Cryptic and Weird
Karla Sofen woke from a place of screams and fire, returning again to the welcoming pains of her own body. She groaned, curling over onto her side and holding the sides of her head in her hands. The massive rumbling of the Helicarrier’s engines vibrated through the bunk and through her, but with the breaks, bruises, and fractures that Lightbright had given her it felt more iron maiden than massage chair. Working her sleep-gummed eyes open, she reached across the mix of sleeping tablets and painkillers scattered over her nightstand, picking up the half-empty bottle of wine to reveal the entirely empty one behind it. She set it down and flopped back into the bed.
What did it take to get a full night’s sleep without dreaming?
Eyes closed again, but wholly awake now, she tried to conjure the dream again in her mind. She remembered gunfire, screaming, smoke. It had to be her fight with Lightbright in the Desert Sword compound. It had made an impression on her body, it stood to reason that it would have made one on her subconscious mind as well. Dreams, in her opinion, didn’t mean nearly as much as Dr Freud used to think they did, but now she thought about it she wasn’t sure that the recollections from her dream represented her fight in the villa after all. She shivered as something passed through her, an echo of something half-remembered, a sympathetic vibration in the pit of her stomach as her moonstone responded.
Her lips twitched as she brought her awareness inwards.
The gravity stone was responding to an awesome release of energy, somewhere close.
She knew only one person that powerful.
Knocking the bottles off the nightstand and onto the carpeted metal floor, she pushed the intercom button on the wall.
Victoria answered.
Awake now, but still under the residual influence of too many prescription drugs and a lot of alcohol, Karla wondered why she wasn’t talking to Norman.
“Ms Marvel, are you up?”
“I think I just felt the Sentry powering up. What’s going on? Are we under attack?”
“The Helicarrier is heading into Kuwaiti airspace in pursuit of him right now. Are you strong enough to fly?”
Karla experimentally sat up in bed and grimaced. “I’m strong enough to fall.”
Victoria’s voice dropped. “Then I won’t tell you to get suited up and prepped right now.”
“It’s not even dawn yet and you’re being cryptic and weird.”
“I wouldn’t tell you to do that because Director Osborn has ordered the Avengers to remain aboard the Helicarrier. I certainly wouldn’t tell you that he’s set the Sentry to destroy the city below us and that you’re the only other person still aboard that Robert might listen to. Is there anything else you need me to not tell you?”
Karla’s head swam. It was too early in the day for her to be dealing with Victoria Hand. “No, I… I think I got it.”
She took her finger off the button.
Groaning from a hundred and one points of stiffness and complaint, she eased her legs out of the bed, drawing the bedsheets up around herself and inadvertently eliciting a corresponding mumble of sleepy protest from the other side of her bed.
She turned and frowned down at what appeared to be a naked H.A.M.M.E.R. trooper in her bed. She had no memory of his arrival, or of the interim, but she could only assume that whatever had transpired therein it hadn’t quietened her dreams either.
“Wake up,” she muttered, swinging a leg back up to poke him in the ribs with a toe.
His eyes fluttered drowsily open. He gave her the most toe-curlingly infatuated smile.
“Morn–”
“Look, I have no idea who you are. I have to leave in, like, ten seconds, and I’m not leaving you alone in my room.”
“But–”
“Ten seconds. You’ve got three before I throw you out. Seriously. I’m not even going to open the window.”
“Wait a–”
“One.”
The guy fell out of the bed, scooped up a pair of combat pants and tried to hop into the leg.
“Two.”
He bundled up the rest of his scattered clothes, wearing one leg of his pants, and hurried for the door.
“I’ll send you some flowers or something,” Karla called after him. The guard standing outside the door just look amused as the trooper stumbled away at speed. “Just as soon as I find out who you are.”
The door closed behind him.
With a heavy sigh, she got out of bed.
