Freezer Burn (49/50)
Last two parts are one chapter, same as previous.
Freezer Burn
Genfic; PG-13-ish
Avengers/Captain America ensemble
previous parts | ao3
“This isn’t fun,” Clint said casually as he nocked his arrow. “Any chance you can move over a few inches so I can draw without putting my elbow in your ribcage?”
The invasion plan, carefully worked out over weeks of strategy meetings involving people who understood the fluid nature of battle because they’d been in their own, had not only not survived first contact with the enemy, it hadn’t even gotten within half a kilometer of where they’d anticipated first contact to be. SHIELD had presumed that HYDRA would upgrade the air defense Minyar had had since the start of the Cold War to protect this most secret and dangerous of bases, which had been correct, but they’d been working off faulty schematics and so they had been picked up by radar and fired upon almost a klick farther out than they’d believed possible from the maps the Pentagon had given them. Things had only spiraled from there.
“Not unless you would prefer to have your elbow hitting lead,” Steve replied, shifting the shield as much as he could so that it was still deflecting bullets away from Clint while giving himself a modicum of protection. They were currently hiding behind a still-smoking Lada sedan that had been turned on its side by an explosion; they were covered from the west by the car, but Steve's shield was their only coverage from the north, where the bullets were coming from now. “You could have gone with Bruce.”
Bruce, miserable because of a cold and tired of the repeated questions about whether he knew what he was supposed to be doing at all points and where his rally points were, had taken the sudden changes of plans badly and transformed right on the Helicarrier flight deck, jumping off the side after a running start and without a parachute.
"I don't think Bruce was in the mood for a traveling companion," Clint replied, taking one knee so that he could angle up better.
"Watch the elbow," Steve warned, since Clint's new position put him at risk of jabbing Steve in a much more sensitive area. With his free hand, he reached down to try to change the channel on his radio, which had stopped receiving at some earlier point during their mad dash from where their jet had crash-landed to where they thought the science complex would be.
Clint loosed the arrow and stood up carefully. "Rogers family jewels remain undamaged," he reported. "But you can probably stop fiddling with the radio; it's got a bullet in it."
Steve's reply was drowned out by the explosion across the street as Clint's arrow detonated, blowing up the house they'd been hiding behind previously and from which they'd been chased by a detachment of HYDRA troops. They nodded at each other and started running south again.
The problem -- a problem -- with HYDRA's air defense perimeter being so much larger than anticipated was that SHIELD had been forced to hit the ground much sooner and then fight their way to what passed as downtown Minyar on foot. Which in turn meant a costly, chaotic battle over largely open ground, since Minyar was both small and spread out, and the loss of precious resources (to wound, death, destruction, or confusion) before they could be effectively used. The fog of war had rolled in early and thick; Steve had no way to directly communicate with anyone other than Clint, no way to keep track of the rest of the Avengers or of the main ground element or to request air support or, god forbid, a medevac. Clint had joked a few leapfrogs ago about how this must have been like fighting was back in ‘the old days,’ but it really wasn’t. Steve had never had to command or control a large group without a radio and, when it was just the Commandos, they’d worked together for so long that even if things had gone to hell, they’d know where the others would be. The Avengers had just been reunited and Steve had no idea where his teammates were, what they were doing, or how they’d react to a prolonged communication breakdown when they were none of them so close that they could intuit the others’ actions.
It could have been worse, Steve knew as he ducked instinctively when a MiG screamed overhead. It could still get worse. HYDRA had vastly superior numbers and it had the AIM mechas that served as a terrible, terrifying force multiplier even though many SHIELD units carried the experimental EMP weapons that would short out whatever they were aimed at without blacking out the neighborhood. There had already been casualties from fighting the mechas - the experimental weapons were experimental, not always working as intended and not everywhere they needed to be - and the HYDRA troops’ willingness to die en masse to secure their goal meant that, very often, they did both.
But the simple fact was that sometimes numbers were necessary but not sufficient and SHIELD’s ground forces were far superior to HYDRA’s while the Russian Air Force was outclassed and outmatched by the multinational air support Fury had cobbled together and then put under SHIELD control. SHIELD transports were not flying with impunity - the ground-based air defense was still formidable and not yet completely destroyed - but they were flying regularly and there were fewer and fewer MiGs and Sus to harass them.
They got to the next structure large enough to hide them - a panel truck with no markings, it was possibly a HYDRA vehicle - and caught their breaths for a second before realizing that nobody was actually shooting at them at the moment. Clint, breathing hard but unlabored, smiled.
“Let’s keep going,” he said, gesturing with his chin in the direction they needed to go. “We’ve still got a couple of klicks and you know Natasha hates it when we’re late.”
Natasha had come to Minyar on her own, entirely so that she could get a feel for how things were on the ground; Fury had dropped any pretense that she wasn’t fully part of his plans by the time they’d crossed into Russian airspace. When it was all over, Steve could ask how much of the extended official estrangement had been planned and how much had been necessity, but right now his priority was getting to the rendezvous point.
“Your radio still working?” he asked as they jogged. “I’d kind of like to know what is going on everywhere else.”
A blue-green blast of one of HYDRA’s anti-aircraft artillery lit up the sky to their left. The offensive had started at 0315 local time (original launch time had been 0330) but it was still pre-dawn and every weapon firing, blaster or bullet, still shone like a beacon in the slowly lightening gloom. It had been a three-quarter moon and it had never gotten truly dark, even in the outlying areas; there had been an insignificant tactical advantage to waiting for a new moon. HYDRA had night optics, too.
“There’s a triple-A battery over there,” Clint offered sarcastically. “Do you want mine? I don’t need to hear all that shit.”
The radio channels were full of chatter - and full of people telling everyone else to shut up. Steve’s radio had been programmed to find all of the command networks in addition to the Avengers’ own channel, but he could also tune into the various unit nets in case he found himself aligned with a platoon, as had happened in the past. Clint’s had a slightly narrower range of access, but it would get him what he needed. Except…
“I don’t know how to reprogram my earpiece,” Steve admitted. He’d known how to do it with the old radios, but the new ones, with their fancier technology, still confounded him even after the training sessions and using them in the field for the last few months. Corrales or Jablonsky had always fixed whatever he’d needed done with them out in the field. “They have to marry or something.”
Clint barked out a laugh. “They have to mate,” he corrected, holding out his hand for Steve to hand him his earpiece, which he did. “This is the twenty-first century; we believe in enthusiastic pre-marital sex. Especially for our electronics.”
Steve frowned. “We believed in it in the twentieth century, too. People and electronics.”
Clint handed back his earpiece. When Steve looped it behind his ear and pushed the little part in, he could hear Tony griping about something.
“Stow it, Tony,” he barked.
“Finally,” Tony replied, completely unfazed. “Where the hell have you been?”
Steve knew Tapper was on the channel and if anyone had been trying to reach him, Tapper would pass it on. And he did, informing him that the support unit that was supposed to be meeting them at the northwest entrance to the HYDRA complex - Corrales and his team, which now included what used to be Steve’s team - was delayed, having to move the same kind of extra distances that Steve and Clint were facing.
“We’re even further out,” Steve told Tapper. “ETA twenty at minimum.”
“I can fix that,” Tony offered. “I’ve got your location now.”
Steve did not point out that Tony could have found them from Clint’s radio all along because it possibly hadn’t been obvious and also Iron Man had had his own to-do list. And Tony hadn’t been in action for almost a year and was rusty, although there was no positive reason to say so aloud.
