USAgent

GEARS OF CHANGE

Part I: Hit & Run

By Clayton Tooley

S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier
Two Miles Above Death Valley, CA

“Situation Report!”

Major Jason Bludd stormed into the flight deck control room for the port side of the S.H.I.E.L.D. Hellicarrier and tried to take in all of the screens at once. The two agent’s manning the screens did not spare him a glance as one of them responded, “Ship-wide communications are dead on all channels, sir.” Agent Noble did not look up as she pounded frantically on her console. “There has been a massive explosion mid-ship on the starboard side, penetrating at least four subsections of deck 10, almost in a direct line to the…”

“Major!” Agent Cenn shouted suddenly. “Radar has picked up hundreds of targets inbound dropping down from a sub-orbital approach vector!”

“Identify targets,” Bludd said, racing to man the empty firing control console while Noble switched to trying to scramble their birds manually in lieu of the comms.

“They…I…can’t, sir,” Cenn said, shaking his head. “They aren’t enemy aircraft, they can’t be! They’re too small!”

“Jetpacks?” Bludd said as he attempted to engage the quarter of shield bubble that should have been available for activation from his seat, but it didn’t work. “Damnit! We’re defenseless!”

“Negative, sir,” Cenn responded, calming himself. “Targets now read at…less than a foot in wingspan, half that in height. I…I think they’re toy airplanes, sir!”

“Well, ain’t that an unwelcome finger up the ass,” Bludd said as he switched from shields to weapons. “Even if our rail guns, lasers or missiles worked, we’d never hit them all,” Bludd said, watching the deadly wave crawl toward them on his screen. “Noble, get everything we’ve got in the air and doing what they can. Cenn, sound general quarters and crash alarms. If those things are packing weaponry, we’re toast.”

“No go, sir,” Noble said, throwing her headset across the room. “Pilots on walkies in the hangers report the bay doors froze after opening only a few feet. We can’t even launch our flying cars! Agent’s with flightpack experience are suiting up but I don’t think it’ll be enough.”

“Major!” Cenn said, smiling. “Alert fighters are in-bound and firing!”

A second later a shockwave struck the ship and rocked the mighty craft and the screen showed a huge swath of the incoming wave had disintegrated, maybe as much as 20% of the fleet, but all four alert aircraft were…gone.

“The wave is reforming,” Cenn said, his voice subdued. “Radiation levels are nominal; whatever that was it wasn’t nuclear, at least.”

“Conventional explosives,” Bludd confirmed form his scanners, “but a hell of a lot of them. Those little bastards must be packed plum full like a Thanksgiving turkey.” The deck tilted beneath them as the waves approach halted for a few moments, but then he shifted in his seat unexpectedly. “We’re moving!”

Noble had retrieved her discarded headset and was spinning through the basic radio band rapidly. “Sir, Operations has managed to cobble together basic flight controls for the carrier. The wave is only approaching from starboard, and the top deck has scrambled all exterior fighters, though they have been ordered to limit engagement to strafing runs at maximum weapons range to try and use the enemy’s explosive nature against them.”

On Cenn’s screen the attacking fighters took several hits all at once, but nearly as soon as the planes had made a dent the wave broke into a morass of directions, with a squadron of ships peeling off to following each S.H.I.E.L.D. aircraft, preventing them from being able to easily attack again. As Bludd watched, two of the S.H.I.E.L.D. ships were overcome and destroyed along with their attackers. He watched one of the planes attempt to evade its attackers by releasing chaff but it did not gain sufficient distance before the impact overcame them all.

“That’s it! Release chaff along port side, all decks! Noble, get our ships clear; have them bug out supersonic to escape the explosion. Then get the flight deck to roll the helicarrier to starboard and allow our heavier bottom armor to absorb the impact instead of the upper rotors! Cenn, sound impact alarms…this is going to be a bitch!”

When the first explosion had rocked the ship, John Walker and Julia Carpenter were shaken awake from where they slumbered in each other’s arms atop his hospital bed. Before she’d even fully awoken, Julia was in the air and flattening herself against the nearest wall, crouching upside down and looking for any imminent danger.

Even as confusion overtook him, Walker looked up from where he still lay on the bed and took in the sight. “Oh, that is promising,” he said, smiling even as he rolled out of his bed, missing the half-formed sly smile on Julia’s face as she dove for her clothing and dressed in a second, leaping after him and swinging on a psi-web.

