A Cosmic Rendition: Chapter 49 (Patreon)

The corridor was eleven feet wide and that turned out to be the only thing keeping Steve alive.

Eleven feet meant the Winter Soldier couldn’t circle. It meant every attack had to come down a line Steve could see coming, and it meant the shield, held at the right angle, covered most of what mattered.

The metal hand came in high. He caught it on the shield rim and felt the shock go up through his shoulder and into the ribs that had given way ninety seconds earlier. He used the bounce to put the shield’s edge into the asset’s sternum, which moved him back about eighteen inches and accomplished nothing else at all.

“Hill,” Steve gritted through his teeth. “Where’s the lattice?”

“Seventy nine percent.” Hill’s voice was raw, worse than it had been ten minutes ago. “Steve, I need that chip in a cradle.”

“I’m aware.”

The chip lay on the deck plating fifteen feet behind the Winter Soldier, small and green and absolutely out of sight or reach. Every time Steve tried to work his way down the corridor toward it, the asset simply stepped into the line and made him pay for the attempt, and after the third try Steve stopped trying.

He changed the problem instead.

“You want to know the thing I keep thinking about,” Steve said, backing up two steps, letting the asset come. “It’s not the train. Everybody thinks it’s the train. It’s not.”

He received no answer. The Winter Soldier struck at knee level and Steve took it on the shield, letting it turn him, riding the force instead of getting pushed back by it.

“It’s the diner on Fourth,” Steve continued without missing a beat. “You remember the diner? Probably not. It was nothing. Place had eight stools and a griddle run by a guy named Dominic who hated everybody.”

Another strike came in, this one at the throat, and Steve got under it. He struck forward this time, slamming his shoulder into the asset’s chest, and for the first time in the fight, he actually moved him.

“You used to take me there after I got thrown out of a recruitment office. Every single time. Four times. You’d order two coffees and one plate of eggs and then you’d eat about a third of the eggs and push the rest at me because I was a hundred and ten pounds and you thought I didn’t know what you were doing.”

The metal arm slammed in, the fist hitting him on the side of the head, and Steve’s vision went briefly white at the edges.

“I knew what you were doing,” Steve said with a grunt, blinking and shaking his head as his vision returned to normal. He got the shield up just in time for the next strike.

Down on the deck above them, something heavy fell over, and a voice Steve had almost given up on came crackling through the comm.

“Cap.” Sam gasped, breathing heavily. He’d just collided with the steel plating from twenty feet and Steve could tell he had lots of opinions about it. “Cap, I’m up. I’m up, I’m moving, my left wing’s chewed to hell but I’m up.”

“Sam.” Steve felt relief wash over him, the worry easing in his chest that had been locked since the crash. “Stay off deck three.”

“Why would I stay off deck three?”

“Because that’s where I am and I’ve got company.”

There was a pause.

“That’s exactly why I’m coming to deck three, man, what kind of logic is that?”

“Sam. The chip’s on the floor down here and I can’t get to it. If you come through that hatch he’s going to put you through a wall and then we’ve got nobody.” Steve took another blow, this one across the forearm, and the shield rang. “Get to the bridge. Charlie’s got a secondary cradle inboard the same as Bravo did. Stark’ll push you the location.”

“You want me to leave you down there!? Are you serious?”

“I want you to finish the mission.”

There was a moment of terse silence on the line.

“Yeah,” Sam said finally, sighing. “Okay. Okay, Cap. Don’t die while I’m gone. That’d be a real bad look for me on day one.”

XXXXX

Nick Fury had Alexander Pierce on the floor of his own office with a broken nose and a black case under one knee, but it still wasn’t over, because Pierce was talking.

That was the thing about Pierce that Fury had spent twenty years underestimating. The man talked the way other people breathed, and he was never, not once in two decades, talking for the sake of it.

“You’ve got the case,” Pierce said, thickly, through the blood. “Congratulations. You understand it doesn’t matter.”

“Humor me.”

Wind came through the shattered west wall in long gusts that carried glass dust and the smell of the river, and it whipped papers off the desk and out over the city forty-three floors down. Somewhere below them the building was still shooting itself.

