The math on the symbiotes was straightforward once Smith framed it correctly.
Six ordinary agents bonded to six symbiotes produced six warriors who were stronger than Super Soldiers. That was useful. But six enhanced individuals bonded to six symbiotes — starting from a higher baseline, adding rather than supplementing — produced something the two-option math couldn't adequately capture. Jessica Jones was the demonstration. Her native strength hadn't been diluted by the bond; it had been built on. The symbiote's capabilities compounded on top of a foundation that was already there.
The example that kept coming back was Pietro. A speedster bonded to a speed-class symbiote — the resulting combination would be operating at a level that was genuinely difficult to model in advance. Somewhere between what Pietro currently was and what the X-Men's version of the same power represented. Possibly past it.
He needed the right candidates, not just available ones.
The ten serum injection slots he'd already authorized could go to the priority list: Sharon Carter, Bobbi Morse, Hawkeye, Coulson, Hand, and the others in that tier. Standard enhancement, baseline to enhanced. The symbiote pairings would require a different approach and more time.
He left the symbiote facility and moved on.
Several days later.
Coulson walked back to the Airbus with the particular post-injection combination of feeling exactly the same as before and somehow also considerably more capable than before. Fifty combat power. In the broader landscape of what SHIELD was encountering, it wasn't a top-tier number. In the context of a field team that had previously been running every operation at baseline human capacity, it changed the calculus substantially.
May met him at the boarding ramp. "Blue Dot asset out of Portugal called."
Coulson took the tablet she handed him, read it, and looked up. "When do we leave?"
Faro, Portugal.
The police station was a converted administrative building in the older part of the city, staffed by people who had clearly received a call from someone with considerably more institutional weight than they were accustomed to dealing with, and who had responded by doing exactly what they'd been told.
The officer at the reception desk greeted them with the specific composure of someone who had made peace with the strangeness of the situation. "The Prime Minister's office called. They said to keep the woman here and wait for your people."
Coulson nodded. "How did you manage that?"
"I told her Kava was on his way to see her."
A beat.
"I'm not Kava," Coulson said.
The officer's smile widened. "Luckily, I don't have to be the one to tell her that." He nodded toward the second-floor corridor above them. "She left her sword at the front. Remember to take it on your way out."
Coulson went up.
Sif was sitting on a bench in the corridor with the upright posture of someone whose body had not forgotten its habits even if her mind had. She looked at him when he reached the top of the stairs, and the look was the specific kind of watchful attention that people deploy when they're trying to determine if something is safe.
"You are not Kava," she said.
"No," Coulson said. He sat down across from her. "My name is Coulson. Phil Coulson." He let that settle for a moment. "Some people call me Son of Coul." He opened his tablet and turned it toward her — a photo from the Airbus's monitoring system, himself and Sif, clearly comfortable in each other's presence. "We've worked together before."
She looked at the photo. At him. At the photo again.
"I don't remember."
"Do you remember who you are?"
"I know I'm from Asgard." Her voice was steady — the information was there, it just wasn't attached to anything else. "I don't remember my home. I don't remember why I came to Midgard. I don't remember—" She glanced down at her clothes. The plain leather jacket, the civilian boots. "Why I'm wearing this instead of armor."
"You're Sif," Coulson said. "Lady Sif of Asgard. You're a warrior — one of the best your world has produced. The armor is because you were on an undercover mission when you arrived." He kept his voice even and informational, not patronizing. "You knew from a previous visit that Asgardian armor draws attention."
Sif looked at her hands for a moment. "A warrior," she said, more to herself than to him.
May had been standing back. She stepped forward now and held up her tablet, playing a video clip that Fitz had located from dock security footage. On the screen: Sif and a man, fighting with serious intent, the kind of fight where both parties were clearly operating well beyond normal human capacity. It ran for forty seconds, ended with the man taking Sif off the dock into the water below.
Sif watched it without expression.
"That's me," she said.
"Yes."
"I don't remember it." She looked at the frozen last frame — the moment of impact, the water. "I'm a good soldier. I wouldn't have lost like that unless the opponent was—"
"Remarkable," Coulson said. He meant it. "Whoever he is, he fought you to a standstill and won. We need to know who he is and what he's here for." He looked at May. "Lorelei?"
"Already have the number," May said.
Lorelei answered on the second ring, and Coulson could hear the specific quality of a sofa in the background — someone who had been comfortable before the interruption.
"Ambassador Lorelei. This is Coulson. We've located Sif, but there's a complication."
"What kind of complication."