“I’m really not comfortable fighting in my pajamas, Jack,” she said, referring to him by the name he had used when they’d first met as West Coast Avengers. Though his short history as ‘Jack Daniels’ had ended, his friends found the name suited him and it was most often the name he responded to anyway. After his parents had died, only Lemar and his sister ever called him John any more, and after Jeannie’s kidnapping…

Pushing aside those thoughts, he slid to a stop next to a series of locked cabinets near the exit to the hellicarrier’s sickbay. “No problem,” he answered as he jerked the hermetically sealed doors off the cabinets and tossed them away. “Doc told me they had decontaminated our clothing and equipment from the radiation we ran into and had locked them in her per regulations. Lemar and Greer have already gotten theirs, but the rest should be here.”

He tossed her the silky yet durable unstable molecule costume she wore and pulled his own out and donned it as quickly as possible, which was twice as long as Julia had needed. While she waited for him to get his shield-generating gloves adjusted, she tore the doors off of the cabinets containing Firebird and D-Man’s uniforms using her own super-strength, tucking them both into a psi-webbing backpack. “I’ll find the others and see what we can do to help the crew.”

“I’ll find Bludd or Fury and get a situation report, then call you guys on the communicards,” the now fully dressed USAgent said, generating his shield and leading the way to the door. “Julia, I…” he began, unsure what to say.

“Just do your job and keep it in your pants, soldier,” Arachne said as she leapt out the door and bounded down the hallway faster than he could ever hope to follow. He laughed and turned down the opposite direction and pulled his communicard out and started to punch up Major Bludd’s S.H.I.E.L.D. frequency but slid to a stop when an unknown Avengers ID appeared at the source of the initial explosion, two decks down from his location.

An Avengers ID that was listed as inactive yet was currently plowing through S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent’s like a scythe through wheat.

Altering his course, Jack ran to the nearest elevator and pried the doors off. He concentrated briefly and changed his photonic/holographic shield into a thick, smooth glove over his hand as he grasped the cable in the center of the shaft and leapt free. The glove, made nearly frictionless by his mind, allowed him to quickly traverse the decks and then use his strength to clamp down at the proper deck and swing his body around, planting his booted heels into the doors and kicking them clear of their mounts and into the deck. He landed just to the side of the doors and rolled to his feet, reforming his full shield even as he sprinted down the center of the deck amid the scattered injured, or worse, agents.

He desperately wanted to stop and check on the downed men and women, but he heard a terrible shrieking noise ahead and had to respond. His blood was roaring in his ears as he rounded a corner and saw his quarry prying open two heavy doors of a laboratory section of the ship. Rearing back, the USAgent let his shield fly and it struck the armored back of his opponent hard, stunning him briefly just as he’d loosened the doors, which his face impacted with causing them to fall into the blackness of the laboratory.

As his shield ricocheted back to him, Jack called out, “That’s far enough, Machine Man. This madness is over!”

Arachne had found Battlestar, D-Man and ex-Agent Quinn three decks up from the medical bay helping to put out several fires started from the explosion that had ripped through the helicarrier.. Quickly handing Dennis his gear, she indicated the direction Jack had gone and continued past to locate Tigra and Firebird, who Lemar had mentioned had contacted him just after the explosion and were helping out further along the deck.

Battlestar charged back the way Julia had come and found the destroyed elevator and noted the scrapes that trailed down the cable. Realizing what Jack had done in his descent and noting the hasty exit his friend had made two decks down, he dug into a back pocket of his utility belt and pulled two interlockable handles that had been custom made for an elevator cable descent such as this, courtesy of Silver Sable, Inc. Handing one to D-Man, he said, “I’m familiar with this type of slide so I can take Quinn with me.”

The other two men assented and Lemar picked the smaller man up in his free arm as he attached the handle with his shield hand and slid quickly and easily down to the open deck and leapt nimbly through the doorway, setting Quinn down and turning to watch D-Man begin to move down the cable in fits and starts. He was beginning to get the hang of it when the ship felt like it was kicked and rocked hard to the side and knocking the unsteady Battlestar into the open maw of the elevator shaft.