The bedsheet fell away, revealing the immaculate black and red of Ms Marvel. Brushing tangled hair from her face, she consciously drew the black mask of her alter-ego across her eyes. Looking through the armored glass of her cabin’s porthole window into the night-dark clouds beyond, she studied her reflection. Lightbright had done more than teach her how badly she needed to learn how to fight. She had forced her to reassess a few of her priorities. She had come to realize that pretending to be Ms Marvel wasn’t enough for her anymore.
She wanted to be Ms Marvel.
And God, how she hated it.
“Time to look like a hero, Dr Sofen,” she muttered to herself, and turned towards the door.
The guard in the corridor was not for her protection. She was an Avenger, but she was Norman’s Avenger, and as long as that remained the case, she would never be free.
With a shimmer of intangibility, she stepped back into the window and through it, exiting the Helicarrier on her own terms to be the hero, or the villain, that she chose to be.
•••
The Helicarrier drew into position, settling into a stable hover five thousand feet above the southern outskirts of Kuwait City where suburbs broke up into open desert, Kuwait International Airport and Abdullah al-Mubarak airbase drawing geometrically perfect lines across the faltering conurbation and blowing sand. With a rattling of armor panels and iron chains, the Helicarrier rolled out its guns. Primary and secondary flight decks hurled F-22 fighter screens and helicopter gunships into its immediate airspace like chaff. H.A.M.M.E.R. marines in clattering field armor rushed to the gunwales to defend against hypothetical boarders. Corridors were locked down. Bulkheads were sealed. They would not be needed. The Sentry was taking care of even hypothetical foes.
And on the bridge, when the heavy doors unlocked to admit Victoria Hand and her escort, the sound that emerged would not have been out of place in a football stadium.
Operatives bound to their desks by their headphones screamed over the top of one another with updates on buildings destroyed, military assets mobilized, units wiped out. Spotters on the lookout deck equipped with high-powered binoculars and specially adapted equipment called out the last known coordinates of the Sentry, the information out of date almost as soon as it left their mouths to be cast to the din.
She displaced a junior officer, shaking her head at the ridiculously avoidable crisis they all found themselves dealing with and sat down at the central workstation, accessing a computer and immediately authorizing the prompt to transfer data from her smart glasses to the larger console.
There had been rumors of a secret base program circulating around S.H.I.E.L.D. even when she had still been working in the New York station as an accountant. After her searches, with full access to all of Fury’s files, had turned up nothing she had filed it away as just another myth of the kind that all clandestine organizations inevitably generate over time. Like the Roswell grays, Area 51, and Montezuma’s treasure.
Suffice to say, neither Norman Osborn nor the Sentry had any clue where Iceberg was. But now that she had proof that it existed, Victoria Hand intended to find it. She was a S.H.I.E.L.D. accountant, after all. Ordinarily that was leveled against her as an insult or a joke.
Well, today it was going to save a city.
And possibly her job.
She looked up as one of the radar crew reported another building destroyed. They were lucky that the Sentry had started in downtown. The buildings there were taller, and more densely packed, but at that time of the morning they were unlikely to be fully occupied. If the Sentry had attacked just two hours later when everyone was at work then Victoria would have been looking down on a massacre. “We should send in Ares and Hawkeye,” she yelled over the din. She suspected it was hopeless, but she had to try. “With a full H.A.M.M.E.R. division and the Helicarrier brought in to provide close support.”
“Do you really expect any of that to do the slightest good against the Sentry, Ms Hand?”
Norman Osborn strutted the main deck with his hands in his pockets and a smile on his face, like a second term president at the peak of his powers, all his enemies vanquished, and owning the party conference stage.
“We did this, sir. We have to do something!”