“What the sitrep for Hulk and Thor and the Widow?” he asked instead.
“Killing time waiting for you guys,” Natasha replied, an edge to her voice indicating that she was not passing the time idly.
“I am engaged,” Thor replied, a little loudly. Which indicated nothing because, bless him, Thor was still not quite sure how radios worked. “And the Hulk is having a fine time if the flight of mechanical creatures on the eastern horizon is any indication.”
Tony appeared - visible mostly by his repulsors - low on the horizon, moving fast toward them. They stopped, looking around to make sure they wouldn’t get shot at while they waited, and Tony landed in a gust of wind and dust.
“Secure your toys,” Tony ordered in the Iron Man’s flattened voice. “Present your belt hooks and get ready for a subsonic wedgie.”
It was an old joke - Tony had done exactly that to both Steve and Clint early on, before they’d agreed that Clint’s quiver was attached securely enough to be used as a handle and Steve was secure enough in his masculinity to be carried by an arm around his waist - and they both rolled their eyes at it. Instead, Clint turned to let Tony grab hold of the quiver straps and Steve stepped up on to Iron Man’s left boot and away they went.
The airspace was crowded - Steve fought the urge to flinch when an RAF Tornado flew overhead low enough that he could feel the edge of the hot exhaust - and, after the second quick dodge around friendly jets, they flew low enough that Steve could see the various battles below in detail; they were more concentrated and complicated the closer they flew to the underground bunker city that was the Minyar base.
“Hold on to me,” Tony told Steve a moment before he loosened his grip to free his left hand enough to use the palm blaster to fire upon a trio of mecha spiders pinning a SHIELD unit down at an intersection. There was no real good place to hold on - Steve could always get a rise out of Tony by demanding that he add handles to the armor - and so he was forced to tighten his embrace and cling like the damsel in distress he was.
When they landed, Natasha, definitely not a damsel in distress, was waiting. She’d chosen a spot very close to one of the complex entrances, a reinforced concrete tunnel with heavy blast doors protected by half a dozen HYDRA troops and two of the small spider mechas. The entire area was surrounded by chain link fence of very recent vintage, a detail that had boggled everyone when they’d seen it on satellite because it wasn’t enough to stop even the least prepared assault team - anyone with a pair of bolt cutters would get through - and Minyar was a company town now, so everyone already knew what lay beyond. It was remote enough to not get casual visitors and with an army garrison close enough to dissuade any wanderers; who was the fence supposed to keep out?
“About time,” Natasha said, blowing the hair out of her face with a sharp puff out of the corner of her mouth. She’d been leaning up against what might have been a guardhouse or a supply shed, something that pre-dated the chain link fence and had no function since its installation. “Where’s the rest of the gang?”
Steve told Tony to get back in the air and find Corrales and his team, since while the Avengers could certainly breach the complex on their own, the clearing and holding would require extra manpower. And then he radioed Thor again, phrasing his request somewhere between suggestion and order because he might be the leader of the Avengers, but Thor was still the crown prince of Asgard and sometimes a little diplomacy went a long way.
“Are we in anywhere else?” Steve asked Tapper, since even if he’d had his radio the entire time, there was too much going on to be able to keep track.
“Foxtrot Team is in at Point Sierra,” Tapper replied a long moment later. “Which is three hundred yards southeast of Point Zulu.”
The extra information was necessary because they’d only assigned codenames to the five entrances they’d known about; Steve wondered where Points Uniform and Tango were, unless they’d skipped Tango to avoid confusion.
“What kind of defenses are they encountering?”
The complex itself was subterranean, a little more Hall of the Mountain King than what HYDRA had built in Detroit. According to their intel, the tunnels dated back centuries, although the original modernization had taken place when Steve had been a child. (“So it’s all still older than dirt,” Clint had joked.) There were no blueprints, just a couple of schematics drawn up from the recollections of defectors during the Cold War that didn’t quite correspond to each other and were forty years old at best. The overall layouts were where the most obvious discrepancies had been; the defectors had all spoken clearly and exactly about the labs where they had worked.
Once SHIELD was fully present, Helicarrier and all, they had the technology to see through the mountains and the ground to generate maps of the complex, what they’d done in Detroit the other year, but those maps would take time to render and would only show them where to go and not what awaited them once they got there. Which meant that what the Russians had done since Stalin had blessed this place and what HYDRA had done more recently were giant unknowns that made everyone uneasy. The place had been built for warfare of the dirtiest kind, to be protected at all costs against enemies imagined and real.
“Troops with blasters and-“ Tapper cut himself off. “Shit, we’ve lost them. Hold on, Cap. You got a second to hold?”
Thor was just landing, but Tony hadn’t either reported in or returned. “I’ve got a second.”
Steve used a sharp whistle to draw Clint’s attention from where he’d clambered up on top of the small building’s roof and was watching Point Whiskey, the entrance the Avengers were supposed to use. Once he had it, he used hand signals to request an update.
The half-dozen guards were now fifteen, was the answer, and they’d brought out some heavier firepower than the rifles they’d been holding when Steve had seen them last. He snuck a peek around the corner of the building and saw what looked like one of the blaster cannons, the medium kind they used for ground-to-ground defense and not the massive spotlight-sized ones they used for ground-to-air. A quick look back up at Clint, who nodded. It would have to be taken out before they made any move toward the doors.
Steve indicated that Clint should wait, then radioed Tony, asking how far away Corrales and his people were.
“Three hundred meters down the road and closing,” Tony replied. “I’m playing tail-end Charlie and cleaning up the last of the mess.”
If it weren’t so loud, Steve would have probably heard the approach, but the air was full of fighters and the ground was full of war and so he sent Natasha to flag Corrales and his team down and bring them around the way that would keep them off the road and, perhaps, out of sight.
“Tapper, my second is going to have to be put down,” Steve warned. “If you’ve got intel before we go in, I need it now.”
Steve gestured to Clint to wait until Natasha returned before taking out the blaster cannon.
“Pressure plates,” Tapper replied, voice carrying his shock and sadness. “Foxtrot got taken out by bombs set off by pressure plates inside the entrance. Can’t tell you more than that right now.”
Foxtrot had been led by Gallivan, a friend of Tapper’s, and a man unlikely to be found anywhere but at the front of wherever his team was going.
“It’s something,” Steve replied, trying to put kindness into his voice without it sounding like pity. “We’ll use it.”
He told Tony to wait where he was, not wanting the unmissable spectacle of Iron Man’s approach to ruin whatever surprise they might still have on their side, then waited for Natasha and Corrales to join him. Corrales greeted him with a nod and, whistling up at Clint, tossed him a radio identical to the one Clint had given Steve. Once Clint was back on radio, Steve passed on the news about the pressure plates, which might or might not exist at this entrance and were undoubtedly not the only trap awaiting them.
“We need a bowling ball,” Steve said. “Anything we can use for that?”
It would have to be something heavy enough for the plates to register the weight - dirt or a canteen wouldn’t be enough - and something they didn’t need to get back.
“I have found something,” Thor offered, turning to go back around to the side of the building.
“He knows what bowling is?” Corrales asked, surprised.
“Girlfriend lived in Cleveland for a while,” Natasha replied with a shrug. Corrales nodded at this apparent sagacity.
Thor returned with a small metal drum. “I believe there is ice inside,” he said, sniffing at the open spout. “It is not cold enough for liquid fuel to freeze.”
Steve smiled. “How’s your bowling arm?”
