One thing that I have to give it to Hydra for. They do not use meal vouchers. As a loyal and dedicated SHIELD agent, (well they probably have capture on sight orders out publicly, and I wouldn’t doubt the Skrull infiltrators and possibly my own Kree sleeper handlers have private kill orders out, but I remain loyal) allow me to express the real issues of working “agents of influence” for a government agency that works on meal vouchers. If you are working to seduce an agent of influence, being someone who is not knowingly an agent for your organization, but a person recruited by and for the target of your penetration that you subvert into betraying their own organization because of their relationship with you and whatever token incentives you offer them, then you need to “wine and dine” them, you need to build a relationship through a large number of social interactions involving food and drink, paying for medical bills for loved ones when they are short, paying for abortions for mistresses when they live in places that will get you killed, cover gambling debts or personal loans of absolutely trivial (compared to the objective), and secure things like tickets to games or concerts that they promised to loved ones and cannot deliver because they “cannot be had”. This is how the game is played. You need to spread a little money around to prove your sincerity as a friend, how you are so loyal to them, so there for them and their needs that it drives home their employer, their family, their nation hung them out to dry because of “the rules” but YOU were there for them, rules be damned.
That makes their betrayal less about what pittance you offer them, and more about a big FUCK YOU to the soulless organization, corporation, and country that took years of their dedication and pissed on it when they needed some loyalty in return. Make note of this boys and girls, your best protection from Hydra, the KGB, and radical political terrorism is good HR policies and socialized healthcare. Since this is America, we don’t do that, and every evil organization in the world has their working headquarters here. The KGB US division used to make so much money it bankrolled half their operations domestically, because they didn’t require receipts or use vouchers for every meal. They wielded money like a weapon, and the Russians never count bullets or bodies. Luckily they couldn’t organize starving mice to eat cheese so they destroyed their own country, so we won the Cold War by virtue of collapsing last.
SHIELD used meal vouchers, if you bought a contact a meal or extended a favour, you had a list of types of contacts and agreed upon prices (all set back in 1974 when Nick Fury wrote the manual and rarely indexed to inflation so it is as bad as you think), and you had to get receipts. Do you know how suspect you look when you have to ask a hooker for a receipt? How suspect you look when you ask a bookie, or loan shark, a black market gun dealer or off books physician for a receipt? The good agents worked around the rules, a lot of them by stealing from bad guys, but down that slope some bad things happened and we got a lot of our rogues by that route.
Hydra came out of WWII with half the loot of Nazi occupied Europe, went on to play East vs West in the Cold War (yes we used them), slid into the gap when the Cold War ended to support all the little tin pot dictators with resources, and exploit the ones whose only resource was legal sovereignty and people no one would miss. Money was not their problem. Hydra came with rings on their fingers, bells on their toes, and paid cash for everything, with enough tip that when they called yes there is certainly a table available, HAIL HYDRA!
I felt bad for Hydra, they played it perfect. They set a perfect honey trap, they read Ronald Sung like a book and tailored this to exploit both his every desire, and his every fear.
My friend, or rather Rondald’s Hydra handler, Marc Connelly, was sitting at a table for four at “The Thousand Dragon Pavilion” which was to Chinese restaurants what a fully loaded F-35 Strikefighter was to a WWI Sopwith Camel biplane. The place looked like a mansion from some Chinese Imperial Court period drama. I was lead under flowering jasmine bows over a wooden bridge over a stream with lazy koi, past beautiful moon faced beauties in traditional costumes who played haunting melodies on traditional instruments so softly it merged with the artfully crafted burbling of the stream to strip away all awareness of the outside world. Everywhere were carved pillars of wood topped with Chinese dragons, white marble walls interspersed with rich red tapestries upon which were ancient poems inscribed in gold thread or watercolours that belonged in museums.
In little grottos surrounded by plants designed not just to provide privacy in sight and sound, but to scent the air in relaxing ways and provide the illusion that each table was its own world. The people in this restaurant had never seen a clothing rack, every single piece they owned had been crafted for them. Every accessory was either a priceless heirloom or masterpiece of a name designer, but the people wore them with the casualness of the truly powerful. They did not dress to impress, they were cloaked in the arrogance that comes with knowing that they could be naked and no one would dare raise their eyes from the ground long enough in their presence to notice.
