The Ultimates: Against All Enemies (12 page)

Janet stood and slid her copy of the report in the exchange tray, half-edited. "Why don't you finish these," she Said, and walked out.

17

Status Report

Operations involving continue to progress. Assets in place around and

signal readiness to commence the next phase of the human ordering project. Observations of human cultural production including television broadcasts indicate that is behaving according to projections. These observations increase confidence in further projections, which are to be acted on beginning immediately.

assimilation of nonhuman targets should commence immediately as preparation for "the next wave of diversionary missions.

In addition, redirection of assets away from infiltration and control of human cultural production will commence. The institutions in question behave according to rules that defy systematization, and the institutions are thus useless for our purposes. Assets previously dedicated to this portion of the human ordering project will receive orders attached to this directive.

Further misdirection and subversion operations to commence in at the earliest opportunity. Assets in place are given initiative to assess and execute as rules of engagement indicate. Impact of research of involving manipulation and control of arthropods, order

, uncertain. Consideration of possible consequences for success and timeline of human ordering project continues. Laboratory at which conducted research was destroyed during combat with assimilated asset in place; however, appears to be constructing a new laboratory with similar facilities in close proximity to current residence of . Placement of new assets and adjustment in placement of existing assets to commence immediately per previously issued directives.

Further, it is directed that construction be restarted on facility abandoned after events in 1.10453 solar year ago. Financing and rearrangement of asset deployments is underway, and will be refined as events dictate. This directive should in no way be considered an expression of doubt in the human ordering project; rather, infrastructure penetration should—as articulated—be one of the primary long-term goals of the project. Despite 's many shortcomings, on this topic he was useful. In addition, 's belief that the human opponent, especially its augmented cohort—specifically the —should be leveraged and weakened through the exploitation of individual personalities is in the process of being vindicated.

Appendix

Pursuant to previous directives encouraging development of viable contingency plans, priority assets have been assimilated in ; . Assets required for use of facilities necessary to the execution of viable contingency plans are under surveillance in these and other locations. Assimilations ongoing and productive. 18

Considering the fact that I've bought and sold everything from steel to genes to currency, Tony thought to himself, it shouldn't have been so damn complicated to get hold of a bunch of ants. He'd had an easier time putting his hands on radioactive isotopes, for God's sake. Harvester ants were the easiest, but even for them he'd had to pull all kinds of strings at the Department of Agriculture because it turned out that Pym had been working without the proper permits. This was where all the money he spent on lobbyists every year paid off... although it galled him to think that he was putting $2,000-per-hour lobbyists to work on behalf of Hank Pym. His defense of Pym to Fury the other day had been mostly motivated by annoyance at Fury's high-handedness. The truth was, if Tony never had to lay eyes on Hank Pym again, it would be too soon.

Another thing that galled him was that he'd had to fly into the Podunk Palwaukee airport again, also because of Fury, since Commandante Eyepatch had decreed that the team should come out to observe a demonstration of Pym's ant wizardry in Illinois. Why not just bring him to the Triskelion, Tony had asked, instead of dragging everyone off to the Chicago suburbs... but Fury had been his usual stubborn self So here they were. Tony, Fury, Clint, and Thor. Just like last time, except that Clint was along this time and Steve had flatly refused to come (once again getting away with it when the rest of the team wouldn't have been able to, Tony thought sourly). Janet had begged off for reasons that, Tony assumed, were more reasonable than whatever Steve had come up with. If he'd bothered to come up with anything at all. A SHIELD tech team had built Hank a new lab not too far from his old one, where Hank could show off his repertoire of tricks with all of the new ants Tony had flown in from all over the world. Probably he'd just gone out on the sidewalk and kidnapped a bunch more since then; Hank Pym in his headset was a kind of ant Pied Piper. Tony imagined mother ants telling their babies to never, ever get close to the human with the metal hat on. The anthills around the lab were probably ghost towns by now. Sidewalk ants, leaf-cutter ants, regular old harvester ants, Hank had them all. One of these days he was going to invent a technology to turn himself into an ant, and then Hank Pym's human problems would be solved. Tony had half a mind to start the research himself, just to spare the world more of Hank's paranoid, self-pitying neediness.

All in all, Tony was in the perfect frame of mind to watch a scientific demonstration. The new lab was about the same size as the old one, but without the thrown-together quality that had been obvious in the old one even when Tony had observed the ruins from out in the parking lot. Whatever their deficiencies in creative thinking, SHIELD teams had a good eye for organization. This space was arranged around a slightly raised central control desk, with all kinds of terminals and headgear piled on it. No organizational impulse could survive the prolonged presence of Hank Pym. Ringing the outer wall of the lab were small doors, behind each of which was an ant farm designed along the environmental lines of each species' favored habitat. Compartmentalized areas in front of each door provided space for observations of the ants and experimentation with various headgear and control broadcasts.

"Ants and wasps have a common ancestor. They're really very similar," Hank said, in response to a question Tony hadn't heard. Tony immediately found his attention wandering to the question of whether Hank's headset would have any power to control Janet Pym, and what one might do with that control in the event one had it... oh my.

He snapped out of it in time to see Hank putting on one of his helmets. Something about the sight took all the steam out of his Janet fantasia, which was just as well, since Tony had better things to do than joust with a jealous Steve Rogers. The world was full of women. He could find one who wasn't an emotionally scarred mutant.

"Okay, people," Fury said. "Everyone up on the island." The four Ultimates, plus Hank and two SHIELD techs, clustered in the middle of the lab. Hank touched a terminal screen, and walls slid across the gaps through which they'd entered, sealing the command platform off from the rest of the lab. "The walls have a mild electrical current running through them, too," Hank said. "They won't come near us."

"They're just ants," Clint said.