“I have scored over two hundred points in a single game,” Thor replied proudly.
Everyone chuckled.
“Is there a reason we’re not using the EMP handhelds or just letting me zap everything?” Tony asked.
“Some, if not all, of what we’re about to face has been here since the Cold War,” Steve replied. “I want to do this the old fashioned way because that’s what it’s likely to be. It’s going to be my kind of tech, Tony, not yours.”
“You can blast a hole through the rubble afterward,” Clint offered.
“If I’d known that I was going to be on clean-up duty all day, I’d have packed some housekeeping robots,” Tony replied sourly, but not the kind of sourly that went with him being annoyed enough to ignore orders.
Cutting through the chain link fence in a place still covered by the dawn shadows was easy enough; Corrales lined his men up and Steve told Tony to start flying once he heard the boom before gesturing up to Clint to fire his arrow on three.
“The Avengers plus Alpha Team are a go for Point Whiskey,” Steve told Tapper on the radio. It would probably be their last communication because the radios would not be able to contact the surface from so far underground. They’d be able to talk to each other, but not with the Helicarrier. “On three, two, one… Go, go, go!”
Clint loosed his arrow and it was only a couple of heartbeats before the blaster cannon exploded, taking out most of the guard troops in the process. Steve led the way through the fence and across the open space between the few trees and the doors, now hidden by smoke and defended by the five HYDRA guards still healthy enough to stand. They fell quickly and Tony, approaching on the fly, took care of the blast doors from thirty meters out.
“Right,” Steve said, looking around to make sure they were safe for the moment; they were. “Thor, let’s go bowling.”
Thor ripped the doors aside easily and, with one final judging of the weight distribution in the drum, set it down on its side and pushed, watching it roll true for a moment before standing up and stepping back.
The drum rolled for about ten meters before there was a click and Steve turned and threw up his shield arm as the blast wave hit. It was strong enough to knock him and Thor back a step and Steve felt the heat through his protected uniform pants.
When he lowered the shield enough to look, one glance told him that there was no way anyone on the front end of Team Foxtrot would have survived. The ceiling and walls of the tunnel were charred black and melted plastic and metal oozed down the sides.
“Any chance that’s the only one?” Corrales asked from behind Steve’s left shoulder.
“We shall see,” Thor replied, sounding angry. Offended, maybe. He threw Mjolnir so that it landed just past the darkest spot on the floor and slid, setting off a second and then a third explosion before returning to Thor.
Through the smoke came blaster fire and bullets; the reinforcements had arrived.
The fight through the entrance tunnel and into the complex itself was straightforward, if made more difficult by the smoke and noxious fumes. The pressure plates had been shaped charges, exploding up and out and not down, so there were no craters to navigate and the oncoming HYDRA troops made it very clear by their actions that there were no more bombs left to detonate. And soon enough, there were no more troops to shoot at, either, at least for long enough to do a head count.
“Left or right?” Steve asked Tony. “Do you have the maps yet?”
“No,” Tony replied, “but go left. I can see through enough here and now. There’s nobody coming from the right, which means there’s nothing of interest.”
So they went left, down a corridor and into a waiting fusillade of blaster and bullet fire that Tony flew right through and past because Steve had told him that they needed a better picture.
The HYDRA troops here at Minyar had thus far proven to be somewhat better shots than the ones Steve had encountered the last few months in South America and then in Canada; these weren’t trainees or otherwise wet behind the ears. They even showed some sense of tactical awareness, trying to work their knowledge of their environment to their advantage instead of standing there and shooting at SHIELD until they ran out of bullets or got killed, but in the end it didn’t matter. Steve had fought alongside Corrales and his men for the better part of a year and knew how good they were, knew how good Thor and Clint and Natasha were, and knew that there was no way that they would not be moving on past this obstacle.
“The good news is that there aren’t any more troops on approach,” Tony said in his ear after giving directions. “The bad news is that there are mechas. And they’re not going down on the first shot.”
Tony hadn’t designed the EMP weapons SHIELD was carrying, but he’d modified the design when he’d loaded up the armor and his version was more powerful than the handheld zappers.
“What about the second?” Steve asked hopefully.
“They need a spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down,” Tony replied after a beat, long enough for Steve to take the last right before the final left and he could already hear the sound of blasters on metal and he wasn’t sure who was firing on whom. “Knock ‘em down with the EMPs, then shoot the hell out of them.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Steve could see Clint fiddling with one of the pouches on his quiver. “Works for me.”
They slowed down after the left and were surprised at how large the room Tony was in actually was. After the dark, narrow corridors, an open space seemed like an airplane hangar. Granted, it was an open space with Iron Man getting attacked by a half-dozen giant mecha spiders, but it felt airy, still.
“We should probably help him,” Clint sighed, as if resenting the effort it would involve. “He’s such a baby when he gets beaten up.”
He whistled between his teeth and Corbette, the sniper on Corrales’s team, materialized, EMP weapon in one hand and the SHIELD equivalent of a scatter gun in the other. “We’re going skeet shooting,” he said, gesturing toward the metal ladder than ran up to a rickety-looking metal balcony that in turn ran around the room.
Steve let Thor lead the way for the others, which he did with gleeful aplomb, sending Mjolnir hurtling toward the first spider as he ran full bore, holding out his arm to catch the hammer on its return and then using that momentum to spin gracefully into a vicious overhead attack. The rest of them went about it more prosaically, setting the spiders up so that Clint, Corbette, and Tony could deliver the one-two punches of EMP and good old-fashioned excessive firepower.
“Next!” Thor called out, eyes aflame, even as the last spider mecha had ceased in its death-twitches.
Next was through the doorway on the far side, back into the rabbit warren of claustrophobic corridors with Tony flying enough ahead of them to warn them of approaching dangers.
“We’ve got office space,” Tony announced from a turn ahead. “Looks like the fun kind. I remember those smells from Afghanistan. Tell the delicate to brace themselves.”
Minyar was in many ways the Russian equivalent of Area 51, a place that had built legitimate if secret wonders and was subject to outlandish rumors, but with a much more sinister basis in reality. The stories of Minyar weren’t of aliens and atom bombs; they were of mass graves and human experiments, a macabre place of horror and tragedy. Natasha hadn’t quite been able to hide her revulsion when they’d talked about it privately; Minyar had been a threat that had hung over Red Room trainees: fail us here and we will turn you into something useful to us through other means. The Monster Factory, it had been called.
“They made sure we saw the monsters,” Natasha had told him, not looking up from her brandy snifter. Steve rather suspected she’d lost a friend or a lover to the Monster Factory, but he’d never ask and she’d never volunteer. “Most of them looked quite human at first. But then you’d see their eyes and you knew. I was afraid of things back then, with good reason, but that place… that place was the one thing that truly terrified me.”
Today, though, she hid any lingering terror behind a veneer of irritation and purpose. “None of us are here because we’re delicate.”
“Wasn’t thinking of you, sweetcheeks,” Tony replied airily. “But if you’ve got menthol for your upper lip, I suggest you apply it now.”
The smell wasn’t overwhelming - the eye-watering ammonia fumes were stronger - but it was there and, to Steve’s sense-memory, it was overpowering in its own way. This was every HYDRA lab he’d run into during the war, right down to the metal and glass doors and wire-caged light bulbs and the underlying stink of chemicals that snuck through and around the smell of old bodily fluids that neither time nor ammonia could wash away. The signs might be printed in Cyrillic, but the same dismal mint paint color and creeping shadows were enough to play tricks at the edges of his vision. He was here looking for the Red Skull and these were not the Commandos and Bucky was behind none of these doors.