Reacting with amazing speed, he managed to reach out and grasp the cable with his gloved hand and clamp down on it hard, stopping his fall immediately and jarringly. Though his shoulder ached from the unexpected move, his nigh-invulnerable skin easily withstood the bite of the raw metal cable. He had just turned his head up when he saw a shape falling toward him fast screaming, “Incoming!”

Reaching out with his shield arm, Battlestar grasped the reaching hand of D-Man as he dropped past in freefall, completely unable to grasp a handle to stop himself. Spinning like an overbalanced gondola, Battlestar strained his upper body and arms to hold his friend’s tremendous weight and angle him toward the emergency ladder next to the elevator doors. Though he impacted with the wall harder than he’d have preferred, D-Man rationalized it would have been much worse to hit the bottom of the shaft.

The two strongmen helped each other out onto the deck and heard a watchful Quinn sigh in relief from a quarter-way down the deck where he knelt next to a couple of busted up S.H.I.E.L.D. agents, calling for medical attention on his communicator. He moved on to the next body as he waved them past him, and an out of breath Battlestar snapped off a quick salute as they raced past.

“What the hell was that impact?” D-Man asked.

“Ship must be taking fire, though that felt more like a shockwave to me,” Battlestar said, rounding a corner into a suddenly wide-open section of the deck. He noted the sound of fighting were coming from further down the hallway to his right and he could tell by the clang of metal that jack was fighting down there with his shield. He almost continued in that direction but a sudden movement from within a set of destroyed doors made him freeze and dive quickly for the floor, dragging D-man down with him.

His quick movement saved them from being eviscerated by a flying section of the shattered doors that had to have weighed at least 10 tons, which tore into the wall behind them and deeper into the helicarrier’s guts. “Son of a bitch!” Battlestar said, flipping forward onto his haunches and raising his shield. “Did that Banjo freak get free?”

“No…something bigger!” D-Man said as he dropped into a wrestling crouch. From out of the shadows of the laboratory came an eight-foot tall metal robot, one footstep at a time, its purple armor reflecting the light from the ceiling but the lighter yellow color of it’s face stared out at them with completely black, soulless eyes. “What the hell isthat?”

“It’s called the Sleeper IV,” Quinn said from behind them as he peered around the corner, his ever-present scanner out and aimed at the robot. It’s a World War II-era Nazi robot of destruction, hardwired to obey the commands of the Red Skull, or at least it used to be. It was captured by Captain America a few years ago during a fight with the Skrull’s Skeleton Crew. We just had it moved out of secure storage to analyze it before we headed out after the Resistants, and had even managed, completely unintentionally by the way, to restore its ability to…”

While Quinn had been babbling, Battlestar had decided enough was enough and hurled his shield at the Sleeper, aiming expertly for a shoulder joint in hopes of finding a weak spot. The throw was precise but shockingly the robot wasn’t there when it hit, the shoulder and arm appearing to turn intangible and allowing the shield to pass clean through to stick in the wall like a dart.

“…control its molecular structure,” Quinn finished, nodding as he read the scans picked up on his handheld scanner. “Fascinating. Anyway, it is quite strong and also has a force blast from its faceplate of varying levels of…”

As if acting on cue, the Sleeper pivoted its head and loosed a concentrated blast of yellow energy at Battlestar, who had provoked it with his shield and who just barely evaded the blast that impacted with the floor, crumpling it like tinfoil.

“Stop listing its strengths!” Battlestar said, making a quick move past the robot and plucking his shield from the wall. “Quinn, anything in that room there we can use to stop this thing?”

As D-Man jerked a piece of support bar from the rent in the wall and charged the Sleeper, Quinn considered his scanner. “There’s only stasis pods and energy neutralization rays in there,” he answered. D-Man was able to land a powerful two-handed overhand blow that actually rocked the Sleeper backwards, but the force of the blow on the super-strong robot armor shattered the bar and nearly put Dennis’s eye out with flying shrapnel. “With power to the deck fluctuating, I don’t think those will assist us, since a failure of power obviously allowed the Sleeper to awaken!”

