The Ultimates: Against All Enemies (8 page)

"Soldier, I don't have to tell you that's not your job."

"Maybe not," Steve said. "But I'll do the jobs that need doing, whether they're supposed to be mine or not."

In the silence that followed, Fury thought: so this is how it begins.

Eventually someone had to say something, and as might have been expected, it was Tony. "There's going to be a review of Stark Industries' defense contracting policies," he said. "Even with all the skimming and no-bid lard, I can make more money doing other things. Headaches like this are the last thing I need."

"Your financial decisions aren't really what we're talking about here," Fury said.

"Well, I don't appear to have much to say about national security or the typical courtesy that one might hope would be extended when one's proprietary tech is going to be stolen and farmed out to a glorified machine shop," Tony said. "So it looks like my finances are the only thing I can talk about. General, I don't suppose you have a bottle in your desk."

As a matter of fact, Fury did, but he wasn't about to break out the bourbon at ten in the morning. Not even for Tony Stark. "Afraid not," he said.

"And I don't guess that Captain America here is about to go up on espionage charges?"

"I don't see how that's in the national interest," Fury said.

"Ah. National interest. There was a time when intellectual property was part of national interest. I guess that isn't the case now."

"Oh, for Pete's sake," Steve said. "Are you really going to get self-righteous about this?"

"No, Steve, I'm going to stay angry You might be able to bamboozle the general here with your line about the people, and dirty jobs, and whatever else, but I'm going to tell you what that is. You've always been a latent fascist wrapped in a flag that we all happen to love, and we've cut you too much slack for it. Not anymore."

Steve took a step toward Tony. "Knock it off," he said.

"Go to hell," Tony said. "You want to take a swing at me, go right ahead. Who are you serving?

Whoever fed you SKR TechEnt, why do you think they did it? Do you think they care about the people?

"Who are 'the people,' anyway?"

"They're the ones I rode a Nazi rocket for," Steve said, moving even closer to Tony. "They're the ones I got shot up with experimental chemicals for. They're the ones I pledged my life to, and if you're about to say that they don't know who I am and don't care what I've done, I'm here to tell you that doesn't matter. I believe in them. You don't believe in a damn thing except your bank balance."

"The people, huh?" Tony said. "Shouldn't you say
der Volk?

Faster than Fury could see, Steve leveled Tony with a pile-driver right hand. Tony went over backward, banged his head against the wall, and sprawled next to the ficus tree Fury had brought with him from the last SHIELD headquarters. Then something happened that Fury never would have figured: Tony shook his head and got to his feet. Blood streamed from a cut under his left eye, and he couldn't quite focus his eyes, but he got up. Fury's opinion of Tony Stark changed in that moment. Before then, he'd always thought that Tony without his suit was just an unusually smart rich guy... but anyone who could take a shot from Captain America and get to his feet was more than your ordinary CEO.

"Don't ever say that about me again," Steve said. He was breathing hard, from anger rather than exertion.

"Ever."

"You wouldn't be so pissed about it if you didn't think it was true," Tony said. He leaned against the wall and hawked an enormous gob of blood into a handkerchief Blood had started coming from his nose, a slow trickle compared to the flow on his cheek.

"Next time I'm not holding back," Steve said.

Tony grinned. "Next time I won't stand there and wait for you to do it."

"All right," Fury said. "I've seen enough. What's done is done. Now it's up to us to make sure that the consequences work for us. You two want to kill each other, do it some other time. Right now what we need to do is find out who we get in touch with at SKR."

"Can't beat them, join them," Tony said. "You're a better politician than you give yourself credit for, Nick. And I hope that now you're not so worried that the original leak came from Stark Industries." He pressed the handkerchief to the cut on his face and added, "Now if you'll excuse me, there's a plastic surgeon whose golf game I need to interrupt."

After Tony was gone, Fury said to Steve, "Sit." He indicated a chair.

"Sir," Steve began, but Fury cut him off.

"No. I did not say talk. I said sit."

Steve sat.

"Thank you, Captain. Now. I am going to ask questions and you are going to provide answers."

'Yes, sir."

"The first question is who asked you to leak the screener."

After a pause, Steve said, "Admiral Garza."