“Let’s move,” he said aloud, hoping none of the others could hear anything in his voice. “These are empty and the ones we’re looking for will still be occupied. We can come back later.”
The look Natasha gave him said that he’d not been as successful as he’d wanted, but maybe nobody else had caught on.
More corridors, another firefight with another HYDRA troop detachment, a cramped and cluttered battle with two giant mecha cockroaches that trapped them in a corridor with no exit but through their attackers, a wrong turn and then doubling back, and then finally another corridor with brighter lighting, a vending machine, and the familiar sight of HYDRA recycling bins.
“It’s so weird how these make me feel better,” Corrales mused as they passed by a blue bin. “I hate having to recycle at home, my kids are always putting things in the bin without rinsing them out first, my wife always has to remind me to take it out front, but here, here they’re good.”
Here, they also meant that they’d entered the active parts of the Minyar base, the parts HYDRA was concerned with, and they reacted accordingly. They tightened their formation and Tony stopped being quite so cavalier in how far ahead he flew and how informal his reports were. Soon, he couldn’t fly ahead at all because there were regular guards and pedestrian traffic and people going about their work without any concern about the war going on above them on the surface.
“My turn,” Natasha announced, slipping past Steve and elbowing Thor out of the way of a door, which she opened and then closed behind her, emerging a moment later in a HYDRA work suit and a hair kerchief. She gave Steve a quick smile and then moved past Tony, who was closest to the swinging double doors past which they could not travel without being found out.
It was a long three minutes and eleven seconds before Natasha whispered in his ear. “An even dozen guards, two at each entrance for four, two more sets on the second floor catwalks, and two sets of two on roving patrols. Maybe forty civilians, probably unarmed but easy to take if they are. It’s a straight north-south room, catwalks are north-south and east-west and older than you are.”
Steve organized the image in his mind. “Okay, so can we plow straight through or will we need to stop?”
“We’ll need to stop,” Natasha replied, an odd tone to her voice. “But not for the usual reason. This is where they’re working on Extremis.”
Steve looked over at Tony; he couldn’t see his face behind the armor, but just the body language alone was enough that he could imagine Tony’s reaction perfectly.
“What-“ Tony began, but was cut off by Natasha.
“There are eight tanks with bodies inside of them, some in the scab cocoons, some just floating there,” Natasha went on. “They’re all the same body, at least the ones I can see.”
“Mine,” Steve said before Natasha could. He felt sick to his stomach and very dizzy, but he closed his eyes and breathed deeply and the worst of it passed. This had been an option - a threat - for so long that he’d thought himself used to the weight of it. But he wasn’t. He opened his eyes and kept them focused on the floor because he didn’t want to see whatever was on Clint’s or Thor’s or Corrales’s faces or in Tony’s posture. He didn’t need the pity.
“I’m sorry,” Natasha said gently.
“I thought you said I wasn’t a candidate for Extremis,” he said to Tony.
“You’re not,” Tony replied, sounding almost as shellshocked as Steve felt. “But Extremis can be programmed to do anything, at least in theory. Including making someone look like you, although there’s probably something else going on there. It doesn’t matter. We have to get in there to make this all go away.”
Thor took a step toward the swinging doors and Steve looked up and gestured for him to still, which he did.
“I appreciate the sentiment, but that’s not our primary objective and while I’m happy to take care of it en route to that primary objective, we need a better plan than just rolling in and destroying everything in sight.”
“Since when?” Clint asked. “That’s our stock in trade even without the Green Genie along.”
Steve rubbed at his jaw. “We’re here for bigger fish.”
“Bigger fish are on the far side of the room,” Natasha pointed out. “We’ll just be extra-special versions of ourselves to get there.”
Steve sighed and looked over at Corrales, who shrugged. “I’m siding with the dangerous lady if get a vote.”
Tony stood up from where he’d been tinkering with one of his boots. “So you’re completely outvoted and outnumbered. Let’s go make a mess and then go find Schmidt.”
Steve took a step toward the doors, then paused. “The men in those tanks are alive and they’re helpless. I don’t want them murdered because someone decided that they should look like me.”
Thor gave him a long look, like he was seeking something, but nodded. “That is fair in sentiment. They might still be killed-“
“But by accident,” Steve said, looking straight at Clint long enough for him to look away first, then at the others. “Not by intent. Not by accidentally on purpose. They are helpless to defend themselves and I will not allow anyone under my command to make them a target.”
There wasn’t so much agreement as failure to protest, which under the circumstances was sufficient. Steve led the way through the double doors himself, although Natasha had already taken out four guards by the time they arrived. It didn’t take long to subdue the rest; the scientists were disinterested in fighting back after their protectors were felled.
Seeing the men - seeing himself -- in the tanks was profoundly, elementally disturbing and for a long moment Steve wanted to disregard his own dictum and toss his shield at the tanks to make them shatter. But he didn’t. He focused on finding someone who looked like they might know how the tanks worked so that they could be shut down in a safe manner.
He found a woman with a badge around her neck and grabbed her by the arm. “Shut these down and get the men out,” he ordered.
“They are not men,” she replied in a Scandinavian accent, sounding less afraid of him than annoyed at the interruption. “They are clones of you. They are not alive or dead. They have no consciousness, no awareness.”
Steve shook his head. “Clones? These can’t be clones.”
Tony landed next to him. “They’re not exact clones,” he said, sounding intrigued, which was extra-creepy through the Iron Man voice filter. “They were tweaked enough to be able to accept Extremis, which then overrode the faulty code during the cocoon process and the end state is a genetically perfect match.”
“Except better,” the woman replied, her attention on Tony even though Steve still held her by the elbow. “Extremis improves the clones performance an average of 38% across the board from the original super-soldier serum. And this is just the beginning, once-“
Tony raised his arm and fired at one of the tanks, shattering it. “New orders, people! Smash away, they’re not real, just meat suits.” He turned back to the woman. “This is not the beginning. This is the end.”
The rest of the tanks were destroyed, although watching his teammates and subordinates take care to respect the bodies of the men - clones - that fell out, it was no less disturbing for Steve to watch. If these had been real men who’d been selected - or volunteered - for the procedure, then at least there’d be something there, no matter how misguided or wrong-headed or evil or stupid. It was worse to see what were essentially extra copies of his body lying on blankets or propped up against consoles, vacant vessels without souls or thoughts.
Vessels. Cauldrons.
“Oh my god.” Steve let go of the woman, who pulled her arm back indignantly. “Schmidt’s not building himself an army. He’s building himself a new home.”
Tony, who’d been floating a foot or two over the floor, came down to land. “Holy shit.”
A loud explosion from the doorway they’d come through and they both turned to look; reinforcements.
“Go,” Corrales shouted to Steve from a few feet away. “We’ve got this.”
Steve didn’t move right away, not until he could see how many were coming; he wasn’t going to leave Corrales’s team to be overwhelmed.
“Go,” Corrales repeated more forcefully. “This is what I’m here for. You guys are the Space Shuttle, my guys are just the rocket that gets you where you need to go and then detaches. Go do your thing and save the world.”
Steve looked over at Tony.
“Go,” Tony said. “I’ll catch up. I’ve covered these guys in so much puke that I owe them one.”
Steve smiled. “You owe them several for that,” he said, patting him on the armor’s shoulder as he passed by.