In the middle of this Marc Connelly should have looked out of place and insignificant, yet somehow that dangerous little dandy had switched his Armani and gangster bling for a quiet somber elegance that turned the welcoming smile on his face into something that should have set every alarm bell Ronald had into overdrive, as that smile had the satisfied contentment of a constrictor snake, seeing its prey already well and truly settled into its coils. Marc knew Ronald, knew his inferiority complex, his greed, his lust for the good things he felt his “greatness” deserved and he was “robbed” of by those who actually succeeded. Ronald would be too numb to notice.
Too bad he got Geralt Lovecraft, Kree-Flayer, defender of humanity and bona fide secret agent. Not that my SHIELD ID matches me, but I do have one.
Marc rose to greet me with a smile as the jade beauty in traditional Chinese dress led me to our table. “Ronald, so glad you could join us. There are some people who are dying to meet you. They are quite impressed not just by the work you have done for us, but by your potential. Yes my boy, they agree with me. They see great things in your future, GREAT THINGS!” His grip was strong, his gaze direct. Marc had always played friendly-but-intimidating to Ronald, knowing that fear and lust were the ways to force him to scuttle about to curry favour with his very great friend, sure that his favour was all the protection from consequence he needed. Time to wiggle a little on the hook to make sure everyone knew they had their little prize and got on with the reeling in.
“Marc, oh my god, who are your friends? Are they criminals? Someone tried to kidnap Anna Kendrick from my lab. With VIOLENCE. They only got stopped because some bystander in red and gold got in the way, like some sort of superheroine or something.” I gushed, tweaking my illusion to make it look like I was sweating. If he paid attention he would note my hand was too big, too strong, and not yielding under his crushing strength. Honestly, I could crush it to paste if I flexed. Since working out with Warpath on a daily basis, my strength is coming back. Not all the way, but it’s getting there. To think a human could impress me with a handshake finger crush was amusing, but skin contact made telepathy less noticeable to the subject as contact through your own nerves was not instinctively felt as a violation. I slid into his mind and saw his amusement.
I would be taken today for indoctrination. I would be taken by the leader of this operation, Lady Viper, and the agent sent by the Hydra Council to deal with the superpowered interference. Someone known only as Kraken. Lady Viper scared and aroused Marc Connelly, but Kraken made the Hydra agent want to wet himself in fear. That was excellent. This was a high-level operation, part of some core strategy of Hydra, and therefore something of supreme importance to SHIELD. They would have someone inside. I just had to let them take me, and sift through the minds they had until I found them.
Marc’s smile was hurt, almost offended. “Sorry about that, for purposes of deniability, someone in middle management decided to contract the snatch out to common criminals, and they doubtless got sloppy and attracted some caped crusading busybody. Honestly, this city is infested with them, but do not worry. Our benefactors have dealt with such pests in the past, and the people you will meet today are certainly not impressed or deterred by someone in fancy spandex with delusions of grandeur.” Marc was happy I lead with that. His surprise was expected to terrify and impress me.
We were seated and made small talk. He stroked my ego and we talked about the lab’s progress. His awareness of everything we had in patent approval and all the research we were doing in corporate or university partnerships proved we had a serious problem with software security and that everything not in the Tempest Shielded stand alone systems was already safely in Hydra labs with higher budgets than our own start up could afford. I let the copy of Ronald’s mind in my head carry the conversation and react to everything, yeah, wearing someone else’s brain as a hat is a Mind Flayer thing, and let me tell you, it is some creepy sort of wolf in sheep’s clothing bullshit. I killed and ate a man’s very being, and wrapped myself up in it for this infiltration. I followed Mind Flayer instinct, but two thirds of me was going to need therapy over it.
Just when Ronald was relaxing, she came.
Marc rose to his feet, then dropped to one knee as the waitress approached with a woman whose beauty could stop a heart. Lady Viper, Ophelia Sarkissian. Black midnight hair covered one half of her face, heavy lidded blue eyes and a full rich set of soft lips gave her the appearance of beauty to match her porcelain white skin. Ronald would not have been able to spot the muscles of an Olympic athlete, and would have seen the way the C cup breasts moved freely under the emerald green silk of her dress worked with golden serpents, slit all the way up one leg to the thigh to allow ease of movement and matching green slippers. Ronald would have known only that she was like sex with feet, moving with the trained sensual power of the most famous hetaireia or courtesans of history. I personally noted that her hair bun served largely to hold the five throwing spikes, that her muscle development pattern was that of an agility-based fighter with a mixed focus on striking and grappling, and that her eye looked upon him with the lazy contempt of a predator for prey already taken. The bare leg had a Hydra blaster strapped to it in a drop holster, also in dark green chased this time with a single golden viper pattern.