Sometimes, Nick thought, the obvious answer is the correct answer. "And I assume that Admiral Garza suggested SKR?"

"Yes, sir," Steve said again.

Fury caught himself pacing the room. Pacing annoyed him, in himself more than in others. He went back around behind his desk and sat. "I'm going to repeat one of Tony's questions to you. Why do you think Admiral Garza suggested SKR?"

Steve shifted in the chair. "I didn't give it that much thought, General. Something needed to be done, and Admiral Garza found a way. That's as far as I took it."

"Did Admiral Garza suggest to you that SKR was ready to take the screener into production?"

"No, sir. He suggested them, and I made the call."

Something about the newspaper article was bothering Fury, but he couldn't figure out what it was. "See, Cap, my problem here is that I'm not necessarily opposed to this, but at the same time I can't have SHIELD team members doing end runs around Congress whenever they don't like the political winds."

"This isn't just any circumstance, sir."

"Agreed, Captain. The point still holds. I took a lot of heat about Tony Stark at the meeting in Washington, because people there think he's a loose cannon. Now I get home, and I have an actual loose cannon to deal with, who also happens to be the public face of SHIELD. This is one more headache than I need."

Steve stood. Fury eyed him but didn't comment on the small insubordination. Mostly he'd put the conversation on a chain-of-command footing because he wanted to calm Steve down. Now it didn't seem necessary. "General, I stand by what I said to you earlier and to Tony. This needed to be done. I did it. I'll take whatever heat is coming my way. Admiral Garza showed me the corpse of a Chitauri caught on the grounds of Andrews. Then we have the bombing downstairs. I'm not the most politically savvy guy in the world, but even I can tell something's coming. Do you want to look back and know that you didn't do everything you could?"

Now Fury stood to look Steve eye to eye. "I don't know, Cap. Do you want to be the guy who stands up later and says he had to destroy the village in order to save it?"

"I don't get the reference," Steve said.

"You don't need to. Do you want to be the guy who uses the flag as an excuse to burn the flag? And what if Garza's got some other plan? You know as well as I do that you can't trust a single person in Washington. You should have brought this to me."

For the first time since he'd come into the room, Steve's gaze wavered. "Admiral Garza suggested I not do that, sir."

"Which is exactly why you should have done it, Captain Rogers. You're dismissed." Hell of a way to start the day, Fury thought after Steve had gone. What do we do now? He sat considering for a few minutes, idly spinning the newspaper around on his desk; then he picked up the phone and started making calls.

12

For Hank Pym, regret was something to be suffocated by work. Also booze, but he was doing his best to keep the two separate. This morning he'd woken up with his eyeballs throbbing and a railroad spike in his head, but here he was at the lab at seven a.m., coffee slowly working its way through his system and his tech, Greg, already in place at a microscope.

"Do you ever sleep?" Hank grumbled. First things first; he went to the lab coffee pot and got it going. Then he glanced at the morning's news feed. "Hey, would you look at this," he said.

"What's that?" Greg said, eye still glued to the microscope. "Oh, and as far as sleep, the answer is no. Not when there are eggs to count. You tell me to get fertility data on
Myrmecia pilosula
, that's what I'm doing, boss."

Lab techs, Hank thought. Either they're humorless drones or merry pranksters. Why couldn't any of them be normal? Not that he was complaining. Greg was like Super Lab Tech. He worked hard, made few mistakes, and didn't ask too many questions about things like how Hank had invented a wireless method of controlling ants. In a way, Hank felt badly about keeping Greg so completely in the dark. It would have been nice, not to mention more efficient, if Greg understood a little more about the goals of Hank's various projects. So, Greg, Hank imagined saying.
There's these aliens, and they can take the
appearance of human beings, and I think I can figure out a way to get ants to detect them so we
can stop them from taking over the world. You on board
?

Ay yi yi
, Hank thought. Time for some normal conversation.

He pushed back his chair. "You see the news today? All of a sudden everyone's in love with screening technology again. SKR TechEnt. Hmm. Wonder if I should send them a proposal."

"Might not be a bad idea," Greg said. "But I thought they were a consortium kind of thing. A bunch of venture types creating a collective in-house lab or something."