(on to the conclusion)
Freezer Burn
Genfic; PG-13-ish
Avengers/Captain America ensemble
previous parts | ao3
“This isn’t fun,” Clint said casually as he nocked his arrow. “Any chance you can move over a few inches so I can draw without putting my elbow in your ribcage?”
The invasion plan, carefully worked out over weeks of strategy meetings involving people who understood the fluid nature of battle because they’d been in their own, had not only not survived first contact with the enemy, it hadn’t even gotten within half a kilometer of where they’d anticipated first contact to be. SHIELD had presumed that HYDRA would upgrade the air defense Minyar had had since the start of the Cold War to protect this most secret and dangerous of bases, which had been correct, but they’d been working off faulty schematics and so they had been picked up by radar and fired upon almost a klick farther out than they’d believed possible from the maps the Pentagon had given them. Things had only spiraled from there.
“Not unless you would prefer to have your elbow hitting lead,” Steve replied, shifting the shield as much as he could so that it was still deflecting bullets away from Clint while giving himself a modicum of protection. They were currently hiding behind a still-smoking Lada sedan that had been turned on its side by an explosion; they were covered from the west by the car, but Steve's shield was their only coverage from the north, where the bullets were coming from now. “You could have gone with Bruce.”
Bruce, miserable because of a cold and tired of the repeated questions about whether he knew what he was supposed to be doing at all points and where his rally points were, had taken the sudden changes of plans badly and transformed right on the Helicarrier flight deck, jumping off the side after a running start and without a parachute.
"I don't think Bruce was in the mood for a traveling companion," Clint replied, taking one knee so that he could angle up better.
"Watch the elbow," Steve warned, since Clint's new position put him at risk of jabbing Steve in a much more sensitive area. With his free hand, he reached down to try to change the channel on his radio, which had stopped receiving at some earlier point during their mad dash from where their jet had crash-landed to where they thought the science complex would be.
Clint loosed the arrow and stood up carefully. "Rogers family jewels remain undamaged," he reported. "But you can probably stop fiddling with the radio; it's got a bullet in it."
Steve's reply was drowned out by the explosion across the street as Clint's arrow detonated, blowing up the house they'd been hiding behind previously and from which they'd been chased by a detachment of HYDRA troops. They nodded at each other and started running south again.
The problem -- a problem -- with HYDRA's air defense perimeter being so much larger than anticipated was that SHIELD had been forced to hit the ground much sooner and then fight their way to what passed as downtown Minyar on foot. Which in turn meant a costly, chaotic battle over largely open ground, since Minyar was both small and spread out, and the loss of precious resources (to wound, death, destruction, or confusion) before they could be effectively used. The fog of war had rolled in early and thick; Steve had no way to directly communicate with anyone other than Clint, no way to keep track of the rest of the Avengers or of the main ground element or to request air support or, god forbid, a medevac. Clint had joked a few leapfrogs ago about how this must have been like fighting was back in ‘the old days,’ but it really wasn’t. Steve had never had to command or control a large group without a radio and, when it was just the Commandos, they’d worked together for so long that even if things had gone to hell, they’d know where the others would be. The Avengers had just been reunited and Steve had no idea where his teammates were, what they were doing, or how they’d react to a prolonged communication breakdown when they were none of them so close that they could intuit the others’ actions.
It could have been worse, Steve knew as he ducked instinctively when a MiG screamed overhead. It could still get worse. HYDRA had vastly superior numbers and it had the AIM mechas that served as a terrible, terrifying force multiplier even though many SHIELD units carried the experimental EMP weapons that would short out whatever they were aimed at without blacking out the neighborhood. There had already been casualties from fighting the mechas - the experimental weapons were experimental, not always working as intended and not everywhere they needed to be - and the HYDRA troops’ willingness to die en masse to secure their goal meant that, very often, they did both.
But the simple fact was that sometimes numbers were necessary but not sufficient and SHIELD’s ground forces were far superior to HYDRA’s while the Russian Air Force was outclassed and outmatched by the multinational air support Fury had cobbled together and then put under SHIELD control. SHIELD transports were not flying with impunity - the ground-based air defense was still formidable and not yet completely destroyed - but they were flying regularly and there were fewer and fewer MiGs and Sus to harass them.
They got to the next structure large enough to hide them - a panel truck with no markings, it was possibly a HYDRA vehicle - and caught their breaths for a second before realizing that nobody was actually shooting at them at the moment. Clint, breathing hard but unlabored, smiled.
“Let’s keep going,” he said, gesturing with his chin in the direction they needed to go. “We’ve still got a couple of klicks and you know Natasha hates it when we’re late.”
Natasha had come to Minyar on her own, entirely so that she could get a feel for how things were on the ground; Fury had dropped any pretense that she wasn’t fully part of his plans by the time they’d crossed into Russian airspace. When it was all over, Steve could ask how much of the extended official estrangement had been planned and how much had been necessity, but right now his priority was getting to the rendezvous point.
“Your radio still working?” he asked as they jogged. “I’d kind of like to know what is going on everywhere else.”
A blue-green blast of one of HYDRA’s anti-aircraft artillery lit up the sky to their left. The offensive had started at 0315 local time (original launch time had been 0330) but it was still pre-dawn and every weapon firing, blaster or bullet, still shone like a beacon in the slowly lightening gloom. It had been a three-quarter moon and it had never gotten truly dark, even in the outlying areas; there had been an insignificant tactical advantage to waiting for a new moon. HYDRA had night optics, too.
“There’s a triple-A battery over there,” Clint offered sarcastically. “Do you want mine? I don’t need to hear all that shit.”
The radio channels were full of chatter - and full of people telling everyone else to shut up. Steve’s radio had been programmed to find all of the command networks in addition to the Avengers’ own channel, but he could also tune into the various unit nets in case he found himself aligned with a platoon, as had happened in the past. Clint’s had a slightly narrower range of access, but it would get him what he needed. Except…
“I don’t know how to reprogram my earpiece,” Steve admitted. He’d known how to do it with the old radios, but the new ones, with their fancier technology, still confounded him even after the training sessions and using them in the field for the last few months. Corrales or Jablonsky had always fixed whatever he’d needed done with them out in the field. “They have to marry or something.”
Clint barked out a laugh. “They have to mate,” he corrected, holding out his hand for Steve to hand him his earpiece, which he did. “This is the twenty-first century; we believe in enthusiastic pre-marital sex. Especially for our electronics.”
Steve frowned. “We believed in it in the twentieth century, too. People and electronics.”
Clint handed back his earpiece. When Steve looped it behind his ear and pushed the little part in, he could hear Tony griping about something.
“Stow it, Tony,” he barked.
“Finally,” Tony replied, completely unfazed. “Where the hell have you been?”
Steve knew Tapper was on the channel and if anyone had been trying to reach him, Tapper would pass it on. And he did, informing him that the support unit that was supposed to be meeting them at the northwest entrance to the HYDRA complex - Corrales and his team, which now included what used to be Steve’s team - was delayed, having to move the same kind of extra distances that Steve and Clint were facing.
“We’re even further out,” Steve told Tapper. “ETA twenty at minimum.”
“I can fix that,” Tony offered. “I’ve got your location now.”
Steve did not point out that Tony could have found them from Clint’s radio all along because it possibly hadn’t been obvious and also Iron Man had had his own to-do list. And Tony hadn’t been in action for almost a year and was rusty, although there was no positive reason to say so aloud.