Taking advantage of the robot’s momentary imbalance Battlestar charged and leapt, bringing his shield down like a mallet and pounding the head of the Sleeper hard. By a fortuitous chance, the robot had begun phasing its arms to avoid an attempt by D-Man to grab them in a wrestling hold and the Sleeper reformed them after he’d stumbled forward and passed his hands through the deck. This turn of events effectively immobilized the Sleeper in a forward crouch, to which D-Man responded to quickly and kicked the legs from beneath the robot, which then slammed to the deck onto its face.

“HA!” Battlestar shouted. “Take that, Robby!”

As if responding to his taunt, the ship suddenly dropped to the side and the world pinwheeled and became a chaotic series of impacts, pain and extremely loud explosions from far below what had used to be the bottom of the ship. Then, almost as suddenly as the ship had flipped it began righting itself, but the damage was done.

Having been pinned to the deck when it flipped, the Sleeper had not been slammed around like the other three men in its vicinity had and when the deck began tilting back to normal it used the time to regain its feet and jerked its arms free of the floor, either unable to unconcerned with simply phasing its arms free of the deck. Unfortunately this had a dramatic effect on the already weakened deck and it collapsed inward, dragging the Sleeper, Battlestar and D-Man with it to plummet through the deck into the darkness below.

Arachne had found Tigra and Firebird in the hallway on the deck just below the flight deck assisting in search and rescue efforts and had just handed Bonita her costume when the ship suddenly pinwheeled up onto its side and upended them all. Reacting with their respective unnatural agilities, both Julia and Greer landed on their feet and Firebird caught herself in mid-air but dropped her costume, forgetting about it in the madness.

“What the hell?” Tigra asked, flipping around and racing for the emergency stairwell for the flight deck. C’mon!” she shouted as she put her own enhanced strength into opening the sideways door and gesturing into the stairwell. A flier and someone who can spin long webs can help save the lives of falling pilots. I’ll keep things going here.”

Nodding, Arachne bounded into the stairwell and leapt quickly up the single flight of stairs with Firebird right behind here. They exited onto the slowly-leveling deck together and could hear panicked screams all over and they immediately set to work. Firebird shot over the side of the downward sloping ship and immediately spied that, fortunately, only three S.H.I.E.L.D. agents had fallen over the side, one of whom had been caught in the safety netting lining the side of the ship. Diving as quickly as she was able, she caught up with the two falling bodies, one of whom was conscious and one that was not and she grabbed them by their safety harnesses, which appeared to have not been properly fastened to the deck’s security lines.

Arching her back and grunting, Firebird pulled back toward the heavens and prayed. Slowing their momentum was hard enough but having to do it while keeping her heat aura as tightly contained against her own body as possible to keep from frying her charges while still allowing enough heated air to expand outward to help augment her strength to carry the men, both of whom outweighed her by half. Though her powers gave her certain abilities, greatly increased strength was not one of them and the crawl back to the now-righted helicarrier was hard on her, but she did note through clenched eyes the large hole in the side of the ship that must have been where all of this started.

She was within 25 feet of the safety netting when her strength flagged and their ascent slowed perceptibly and Bonita let escape a frustrated growl. She could have probably lowered them to the ground safely initially, despite the incredible distance to the desert below, but now she was afraid she didn’t have the strength left to control such a heavy and unwieldy landing. “Lord, help me!” she hissed between her teeth, taking the risky chance of allowing more of her fire aura to expand.

Feeling the heat and smart enough to figure out how his savior’s powers likely worked, the agent who was awake reached for the snap release on his safety harness. “I get it,” he said, struggling with the clasp, which was stubborn with his weight pressing into it. “Save Vale, he’s got kids…you did all you could. Thank you,” he finished as he succeeded in popping the clasp and ripping free of Firebird’s grasp, which cut her load by half and she shot up at an accelerated rate and struggled to control her flight, nearly slamming into the helicarrier before she centered her passenger.

Those seconds cost her any chance to circle back for the man who’d just sacrificed himself. “NOOOO!” she screamed.

“I got it,” a voice said as a body shot past Firebird in a streak of black, white and red. Once she got her bearings, Bonita realized that Arachne had anchored a psi-web to the ship and had likely already been preparing to leap to their aid as the man had, incorrectly it now appeared, been sacrificing himself for his friend. It was the only explanation for how Julia could have caught up to the falling man so quickly, wrapping him in her other arm as her psi-web drew taunt at her mental command and propelled them back toward the ship. Using her incredible agility heightened senses, Arachne flipped gracefully with her cargo and landed in a crouch, her adhesion ability securing them safely to the deck.