"Whatever," Hank said. "There must be someone there who can read a proposal." He sat back and thought about it.

It occurred to him to wonder if anyone at SHIELD was involved. Wouldn't have been the first time that Fury and the gang had put the media to work for them... although that thought led down a memory path that Hank didn't want to travel again. He couldn't help it, though. He dreamed, when he wasn't too drunk to remember his dreams, of two things: Janet and the Hulk.

The Janet dreams were usually short, overwhelming spikes of sensation. He could feel the headset, and through it came the mechanical buzz of predatory satisfaction felt by the tetramorium ants he'd turned loose on her. In the dream, that feedback always crested as the darkest of pleasures, which was the curdled pleasure of revenge-—and he woke up with a pain in his chest and guilt like a second skin. Hank knew he couldn't undo what he had done, but he had resolved to atone for it. He would make them understand that sins could be expiated, failures forgiven, if he had to spend the rest of his life in the lab to do it.

When he dreamed of the Hulk, too, it was typically the same moment over and over again: the tearing at the corners of his mouth as that homicidal freak tried to rip off his jaw. Never in his life had Hank felt so vulnerable, and never had he expected his size advantage to be so completely and easily overcome. He hated himself when he woke from that dream, even more than after the Janet dreams, because the Hulk had made him look weak. Flat on his back, mouth wide open, unable to get loose... he couldn't think about it. Even Steve Rogers hadn't shamed him that way.

"Huh," Greg said, startling Hank out of his self-loathing. He looked up and saw that Greg was reading about the screening tech over his shoulder. "Lot of R&D goes into something like that," Greg went on.

"Wonder who's keeping his name off it."

"Me, too," Hank said. The fact that Greg's thoughts were moving along the same lines as his made him feel a little less paranoid. Maybe he could call Tony again, although he couldn't go to that well very often. The next time he'd have to have something concrete. Tony Stark was the only real human being in the whole damn Triskelion; he'd done Hank a huge favor giving him the Chitauri sample, and Hank would pay him back for it. Starting today, with any luck.

"If it was me, I'd just train dogs," Greg said. "Nothing beats Fido when it comes to sniffing."

"Except what we've got here," Hank said. "These little guys put dogs to shame. Nothing against dogs, but they work one at a time. What I've got here is the equivalent of a million dogs who can communicate almost instantly by chemical signals, and don't need to be housebroken." Greg laughed and went back to his microscope. "There's your proposal, Hank. Write it up and send it out."

Hank got up and started running the checklist on the new headset he'd designed to test a little screening process of his own. It all seemed to be in order, so he went to the farm closet, where he kept something like fifty million ants of twenty-seven species that he'd found best suited to the kind of work he wanted them to do. Once he'd had them move boxes and make coffee; now he was going to put his little myrmidons to work protecting the people who crushed them on sidewalks and fried them with magnifying glasses. Good thing they weren't sentient enough to bear a grudge or note the irony, he thought.

"Paraponera clavata
, come on down," he said, rolling one of die farm boxes out of die closet. He didn't have too many of these, maybe ten thousand, but it was plenty for a test run. The inside of
P.
clavata's
farm mimicked a system of tree roots, reflecting their preferred habitat on the South American Atlantic coast. They were big, about an inch long, and mean as hell.

"What have you got there?" Greg said, coming over from his workstation.

"Bullet ants. Most toxic insect in the world except for my soon-to-be-ex wife." Greg chuckled. "Scientific objectivity."

Hank grinned along with Greg, but he hated himself for making the joke. "You know why they're called bullet ants? People who are lucky enough to have been both shot by a bullet and stung by one of these ants say that the experiences hurt about the same. Fierce little bastards, aren't they?"

"Keep 'em in the box. Jesus," Greg said.

Back at his terminal, Hank ran through the broadcast sequence he'd written. With any luck, it would provoke
P. clavata
to swarm and bite the Chitauri tissue sample he'd hidden in one of the lab wastebaskets. Then Hank would switch off that signal, send them back to the farm, and call Nick Fury with the test results. Presto! New reputation, big welcome back into the great stew of mutual exploitation that was SHIELD. If Fury could keep using Banner as a researcher after what happened in Manhattan, there was no reason for him not to take Hank back.