“What the sitrep for Hulk and Thor and the Widow?” he asked instead.
“Killing time waiting for you guys,” Natasha replied, an edge to her voice indicating that she was not passing the time idly.
“I am engaged,” Thor replied, a little loudly. Which indicated nothing because, bless him, Thor was still not quite sure how radios worked. “And the Hulk is having a fine time if the flight of mechanical creatures on the eastern horizon is any indication.”
Tony appeared - visible mostly by his repulsors - low on the horizon, moving fast toward them. They stopped, looking around to make sure they wouldn’t get shot at while they waited, and Tony landed in a gust of wind and dust.
“Secure your toys,” Tony ordered in the Iron Man’s flattened voice. “Present your belt hooks and get ready for a subsonic wedgie.”
It was an old joke - Tony had done exactly that to both Steve and Clint early on, before they’d agreed that Clint’s quiver was attached securely enough to be used as a handle and Steve was secure enough in his masculinity to be carried by an arm around his waist - and they both rolled their eyes at it. Instead, Clint turned to let Tony grab hold of the quiver straps and Steve stepped up on to Iron Man’s left boot and away they went.
The airspace was crowded - Steve fought the urge to flinch when an RAF Tornado flew overhead low enough that he could feel the edge of the hot exhaust - and, after the second quick dodge around friendly jets, they flew low enough that Steve could see the various battles below in detail; they were more concentrated and complicated the closer they flew to the underground bunker city that was the Minyar base.
“Hold on to me,” Tony told Steve a moment before he loosened his grip to free his left hand enough to use the palm blaster to fire upon a trio of mecha spiders pinning a SHIELD unit down at an intersection. There was no real good place to hold on - Steve could always get a rise out of Tony by demanding that he add handles to the armor - and so he was forced to tighten his embrace and cling like the damsel in distress he was.
When they landed, Natasha, definitely not a damsel in distress, was waiting. She’d chosen a spot very close to one of the complex entrances, a reinforced concrete tunnel with heavy blast doors protected by half a dozen HYDRA troops and two of the small spider mechas. The entire area was surrounded by chain link fence of very recent vintage, a detail that had boggled everyone when they’d seen it on satellite because it wasn’t enough to stop even the least prepared assault team - anyone with a pair of bolt cutters would get through - and Minyar was a company town now, so everyone already knew what lay beyond. It was remote enough to not get casual visitors and with an army garrison close enough to dissuade any wanderers; who was the fence supposed to keep out?
“About time,” Natasha said, blowing the hair out of her face with a sharp puff out of the corner of her mouth. She’d been leaning up against what might have been a guardhouse or a supply shed, something that pre-dated the chain link fence and had no function since its installation. “Where’s the rest of the gang?”
Steve told Tony to get back in the air and find Corrales and his team, since while the Avengers could certainly breach the complex on their own, the clearing and holding would require extra manpower. And then he radioed Thor again, phrasing his request somewhere between suggestion and order because he might be the leader of the Avengers, but Thor was still the crown prince of Asgard and sometimes a little diplomacy went a long way.
“Are we in anywhere else?” Steve asked Tapper, since even if he’d had his radio the entire time, there was too much going on to be able to keep track.
“Foxtrot Team is in at Point Sierra,” Tapper replied a long moment later. “Which is three hundred yards southeast of Point Zulu.”
The extra information was necessary because they’d only assigned codenames to the five entrances they’d known about; Steve wondered where Points Uniform and Tango were, unless they’d skipped Tango to avoid confusion.
“What kind of defenses are they encountering?”
The complex itself was subterranean, a little more Hall of the Mountain King than what HYDRA had built in Detroit. According to their intel, the tunnels dated back centuries, although the original modernization had taken place when Steve had been a child. (“So it’s all still older than dirt,” Clint had joked.) There were no blueprints, just a couple of schematics drawn up from the recollections of defectors during the Cold War that didn’t quite correspond to each other and were forty years old at best. The overall layouts were where the most obvious discrepancies had been; the defectors had all spoken clearly and exactly about the labs where they had worked.
Once SHIELD was fully present, Helicarrier and all, they had the technology to see through the mountains and the ground to generate maps of the complex, what they’d done in Detroit the other year, but those maps would take time to render and would only show them where to go and not what awaited them once they got there. Which meant that what the Russians had done since Stalin had blessed this place and what HYDRA had done more recently were giant unknowns that made everyone uneasy. The place had been built for warfare of the dirtiest kind, to be protected at all costs against enemies imagined and real.
“Troops with blasters and-“ Tapper cut himself off. “Shit, we’ve lost them. Hold on, Cap. You got a second to hold?”
Thor was just landing, but Tony hadn’t either reported in or returned. “I’ve got a second.”
Steve used a sharp whistle to draw Clint’s attention from where he’d clambered up on top of the small building’s roof and was watching Point Whiskey, the entrance the Avengers were supposed to use. Once he had it, he used hand signals to request an update.
The half-dozen guards were now fifteen, was the answer, and they’d brought out some heavier firepower than the rifles they’d been holding when Steve had seen them last. He snuck a peek around the corner of the building and saw what looked like one of the blaster cannons, the medium kind they used for ground-to-ground defense and not the massive spotlight-sized ones they used for ground-to-air. A quick look back up at Clint, who nodded. It would have to be taken out before they made any move toward the doors.
Steve indicated that Clint should wait, then radioed Tony, asking how far away Corrales and his people were.
“Three hundred meters down the road and closing,” Tony replied. “I’m playing tail-end Charlie and cleaning up the last of the mess.”
If it weren’t so loud, Steve would have probably heard the approach, but the air was full of fighters and the ground was full of war and so he sent Natasha to flag Corrales and his team down and bring them around the way that would keep them off the road and, perhaps, out of sight.
“Tapper, my second is going to have to be put down,” Steve warned. “If you’ve got intel before we go in, I need it now.”
Steve gestured to Clint to wait until Natasha returned before taking out the blaster cannon.
“Pressure plates,” Tapper replied, voice carrying his shock and sadness. “Foxtrot got taken out by bombs set off by pressure plates inside the entrance. Can’t tell you more than that right now.”
Foxtrot had been led by Gallivan, a friend of Tapper’s, and a man unlikely to be found anywhere but at the front of wherever his team was going.
“It’s something,” Steve replied, trying to put kindness into his voice without it sounding like pity. “We’ll use it.”
He told Tony to wait where he was, not wanting the unmissable spectacle of Iron Man’s approach to ruin whatever surprise they might still have on their side, then waited for Natasha and Corrales to join him. Corrales greeted him with a nod and, whistling up at Clint, tossed him a radio identical to the one Clint had given Steve. Once Clint was back on radio, Steve passed on the news about the pressure plates, which might or might not exist at this entrance and were undoubtedly not the only trap awaiting them.
“We need a bowling ball,” Steve said. “Anything we can use for that?”
It would have to be something heavy enough for the plates to register the weight - dirt or a canteen wouldn’t be enough - and something they didn’t need to get back.
“I have found something,” Thor offered, turning to go back around to the side of the building.
“He knows what bowling is?” Corrales asked, surprised.
“Girlfriend lived in Cleveland for a while,” Natasha replied with a shrug. Corrales nodded at this apparent sagacity.
Thor returned with a small metal drum. “I believe there is ice inside,” he said, sniffing at the open spout. “It is not cold enough for liquid fuel to freeze.”
Steve smiled. “How’s your bowling arm?”
