Chapter 154: Soldier Boy: Who Let This Thing Into My Room?
The following morning. Umbrella Corporation.
Matthew stood at the office window looking out at the skyscraper at the far end of the street, where workers were moving with the focused energy of a deadline. At the top of the building, a crew was installing Vought's oversized logo in the most visible position on the facade.
"So he bought the whole building?" Matthew glanced sideways at Ada.
Ada, who had been doing something to entertain Milky, nodded. "That's right. It wasn't originally owned by a single company. It was commercial rental space."
"Vought paid well over market to acquire it. It's their new headquarters after the relocation."
She paused, and something specific came into her tone. "They moved their headquarters to New York. Pretty clearly a statement of intent. Letting us know they're here and they consider themselves competition."
"Competition." Matthew turned the word over quietly.
On the television across the office, a live broadcast was running footage of a fire.
A-Train was in the frame, moving repeatedly between the burning building and the street, carrying trapped occupants out one after another. The firefighters watching from the perimeter had a quality in their expressions that was easy to read. So did the crowd gathered behind them; they were calling his name.
Once the last trapped person had been brought out, a figure in a red suit with a spider emblem on the chest came around the corner from a different street.
A-Train stood calmly at the roadside, receiving a reporter's questions, and when he noticed Spider-Man's late arrival, he offered a wide, warm smile and raised his voice. "Hey, Spider-Man! Sorry, looks like you're a little late today. Bad night's sleep? Sleeping in?"
The tone was entirely pleasant. Underneath it was something with an edge, like a new fighter at the press conference challenging the established champion before their first bout.
Peter Parker heard this and didn't react with anything resembling irritation. He shrugged from his perch on the lamp post. "You're right, I was up late. But I appreciate you getting the people out. They'll be glad you were here."
A brief pause. "Keep it up." Then he stood, shot a web from his wrist, and swung away around the corner, leaving A-Train standing in the street alone.
The interview continued for a while after that.
When the reporters had dispersed, A-Train walked over to a bystander nearby who was holding a phone, dropped his voice, and asked: "Get anything?"
"Not really." The bystander shook his head slightly. "Spider-Man's image management is too clean. Didn't give us a single frame of anger."
"Doesn't matter. We got plenty of fire rescue footage. That'll move the numbers."
And that was accurate. The fire, the trapped civilians, the firefighters, the reporters, the interviewer: all of it was a production. Staged by Vought's people from start to finish, for the specific purpose of building A-Train's public profile.
The secondary objective had been to damage the reputations of the established heroes. Spider-Man, Daredevil, Iron Man. If the old names looked slow or insufficient, the new names looked faster and more capable by comparison.
The problem was that they hadn't accounted for Peter Parker being exactly the kind of person he was.
Peter had always believed that with great power came great responsibility. If someone else was willing to carry some of that responsibility, his honest reaction was relief. There was nothing to provoke.
Meanwhile. SHIELD.
Nick Fury was being called to account by his superiors.
The specific issue: his Avengers Initiative had produced nothing visible, while Vought's Seven had assembled publicly and completely in the time it had been sitting idle. This had caused his superiors to express doubts about SHIELD's operational efficiency, and to raise, not entirely obliquely, the idea of approaching Vought directly to hire the Seven as a substitute for the Initiative that showed no sign of materializing.
Fury's response to this suggestion was carefully noncommittal. "If they turn out to be suitable, I'll consider it."
He ended the video call.
He leaned back in his chair and pressed both fingers into his temples, which were doing something percussive and unpleasant.
What exactly was happening to the world lately?
Where had Vought's superheroes come from?
Why was the World Security Council recommending them to him?
Fury had maintained something close to instinctive wariness toward Vought and the Seven since they appeared. Something that showed up this suddenly, saturated every media channel, filled every platform, and had everyone around him enthusiastically endorsing it, was in his experience the kind of thing that was a problem about nine times in ten.
Especially since he'd watched Vought's operational playbook from the beginning.
An ordinary member of the public might not see through it. Fury saw it clearly enough. What Vought was running was the same mechanism used to manufacture entertainment celebrities through capital and media infrastructure. They'd simply replaced the celebrity with a superhero. With enough money and a competent production team behind it, building a "superhero's" public profile and monetizing it was straightforward.
"Something's wrong here." He said it to no one.
Superheroes appearing in clusters was already something worth watching carefully. Superheroes appearing in clusters, organizing into a group, and operating with the profit structure of a celebrity management company was a different category of concern entirely.
He called Natasha in.
Brief, direct: here's the assignment. Natasha acknowledged it without discussion and withdrew to begin preparation for the undercover operation.
After she left, Fury stood slowly and looked at the three files on his desk.
He considered them for a moment, selected one, and walked out.
A standalone apartment building. Outskirts of New York.
Soldier Boy was sitting on the bed in a sleeveless undershirt, a freshly opened beer in his hand.
He had only just been brought out of the long sleep, and he hadn't fully put the pieces together yet. His body was running on low and his head was full of static. The beer had arrived in his hand purely through muscle memory, his arm reaching for it before his brain had confirmed the plan.
"If I'm remembering right." He frowned, and a stream of fragmented memories moved through him.
Himself as a child, playing with his brother. The time before he became a superhero. The wars he'd fought once he was one.
More than any of those: the memory of being betrayed. And of how he'd used his particular set of skills on the people around him.
He was still trying to work out how he'd ended up in this room when the door opened without warning.
This didn't improve his mood.
When he looked up and saw who had come in, his mood arrived at its ceiling.
He surveyed the apartment around him, took in the ordinary domesticity of the space, and then addressed the open door at full volume.
"Hey. Somebody want to explain to me who let this farm implement into my room?"
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