“The case contains launch authorization,” Pierce said. “Launch, Nick. Not targeting. The carriers are already airborne. Authorization to fly was granted eleven minutes ago by a man whose retinal scan is in the system, and that man is me. It’s done.” He got an elbow under himself. “What’s in that case is the arming key for weapons discharge. It’s the last door. And you’re right, I can’t open it without you.”

“Then we’re done.”

“We’re not remotely done.” Pierce spat blood onto his own carpet. “The algorithm doesn’t need the arming key to work. It needs the arming key to fire. Those are two different things and you built them to be two different things. In about four minutes you’re going to wish very badly that you hadn’t.”

Fury’s hand tightened on the case. Before he could move, the office door came off its frame.

It did not open in the conventional sense. Instead, it came off, hinges and all, and the thing that walked through it had a torn cowl, a line of blood along its jaw, and a hole in the side plating that was still smoking slightly.

Pierce actually laughed, which was not the reaction Fury had been expecting from anybody.

“Ah,” Pierce said. “The Gotham problem.”

“Rumlow’s alive,” Batman said to Fury, ignoring him. “Bravo’s relay is ours. He’s zip tied to a conduit rack on deck two and somebody should probably go get him at some point before the ship comes down.”

“Noted.” Fury didn’t take his eye off Pierce. “He was about to explain why having his own arming key doesn’t matter.”

Bruce crossed the room in four steps and looked down at the man on the carpet, and whatever Pierce saw looking back at him through the lenses, it took a little of the humor out of his face.

“Talk,” Bruce said, and that was all.

XXXXX

The asset was faster than Steve and stronger than Steve. He did not get tired, and by the four minute mark Steve had accepted all three of those facts and stopped trying to fight the problem he wished he had.

It had been four minutes of nothing. That was the part that was killing him, more than the ribs. Four minutes of two men in a corridor doing everything they knew how to do and neither of them getting anywhere, because Steve couldn’t finish what he landed and the asset couldn’t land what would finish it. Steve had put him into a bulkhead hard enough to buckle the plating and the man had come off it without a limp. The asset had caught Steve across the jaw twice with the metal hand and Steve was still standing, which by rights he shouldn’t have been. Both of them had started to understand somewhere around minute three that this was going to be decided by something other than who hit harder.

The corridor didn’t help. Every time Steve found an angle, the walls took it away from him. Every time the asset built momentum, the bulkheads ate it. They were two men fighting in a hallway with a clock running, and the clock didn’t care about either of them.

What the asset was not, was patient.

Seventy years of conditioning had built a weapon that closed distance and finished things, because that was what it was built for, and every time Steve gave him an opening the asset took it, whether or not the opening was real. Steve recognized it, and he started giving him openings that weren’t real.

He dropped his guard on the left and took a hit he could survive to catch a wrist he needed. He backed into a bulkhead on purpose so the asset would commit to a straight line. He let himself get thrown twice because getting thrown put him closer to the deck, and the deck was where he needed this to end.

On the third throw he took the metal arm with him.

They went down together in a tangle of limbs and shield and deck plating, and Steve got his legs up between them and his hands on the arm at the elbow joint. With a grunt, he turned the whole weight of himself into a lock that had no business working on a limb made out of whatever that limb was made out of.

It didn’t break. But it held.

The asset bucked, and Steve rode it. The asset drove an elbow backward into Steve’s already broken ribs and Steve let out a groan of pain. However, he did not let go and got his forearm across the man’s throat from behind. He tightened his hold, clenching his teeth, and once he had settled into it, it became a question of seconds.

It was not a chokehold for air. The asset could go without air longer than most people could go without opinions. A blood choke, the kind they’d taught in 1943 and nobody had improved on since, and the Winter Soldier fought it for roughly twenty seconds before his hands stopped being efficient and started being desperate. At thirty seconds, his human hand came up and scrabbled at Steve’s sleeve, and at forty-five, he went completely slack.

Steve held it for five more seconds and only when he was sure did he let go.

He could have finished it. He understood, kneeling on the deck of a flying aircraft carrier with his ribs grinding and blood running into his left eye, exactly how simple it would have been to hold on for another forty seconds and end the single most dangerous problem in the building.

He just couldn’t do it. With a sigh, he rolled off and left the man breathing.

Then he stood up, put a hand on the bulkhead to make sure the corridor was going to hold still, and walked past him toward the chip.

