CHAPTER 11

Pym sat Scott down at a big video screen and started explaining the importance of the job he wanted Scott to do. “This isn’t the first time these guys have tried to get their hands on game-changing weaponry,” he said, pointing out a particular person on the screen. “That’s Mitchell Carson, ex–head of defense at S.H.I.E.L.D., presently in the business of toppling governments. He always wanted my tech. And now, unless we break in and steal the Yellowjacket and destroy all the data, Darren Cross is gonna unleash chaos upon the world.” Scott gathered that Cross was planning to sell the Yellowjacket thing—which was a version of Pym’s original suit, only with weapons—to this Carson guy. It didn’t sound good.

But it was a problem with an obvious solution that maybe hadn’t occurred to Pym. “I think our first move should be calling the Avengers,” Scott said.

Pym stood up and paced the room. “I’ve spent half my life trying to keep this technology out of the hands of a Stark. I’m not going to hand deliver it to one now. This is not some cute technology like the Iron Man suit. This could change the texture of reality. Besides, they’re probably too busy dropping cities out of the sky.”

“Okay, then, why don’t you just send the ants?”

“Scott, they are ants. Ants, they can do a lot of things, but they still need a leader. Somebody that can infiltrate a place that’s designed to prevent infiltration.”

“Hank, I’m a thief,” Scott said. “All right, I’m a good thief. But this is insane.” The last guy in the world Scott wanted to rely on to save the world was himself.

“He’s right, Hank, and you know it,” Hope said from the doorway. Neither of them had heard her come in. “You’ve seen the footage; you know what Cross is capable of. I was against using him when we had months; now we have days. I’m wearing the suit.”

Pym shook his head. “Absolutely not.”

“I know the facility inside and out. I know how Cross thinks. I know this mission better than anybody here.”

That was all true, Scott thought. But this was turning into a father-daughter thing again, and he stayed out of it. “We need you close to Cross, otherwise this mission cannot work,” Pym said.

“We don’t have time to screw around,” she argued. Meaning, screw around getting some random thief up to speed.

Frustrated, Pym started to raise his voice again. “Hope, please, this is a—”

“He is a criminal. I’m your daughter.” She was getting hot, too.

“No!” Pym shouted. In the silence that followed, they glared at each other and Scott wished he was anywhere else. Even prison. Then Hope, the hurt and disappointment plain on her face, left the room.

“She’s right, Hank,” Scott said quietly. “I’m not your guy. Why don’t you wear the suit?”

“You think I don’t want to?” Pym answered. “I can’t. I spent years wearing it. It took a toll on me. You’re our only option.” He paused, his anger all gone and replaced with sadness. “Before Hope lost her mother, she used to look at me like I was the greatest man in the world. And now she looks at me and it’s just disappointment. It’s too late for me. But not for you. This is your chance. The chance to earn that look in your daughter’s eyes. To become the hero that she already thinks you are.” That echo of what Maggie had said to him the day before stung Scott. “It’s not about saving our world,” Pym finished. “It’s about saving theirs.”

“That was a good speech,” Scott said after a moment.

Pym didn’t care about the compliment. He cared about making his point. “Scott,” he said, “I need you to be the Ant-Man.”

And so Scott’s training began. An hour later he was wearing the suit while Pym prepped him and Hope stood by watching, angry but staying with her father because the threat from Darren Cross was bigger than their argument. Scott was at one end of a hallway, Hope and Pym at the other.

“In the right hands, the relationship between man and suit is symbiotic,” Pym said. “The suit has power, the man harnesses that power. You need to be skillful, agile, and above all, you need to be fast. You should be able to shrink and grow on a dime so your size always suits your needs.”

Pym shut the door between them. “Now dive through the keyhole, Scott. You charge big, you dive small, then you emerge big.”

Scott tried it. He mistimed the change and hit the door. “Ow!” He tried it again. “Ow!” And again. “Ow!”

Hope looked at her father as Scott hit the other side of the door one more time. “Useless,” she said.

But she took over part of his training, too, in another area of the basement they rigged up as a gym. “When you’re small, energy is compressed, so when you have the force of a two-hundred-pound man behind a fist a hundredth of an inch wide, you’re like a bullet. You punch too hard, you kill someone; too soft, it’s a love tap. In other words, you have to know how to punch.”