Firebird landed just as gently, falling into an exhausted heap next to her unconscious passenger and took many long gasps of air. She looked up to see Julia propping the very pale man up and patting him on the shoulder. “Brave,” was all she said to the man who, realizing what he’d done, turned and began to vomit over the side with Julia holding him up. “Ah, it’s good to be alive,” she said, smiling at Bonita.

After the second time the frig’n ship had unexpectedly rolled, USAgent pulled himself out of the wreckage of a series of storage lockers he’d been knocked into by Machine Man just as the ship had shifted, costing him valuable seconds. Their battle had been all but silent after he’d jumped the robot at the laboratory doors, just a flurry of blows as he’d tried to simply keep the snake-like arms and yellow eye-beams from crushing him in various ways. He’d tried to hold back his own blows to keep from harming Machine Man, not knowing why he was doing this break in, but he was getting tired and he realized as he raced back toward the laboratory that it was time for the kid gloves to come off.

Hoping he wasn’t too late, Jack rounded the corner and slid to a stop at the edge of a large hole in the deck and spied a stunned Agent Quinn leaning against the wall on the far side of the hole, holding his throat in obvious pain. Leaping the chasm, Jack landed next to Quinn and asked, “What happened?”

“Ma-Machine Man tr-tried to kill me,” he stuttered, rubbing his swollen larynx. “She saved me.”

“She who?” USAgent asked, imagining Julia or Greer were the only likely choices to get back her so quickly. A loud crash from within the hole drew his attention and he risked a quick look over the side and caught his breath.

Wearing a S.H.I.E.L.D. uniform he wasn’t certain from where, Cathy Webster a.k.a. Free Spirit, the young super-heroine that they’d just rescued from the Resistants after her terrible torture and miraculous recovery, stood over a stunned Machine Man and was kicking him with all the fury of a woman who’d just watched the love of her life be tortured alongside her for days and then been forced to sleep through him sacrificing his life for hers.

She didn’t speak but her rage and agony was written all over her face, tears streaming down her cheeks even as her smile was terrifying as she pounded super-strong blows onto the reeling robot. It reminded Jack of the recently reviewed news footage of himself, just days after his parents had been murdered by the Watchdogs, beating mercilessly on a band of Resistants in Washington D.C., nearly killing them all. Even though her actions had saved Quinn’s life and were allowing a groggy D-Man and Battlestar time to recover, her emotional state deeply concerned him.

Free Spirit’s prowess, however, fascinated him. Enhanced in a different manner than the original Captain America, she had nonetheless received an enhanced physique to the peak of human ability but not superhuman strength. However, from the way she was landing unprotected blows against Machine Man that were knocking him around without any hint of discomfort on her face made USAgent wonder if the sacrifice of Jack Flagg for her recovery had given her more than just unbroken bones and skin.

[Enough!] Machine Man finally shouted and struck out at her with his arms extended like whips, striking her in the stomach and upper chest and propelling her back into a console, which shorted out from the impact though the tough uniform she wore protected her from being burned. Cathy rolled to her feet and came up with a growl, but a sudden movement in the shadows caused her to jump backwards, saving her from the huge purple fist that slammed into the floor where she’d just been. From out of the shadows stepped the Sleeper IV and its face began to glow.

Not knowing much about the robot other than its name, the USAgent knew a threat when he saw it and leapt shield-first from his perch toward the large robot and hit it with as much force as his enhanced body could provide, driving it into and through the wall that the burnt-out console had weakened, which crumbled further when the force blast the Sleeper had charged up exploded into the wall, raining debris down upon it though the Agent was able to leap clear of it.

“Nice timing, Agent,” D-Man said as he helped his friend to his feet, “but he can walk through walls, or at least parts of him can at a time, and he’s quite strong. Don’t underestimate him.”

“Thanks,” Jack said, turning to see that Battlestar had joined Free Spirit in fighting Machine Man, who seemed to be holding his own against them but the downed Sleeper seemed to leave him a little unsteady. Activating his communicator, he said, “Quinn, is it me or is Machine Man not acting himself?”