“Cap.” Sam’s voice came on the comm. “I’m at the secondary cradle. Bad news, it’s welded shut. Somebody spot welded the access housing, I’m guessing right after Bravo went down. I got nothing to cut with.”

“Then the primary’s the only cradle we’ve got.”

“Guess so. How’s your company?”

Steve looked back over his shoulder. The asset had gotten to one elbow, his head down, breathing hard, and he hadn’t come after him.

“Quiet,” Steve said.

He bent down and picked up the chip.

“You knew me,” the Winter Soldier said, behind him.

Steve stopped.

“Down there. On the floor.” The man’s voice sounded wrong now. It was neither the usual flat operational tone nor the raw one from the parking garage, but something in between and unsteady. “You had it. You had the angle and you had the time, but you let go. That’s not a mistake. Nobody makes that mistake.”

“It wasn’t a mistake.”

“Why?”

Steve turned around. His hand closed around the chip until the edges bit into his palm. The lattice was at eighty something percent above them, but he took the time anyway, because some things you don’t get twice.

“Because you’re my friend,” he said.

The asset’s expression shifted, just a little. “You’re my mission.”

“I know.” Steve took a step toward him. “I’ve been your mission for four days. I’ve been your friend for about a hundred years, give or take the part where neither of us was around for most of it, and I’d rather you shot me than I pretended otherwise.”

“Stop.”

“The eggs at Dominic’s. Your mother’s kitchen. The recruitment office on Flatbush where the guy behind the desk called me a liability and you told him to go to hell and got us both thrown out.” Steve kept walking, slowly, empty handed except for the chip. “Your sister’s name was Rebecca. You called her Becca and she hated it. You had a girl named Connie on the second floor of your building who you never actually asked out, not once in three years, because you’d have had to take her somewhere nice and you were sending your pay home.”

The Winter Soldier had gotten to his feet. He was shaking, which Steve had never seen, not in Malibu and not in the garage and not thirty seconds ago when he was trying to kill him.

“You’re making that up.”

“You want to know how you’d know if I was?” Steve stopped six feet away. “Because if I was making it up, it’d be heroic. It’d be the train and the war and the unit. I’m telling you about eggs and a girl on the second floor you were too broke to ask out. Nobody invents that.”

Second floor. Green door with a bad latch. A girl laughing at something he’d said in a stairwell, and himself, seventeen, with three dollars in his pocket and the math already done.

The asset put his human hand flat against the bulkhead like the corridor had tilted, his other hand going to his head.

“Connie,” he said.

“Connie.”

“She had a...” He stopped. His eyes had gone unfocused and his jaw was working. “There was a door. The latch didn’t sit right. You had to lift it while you turned it or it wouldn’t catch.”

Steve didn’t breathe.

“That’s not mine,” the man said, and his voice broke apart on it. “That’s not mine, I don’t get to have that, they took it, they take it every single time. Every time I remember anything they put me in the chair and they take it out and it hurts so much and then I don’t have it anymore and I don’t even know it’s gone.”

“Buck.”

“Don’t.” He pressed the heel of his hand into his eye. “Don’t say it like that. You say it like you’re glad and I can’t have you be glad about me. I’ve killed, I don’t know how many… there are years I don’t have at all but I know what was in them because I can feel it. I can feel it all.”

“I know.”

“You don’t.”

“No,” Steve admitted. “I don’t. But I know you didn’t choose it, and I know the man who did choose it is sitting in an office about three miles that way. I know that in about four minutes something is going to happen that neither of us gets to take back.”

The man lowered his hand. His eyes were red and his face was, for the first time since 1945, unmistakably the face Steve remembered, older and harder and marked up, but present, actually present, looking out at him from behind seventy years of somebody else’s work.

“I know you,” he said. “I don’t know all of it. I’ve got pieces that they don’t hold together and half of them might not even be mine.” He swallowed. “But I know you. Steve.”

Steve didn’t say anything for a second, because he couldn’t.

“Yeah,” he managed. “That’s right.”

“It’s not like remembering.” Bucky was looking at his own hands now, the metal one and the other one, like he was checking whether they belonged to the same person. “That’s what I need you to understand, because you’re going to ask me later and I want to say it while I’ve still got hold of it. It’s not a picture coming back. It’s more like I’ve been reading a file about somebody my whole life and I just found out the file’s about me.” He shook his head slowly. “I knew there was a Brooklyn. I’ve known that for years. I didn’t know I was from there. I thought it was a location in an operation.”