“I was in prison for three years,” Scott said. “I know how to punch.”

She held up a hand like a sparring glove. “Show me.” Scott did. “Terrible,” she commented.

Irritated, he said, “You want to show me how to punch?” He held up his hand like she had. “Show me.”

Faster than he could follow, her right hand snapped out and her fist caught Scott flush on the corner of his mouth. He staggered backward and sank down to the floor, eyes wide. She hit like Peachy.

“That’s how you punch,” she said.

“She’s been looking forward to this,” Pym said with a grin from nearby, where he was tinkering with the Ant-Man rig.

“No kidding,” Scott said. His head was clearing.

“Hope trained in martial arts at a, uh, difficult time,” Pym said.

She gave him an acid smile. “Oh, by ‘difficult time,’ he means when my mother died.”

“We lost her in a plane crash,” Pym explained to Scott.

“It’s bad enough you won’t tell me how she died,” Hope said. “Could you please stop telling me that lie? We’re working here.” She turned away from him and back to Scott. “All right, princess, let’s get back to work.”

Back on his feet and all the way upright, Scott held up his hand again. “Were you going for the hand?” he asked. She just smiled.

Another part of his training was fiddling with the electronics in the Ant-Man suit, and the next day he was resoldering some of the connections in the regulator. He’d started to figure out how it all worked. Pym walked in and Scott said, “You know, I think this regulator is holding me back.”

“Do not screw with the regulator,” Pym said immediately. “If that regulator is compromised you would go subatomic.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that you would enter a quantum realm.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that you would enter a reality where all concepts of time and space become irrelevant as you shrink for all eternity.” Pym spoke slowly, with deep emotion. This wasn’t just a description to him. “Everything that you know, and love, gone forever.”

Scott considered this. “Cool. Yeah. I’m…” He shrugged. “If it ain’t broke…”

Pym had come in to show him the next training stage according to the plan he’d worked out with Hope.

“You’ve learned about the suit, but you’ve yet to learn about your greatest allies.” He pointed at the wall lined with ant farms, each labeled with a different species name. “The ants. Loyal, brave, and your partners on this job.” Pym had Scott suit up and head outside. While they sat on the porch, Scott shrank and entered an anthill in Pym’s backyard. The first ant he got to know was Paratrechina longicornis. “Commonly known as crazy ants,” Hope said over the suit’s headset. “They’re lightning fast and can conduct electricity, which makes them useful to fry out enemy electronics.”

Scott saw one of them in the tunnel. Yellow and orange with a striped abdomen. It came right up to him, and when he knelt it climbed into his lap like a puppy. “Oh, you’re not so crazy,” he said, petting it. “You’re cute.”

A split second later he was covered in hundreds of them. “Aaah!” he screamed, exploding back to normal size and erupting up through Pym’s lawn.

Hope and Pym stared at him.

“That was a lot scarier a second ago,” he said, but he could tell they didn’t believe him. They sent him right back down.

“Okay. Who’s next?” he asked when he was back underground and shrank again.

“Paraponera clavata.”

Those he recognized. They loomed over him in the tunnel, twenty times the size of the crazy ants. “I know. Bullet ants, right? Number one on the Schmidt pain index.” Scott decided he might as well talk to them. “Hey, guys! Remember me from the bedroom?”

When they came after him, he couldn’t help it. He exploded through the lawn again.

Pym and Hope brought him inside for the next introduction. “Camponotus pennsylvanicus,” Pym said as Scott looked through a magnifying glass at the ant in question, which was crawling over an open book on the coffee table. “Alternatively known as a carpenter ant. Ideal for ground and air transport.”

“Wait a minute, I know this guy,” Scott said. He was pretty sure it was the ant he’d ridden on the police car. 247. But now he needed a name. “I’m going to call him Ant-thony.”

“That’s good,” Pym said. Scott couldn’t tell if he was joking. “That’s very good, because this time you’re really going to have to learn how to control him.” He set Scott up with some ants and some sugar cubes. “Tell them to put the sugar in the teacup.”

Scott got to work.