I held Pericles, who had the same weird brain trait I and his sister had, in my arms. He was a handsome little fellow and I will admit to having been overwhelmed at now having two children! Wild stuff. Andromeda had gone through her pregnancy like a champ and now we were flitting around the house.
Andromeda was walking around in her nightrobe and Persephone was managing to toddle her way around. In moments like this, I felt a strange stirring, that this was what I wanted, that I should stay here forever. But inevitably, there was a phone call and with it there was some sort of dire news – Our government in Brazil was faltering, the stitching on our coalition in India was coming apart before we even launched anything, Pakistan was dealing with religious dissent. It was exhausting.
---
"Congratulations Tony," I said, shaking his hand. His wedding had been the largest, most massive and ridiculously ostentatious thing I could imagine. It was all marble and gold and the gaudiest, ugliest thing I could imagine. This is why I had my first wedding outside and my second wedding in a church – The temptation to flashy was part of my nature and I hated it.
Tony was in a nice suit, Pepper was in a beautiful, understated dress that she had clearly picked for herself. Rhodey had scouted and I had hired the wedding planners as our joint wedding gift, so at least Pepper hadn't done most of the work of planning her wedding.
"Congratulations, Pepper," I said sincerely, getting a polite hug in return. "The look was your decision right?"
"Yes," Pepper replied before releasing me. "The look was our decision. We really cannot thank you enough for all of this."
"We could thank them enough," Tony said, "Probably could afford two gold statues of the studs. I think they would like it."
"No thanks, Tony."
---
The first city-wide shield was an experiment and it was driving me up a wall. But finally, finally, on the roof of the Triskelion at three AM in the midsummer air, I turned on the beginning of the future. Energy sputtered, twisted, halted, and then the shield expanded over the city, slowly, slowly – And then it cut out halfway down.
---
President Salcedo and I were drinking coffee, blech but manners, in his presidential suite. Salcedo had been the first of our dominoes, but the table between us had a chess board. He sighed as I took his last piece before his king. I always won chess games against normal people, even when I imposed arbitrary rules on myself. "Brazil and Argentina have been great helps," Salcedo said. "As SWORD money continues to flow into our training academies, I think we will continue to develop Chile into the nation of the future that it deserves to be."
"That's good," I said, taking a sip of coffee, careful not to wince. It was so strong and bitter. "Have you had much resistance?"
"Not yet," he said, putting down his cup. "But we learned from Konstantin's mistakes, just as you suggested. His own secret police have been a large help with infiltration and counter-insurgency training here."
----
The night wind was cold atop the Triskelion, but we were back out here for round two – Stronger energy supply, more distribution, a coordinated network of support power. We turned on the primary unit and the shield began expanding, it made it halfway down. It made it two thirds of the way down.
Then it stopped expanding.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
I cursed.
----
Andromeda came over and gave me a kiss as I listened on the phone, I grinned at her as she walked off. "And, at any rate," the voice on the end said, "You cannot expect me to work closely with the Pakistanis."
"I don't expect you to grab a beer with them," I said, pinching the bridge of my nose. The general we had recruited in India was not the brightest of my little coterie of puppet dictators. "I am saying that when your coup is completed, we will be able to expand the trade between your countries and make you both richer and more efficient." And safer from nuclear exchange, always an important question.
"The Indian people may bow to a general, but I assure you, they will not shake hands with the Pakistani."
"Fine," I said, weary of this argument we'd been going in circles on. "If you can't make it work, you can't make it work. Be poorer for it. I'll let Durrani know. We'll find some other way to shore you both up."
If he lost, we could always go back to the drawing board.
---
The opening of the shield finally happened, spreading over the city, only a few billion dollars over budget and the United States capital was proof against radiation and missile strikes, as well as durable to an orbital drop. I breathed a sigh of relief, no more late nights on the East Coast, I couldn't stand this. Maybe I should've had an employee do it, but I just didn't have the energy.
---
Andromeda and I shared some hot chocolate on the early November night when we were finally sure that India's democratic leaders had gone down in defeat. "We're almost there," she said, wrapping her hands around her mug. "I knew you were the one. Everybody thought I was crazy, but I knew."
Andromeda had been with me from the very start. She'd been with me when I'd put Nicole Arden into the ground. It was funny that I remembered her name, even all these years later – I had killed more people, ordered the killing of better people, I had even killed Obadiah first. But I still remembered the name of a tax accountant for the IRS whose disappearance had gone unsolved all those years ago.
I shook my head. No point dwelling on that now. "Nobody thinks you're crazy now," I said, "To Andromeda Albertson, the greatest recruiter Hydra ever had."
---
"What am I looking at," I asked, my private holographic suite displaying the recurrent surge of energy in Norway.
"Unclear," Joanna, our SWORD agent in Norway, said on my speaker phone. "We think it's a variation on the bifrost, but for there to be this many people… There would have to be hundreds, maybe thousands of people through."
"What's our picture on the ground look like?"
"Whatever's coming through is definitely not human, but looks humanoid. We believe it's the Asgardians."
Why were Asgardians coming to Norway? Hadn't Thor evacuated his people on ship? Had they made it to Norway before the infinity war?
"Oh!" Joanna said, her voice tilting up in surprise. "It's Thor… And… Loki?"
Well, I told myself, at least he was certainly imprisoned again. I didn't have to worry about him. I got on my plane to head to Norway when I got a diversion message – We were all meeting at the United Nations building in New York, it said.
And Loki was going to be there.