“How long have you known that?”

“I don’t know. That’s the thing. I don’t know how long I’ve known anything.” He finally looked up. “There was a mission in Odessa. Two thousand nine, I think, I don’t know why I’ve got the year and not the month. Woman put a car in front of a bridge abutment to protect a client, and I remember thinking she did it right, she did it exactly the way you’d do it, and I didn’t know who you were. I just had the comparison sitting there in my head with nobody attached to it.”

Steve thought about Natasha and a bullet through her hip, a story she’d told him in a stairwell, and decided that was a conversation for another day.

“You’re smaller,” Bucky said, and it came out almost like a complaint. “In my head. You’re a lot smaller.”

“I got bigger.”

“You got stupider is what you got, if you’re up here on this thing.”

And that, more than the name or the kitchen or the girl on the second floor, was the moment Steve actually believed it, because that was exactly the tone and exactly the timing and nobody on earth could have faked it.

“Cap.” Sam’s voice came on the comm, urgent. “Cap, I don’t know what’s happening on your end, but I need you to look at the sky.”

Steve got to the corridor’s observation slit in four strides.

Across three miles of gray morning, the two other carriers hung in the air with the linkage lattice running between them in threads of pale blue, and the threads had stopped reaching for Charlie.

They’d started reaching down.

XXXXX

“Zola’s algorithm doesn’t wait for the arming key,” Pierce said.

He was sitting up now, his back against the front of his own desk, one hand cupped under his ruined nose, and he was talking the way a professor talks, which was the single most obscene thing about him.

“That’s the part you never read carefully, Nick. You read the operational summary. You read the part about targeting solutions and discharge authorization, and you satisfied yourself that no one man could pull the trigger.” He tilted his head back against the desk. “The algorithm resolves its solution the moment it has sufficient sensor coverage. It doesn’t need permission to identify. It needs permission to fire. Those are separate systems on purpose, because I needed them to be separate, because a targeting solution that already exists is worth considerably more than one that has to be generated on demand.”

Bruce had gone very still. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying the list was never seven hundred thousand.” Pierce almost smiled. “Seven hundred thousand was the domestic tier. That’s what Romanoff pulled at Aldgate, the American subset, because that’s the file that was sitting on the server she happened to reach. The full solution is global, and it’s running right now, resolving at about eleven thousand names a second.”

Fury’s hand had gone white on the case.

“How many?”

“Somewhere north of twenty million, at final count. I’d have to check.” Pierce said it like he was reading a forecast. “Journalists in Cairo. Union organizers in Jakarta. Three quarters of the sitting parliament in two countries I won’t name because you’d find it distasteful. Everyone whose existence, extrapolated forward across the next forty years, produces a world less governable than the one I’m proposing.”

“Twenty million people,” Fury said.

“Twenty million people who die once, Nick, instead of four billion who live badly forever. I’ve run the numbers for forty years. I’ve run them every way there is to run them. There isn’t a version where the arithmetic comes out differently and there isn’t a version where anybody volunteers.” Pierce looked up at him, and there was nothing performative in his face at all, which was worse. “Somebody has to be willing to be hated. I’ve made my peace with being hated.”

“You’ve made your peace.” Fury’s voice had dropped into something very quiet. “That’s the sentence. That’s the whole man, right there in four words.”

“You’d have done it if you’d gotten there first.”

“No,” Fury said. “That’s the difference between us and it always was. I don’t think I’m worthy enough to pick who lives. Neither are you. The only difference is I know it.”

Bruce had moved to the window. The carriers hung out there in the gray, and the lattice between them had changed color. He didn’t need a display to tell him that was bad.

“They’re already targeting,” he said. “Right now. Without the key.”

“They’ve been targeting for six minutes,” Pierce said. “You were busy.”

Bruce keyed his comm. “Stark. Tell me what you’re seeing.”

XXXXX

What Tony was seeing was the worst thing he’d ever seen on a screen, and he had once watched a wormhole open over Manhattan from the inside.

“They’re painting,” he said. “JARVIS, give me the count.”