She strode to stand before me, looking down at me, and I let Ronald’s illusion go wide eyed and terrified as I worked to slowly scan Lady Viper’s surface thoughts. Serious control, the kind of mental defenses that do not give anything away. Her only give aways were subvocalized thoughts and those were so close to her actions that any benefit to them was negligible. I could crack her mind, but it would take brute force and leave damage behind. This woman was dangerous in a way that gave me a certain amount of pride in the race not my own. This was a peak human. An apex predator without a single genetic advantage, a threat to even theoretically superior races like mine, or genetically/technologically enhanced superbeings. Evil as hell, but inspirational from the standpoint of human potential.
“Introduce us.” Lady Viper said coldly.
Us? I thought for one second.
Marc Connelly rose to his feet and his voice boomed theatrically.
“Ronald Sung, rejoice. You have been found worthy to join the true society, the future of humanity, the eternal brotherhood. Be known to two of the Great Leaders among us. Our team leader, Lady Viper, and her patron, Council member Kracken. HAIL HYDRA!” March shouted, as if we were not in a public restaurant filled with several dozen powerful and influential people who could neither be bribed nor threatened into silence!
Then the air behind Lady Viper shimmered and a figure about a foot taller and wider stood behind her. Kracken. My blood ran cold. I could not sense him! In momentary mental paralysis, the next development made me thankful the maintenance of my illusion was mechanically assisted, or I might have dropped it in shock, the entire restaurant, staff and patrons both, rose as one and shouted back.
“Hail Hydra!”
Lady Viper let Marc Connelly pull back her chair as she sat gracefully and snapped her fingers as waitresses flocked with delicacies to cover the table for the condemned man’s last feast. Kraken pulled back his own chair, and there was no whine of hydraulics, no hiss of pneumatics, nor the creak of pseudomyomer stressing as his power armour closed with delicacy to move the object, and he settled onto the chair, great legs locking into sitting position as if the seat was really taking the pressure of the super dense suit material rather than the suit muscles locking the legs into a sitting position conforming to the chairs geometry.
The Mark XIV did that. It had been common on Kree Heavy Assault Armour since the XII series that fought most of the Brood war. The Mark XIV was the most advanced power armour the Kree fielded during the Nova Crisis, and delivered the spanking that taught the Shi'ar that they needed to progress a long way if they wanted to play empire and the Nova that they needed to militarize fast and across the whole of their economy if they wanted to remain free. It had the power to blast a Nova Fighter out of space, autotargeting, shields strong enough to shrug off my blaster all damned day and not notice, short range teleportation, enhanced the strength of its wearer by a factor of about five, and shielded against gas, nanotech, virus, and telepathy. It was also forbidden by treaty on earth. The reason we let the Inhumans walk away when our little lab rats broke free was simple, since the Treaty of Asgard, we are forbidden from importing any starships, ground attack craft, or power armour into Earth on pain of, well, pain. The Agardians had the power to wipe out the Kree, and when Odin made it clear to the Supreme Intelligence that they would end the home world and empire, along with the Supreme Intelligence itself if we sent anything heavier than people into their sphere of influence (including earth), he agreed. Thus when the Inhumans rebelled and broke free of our control, we had to simply let them.
Now a set of Mark XIV Kree battle armour in Hydra green and gold was settling into the chair across from me. Kraken was a walking treaty violation. I was sitting next to a treaty violation that got enforced by bolts of freaking Asgardian power that could level whole cities, or rated personal visits from THOR.
I was panicking. Knowing you are panicking in no way stops you panicking.
A cultured deep male baritone voice came from the Kraken armour, matching the black skin that showed from the exposed lower face. “Relax Ronald, you have impressed us. Those that thought what you had to offer was simply Anna Kendrick on a platter have been educated as to their mistakes. You have a great future ahead of you. A future in Hydra. Oh don’t worry, you will get to enjoy miss Anna as your most dedicated follower. We reward our people well, but we also take pains to make sure they are indeed our people. Eat up Ronald. You have a long and rather hard night ahead of you.”
