The young man's aggression wasn't well-hidden. He looked like someone who spent most of his time finding reasons not to start fights and was currently running low on those reasons.
He'd obviously recognized her. The look he threw her was pure provocation.
Daisy's voice carried a note of mockery: "You stole my research data. Don't you owe me an explanation?"
He opened his mouth. Stryker stepped on it without turning around: "Miss Johnson's conclusions on metabolic-pathway genetic optimization were quite illuminating. They gave us substantial material to work from. Ajax acted without authorization—his frustration with our program's timeline overrode his judgment. I apologize on his behalf."
Flat delivery, zero sincerity, technically a complete sentence. Daisy produced a small sound of acceptance and let it go.
The woman standing behind Ajax was East Asian, slight, and absolutely still—cold as a machine. She reached back and took hold of Ajax's arm. The five of them went in, dividing cleanly into two clusters as they walked.
Daisy was quietly cataloguing the people in front of her. Stryker needed no introduction. Ajax was a different matter—super-speed nerve reflexes, no pain response, some working knowledge of science and tech. After Stryker's death, he'd take over the program. His biggest achievement, by any measure, would be the experiments he ran on Wade Wilson, a terminal cancer patient—the ones that produced Deadpool.
The woman holding his arm almost certainly had the same ability set as Logan. Healing factor included. Lady Deathstrike.
Stryker had brought two enhanced operatives as contingency muscle. Fury had brought Daisy for the same reason. Neither side trusted the Pentagon not to make a move if the politics went sideways.
The checkpoint settled that question temporarily.
Both Ajax and the woman triggered the detectors. The guards had their orders and weren't interested in a discussion. Mutants did not pass this line.
Stryker spent several minutes negotiating. The guards declined to be negotiated with. Stryker sent his people to wait outside and walked back through the checkpoint wearing the expression of a man recalculating several things at once.
The technical staff in the corridor, suddenly uncertain what they'd done wrong, collectively froze.
Stryker returned five minutes later. The three of them walked into the heavily secured conference room. Generals around the table—Daisy recognized several of them, had even had dinner with two. She'd been expecting a straightforward SecDef tasking. She hadn't expected the Joint Chiefs.
Robert Gates was running the room—former CIA, risen through the analysis track, currently Secretary of Defense by presidential appointment. Daisy had read his file. He thought before he acted, understood political geometry, and didn't let himself be managed by the people around him.
S.H.I.E.L.D. thought well of him—he was only the second person to reach this level of seniority after coming up through the intelligence track, the first being a sitting president nobody had managed to surpass. Compared to the previous SecDef, who had operated on a simple kill-kill-kill logic, Gates was considerably more rational. He laid out what had developed.
"The Department of Defense has been tracking online traffic associated with the Hulk situation. The traffic traces back to someone who was using the handle 'Mister Blue.' Real name: Samuel Sterns. PhD, cellular biology, SUNY Grayburn." The image went up—nondescript, middle-aged, the kind of face that disappeared into crowds. "Yesterday evening, Dr. Sterns injected himself with Banner's irradiated blood. This is security footage from his lab."
The playback was corrupted—some kind of interference had degraded the recording—but the sequence was legible. The injection. The cranial deformation beginning, the forehead expanding and rising while the skull restructured itself, doubling in apparent volume as Sterns screamed. The skin going green.
"Sterns appears to have developed a form of psychic capacity. Thirty minutes ago, he walked into this building, walked Blonsky out past active security, and every guard in that corridor saw nothing. We discovered the breach when the camera recordings were reviewed ten minutes after both subjects were gone."
The generals were badly rattled. They'd called this meeting the moment they understood what had happened—and pulled in both S.H.I.E.L.D. and Stryker to figure out what to do about it.
Gates continued without any visible affect. The terms: joint operation, DoD plus S.H.I.E.L.D. plus Weapon X. Compensation to S.H.I.E.L.D.: the $5.5 billion previously frozen in the dispute, unconditional, plus authorized weapons upgrades for three S.H.I.E.L.D. carriers. Compensation to Weapon X: the bodies, designated "Big Head" and "Abomination," for research use.
"That covers the situation. Any contributions?"
The room understood why everyone at this table was personally motivated to resolve this quickly. A telepath with undetectable movement was not a theoretical threat. It was an immediate one.
Fury glanced at Daisy. The look said: if you have something, now. He'd decided he could work with whatever she came up with—the disco ball or the golden retriever, either one.
She knew several of the generals in the room. Had eaten with two of them. She wasn't nervous. She ran the numbers in her head first, confirmed nothing was going to blow up in her face, and then spoke.
"Secretary Gates. Gentlemen." She kept it direct. "I can write a tracking algorithm, right here in this room, that will locate both subjects remotely. After that, you can target them with a precision strike and remove them from the equation without direct engagement."