“Eighteen million four hundred thousand and rising, sir. The rate of acquisition is increasing as sensor coverage improves with altitude.”

“Tony.” Pepper’s hand was on the back of his chair. “Tony, what does painting mean?”

“It means the guns aren’t hot but they know exactly where everybody is.” He was already deep in the interface, both hands moving, the heart monitor beside him climbing into a range that had made JARVIS start flagging it out loud and then, when that accomplished nothing, stop. “It means the second somebody arms those things, the solution’s already loaded. The whole thing takes about nine minutes and there’s no step in between where a human being gets to think about it.”

“Can you stop it?”

“No.” He said it flatly, because there wasn’t time to soften anything. “I can’t stop it. I can slow it down.”

“Sir,” JARVIS said, “may I remind you that your access to the carrier network is read only by design, and that attempting write operations on a live system will almost certainly trigger the intrusion protocols we have spent thirteen hours avoiding.”

“Yeah, I remember, I’m the one who set it up that way.” Tony pulled the read only wrapper off with a gesture that felt, physically, like removing a safety catch. “Doesn’t matter anymore. They already know we’re here. Rumlow’s on a conduit rack and Pierce is on his own carpet, so whatever’s left of their security desk has bigger problems than me.”

Rhodey had come off the stool. “What are you doing, Tones?”

“The acquisition routine runs on a validation loop. Every name the algorithm paints gets checked against the sensor return to confirm the target’s where it thinks it is.” Tony’s hands didn’t stop. “So I’m going to give it bad returns. Not wrong ones, that’s too obvious, it’d flag as sensor failure and reroute. Slightly late ones. Eleven milliseconds late, across every acquisition channel, all three ships.”

Banner’s voice came in over the line. “Tony, that’s going to force a revalidation on every target it’s already painted.”

“That’s exactly what it’s going to do.”

“You’re going to make it start over.”

“I’m going to make it start over every eleven milliseconds forever.” Tony hit the last of it and sat back, and for one second the whole display wall did nothing at all. Then the acquisition counter, which had been climbing past eighteen million, stopped climbing and began, very slowly, to fall. “Come on. Come on, you Swiss lunatic, chase your tail for me.”

“Seventeen million nine hundred thousand,” JARVIS said. “Seventeen million six hundred thousand. Sir, the algorithm is recalculating from zero.”

“How long does that buy us?” Peggy asked.

“Not long. It’ll figure out what I did.” Tony wiped his face with the back of his wrist and there was blood on it, which nobody in the room commented on. Pepper’s hand on his shoulder tightened over. “Eight minutes, maybe nine. Wayne, Rogers, whoever’s actually listening to me, you’ve got nine minutes and then the solution reloads. I can’t run the same trick twice because it’ll have written a patch for me by then.”

“Copy,” Bruce said. “Nine minutes.”

“And Cap.” Tony’s voice changed, slightly. “Chips in all three or it’s nothing. You know that, right? Two doesn’t do it. Two is a rounding error.”

“I know.”

XXXXX

Maria Hill was running the whole operation out of a server room on thirty-four with a collapsed windpipe and no chair.

She’d tried a chair. Sitting down had turned out to make the breathing worse, so she was standing at a rack with a terminal balanced on top of a cable tray. Sharon Carter stood beside her holding a rifle on the doorway, and between the two of them they had about a third of a functioning command post.

“Say again,” Hill rasped into the comm. “Wayne, say again, you’re breaking up.”

“I said the arming key is dead. Two director authorization, no override, Pierce can’t fire them.”

“Then why is my acquisition counter still moving?”

“Because he doesn’t need the key to aim. Stark’s buying us time on that.”

Hill closed her eyes for a second.

“Ma’am,” Sharon said, not turning from the door. “You should sit down.”

“Tried it.”

“You should try it again.”

“Carter, in about six minutes there are going to be three aircraft carriers doing something to each other over the Potomac, and when that happens somebody in this building needs to be telling the harbor patrol and the Coast Guard and about four thousand people in Rosslyn which direction to run.” Hill pulled up another window and immediately regretted the effort it took. “I’ll sit down after that.”

Sharon didn’t argue. She did, however, drag a folding chair across the floor with her boot and leave it directly behind Hill without comment. Hill did notice but she did nothing to acknowledge it. Still, four minutes later, she used it.