At this point I wished Kree had a religion, because praying would have been nice right about now. The Mind Flayer in me was terrified as always of the unreachable, unreadable. The Kree in me was terrified because I was sitting right beside one of our superweapons that would rate a nuclear level response from Asgard. My inner SHIELD agent was quietly even more terrified. It was the voice you see. I recognized it. It was familiar to any SHIELD agent after all. Nick Fury’s voice.
I reached down and began to shovel food into my mouth mechanically, watching as Lady Viper seemed to use my terror as spice to her meal, but what shattered the panic in my brain was watching Kraken remove his helmet to expose a familiar face, but not Nick Fury.
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Kraken was Jake Fury. Nick Fury’s younger brother, and SHIELD’s greatest failure.
With the helmet off, I might have taken a crack at reading Fury if I had ever tried telepathy against a Mark XIV. I had the training in all Kree hardware put into me by the Supreme Intelligence when it indoctrinated me as a clone, but it isn’t like it included questions like “does the armour without the helmet have the ability to sense telepathic intrusion attempts?” That is really frigging important right now. I know I could get in, but I am surrounded by Hydra, everyone is Hydra. This facility could well be hardened and filled with antipersonnel and anti material weapons of advanced degree. If I set off an alarm, I would not get out of here alive. I would have to think my way out of this one.
Jake Fury. Nick Fury’s younger brother opposed US entry into WWII. He wasn’t a Nazi sympathizer, being black he really didn’t like Nazi’s in general, but he also didn’t see how the US or the power structures of Europe at the time were worth defending either. He entered the war eventually, but never was the natural soldier Fury was. He drifted into covert ops and took to them like a maggot to fresh meat. He had been part of SHIELD since its foundation, but never the hard charger his brother Nick was. In time Nick used his growing disaffection as a lure for those who wanted to infiltrate SHIELD.
It backfired. Jake Fury was sent on a mission to acquire a powerful magical item called the Zodiac Key. It recognized his inner darkness and both accelerated the fall that was probably inevitable and gave him the power to strike back at his brother Nick and the organization that he saw as discarding him. He became the villain Scorpion, and was thought to have died attempting to kill Nick Fury. Now I find him wearing the armour of Kraken, a piece of Kree Hardware that should have been smitten by literal gods simply for existing on this planet. I was doomed, and my food was really pretty good. I mean, really good. I decided if I was going to die, I would eat least eat well. I was over twice as dense as a human, from a much higher gravity homeworld. I needed a lot of food. I was in a death trap, I was sitting next to a divine artillery target, I was surrounded by enemies that would enslave me if I fooled them, and use me as a lab rat if I didn’t, and I was hungry. One of those I could fix.
Jake Fury was leading the conversation.
“You know Ronald, we have a problem. All of humanity, not just Hydra. It is superhumans, like that chick in the red spandex who shit-canned all our bargain basement thugs. Normal people like you and I just can’t compete with them.” Jake said, unironically sitting in a piece of military hardware from the Kree Empire that could walk through a US tank division and win. Across the table Lady Viper snorted.
Jake Fury smiled at her and bowed.
“I stand corrected. Lady Viper here, I recruited and trained her myself, can go toe to toe with most superheroes and hold her own. I have a piece of alien technology here that was left by a group of would be conquerors a few thousand years ago and left when they tucked their tails between their legs and got chased off, but for most humans, a super powered mutant or magical freak is something they have no chance against. That is a problem, and you Ronald, are part of a solution.” Jake went on.
My panic started to dim, and it hit me what he said. Left by aliens thousands of years ago. This Mark XIV was PRE TREATY! Odin wasn’t blasting it, Thor wasn’t hunting it, because Asgard already knew about it and it was covered by the grandfather clause. It was already on earth when the treaty was signed and therefore legal to use. I was not going to be nuked from orbit by gods. I was surrounded by enemies I dared not attempt to mind read with Kraken sitting next to me in Mark XIV armour, about to be taken and subjected to Hydra mental conditioning, again, only this time with a body hidden by illusion, and by Nick Fury’s traitor younger brother. Nick Fury’s dead younger brother who was now no longer Scorpio the magically enhanced supervillain, but had stolen the Kraken armour and assumed his identity within Hydra. How the hell had that happened, and why didn’t SHIELD know about it?
