The Lanters hit the ground running.
Magnetic boots struck concrete in rapid sequence as the assault teams and heavy weapons teams cleared the Thunderhawk cabins and ford up without breaking stride, black-and-white speed armor carrying them forward at a pace that turned the distance to the target building into a very short problem. Nolan's standing order had been specific: unless mortal agents initiated attack or produced unknown lethal weapons, there was to be no return fire. Occupy and control. The defensive capability of power armor against standard ballistic rounds made this a realistic instruction rather than an optimistic one.
The Hydra agents inside the airport tower apparently had not been briefed on power armor.
Large-caliber machine gun fire cut through the air in sustained bursts. Muzzle flash strobed from the tower windows and the hangar entrances in overlapping patterns. The agents behind those weapons were trained and they were committed, and the fire was heavy enough that the distinction between occupied and controlled beca temporarily academic.
The First Company's captain did not need to wait for a second assessnt. The order shifted from occupation to annihilation in the sa breath.
Grenade launchers spoke for the first ti on S.H.I.E.L.D. territory.
The concussive thump of the detonations rolled across the airfield, and the agents in the hardened positions, Hydra and uninford S.H.I.E.L.D. alike, were in those positions when the rounds arrived. Chainswords ca out as the first assault teams completed their approach, and the sounds that followed were not complicated.
Nolan, still in the Thunderhawk as it repositioned, was inford. He noted it, said nothing, and moved on. The Astartes had been given a mission parater and the other side had chosen to dissolve it. Giving an enemy a clean death in combat was, by the standards Nolan had spent years absorbing through the simulator, already a rcy. He had made a promise to Rogers about minimizing it. He could only say sorry.
The Hub had never been attacked.
S.H.I.E.L.D.'s primary command operations center sat inside the Colorado Plateau's mass of rock and compressed earth, hidden from every approach and hardened against every threat that Nick Fury's operational paranoia had been able to envision over the decades. The installation had been completed, maintained, expanded, and never once tested by an external assault.
Today it was being tested internally.
The corridors rang with gunfire from both directions. S.H.I.E.L.D. agents and Hydra operatives who had worked beside each other for years, eaten in the sa cafeterias, attended the sa briefings, had resolved themselves into two populations with incompatible survival requirents and were now working through that incompatibility in the narrow corridors with all the efficiency that close-range firearms permitted. The alarm system had committed to its purpose, red light and harsh buzzing filling every passage from end to end.
The main entrance resolved the debate about whether the situation could get worse.
The explosion ca first, a sequence of detonations that consud the entrance structure and replaced it with fire, smoke, and the compressed silence of a shockwave passing through enclosed space. Then the Terminators walked in through it.
Five of them, one after another, Cyclone missile launchers mounted on their power pack hardpoints, ceramite shells unmarked by the fire they had walked through. They took positions just inside the entrance and waited.
Nolan ca in behind them. The ten rings orbited his forearms in slow arcs, purple energy trailing between them. Rogers was on his right, shield raised, lasgun in the other hand. Doom moved in the dark green cloak, already surveying angles.
"Duggan. Killer Monkey." Rogers turned without stopping. "Find the friendly agent teams inside. Distinguish who is ours and who is Hydra. That is your only task."
Both of them moved.
Nolan looked at David.
"The monitoring system. Crossbones and whatever Hydra manpower he still has. Find them."
Blue light pulsed behind David's optical sensors. It worked in silence for a few seconds, moving through the Hub's internal network with the particular efficiency of a Man of Iron that had already breached more complex systems than this. Then it turned.
"The target is consolidating manpower in the deeper section of the base. So Hydra elents have already boarded vehicles. They intend to push out through the Hub and reach the airport."
Nolan raised one vibranium arm and brought it down.
"Doom: take assault teams, assist Rogers, sweep Hydra from the corridors, keep S.H.I.E.L.D. agents alive where possible." He was already moving. "Terminators, on ."
He went into the corridor without looking back. The five Terminators fell into step behind him, their weight making the floor register every footfall.
Deeper in the base, in a server room chosen specifically for its distance from the primary corridors, Natasha and Hawkeye looked at each other across a monitor as the alarm system's pitch shifted.
"They are in," Natasha said, without looking away from the screen. "That ans we have less ti than we thought."
David had sent them confirmation of the real culprit hours ago. Rather than extract imdiately, they had made a different decision: use the access they already had. Whatever S.H.I.E.L.D. was holding in its classified archive was worth understanding before the organization's command structure changed hands, which it was now in the process of doing in the loudest possible way.
Hawkeye had his compound bow out, the familiar weight of it across his back as he stood and checked the room's secondary exit. Coulson was on the floor in the center of the room, wrists bound, looking at the ceiling with the expression of a man processing the fact that his professional life had beco significantly more complicated in the last hour.
"I did not anticipate it would be Captain Arica personally leading the incursion," he said. It was not quite a complaint. It was more like a man narrating his own situation for the record.
"S.H.I.E.L.D. has been carrying Hydra inside it for years," Hawkeye said, not looking up from the bow. "I believe in Rogers's judgnt and I believe in his character. So I am here, in this room, on this day." He pulled an arrow and checked the tip. "Fury is a capable man, but he missed this. Whatever the reason, that is a failure that does not recover. The organization needs different leadership. Think about it honestly, Coulson. If you actually believe in what S.H.I.E.L.D. is supposed to be, then a change at the top is not sothing to resist."
Coulson was quiet for a mont.
"Fury is probably already on his way here," he said. "Or he is in a secure location inside the base watching all of this develop. He has been careful to avoid direct confrontation with Rogers. That is not cowardice. That is Fury making a calculation."
"Then he miscalculated the scale of today," Hawkeye said.
Coulson looked at the ceiling. He did not have an answer to that.
Natasha had stopped listening to them.
She was leaning toward the screen, both hands on the desk, her expression carrying the specific quality of soone who has found sothing they were not looking for and cannot imdiately determine what to do with it. When she turned around, the anger in her face was contained but present, and her voice was precise.
"Coulson." She looked at him the way a person looks at soone they have decided is going to answer a question. "As one of Fury's inner circle: can you explain to what this is?"
She turned the monitor toward him.
"What exactly is the Cosmic Cube weaponization project?"
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