XXXXX

“So we’re not just blinding it,” Bucky said.

They were moving down the corridor at a run, Steve with the chip in his fist and one arm braced against his own ribs, Bucky beside him moving like a man who hadn’t been choked unconscious eight minutes earlier, which he had.

“No,” Steve said. “Blinding it was the plan when we thought we’d get all three before it painted anything. It’s painted twenty million people. If we just take the guns offline, HYDRA gets to keep that list and they get to try again in a year with a better ship.”

“So what’s the plan now?”

“Ask Stark.”

Tony’s voice came through both their comms. “The plan now is that the chips don’t blind the carriers, they hand me the carriers. Their target file is already loaded, I can’t delete it, but once all three relays are mine I can rewrite what the carriers think is on it. I can put three things on that list.”

Bucky worked it out about half a second before Steve did.

“The ships,” he said.

“The ships.”

“You want them to shoot each other.”

“I want them to shoot each other,” Tony confirmed. “Out over the water, away from the city, and I want it to happen before Pierce’s arming key situation resolves itself in whatever direction it’s going to resolve. So get me that third chip.”

They came around the corner into the rotor housing corridor and ran directly into eleven HYDRA operatives.

Steve had four steps to think about it and used three of them getting the shield up, and the fourth was already gone by the time the first burst came down the corridor and shredded the bulkhead where his head had been.

He went left. Bucky went right, and the thing Steve noticed, in the part of his brain that never stopped being a soldier even when the rest of him was busy, was that neither of them had said anything about it. Seventy years and a war and everything that had been done to the man beside him, and they still split a corridor the same way they’d split one in Azzano.

“Cradle’s behind them,” Steve called.

“I noticed.”

“You got a gun?”

“I got three guns, Steve, what kind of question is that?”

It took forty seconds. Steve took the left side and the shield did most of the work, while Bucky took the right and did it the way the Winter Soldier did it, which was efficient in a manner that Steve chose not to think too much about right at that moment. Two of the eleven dropped their weapons and put their hands up instead, and Bucky looked at them for a moment that went on slightly too long before he moved past without shooting.

The cradle was open. The housing lights were dead.

Steve got to it with the chip in his hand and the lattice at ninety one percent, Hill counting down in his ear, and he had the chip a half inch from the cradle when the deck plating behind him rang with the sound of something very large landing on it.

He turned.

Three more of them had come down the aft ladder, and the one in front had a weapon Steve didn’t recognize, some kind of shoulder mounted launcher with a wide barrel, and he was already bringing it up.

“Down,” Bucky said, and hit Steve in the chest with his whole body.

The round went over both of them and took out the corridor’s forward bulkhead and about nine feet of the deck beyond it. The pressure change pulled every loose object in the corridor toward the hole, including the chip, which came out of Steve’s hand and slid.

Steve watched it go, his eyes wide.

It stopped about four feet from the edge, wedged against a deck cleat, spinning slowly.

“Okay,” Bucky said from somewhere on top of him. “Okay. That’s a problem.”

XXXXX

“You’re out of time,” Pierce said. “Whatever Stark’s doing, and I assume it’s Stark, it’s a delay. That’s all it is. That’s all anything you people have managed this entire week has been.”

Bruce didn’t answer. He had the launch authorization case open on the desk and was going through it with the kind of methodical attention that made Fury, standing three feet away with a weapon on a man he’d known for twenty years, actually feel slightly better about the world.

“Two director authorization,” Bruce said. “Retinal, both parties, simultaneous. There’s no override.”

“There’s no override,” Pierce agreed.

“Then the arming key is dead. Whatever happens in the next nine minutes, HYDRA doesn’t fire those guns.”

“HYDRA fires those guns in about six days, or six weeks, or six months, or whatever time it takes,” Pierce said, “when a different man sits in this chair with a different name on the door and the list is still exactly where I left it. That’s the thing you’re all so bad at understanding. You keep trying to win this afternoon.” He shifted against the desk. “I’ve never once in forty years tried to win an afternoon.”

“Cut off one head,” Fury said.

“Cut off one head,” Pierce agreed, and he smiled with blood on his teeth.

Bruce closed the case.