“What does it look like I’m doing, Ms Hand?” He waved grandiloquently towards the lookout window. “We’re letting the Sentry take out the trash for us. And once he’s worn himself out a little bit, then we’ll let Ares off the leash and bring him in. We’ll tell everyone that the Sentry went mad and turned against us. Everyone will buy it. I mean, it’s not as if Stark never lost control of Scarlet Witch and left the world to wake up to Eric Lehnsherr as their king, is it?” His laughter set Victoria’s teeth on edge. The bridge staff, in the midst of that much chaos, made a point of pretending they could not hear. “Can you imagine, Ms Hand? Putting a power-mad fanatic like that in charge of anything? Setting the Sentry loose on the Middle East is nothing compared to what the people of the world are going to be unconsciously braced for. We could even blame it on the Contessa and Desert Sword. We’ll say it was Raazer, corrupting the Sentry with some kind of magical influence. Book us a black magic expert to say something to that effect on the evening news tonight, Ms Hand. Who do we know?”
“Sir,” said Victoria, trying one more time to break through. “There’s more at stake right now than the evening news.”
“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that, Ms Hand.”
“And if the Void isn’t satisfied with destroying Kuwait City? If Ares can’t stop him?”
Norman gave that doomsday scenario a half-second’s thought. “You worry too much, Ms Hand. I suppose that’s why I hired you.”
It was, indeed, precisely why the director had hired her.
Pushing her glasses back up to the bridge of her nose, mentally resigned to the fact that the director was lost to her for the moment, she dialed out the distractions of the bridge and turned her attention to her computer.
On it, various spreadsheets that she had uploaded from her glasses’ display showed her S.H.I.E.L.D. shipping manifests, invoices, requisition orders. The construction of a string of secret bases could be disguised through shell companies and contractors, if you had the know-how and the resources, but it couldn’t be completely hidden. Given a restricted geographical search area and a finite number of possible locations within it, locating Iceberg, in the end, was not even going to be all that hard. She blinked methodically as she sifted the data, the small movements of her eyelids coupled with the position of her irises controlling the columns on the screen.
“What are you up to over there, Ms Hand?” The director crossed the busy deck towards her, officers scurrying to clear his path. “The look on your face says it’s important.”
“Iceberg, sir. If I can find it. If I can find Lindy, then–”
“It’s a secret base, Ms Hand. You’ll probably find it under the emir’s swimming pool.”
A callsign blinked up on Victoria’s glasses’ overlay. “It’s Washington for you again, sir.”
Osborn sighed. “Do I have one of those numbers that are easy to pocket-dial? Look into it for me, would you, Ms Hand.”
“Sir. They probably just want to know why you’ve deployed a Helicarrier to an allied capital, and what’s attacking the city.” She waited for an answer, silently pleading. “Sir?”
The director whirled away from her, arms spread wide towards the lookout deck windows. The smoky pall of urban destruction was just beginning to darken the thin skies of cruising altitude. “Let the answering machine pick it up, Ms Hand. We still have one of those, right? Obviously, I could tell the president exactly what this is, but I think the message will be that much clearer if he’s allowed to at least try to figure it out on his own. This is what happens, Ms Hand. Cross me, do it in public, try to bring me down, then this is what happens.”
Victoria didn’t know what frightened her more: that her boss was wildly insane or that he meant every word that he said. Or that she just couldn’t tell.
She checked the information in front of her one last time before shutting the screen down. There were a few facts that she needed to confirm on the ground, which was going to require backup, but it was becoming clear to her that she couldn’t rely on Director Osborn’s support in this. If he did really want to see the city burn in order to spite his prosecutors then there was as good a chance of him shutting her down before she could stop it as there was of him helping her. She couldn’t afford to take the risk. Moonstone was on her way to the city now, but there was no guarantee that she would be successful. Recovering Lindy was still their best chance. The responsibility was Victoria’s, but she couldn’t do this alone. She needed help.
What she needed was the Avengers.
A thought occurred to her.
There might just be someone that the director wouldn’t miss.
She rose from her desk. “Permission to leave the bridge, sir.”
The director looked back over his shoulder and gave her a jagged jack-o’-lantern smile. “Granted. Just be sure to be back in time for the press conference. I’ve scheduled it for eleven.” He turned back to the lookout deck and didn’t wait to see her leave.