Hank laughed. "Say that again after you've been stung by a bullet ant."

"Where's the target?" Fury asked.

"There are three," Hank said. "I have a couple of things to show you."

"Okay. Where are the targets?" Fury asked, less politely this time, and with sharp emphasis on the plural verb and final
s
in
targets
.

Hank shot Fury a wink. "You'll see soon enough. Just wait. In ten minutes, you're going to wonder why you ever worried about screeners in the first place."

A veiled shot at me, wondered Tony? Or not so veiled? It didn't matter. Years had passed since Tony's ego had been vulnerable to people like Hank Pym. Genius or not, Pym was a pathetic bundle of inferiority and worry. If you were going to worry about what people like him said about you, you might as well carry grudges against bugs that hit your windshield.

Various chirps and audio dingbats started percolating out of Hank's terminals as he powered up the main control routines. It fit exactly with Tony's perceptions of Hank that the good doctor was one of those geeks who had a different sound effect for every keystroke. "Okay," Hank said. "When I was designing and rehearsing this experiment, it occurred to me that you might not be impressed enough if I only had the ants find a sample. So what I've done here is run three parallel routines, involving different groups of ants. Each one is instructed to look for a particular mass of Chitauri tissue, as expressed by the density of particles in the air. They can tell the three samples apart on this basis alone, but what I want to call your attention to is the way that each species will come out, reconnoiter, and then focus in on the sample they're directed to find."

"I can't wait," Tony said.

"Actually, neither can I," Hank shot back. "This is the first time I'll ever have kept these three plates spinning live. Oh, and I went for one final little flourish. Each of these three species typically attacks one of the others on sight. So if you see an ant massacre out there, you'll know I dropped the ball. If not... " He shrugged and grinned to himself at how smart he was. "Everybody ready?"

"We have the Orkin men in place?" Fury called out.

"Yes, sir," said a white-suited SHIELD tech waiting near the front door. Hank spun on Fury. "Are you kidding me? These—"

"We bought these ants, Doctor Pym. We will dispose of them as we see fit, when we see fit." Fury's expression and tone of voice suggested that he wanted to say much more. "Now. Kindly proceed."

"You people are sick," Hank said. He put on the headset. "Exploitative, manipulative, soulless... sick." As if to emphasize the last point, he checked the time and then popped a pill from a prescription bottle before tapping in a final touchscreen sequence. "All of you go to hell. On five, four... " Hank counted off the last three seconds on his fin-gers like a TV stage manager. At zero, he clenched his fist, and three of the ant farm doors rose smoothly until the inhabitants of each cell had a twelve-by-eighteen-inch portal to the world. Ants in tidy columns filed out of each, and then spread across the floor. When members of one species encountered another, they touched feelers briefly before continuing on their assigned errands. When all three species had intermingled on the floor, Tony gave up trying to follow what was going on and went over to a series of ant's-eye-view monitors installed along the back wall of the control island. Thor was already there.

"What's your take, O namesake of my favorite weekday?" Tony asked him.

"Really?" Thor said. "I would have figured a party boy like you would be partial to Friday."

"Where I went to college, Friday was retroactively extended to include Thursday. Made us all look forward to it a little more. How about you, Clint?"

"Agreed. Plus who had classes on Fridays, anyway?"

Thor shook his head, and Tony could see him thinking: Americans. Both of them watched the screens and saw mortal enemies passing each other by without more than a passing exchange of pheromone... which was also kind of like some of the undergrad weekends Tony remembered, but that was another story. "It really is pretty impressive," he said.

Thor shrugged. "It hasn't worked yet. If we could get them to detect my brother, now, that would be a science project I could get behind."

"Oh my God," Tony groaned. "Is anyone on this team sane?" He returned his attention to the ants, which on the monitors he could sort of distinguish by species. Not that he knew which of them were which, but he could see that one of them was smaller and browner than another, which was thicker through the thorax than the third, which was an odd reddish color with black legs.

Or at least, so it looked through the monitors. Each of the three species seemed to be forming a kind of scouts' perimeter, with more resources following right behind. Tony wished he had a way to tell which of them was looking for which sample, and said so.

"There's a real-time graphic on one of the monitors somewhere," Hank said. "Not sure where. But sure, you can see which of them is going where."

Tony looked around and found the graphic display. Sure enough, on it you could follow what was happening in terms of closing distance to each sample. From the looks of it, all three teams were closing on their samples, and there didn't appear to be much deviation or overlap. If that was the truth of the situation, then Hank had done some very good work indeed. "You feel like explaining this to me?" Thor asked over his shoulder. "I avoid these machines when I can."

Tony compiled, and about the time he'd finished with the explanation as he understood it, the first team of ants found its pot of Chitauri gold. So all Tony had to say was, "See? Where the glowing spot is, that's the target they found."

"Just like I planned it," Hank was crowing. "You just wait. Give it forty-five seconds. God, look at those deployment patterns. I'm too good."

That, Tony thought, was up for debate, but it was beyond question that within about forty-five seconds, just like Hank had said, both of the other species had tracked and located their targets as well.

"Whoo!" Hank shouted. "That's your ant for you, ladies and gentlemen! SKR TechEnt can... "

"Excellent result," Nick Fury cut in.

"Hell yes, it's an excellent result," Hank said. "Better than any machine. Life will find life." Well, Tony thought. I don't know if we need to turn this into an ant versus human machine ingenuity kind of grudge. The tech Steve Rogers had leaked to SKR was good. Very good. The only thing Tony had trouble swallowing, since he'd been on the wrong side of backroom political decisions before, was the question of where SKR was getting their Chitauri samples for calibration purposes. He surely hoped that SHIELD wasn't involved in it.

"And here, look at this," Hank went on, unfolding a piece of paper from the pocket of his lab coat. "I predicted the order."