I was still screwed. Still in a trap, but not about to be nuked, and as a supposedly fat man, I could really eat my feelings right now. Lady Viper now took over the conversation, the silk glove over Kraken’s iron fist, carrot to his stick.
“You see Ronald, your Invictus Life teammates are on the verge of making true human enhancement possible. Imagine it, a world where normal soldiers could be given the power to compete with superbeings simply by implanted technology? First soldiers, then normal people. Eventually, all humanity could live as super beings. Imagine the future for a humanity unchained from its limits, united in purpose under the leadership of Hydra, able to live as gods upon the earth! You Ronald, you will be a part of making that future happen, and you will be among the elite of Hydra!” Lady Viper purred as she stroked Ronald’s arm. Oh she was good, his mind was following her vision and going all the right places for a good pawn. He would have been their good little Hydra drone.
Unfortunately, I knew what their future looks like. Chitauri took that path. They were a race of lizardpeople who walked the path of cybernetics similar to the Star Trek Borg and ended up being taken by Thanos the Mad Titan as his personal army. The path Hydra offers is not that of gods upon the earth but of insects in a hive, each one tailored and programmed to its function without any capacity to think of resistance. It is a dead end that ends in a race of expendable and infinitely replaceable drones for the imperial ambition of those who control, but are not implanted with, the technology. Honestly, if it wasn’t for the power of Thanos protecting them, the Kree or Asgardians would have wiped them out already as a proximal threat to the civilized races. Hydra’s dream was to make us a copy of that gruesomely terrible result. How about no?
I turned to her and let Ronald’s pathetic need to please her show. “Yes! I can see it! Invictus Life has no vision, they only seek to make broken soldiers equal to what they used to be, to help cripples walk, blind to see, they stop at normal human when we could seek to make people so much more!” I let him rant with the fever of a new convert, even tailoring the illusion to show some rice flying from my mouth as I spoke with my mouth full like the mannerless idiot Ronald had been. I pretended to not notice the smug look that passed between Kraken and Viper. I also pretended not to notice the injector Lady Viper palmed from inside her rolled napkin (I only got knife and fork for those who failed chopstick 101, but Lady Viper gets pneumatic drug injectors in her place settings).
I heard her voice whisper in my ear as she put all her sex appeal into shutting down Ronalds brain, it really was effective on him, but Echo had been making sure even my Kree could keep his mind on the job, so I mostly noticed the cold hiss and bite of the pneumatic injector touching my arm and sending a powerful paralytic into my system.
I will admit to having a bad few seconds as my tentacles tried to follow Mind Flayer reflex and attack Viper, while my mind wanted to reach out and blast everyone around me with enough psionic force to lobotomize the unskilled, stun the psionically trained but unpowered, and see if the Mark XIV heavy combat armour psionic shields were functional without the helmet. Luckily my SHIELD operative human mind managed to shut it down before attacking and my Kree fell back upon the conditioned training to use our wonderful organs to identify and detoxify any chemical agent encountered. I can’t get drunk, can’t do any drug for kicks, and forget pain medication, but poisoning a Kree is like trying to water an ocean. Pointless.
The real problem was keeping my tentacles, which are not accounted for in my illusionary body out of the way while I was being carried to the stretcher, and using my telekinesis seamlessly to make my apparent weight match Ronald, not a frigging quarter horse like my superior density naturally would be.
Hydra conditioning as a Kree sleeper agent was painful but ignorable as it was a bare percentage of the real thing Kree use on their own clones to train. I hadn’t expected my enhanced Mind Flayer mind to be the issue. The problem was I had a whole lot more mind for the machine to affect and while yes I could and did suppress the effects it hurt like you would not believe. There was none of the automatic feedback controls of the Kree unit, this was something that we gave to the Nazi’s designed to ‘almost work’ and keep them following a failed technology to hide our successful experimentation. For them a few successes out of hundreds of burned out minds was fine, so they really didn’t improve it much. What they did made it more targeted and stronger, not less brutal or invasive.