"She fought with an individual at the docks — someone capable enough to defeat her. After the fight, she lost her memory. She's currently stable but doesn't recall her mission or much else." He paused. "Can you tell us what she was here to do?"
A two-second silence.
"Heimdall tracked a Kree vessel entering the atmosphere," Lorelei said. "Single-pilot craft, covert. The markings identified it as Ronan's peace faction — not his military command. The God-King sent Sif to locate the pilot and send him back." Another pause. "If Sif failed and lost her memory, then the pilot is considerably more capable than the marking suggested."
"The Kree are on Earth," Coulson said quietly. He looked at May. "Again."
"Yes," Lorelei said. "If you're planning to report it to Director Smith — which you should — do it quickly. These situations tend not to wait."
"We will. Thank you." He ended the call and turned to Sif. "There's an Asgardian embassy in New York. I'm going to arrange your transport there — Lorelei will be able to help with your memory. The situation you came here to handle is something we'll deal with from our side."
Sif looked at him. "The man I was fighting."
"A Kree," Coulson said. "We know. And we have a team already looking for him." He picked up his phone. "Right now, I need to contact the Director."
The hospital. Faro.
Donnie showed the photo to the third person at the desk and got the same result he'd gotten from the first two: no recognition, mild confusion, a polite offer to check the admissions log.
The nurse at the adjacent station looked up suddenly. "You said my name. How do you know my name?"
Donnie turned. The nurse was looking at her own hands with a particular baffled expression — the same quality of confused detachment that he had seen, forty minutes ago, on an Asgardian warrior sitting in a police station corridor.
He called May immediately. "He's been in this building. Recently. But the hospital is large and I can't locate him."
May's voice: "The camouflage system he's operating requires nitrogen. Surgical equipment here will have a supply. Start there."
The equipment room was at the end of the hospital's lower corridor. Donnie pushed the door open and found a man in the process of closing the access panel on a piece of equipment, his skin still carrying a faint blue undertone that was rapidly shifting back to something that looked human as the newly injected nitrogen cycled through his camouflage system.
They looked at each other.
"I'd rather not fight an Earthling," Vin-Tak said. The words were clipped and direct, without particular hostility. He reached for his weapon with a steady hand. "The mutations occurring on this planet are not your concern and you are not our target."
Donnie had enough combat experience to know that the qualifier "not our target" was not the same as "safe to stand in front of." He dropped the temperature in the room by ten degrees in the time it took to exhale and sent a freeze field outward.
Vin-Tak stepped sideways with the ease of someone who had done this before, on a great many planets, against a great many threat profiles. His detection equipment — the compact device at his hip, the one that had been developed over millennia specifically to locate individuals who had undergone Kree-originated genetic activation — showed no red flag for the enhanced human in front of him. Interesting. Whatever this man was, he hadn't come through the Obelisk.
The ice spikes that followed came fast and in a spread pattern. Vin-Tak used his weapon to shatter the first two, ducked inside the third, and closed the distance in four steps. The restraint application was practiced — two points of leverage, a specific angle — and Donnie went down without his freeze field having time to compensate.
Vin-Tak picked up the nearest piece of furniture by way of emphasis and brought it down once, ensuring the pause would last long enough, then walked out of the room without looking back. The Inhumans were the priority. An enhanced Earthling who attacked out of misidentification was a problem for Earth's own authorities.
Skye reached the equipment room thirty seconds later and found Donnie already working his way back to his feet.
"I'm fine," he said, before she asked. "He's gone."
They searched the floor. They searched the adjacent corridors. The trail ended at a service exit.
The wormhole opened in a vacant stretch of the dock area, and Smith stepped through. Coulson and May were waiting. Sif was standing slightly apart from them, watching the water with the expression of someone trying to remember a word that's on the tip of their tongue.
Smith looked at her.
"Sif."
She turned. There was nothing in her expression that indicated recognition.
Smith looked at Coulson.
"She fought the Kree agent," Coulson said. "She lost. The defeat came with memory loss — we don't know yet if it was the fight itself or something the agent used." He paused. "And the agent has already been in contact with at least two civilians who are also presenting with memory loss."
Smith looked at Sif for a moment longer.
A possibility was forming. He turned it over, checking it against what he knew of Kree technology, of the specific tools a cleanup operative would carry, of what method would be most efficient for an agent whose mandate was to locate, neutralize, and erase evidence of Inhuman activation.
The tool that erased memories. The harun-el discharge. The Kree had been building and maintaining the Inhuman program for thousands of years, which meant they'd also been managing the evidence of it for thousands of years, which meant they had instruments specifically designed for this.
He looked at Coulson. "The memory loss isn't a side effect of the fight."