Altobelli and Garza weren't; or all of them were, and the outbursts General Fury had told him about had been an elaborate charade; or Bright and Altobelli were, but not Garza ... but then Tony's parting shot rang in Steve's mind:
You don't think they'd throw one soldier under the
bus if it meant they could keep you harking up the wrong tree?
?

A teenager wearing a Baltimore Orioles cap filled the screen. "I saw him, man. He had them ants all over, and he was screaming... " The kid shook his head. "Almost didn't sound like a man." It wasn't a man, Steve thought. And I fell for it hook, line, and sinker.

"And then did an ambulance come?" came the question from an offscreen reporter.

"No, it wasn't no ambulance. About six men come piling out of a big black Escalade, drove right out onto the grass, and they grabbed the man and took him away."

Back to the anchor, who said, "Mall staff sprayed the area immediately after the attack, and spokesmen say they'll keep that part of the Mall cordoned off while they investigate. We turn now to Doctor Leslie Armentrout of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Doctor Armentrout tracks incidents involving venomous insects, and is here to give us a little background on this phenomenon. Doctor, it seems like all we've been reading about in the papers lately are ants stinging people. Is it really happening more often, or is this a case of the media latching onto a previously unreported story and making it news?"

"Well, Bob, there's no question that there's been an uptick in the number of serious ant-sting incidents. Could be it's climate change, could be just that the ants are tired of waiting for crumbs to fall from the picnic tables and now they're just going to take the whole picnic, you know what I mean?" Steve didn't stay to hear any more. He charged back out onto the street, calling Tony back. Tony's phone cut immediately to voice mail. "Tony, it's Steve," he said, and hung up. Next he tried General Fury, but there was no answer at all there. Then he got an alert: another text message, from a number he recognized as the automated Red Alert line used for SHIELD emergency messages. ATTACK UNDER WAY STARK INDUSTRIES, it said, and nothing more.

29

Status Report

Circumstances, and prospects for success of the human ordering project, have undergone a radical change from -.005476 solar year to present. Under consideration once more is the surgical option. Unfortunately current assets do not include the same caliber of ordnance brought to the last open confrontation with human defenders. It remains possible, however, that assimilated assets in place could cause profound damage to human centers of population. Whether the amount of damage inflicted would, in the end, precipitate ecological upheaval on the scale necessary to bring about the ordering of
Homo
sapiens
via its elimination rather than its alteration remains uncertain. Choices will have to be made whether the remote possibility of such ecological transformation is enough of a potential reward to offset the certain loss of all existing assets in the effort to catalyze it. Another possibility is a degradation of human civilization to its state of approximately -1000.00 solar years. This degradation could possibly be accomplished through a small number of carefully targeted actions to destabilize food production, clean water availability, and similar resource arenas. Simultaneously, ethnic, national, and religious tensions could be inflamed in flashpoints such as . Simulations and projections related to the possibility of success in these and like ventures have thus far yielded unclear results. Further analysis is ongoing. The ordnance challenge after the events of is formidable, and the possibility exists that a large-scale operation designed for pervasive and long-term degradation of human civilization is beyond the scope of current assets.

If so, current asset and command structure will refocus around mission of eliminating augmented human assets such as the , with a view to future reinforcements and redevelopment of the human ordering project. Timeline of the project should perhaps be viewed as more flexible than was previously considered desirable.

While this ultimate decision is analyzed and taken, all available assimilated assets are to review their orders. Mission to reduce or eliminate Stark Industries amplifier technology commences .000273 solar year from broadcast of this report. Primary focus of mission will be capacity of Stark Industries to disseminate software via existing public networks. Secondary objectives are contained in individual unit orders.