I really want a strong word with the idiots who thought Hydra and the Nazi’s were a good idea. I wanted to scream, I wanted to kill everyone there. That would fail my mission to protect Invictus Life and the good people trying to heal all those broken by war, by accident, or by disease. That would fail my mission to infiltrate Hydra and find my SHIELD contact to alert them that humanity was under attack by the Skrull. Plus, with a Mark XIV armour suit (granted only on a human) added to the whole power of what had to be a Hydra command base there was no guarantee I was getting out alive, I had no choice but to writhe in silent agony as ham fisted idiots shot power into the most sensitive nervous system in the known galaxy, blazing raw power along nerves so sensitive that I could read the most minute impulses on a comatose turtle or half formed infant in a womb across the room.
I wasn’t faking the sweat anymore. This sucked. This sucked hard and long.
Honestly, killing my way out was looking like my most serious sexual fantasy not related to my possible future mother-in-law.
Say what you will about Mind Flayers, their information processing powers are the informational equivalent of Kree physical adaptation. I pulled the information from the Hydra indoctrination enough to fake responses perfectly, mapping the decision trees and pulling out a lot more about their organization and resources than they probably thought they were giving away. In order to distract my mind from the pain, and honestly boredom as this process was so brute force it was like trying to download the entire Lord of the Rings extended edition series through a telephone modem using a 1990’s era dial up access. Boredom and pain are a terrible combination, but tentacles are the cure for almost everything.
Like the phone company, I reached out and touched someone.
I touched Bob the Hydra Agent who felt terrible about doing this to me, but secretly wanted to tell me that the health insurance of Hydra made it all worthwhile. Bob had a daughter with a degenerative nerve condition that his various employer’s insurance in the past cheerfully refused to cover as a “pre existing condition” per the letter of the law. Hydra does not care about the law, so just treated her with stolen medical tech as part of his benefits package. Bob was a decent guy, willing to kidnap and torture people because at least his employer cared about their people, and looked after them and their families no matter what the letter of the law or collective agreement stated. They also had dental, optical, parental leave, and a scholarship program that didn’t just cover post graduate work, but any form of advanced training for athletics or scholastic excellence from elementary school to post graduate.
As much as it pains me to say this, Bob would have to live. Bob was an example of good HR policies making evil the better choice for your family. Corporate America take notice, when evil organizations like Hydra can legitimately be the good guy in treating common workers like Bob, you need to fix things.
Len and Oleg were self serving assholes who really liked hurting people, but needed an external authority source to make them feel like good people. Don’t think this makes them any different than most police officers, and no small number of petty bureaucrats, drug dealers, pimps, and street thugs, which were morally almost indistinguishable. SHIELD screening was such a stone bitch because they knew better than to allow such people in.
Then there was Darcy. Darcy was a very angry person. Darcy was quite over armed for a lab tech, four knives, a slap cap taser, a monowire garotte in addition to her Hydra pistol. A very damaged woman who came up through the street gangs like a demon clawing her way out of hell and was picked by Hydra as a diamond in the rough too intelligent to be wasted in street crime when she had the potential to be a serious weapon. Too bad Natasha Romanov found her first. She was a SHIELD operative, trained by the Black Widow not like I was, by the book, but following her own somewhat darker methods. Darcy was going to kill seven of her coworkers. She had budgeted herself seven, no more, no less. Who made the list rotated day to day, based on their interference in her mission, violation of her personal space, and general moral bankruptcy. She was a long term penetration agent, set in place to monitor the cyber enhancement schemes of Lady Viper, lately focused on Invictus Life, and now quietly terrified that Jake Fury was not only not dead, but sitting in the same room as her wearing the armour of Kraken, an enemy SHIELD was utterly sure was Daniel Whitehall, supposedly busy dying in a hospital bed. Darcy was having a very bad day, and very much wanted to report, but before she could she had to finish brainwashing a complete waste of skin called Ronald Sung, new Hydra recruit, traitor to his friends, and would be rapist, currently number seven on her personally allowed kill list.
Success. I had found my SHIELD operative. Plus, her connection was to Black Widow whose own power within SHIELD was separate enough from the usual chain of command to be a common feature of office bitching. She was not someone who could be easily gotten to my Skrulls or ordered off an investigation by anyone they got to. Of course, there is a very good chance she might be able to take me down if she knew about my true identity and abilities. She was a low power superheroine with a record of taking down people so far out of her league that they should have been able to ignore her. I wouldn’t. I really didn’t want to end up in a SHIELD lab being taken apart to see how I work. So, Darcy I wanted to follow up with. Natasha Romanov, I didn’t.
