"Someone at the hospital saw Dr. Pym being escorted out by two men. After that, nothing — he just vanished." Sharon had clearly already briefed Natasha, so this second pass was directed mainly at Daisy and Hill. She finished the summary and handed over a tablet. Hill was still not quite back to her usual self after last night's massage, so Daisy took it.
The footage was low quality, caught in a corner of the frame — three silhouettes, two tall men flanking a third, moving quickly past the lens and out of shot.
"Where did they take him?" Daisy had enough faith in Natasha's investigative instincts to know the question was already answered. If she were doing anything other than waiting for them to regroup, Pym would probably already be free.
Natasha confirmed it. "A small island off the coast of Costa Rica. The registered company is listed as abandoned — a biological genetics firm. The name is unusual: Egghead Enterprises. Original director of record: Elihas Starr, Ph.D. — a cutting-edge biologist."
Daisy nodded. Apparently you need a doctorate just to qualify as a villain these days.
"Starr goes by Egghead in most circles," Natasha continued. "He and Dr. Pym have a documented history of conflict. Starr even sent corporate spies to steal the old man's research. He's our primary suspect."
No one objected. Natasha led the group to the jet and they were airborne for Costa Rica within the hour.
An enemy operating out of a private island base was going to mean serious security. Extraction had to be quiet — which meant going in the hard way.
They prepped in the air — gear checks, weapons inspections, cold steel stowed alongside the firearms. They set the jet to autopilot back to S.H.I.E.L.D. base, then Natasha popped the hatch. One by one, they jumped.
I probably could have managed without the chute, Daisy thought, using her counter-vibration to soften the idea of freefall in her own mind. But there's no reason to show off. She pulled her ripcord with everyone else.
Their combat suits handled the ocean entry well — a few shakes and they were dry enough to move. They hit the shore quietly and started inland.
The island was wrong from the first step. The trees were massive — ancient, thick-trunked giants. The undergrowth came up to their shins. Shrubs that should have been waist-high loomed overhead. Every plant on this island was running at least three times larger than it had any right to be.
It was very, very quiet.
They moved through grass that reached mid-calf (about 12–15 inches / 30–38 cm), single file, the silence pressing down like something alive.
Daisy looked at the handguns the others were carrying and made a quiet decision. She reached back and drew the Chiappa Rhino.
The others shot looks at the massive revolver but kept moving. Nobody said a word.
Natasha slipped on a pair of thermal imaging goggles and swept the area — then went pale.
"Something big! Move!"
They heard it before they saw it — a low, mechanical drone from above. Then the shadow.
A hornet the size of a car dropped out of the canopy and dove straight at them. Its body was nearly 10 feet long (about 3 meters), wingspan spreading over 16 feet (5 meters), every inch of it patterned in warning colors.
Hill hit the ground rolling and came up firing — two shots, clean and fast. It didn't matter. The hornet was faster, screaming past them and climbing again. It circled above, black compound eyes tracking them, lining up a second pass. Both rounds had missed entirely.
Daisy stared at the stinger. It had to be 6 feet long (nearly 2 meters), gleaming and rigid as a blade. Every spiny hair on the thing's thorax and legs looked like a steel needle.
That will absolutely hurt if it connects.
Her vibration ability couldn't track a target moving that fast — not reliably. But the Rhino could.
The hornet hung in the air, compound eyes selecting a target. It chose Sharon Carter and came in hard.
Daisy raised the revolver in both hands, breathed, and waited. She wanted the split-second stall when it transitioned from dive to strike.
She didn't get the shot. Natasha acted first — she pitched an electromagnetic disc from the side. The current locked every muscle in the hornet's body rigid mid-flight.
Daisy fired.
The .357 Magnum round hit the abdomen dead center. Green fluid and fragments sprayed across the ground. The hornet crashed, legs still twitching. Daisy walked up to it, aimed at the compound eye cluster, and put another round through.
"Mutation?" Sharon asked, studying the corpse. S.H.I.E.L.D. training covered basic biology, and nothing about this thing had grown naturally.
"More than that," Natasha said, crouching over one of the legs. "It's got a controller chip. A monitor. Daisy — can you crack it?"
Daisy swallowed her revulsion and went to work on the device embedded in the leg. She was halfway through the removal when the hind limb gave a weak twitch.
Hill and Sharon each put two rounds into it on reflex. Natasha followed up with her electro-batons for good measure.
Daisy extracted the hardware one piece at a time: casing, wiring, two signal receivers, and a pinhole camera. She hooked it to her tablet and worked her way back along the signal trace until she was inside the enemy's main server.
"Okay. Their base is in a valley on the northwest side of the island. And — good news — the fight wasn't picked up. I wiped their footage. I don't know how long the window lasts, so we move now." She pointed. They ran.
The terrain was dense — old-growth jungle, thick canopy, roots everywhere, undergrowth at shoulder height. None of them complained. They were built for this. Ten minutes in, they nearly ran headlong into a rhinoceros beetle the size of a compact car. Its shell looked like it could stop a tank round. They gave it a wide berth and kept moving.
An hour and a half of hard running brought them to the northwest valley and, at the edge of the tree line, a three-story building.
"Damn it." Natasha's voice was barely a whisper, but the venom in it was unmistakable. "I hate Nick Fury."
"Same."
"Agreed."
"Completely."
Four elite field operatives — women who had fought their way through dozens of combat deployments and survived things that would have broken most soldiers — stood at the edge of the jungle and could not take a step forward.
The building's perimeter was guarded. Not by soldiers.
The same oversized hornets from earlier. A centipede as long as a city bus — at least 65 feet (20 meters) — its red exoskeleton gleaming. A spider the size of a small room, legs spanning what had to be 30 feet (about 10 meters). And near the entrance, a caterpillar roughly the size of a locomotive, its entire body dense with bristling green hair.
Even with a man's perspective rattling around somewhere deep in her subconscious, Daisy felt every hair on her body rise.
This mission should have gone to Hawkeye. Or Coulson. Anyone who isn't terrified of bugs.