“Having never met him, I couldn’t say,” Quinn said, peering down at him from the hole, “but scans show nothing out of the ordinary based on S.H.I.E.L.D. historical records on X-51’s operating system. However, I am detecting off-the-grid activity in his cerebral network…if I didn’t know better, I’d say he’s being controlled somehow.”

With that one word and a second glance at the Sleeper, it all clicked into place for the USAgent, who swore loudly as he ran forward just as Battlestar and Free Spirit were battered aside roughly. “Machinesmith!” he yelled, diving under the twin eye-beams that tore from the captured robot’s head and coming up with a powerful thrust of his shield, driving Machine Man’s purple torso into the wall. “Get out of Machine Man’s head!”

[Ah, so one of you meatheads did the math, huh?] the cackling voice of the true consciousness behind this fight said from the speakers within the head of the robotic Avengers. [Never thought it’d be you, though, Replacement America!] With a speed that was inhuman, the robotic arms shot up and grasped onto USAgent’s arms and hundreds of volts of electricity rippled down their lengths and into the hero’s body, which had already absorbed far more electricity that it could handle in the past two days. With a cry of agony, Jack crumpled to his knees and his shield fizzled out, releasing Machinesmith to step away from the wall, pick up the fading hero and summarily toss him aside. Jack bounced off the wall and slid down the corridor until he was stopped by D-Man, who then stepped over his friend and approached Machinesmith.

It was too late, however, as the rubble behind him moved suddenly and a purple and yellow arm shot out and hit him squarely I the left side and drove D-Man deep into the wall, metal crumpling and folding around him even as he slid into unconsciousness. While Dennis Dunphy’s skin was as hard as steel and strong enough to survive the impact without injury, his brain was all but human and the blunt force trauma from the impact of the fist and then the wall was too much for his already battered mind to take.

Just like that, a stumbling Battlestar looked up from where he lay next to a groggy Free Spirit and he felt his chest tighten. Even with his own great strength and nigh-invulnerability, Lemar saw no way to stop the combined power of the two robots who now stood side-by-side and turned toward him. Resolving to die trying if nothing else, he forced his way to his fee and gripped his triangular shield tightly before him, saying only, “Your mammas were vibrators.” In response, the Sleeper’s face began to glow again.

“That is ENOUGH!” a familiar voice said, arriving on a gust of hot wind that hurt the exhausted Battlestar’s throat. Swooping in from the deck above, Firebird came to a halt hovering between the Sleeper and the two fallen heroes and threw up a blistering wall of blazing fire just as the Sleeper released his blast. The energy slammed into Firebird’s shield with a roar and the fire wall swelled as it attempted to not only block the blast but to absorb it, the molecules of ignited air literally bursting with power that was controlled and restrained by the will and faith of Bonita Juarez…a will that was as powerful and fierce as the elemental force she controlled.

With a cry of anguish, Firebird pulled her arms back, forcing the fire before her to condense itself as tightly as possible and then threw her hands forward with her fingers taunt as an arrow. Following her mental command, a column of pure fire struck the towering robot like one of the mythical thunderbolts of Zeus and the flash of light and heat released caused everyone conscious, even Machinesmit, to close their eyes and hold their breaths for several seconds. When Battlestar dared open his eyes, his jaw fell open in disbelief.

The Sleeper IV still stood on its feet, but its body ended at mid-chest…everything above that had been liquefied down to molten metal and splattered across the corridor walls, floor and ceiling behind it, narrowly missing the indention in the wall where D-Man was trapped. As if gravity had just returned to the world, the Sleeper suddenly shifted and fell backwards like a man encased in carbonite, slamming to the deck with an ear-shattering crash.

[You murdering BITCH!!] the Machinesmith shrieked, lashing out at the kneeling and completely exhausted Firebird with Machine Man’s eyebeams, which only an instinctive reaction of Bonita’s flame aura managed to deflect the blast but she jerked powerfully form the impact and was unable to save herself from the real attack. Before anyone could move to her aid, the whip-fast arms of Machine Man circumvented Firebird’s token defense and the extended metallic hands grasped Firebird’s head and twisted savagely.

A sickening crack of bone and squish of muscle echoed down the suddenly silent hallway…and like a marionette with her stings cut, Bonita Juarez collapsed to the deck…dead.

To Be Continued

 

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