That made me wonder. The thugs who got taken out were beaten to a pulp by a woman in red and gold. The Black Widow wore black with gold wrist guards. Red and gold didn’t sound like her. Who the hell was she? I mean, my life was complicated enough already.
Finally it was done.
They pulled the helmet off of me and release the heavy metal shackles on my wrists. Prior to Warpath’s weight training, I wasn’t sure I could have broken them. Now I just wasn’t sure I could have broken them quickly enough not to get shot by Kraken. I am confident I could use my telekinesis to stop Hydra blasters. I am pretty sure I could handle a Kree blaster if the shot was from at least twenty yards away, fifty would be no problem at all (the bend radius was the issue). The Mark XIV on the other hand scared my blue ass white again. I don’t really know if I could do enough with them to stop it. Sitting clamped in a chair the answer is definitely no. Not that I was scared or anything. Just, well, my SHIELD operative training and Kree warrior training labelled trying to break out mid programing as a good way to die gloriously for the Kree Empire.
Lady Viper smiled down on me as I looked up at her. She offered her hand and helped me rise. There is zero doubt. Lady Viper could kill Ronald bare handed, even if he caught her by surprise. I let his conditioned mind take control of my reactions and worked my own adjustment on my active illusions.
“How do you feel Ronald, now that you are one of us?” She asked, her face a mask of compassion and concern but her gaze the cold flat stare of a viper.
“Hail Hydra!” I shouted, and everyone in the room echoed it, with a shout, save Jake Fury who simply grinned, and Lady Viper who smiled softly and replied simply “Welcome to the family.”
Marc Connelly walked me out, shaking my hand in the parking lot as he got into his valet provided Mercedez. I walked away towards the parking lot for mere mortals that I had left my own car in, Ronald being ashamed to drive a Hyundai to a place as fancy as the Thousand Dragon pavilion would never have showcased his poverty before his betters. I was approaching my car when my exhausted and battered telepathy warned me of the incoming attack. I had a moment of paralysis where I wasn’t sure if I had been detected by Hydra and was being tested for my humanity by their powered agents, so did not dodge or deflect it as I could have.
That would prove costly.
I felt what felt like a freight train hit my upper back and blast me into my Hyundai hard enough to shatter my windows and dent my door. Had I been human, without my Telekinesis to automatically shield and my Kree physiology to absorb the impact, I would likely have several broken ribs and mild concussion.
“Ronald Sung, you spineless traitor. It wasn’t enough for you to sell your co-workers out, now you sold your soul to them as well. I am going to ask you questions, and you will answer them. Every time you refuse or lie, I will break a bone.”
The voice was pure mother England, and female. I spun to face her and blocked a punch that came in too fast to dodge. Superhumanly fast and strong. I noted the surprise in her masked face that must have matched my own surprise.
She leaped back to create distance and dropped into a fighting stance, I did the same, both of us clearly trying to figure out what we were dealing with.
“You are not Ronald Sung, who are you imposter, which of Hydra’s tools?” She hissed and moved to close carefully.
She was right, I was not Ronald Sung. And I had been so terrified of running into the Black Widow that I had made the mistake of being scared of the wrong spider.
Squaring off with me now was Spiderwoman, Jessica Drew. Long black hair, red and gold costume with white and black webs under her arms to allow her to glide between leaps because flying spiders are clearly a good idea. As talented as the Black Widow in hand to hand certainly, but according to SHIELD intel, able to lift about seven tons, shoot bio-electric blasts, wall crawl like Spiderman and with reflexes faster than the best trained humans. Her father had gotten involved with Hydra and used experimental spider DNA and radiation on her in the womb to artificially duplicate the powers of Spiderman. Hydra had taken and trained her, given her to Taskmaster to train in marital arts and turned her into one of Hydra’s deadliest weapons. Somehow when she was sent to assassinate Nick Fury, he not only convinced her not to kill him, but to turn against her Hydra conditioning. If she was a normal human that would be impossible, but extraordinary minds and non-human ones didn’t really take fully Hydra conditioning. She was at least one of those.
I was mentally and physically exhausted, I was blocks away from a Hydra base, and I was facing a bonefide superheroine who was willing to break as many of my bones as it took to find out my involvement with Hydra. My evening just kept getting better.