“I have scored over two hundred points in a single game,” Thor replied proudly.
Everyone chuckled.
“Is there a reason we’re not using the EMP handhelds or just letting me zap everything?” Tony asked.
“Some, if not all, of what we’re about to face has been here since the Cold War,” Steve replied. “I want to do this the old fashioned way because that’s what it’s likely to be. It’s going to be my kind of tech, Tony, not yours.”
“You can blast a hole through the rubble afterward,” Clint offered.
“If I’d known that I was going to be on clean-up duty all day, I’d have packed some housekeeping robots,” Tony replied sourly, but not the kind of sourly that went with him being annoyed enough to ignore orders.
Cutting through the chain link fence in a place still covered by the dawn shadows was easy enough; Corrales lined his men up and Steve told Tony to start flying once he heard the boom before gesturing up to Clint to fire his arrow on three.
“The Avengers plus Alpha Team are a go for Point Whiskey,” Steve told Tapper on the radio. It would probably be their last communication because the radios would not be able to contact the surface from so far underground. They’d be able to talk to each other, but not with the Helicarrier. “On three, two, one… Go, go, go!”
Clint loosed his arrow and it was only a couple of heartbeats before the blaster cannon exploded, taking out most of the guard troops in the process. Steve led the way through the fence and across the open space between the few trees and the doors, now hidden by smoke and defended by the five HYDRA guards still healthy enough to stand. They fell quickly and Tony, approaching on the fly, took care of the blast doors from thirty meters out.
“Right,” Steve said, looking around to make sure they were safe for the moment; they were. “Thor, let’s go bowling.”
Thor ripped the doors aside easily and, with one final judging of the weight distribution in the drum, set it down on its side and pushed, watching it roll true for a moment before standing up and stepping back.
The drum rolled for about ten meters before there was a click and Steve turned and threw up his shield arm as the blast wave hit. It was strong enough to knock him and Thor back a step and Steve felt the heat through his protected uniform pants.
When he lowered the shield enough to look, one glance told him that there was no way anyone on the front end of Team Foxtrot would have survived. The ceiling and walls of the tunnel were charred black and melted plastic and metal oozed down the sides.
“Any chance that’s the only one?” Corrales asked from behind Steve’s left shoulder.
“We shall see,” Thor replied, sounding angry. Offended, maybe. He threw Mjolnir so that it landed just past the darkest spot on the floor and slid, setting off a second and then a third explosion before returning to Thor.
Through the smoke came blaster fire and bullets; the reinforcements had arrived.
The fight through the entrance tunnel and into the complex itself was straightforward, if made more difficult by the smoke and noxious fumes. The pressure plates had been shaped charges, exploding up and out and not down, so there were no craters to navigate and the oncoming HYDRA troops made it very clear by their actions that there were no more bombs left to detonate. And soon enough, there were no more troops to shoot at, either, at least for long enough to do a head count.
“Left or right?” Steve asked Tony. “Do you have the maps yet?”
“No,” Tony replied, “but go left. I can see through enough here and now. There’s nobody coming from the right, which means there’s nothing of interest.”
So they went left, down a corridor and into a waiting fusillade of blaster and bullet fire that Tony flew right through and past because Steve had told him that they needed a better picture.
The HYDRA troops here at Minyar had thus far proven to be somewhat better shots than the ones Steve had encountered the last few months in South America and then in Canada; these weren’t trainees or otherwise wet behind the ears. They even showed some sense of tactical awareness, trying to work their knowledge of their environment to their advantage instead of standing there and shooting at SHIELD until they ran out of bullets or got killed, but in the end it didn’t matter. Steve had fought alongside Corrales and his men for the better part of a year and knew how good they were, knew how good Thor and Clint and Natasha were, and knew that there was no way that they would not be moving on past this obstacle.
“The good news is that there aren’t any more troops on approach,” Tony said in his ear after giving directions. “The bad news is that there are mechas. And they’re not going down on the first shot.”
Tony hadn’t designed the EMP weapons SHIELD was carrying, but he’d modified the design when he’d loaded up the armor and his version was more powerful than the handheld zappers.
“What about the second?” Steve asked hopefully.
“They need a spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down,” Tony replied after a beat, long enough for Steve to take the last right before the final left and he could already hear the sound of blasters on metal and he wasn’t sure who was firing on whom. “Knock ‘em down with the EMPs, then shoot the hell out of them.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Steve could see Clint fiddling with one of the pouches on his quiver. “Works for me.”
They slowed down after the left and were surprised at how large the room Tony was in actually was. After the dark, narrow corridors, an open space seemed like an airplane hangar. Granted, it was an open space with Iron Man getting attacked by a half-dozen giant mecha spiders, but it felt airy, still.
“We should probably help him,” Clint sighed, as if resenting the effort it would involve. “He’s such a baby when he gets beaten up.”
He whistled between his teeth and Corbette, the sniper on Corrales’s team, materialized, EMP weapon in one hand and the SHIELD equivalent of a scatter gun in the other. “We’re going skeet shooting,” he said, gesturing toward the metal ladder than ran up to a rickety-looking metal balcony that in turn ran around the room.
Steve let Thor lead the way for the others, which he did with gleeful aplomb, sending Mjolnir hurtling toward the first spider as he ran full bore, holding out his arm to catch the hammer on its return and then using that momentum to spin gracefully into a vicious overhead attack. The rest of them went about it more prosaically, setting the spiders up so that Clint, Corbette, and Tony could deliver the one-two punches of EMP and good old-fashioned excessive firepower.
“Next!” Thor called out, eyes aflame, even as the last spider mecha had ceased in its death-twitches.
Next was through the doorway on the far side, back into the rabbit warren of claustrophobic corridors with Tony flying enough ahead of them to warn them of approaching dangers.
“We’ve got office space,” Tony announced from a turn ahead. “Looks like the fun kind. I remember those smells from Afghanistan. Tell the delicate to brace themselves.”
Minyar was in many ways the Russian equivalent of Area 51, a place that had built legitimate if secret wonders and was subject to outlandish rumors, but with a much more sinister basis in reality. The stories of Minyar weren’t of aliens and atom bombs; they were of mass graves and human experiments, a macabre place of horror and tragedy. Natasha hadn’t quite been able to hide her revulsion when they’d talked about it privately; Minyar had been a threat that had hung over Red Room trainees: fail us here and we will turn you into something useful to us through other means. The Monster Factory, it had been called.
“They made sure we saw the monsters,” Natasha had told him, not looking up from her brandy snifter. Steve rather suspected she’d lost a friend or a lover to the Monster Factory, but he’d never ask and she’d never volunteer. “Most of them looked quite human at first. But then you’d see their eyes and you knew. I was afraid of things back then, with good reason, but that place… that place was the one thing that truly terrified me.”
Today, though, she hid any lingering terror behind a veneer of irritation and purpose. “None of us are here because we’re delicate.”
“Wasn’t thinking of you, sweetcheeks,” Tony replied airily. “But if you’ve got menthol for your upper lip, I suggest you apply it now.”
The smell wasn’t overwhelming - the eye-watering ammonia fumes were stronger - but it was there and, to Steve’s sense-memory, it was overpowering in its own way. This was every HYDRA lab he’d run into during the war, right down to the metal and glass doors and wire-caged light bulbs and the underlying stink of chemicals that snuck through and around the smell of old bodily fluids that neither time nor ammonia could wash away. The signs might be printed in Cyrillic, but the same dismal mint paint color and creeping shadows were enough to play tricks at the edges of his vision. He was here looking for the Red Skull and these were not the Commandos and Bucky was behind none of these doors.