“Then it’s a good thing we’re not cutting off a head,” he said. “We’re taking the list.”

Pierce’s smile stopped.

“Stark,” Bruce said into the comm, without looking away from him. “You can rewrite the target file. Can you copy it first?”

There was a pause on the line that lasted about two seconds.

“Oh,” Tony said. “Oh, that’s mean. I like that a lot.”

“Every name,” Bruce said. “Every entry, every parameter, every piece of the reasoning. It goes out the same way the SHIELD files are going out.”

“Twenty million names.”

“Twenty million people who get to know,” Bruce said. “And every analyst, journalist, and prosecutor on six continents gets to read exactly why a man in Washington thought they’d be better off dead.”

For the first time in the entire conversation, Alexander Pierce stopped talking.

XXXXX

Four feet.

That was the distance between Steve Rogers and the end of it all, but the challenging aspect was the fact that the entire four feet was a hole that opened onto a two-thousand-foot drop into the Potomac with a rotor assembly spinning somewhere in between.

“I’ll go,” Bucky said.

“You won’t.”

“I’m heavier and my left side doesn’t care what happens to it.” He was already moving toward the edge. “That’s not bravery, that’s just physics, and you’ve got three broken ribs that I can hear them from here.”

“Two.”

“Three. You’re lying about one of them because you think I’ll worry.”

Steve almost laughed, which hurt, thus proving the point.

The deck tilted as Charlie adjusted altitude, and the chip shifted against the cleat before it stopped again. Both of them went very still.

“Sam,” Steve said. “Where are you?”

“Coming down the aft spine, forty seconds out, I got hung up on a hatch.” He grunted. “What do you need?”

“I need you at the primary rotor housing on three with a wing that works.”

“The left one’s chewed.”

“Is it chewed enough that you can’t catch something?”

There was a moment of pause before Sam’s voice came again. “Cap, what exactly are you planning to throw?”

“Not something,” Steve said. “Someone.”

Bucky turned his head and looked at him.

“You’re out of your mind,” he said. “You know that? Seventy years and the one thing that didn’t change is that you’re completely out of your mind.”

“Thirty seconds,” Sam said. “And for the record, I hate this, and I’m doing it.”

Steve set the shield against the bulkhead, got both hands on Bucky’s forearm, the metal one, and braced his boot against the deck cleat.

“On three,” Steve said.

“You always said on three and then went on two.”

“That was one time.”

“That was every time.”

The deck tilted again, the chip started to slide, and neither of them counted at all.

Steve threw him.

Bucky went out over the hole flat and fast with his metal arm extended, and his hand closed around the chip about eighteen inches before the deck ran out. He had only a moment to prepare himself before there was no deck at all and he was falling. The wind took him sideways, and the rotor noise swallowed everything.

A shape came up out of the rotor wash with one good wing and one bad one, and Sam Wilson hit him at an angle that wasn’t survivable for either of them by any reasonable standard. The two of them slammed back into the deck eleven feet from the hole in a tangle of metal and feathers and a great deal of swearing.

“Got it,” Bucky wheezed, holding up the chip.

“You’re welcome,” Sam said, flat on his back. “Also, hi. We haven’t met. You threw me off a helicarrier about twenty minutes ago.”

“Yeah.” Bucky looked at him. “Sorry about that.”

“We’re gonna circle back to it.”

Steve got to them, took the chip, and put it in the cradle.

The housing lights cycled amber. Then red.

Then green.

“Charlie’s ours,” Hill said, and her voice cracked in the middle of it. “Tony, all three, go.”

“Already going.” Tony’s voice came fast and clipped. “Rewriting the target file now. Deleting twenty million entries, adding three. JARVIS, confirm the copy’s clear first, I am not losing that list.”

“Copy confirmed and distributed, sir. Forty-one recipients across nine countries.”

“Good. Do it.”

Out over the Potomac, the linkage lattice between three enormous ships finished closing, and for one full second everything went quiet.

Then Carrier Alpha’s port battery rotated ninety degrees and pointed directly at Carrier Bravo.

“Uh,” Sam said, still on his back. “Cap. We’re standing on one of these.”

Steve looked out through the ruined bulkhead at two ships that were now, unmistakably, aiming at the one under his feet.

“Yeah,” he said. “We should probably go.”

To be continued...