She explained the logic for the generals who needed it framed concisely: gamma radiation in Banner's blood was measurable at significant levels. Standard search would be slow and resource-intensive. Her approach would use military satellites to scan the Eastern Seaboard for mobile gamma signatures—then fire a strike on whatever came up.
General Greene—the one from Kandahar, now reassigned stateside—checked the room and got the collective acknowledgment. "The approach is workable. The algorithm itself—"
"I'll write it now."
A few of the generals had the expression of men watching someone promise to assemble furniture without reading the instructions. Gates wasn't skeptical. If she could deliver in the room, he wasn't going to slow the process down.
A laptop was produced. Daisy sat down and started writing.
Gamma radiation sat in a very specific frequency band—extremely high-energy electromagnetic waves with well-documented constants. She already had most of the key values memorized from her recent work on magnetism and the weak force. The algorithm came together quickly: load the standard gamma constants, run source identification against a baseline dataset of fixed installations, exclude the known-static sources, and flag anything mobile.
Nobody carrying radioactive material was going to be walking around the Eastern Seaboard for fun. The remaining signatures should narrow to two.
She finished and handed the laptop to Gates. He passed it to a technical team in the back, who ran a verification pass. He was careful—she might have been building in a backdoor to the satellite network, and she appreciated that he checked. Fifteen minutes later the team confirmed the algorithm was clean, and it went live.
The room watched the display together.
Twenty-nine candidate signatures. Then the filters ran. Down to eight. She refined the exclusion parameters. Down to two—same location.
"Pennsylvania, looks like. Can we pull a visual?"
None of the generals were comfortable operating satellite systems directly. They called in two technicians. After some adjustment, imagery resolved on screen.
The first figure: an oversize skull, the forehead rising thirty-plus centimeters above the brow line, the entire cranium roughly twice standard volume. Greenish skin. That was Samuel Sterns—Mister Blue, now something else entirely.
The second figure: Blonsky. Still carrying the burn scarring across most of his body. Still moving with the deliberate economy of someone who'd spent decades as a soldier. The military designation: Abomination.
Both were alert. Blonsky, as a veteran with deep knowledge of US military systems, had clearly been running a counter-surveillance pattern. Their visual window was short.
Daisy sat back and said nothing. The same wordless stillness had settled over Fury and Stryker.
Gates didn't hesitate. "Fire for effect once position is confirmed."
The Army Chief of Staff felt the weight of the room shift onto him. He wasn't going to have a procedural argument about it in front of the Secretary and a joint conference. He called his staff forward—six, eight aides suddenly in motion, some coordinating with local installations, some preparing launch authorization, some working the logistics of blast radius and civilian exposure—and two female technical officers who'd been having a slow morning found themselves moving like the floor was on fire.
Stryker went back to the checkpoint, spent another few minutes, came back alone, and settled into his seat. The conference moved forward.
Five minutes later, two BGM-109s lit off and went supersonic.
On screen, Sterns came alert almost immediately—some kind of precognitive sensitivity, or simply fast enough to feel a missile lock. He raised a shield: a viscous, greenish-tinted energy barrier that coalesced over him from a substance secreted through his expanded cranium. Blonsky screamed at the sky, threw his arms up, and braced.
Neither of them moved to cover the other. Sterns' shield didn't extend to Blonsky. Blonsky didn't put his body between Sterns and the incoming. They ran opposite directions.
The guidance systems didn't care.
Two impact events, near-simultaneous. The room watched the smoke columns.
"Fire two more."
Sterns was in bad shape when the smoke cleared—the skull had fractured along seven or eight lines, a flow of green-tinted fluid mixed with visible cerebral matter running from the cracks. Daisy looked at it for a moment and decided to look at something else.
Blonsky was worse. Three-quarters of his bone carapace was gone. But his damage was comparatively lighter than Sterns', and his regeneration was already cycling. He made a decision in the space of a few seconds, abandoned Sterns entirely, and ran south toward Maryland at speed.
Sterns, saturated in blood and barely upright, staggered west.
"Deploy ground elements," Gates said. "S.H.I.E.L.D. and Weapon X assets to assist in containment."
Pre-agreed terms. Nobody objected. But what 'assist' was going to look like in practice—that was going to be between the participants.
The Delta Force unit assembled. Fury and Daisy each picked up a sidearm. That was, apparently, their intended contribution to the containment operation.
Ajax and Lady Deathstrike, on the other hand, had been waiting in a corridor with nothing to do and a lot of suppressed hostility to burn through. Now that their mutant status had been formally acknowledged by the circumstances and there was nothing left to hide, they weren't concealing anything.
Ajax came through the checkpoint with an alloy-headed axe, spinning the handle at his wrist until the blade blurred—a speed that was well beyond normal human capacity. Lady Deathstrike extended her adamantium claws and tested them against the air with precise, unhurried strokes.
The Delta unit commander looked at them with barely disguised contempt: "Freaks."