“Let’s move,” he said aloud, hoping none of the others could hear anything in his voice. “These are empty and the ones we’re looking for will still be occupied. We can come back later.”
The look Natasha gave him said that he’d not been as successful as he’d wanted, but maybe nobody else had caught on.
More corridors, another firefight with another HYDRA troop detachment, a cramped and cluttered battle with two giant mecha cockroaches that trapped them in a corridor with no exit but through their attackers, a wrong turn and then doubling back, and then finally another corridor with brighter lighting, a vending machine, and the familiar sight of HYDRA recycling bins.
“It’s so weird how these make me feel better,” Corrales mused as they passed by a blue bin. “I hate having to recycle at home, my kids are always putting things in the bin without rinsing them out first, my wife always has to remind me to take it out front, but here, here they’re good.”
Here, they also meant that they’d entered the active parts of the Minyar base, the parts HYDRA was concerned with, and they reacted accordingly. They tightened their formation and Tony stopped being quite so cavalier in how far ahead he flew and how informal his reports were. Soon, he couldn’t fly ahead at all because there were regular guards and pedestrian traffic and people going about their work without any concern about the war going on above them on the surface.
“My turn,” Natasha announced, slipping past Steve and elbowing Thor out of the way of a door, which she opened and then closed behind her, emerging a moment later in a HYDRA work suit and a hair kerchief. She gave Steve a quick smile and then moved past Tony, who was closest to the swinging double doors past which they could not travel without being found out.
It was a long three minutes and eleven seconds before Natasha whispered in his ear. “An even dozen guards, two at each entrance for four, two more sets on the second floor catwalks, and two sets of two on roving patrols. Maybe forty civilians, probably unarmed but easy to take if they are. It’s a straight north-south room, catwalks are north-south and east-west and older than you are.”
Steve organized the image in his mind. “Okay, so can we plow straight through or will we need to stop?”
“We’ll need to stop,” Natasha replied, an odd tone to her voice. “But not for the usual reason. This is where they’re working on Extremis.”
Steve looked over at Tony; he couldn’t see his face behind the armor, but just the body language alone was enough that he could imagine Tony’s reaction perfectly.
“What-“ Tony began, but was cut off by Natasha.
“There are eight tanks with bodies inside of them, some in the scab cocoons, some just floating there,” Natasha went on. “They’re all the same body, at least the ones I can see.”
“Mine,” Steve said before Natasha could. He felt sick to his stomach and very dizzy, but he closed his eyes and breathed deeply and the worst of it passed. This had been an option - a threat - for so long that he’d thought himself used to the weight of it. But he wasn’t. He opened his eyes and kept them focused on the floor because he didn’t want to see whatever was on Clint’s or Thor’s or Corrales’s faces or in Tony’s posture. He didn’t need the pity.
“I’m sorry,” Natasha said gently.
“I thought you said I wasn’t a candidate for Extremis,” he said to Tony.
“You’re not,” Tony replied, sounding almost as shellshocked as Steve felt. “But Extremis can be programmed to do anything, at least in theory. Including making someone look like you, although there’s probably something else going on there. It doesn’t matter. We have to get in there to make this all go away.”
Thor took a step toward the swinging doors and Steve looked up and gestured for him to still, which he did.
“I appreciate the sentiment, but that’s not our primary objective and while I’m happy to take care of it en route to that primary objective, we need a better plan than just rolling in and destroying everything in sight.”
“Since when?” Clint asked. “That’s our stock in trade even without the Green Genie along.”
Steve rubbed at his jaw. “We’re here for bigger fish.”
“Bigger fish are on the far side of the room,” Natasha pointed out. “We’ll just be extra-special versions of ourselves to get there.”
Steve sighed and looked over at Corrales, who shrugged. “I’m siding with the dangerous lady if get a vote.”
Tony stood up from where he’d been tinkering with one of his boots. “So you’re completely outvoted and outnumbered. Let’s go make a mess and then go find Schmidt.”
Steve took a step toward the doors, then paused. “The men in those tanks are alive and they’re helpless. I don’t want them murdered because someone decided that they should look like me.”
Thor gave him a long look, like he was seeking something, but nodded. “That is fair in sentiment. They might still be killed-“
“But by accident,” Steve said, looking straight at Clint long enough for him to look away first, then at the others. “Not by intent. Not by accidentally on purpose. They are helpless to defend themselves and I will not allow anyone under my command to make them a target.”
There wasn’t so much agreement as failure to protest, which under the circumstances was sufficient. Steve led the way through the double doors himself, although Natasha had already taken out four guards by the time they arrived. It didn’t take long to subdue the rest; the scientists were disinterested in fighting back after their protectors were felled.
Seeing the men - seeing himself -- in the tanks was profoundly, elementally disturbing and for a long moment Steve wanted to disregard his own dictum and toss his shield at the tanks to make them shatter. But he didn’t. He focused on finding someone who looked like they might know how the tanks worked so that they could be shut down in a safe manner.
He found a woman with a badge around her neck and grabbed her by the arm. “Shut these down and get the men out,” he ordered.
“They are not men,” she replied in a Scandinavian accent, sounding less afraid of him than annoyed at the interruption. “They are clones of you. They are not alive or dead. They have no consciousness, no awareness.”
Steve shook his head. “Clones? These can’t be clones.”
Tony landed next to him. “They’re not exact clones,” he said, sounding intrigued, which was extra-creepy through the Iron Man voice filter. “They were tweaked enough to be able to accept Extremis, which then overrode the faulty code during the cocoon process and the end state is a genetically perfect match.”
“Except better,” the woman replied, her attention on Tony even though Steve still held her by the elbow. “Extremis improves the clones performance an average of 38% across the board from the original super-soldier serum. And this is just the beginning, once-“
Tony raised his arm and fired at one of the tanks, shattering it. “New orders, people! Smash away, they’re not real, just meat suits.” He turned back to the woman. “This is not the beginning. This is the end.”
The rest of the tanks were destroyed, although watching his teammates and subordinates take care to respect the bodies of the men - clones - that fell out, it was no less disturbing for Steve to watch. If these had been real men who’d been selected - or volunteered - for the procedure, then at least there’d be something there, no matter how misguided or wrong-headed or evil or stupid. It was worse to see what were essentially extra copies of his body lying on blankets or propped up against consoles, vacant vessels without souls or thoughts.
Vessels. Cauldrons.
“Oh my god.” Steve let go of the woman, who pulled her arm back indignantly. “Schmidt’s not building himself an army. He’s building himself a new home.”
Tony, who’d been floating a foot or two over the floor, came down to land. “Holy shit.”
A loud explosion from the doorway they’d come through and they both turned to look; reinforcements.
“Go,” Corrales shouted to Steve from a few feet away. “We’ve got this.”
Steve didn’t move right away, not until he could see how many were coming; he wasn’t going to leave Corrales’s team to be overwhelmed.
“Go,” Corrales repeated more forcefully. “This is what I’m here for. You guys are the Space Shuttle, my guys are just the rocket that gets you where you need to go and then detaches. Go do your thing and save the world.”
Steve looked over at Tony.
“Go,” Tony said. “I’ll catch up. I’ve covered these guys in so much puke that I owe them one.”
Steve smiled. “You owe them several for that,” he said, patting him on the armor’s shoulder as he passed by.
(on to the conclusion)