Battle of Albany
- Location
- Ottawa
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Whatever
"No. No killing, no more. This stops here, no matter what it costs us." you said.
Clint frowned out at you.
"Kid, this isn't the movies. If somebody wants to kill you, you kill them first. They aren't going to hesitate." he lectured, "Besides, where are you finding sympathy for these people? You worried that if you kill them, you'll become just like them?"
"No. I'm worried if I kill them, I'll become just like you." you said, and he winced.
"... okay. Yeah, I can see that. Fuck, kid, where'd you learn to go for the proverbal jugular like that?"
"It's my real superpower. Though... I can give you a hand. Make this a bit easier on you?" You looked over the equipment left behind by the dead men, pointedly ignoring the second body as Nat dragged it away in a smear of blood. This stuff was better than most of what you had, "Give you an advantage?"
---
The three of you piled back in the van an hour and a half later, loaded with new supplies. Clint had a quiver full of new arrows, tipped not with thermite or tungsten or high explosive, but with silkshooters. One rigged with a smart proximity sensor so it'd burst into a web ahead of the target, expanding and then suddenly contracting with an electric pulse, while the other would simply burst into a blast of thick, expanding superglue-like foam. Nat already had her taser fists (so fucking rad!) so you did some pretty basic work and pulled apart one of her coil-carbines to make what you could best describe as an electric webshooting taser PWD. They looked skeptical, but you did your best to explain your reasoning, including that they could be a lot less discriminant with them and not need to worry about consequences.
"If we burst into an analyst's office and we don't know who's who, blasting everyone might cost us potential allies. With these things... tase 'em all, we'll sort it out later." you explained, sitting in the back seat and filling Nat's magazines as you drove. It was a lot trip, after all, and the more ammunition you could make, the better. "So what's the plan?"
"SSRHQ is located in a very boring small office building at the outskirts of town, which is supposedly the offices of a private car reseller. It's a good cover, it explains why weird vehicles are always coming and going. There's underground labs and containment facilities, but most of the work just happens in cubes like it's a regular old office."
"But why Albany?" you asked. You still couldn't wrap your head around why anyone would set up anything there.
"Rent's cheap." Nat said flatly, and you laughed.
"That's hilarious."
"Nah, it's true. The SSR wants do to everything in the smallest possible financial and bureaucratic footprint. Instead of a government building somebody might ask questions about, somebody working for us just pays property taxes on some old building, collects income from phantom sales that cover and launder the money we use, and life goes on. Nobody asks questions, and it's such an unbelievably boring cover story that we don't get anyone snooping around. It's not even somewhere you might consider breaking in for the cash, because it's just some cube farm, and the vehicles are all in a secure parking garage. Onsite arc reactor supplies power whenever they need more than would seem plausible from the grid." Clint said.
"Wait, arc reactors are real?" you asked.
"Eh... kinda. They work, but they're super temperamental, super expensive, and they don't scale well." Clint said, sounding very casual about it.
"But... as advertised? More power out than they take in, no fuel, fuck thermodynamics?" you asked. Supposedly, the arc reactor was supposed to work by exploiting the ill-understood, recently discovered fifth fundamental force, quintessence, which was... well, it was a lot of things, but the lay explanation that CNN had gone with was "It's the thing that keeps time moving forward instead of backward, and in doing so creates dark matter." Supposedly, it was energy being fed into this universe from other, contracting universes, like a hydraulic pump, an asynchronous cycle of crunch and bang, and the arc reactor widened the normally subquantum passageways the interaction happened through.
Or something.
"Yep, he actually got it to work. It's a janky piece of shit, though." Clint said. "But it's really useful for when we need to cut stuff apart with the big laser in the basement hunting for alien bits."
"Last I heard, they were considering having it get 'bought out' by an automated server company, fill the upper floors with boxes, and move the office underground." Nat added, "Oh, we also have some private jets and a cargo plane up at Ogdensberg, so that's our transportation, when we aren't just riding economy from Albany International."
"Despite having the ability to literally print money whenever we want it, SSR can feel really shoestring." Clint explained, "Because the existence of the organization is the secret, more than anything we have, it constrains us a lot."
"... that is so stupid it wraps back around to being kind of awesome." you admitted, "So what's security look like?"
"There's a security team on-site, which is the reserve for Tactical. Five guys under the command of Brock Rumlow..."
"Hate that guy." Nat added.
"Yeah, me too. He's this Navy SEAL who thinks he's hot shit because he's our youngest-ever recruit. Thinks its a fucking video game. He operates the team's Stark Suit, so I'd really rather avoid dealing with him if he gets suited up."
You heard of him. He was in Korea, was twenty-three or somewhere around there, won a pile of metals and then 'died' in a hunting accident. Stark Suits were the evolution of those DARPA exoskeletons, and they'd first seen use in Korea. Basically, picture a Gothic knight with a backpack full of batteries that could carry his horse above his head for six straight hours. Most of the Stark Suits used overseas were paired with rifles made out of M2 machine guns.
"Yeah, they don't exactly walk around in the things, they're at the armoury down the elevator. I figure our goal is to secure the armoury, take out whoever we need to, and then... work it out from there." Clint said.
"Wonderful plan. This is going to go great." Nat added.
"So... what do I do?" you asked.
"You're a computer type, right? Hacking and stuff? You were giving the phone a run for its money." Clint asked.
"Yeah, that's me." you said.
"Go ahead of us, get on the roof, and cut the alarm if you can. If you can't, don't worry about. Slowing their reaction time will be vital. Then you take the top floor, we'll take the ground floor, and we head for the basement?" Nat said.
Okay, you could do that. The sad grey and brown smear on the upstate landscape was coming into view behind a horde of billboards, so it looks like you were almost there. Time to get suited up.
---
You ended up using one of their own security cameras to get into the system, which you thought was very clever. At first you just tricked the cameras into pausing as you passed, but then you pulled apart the casing on one and pulled a phone into it.
"Okay, the system is mine... oh, hello there."
"You aren't supposed to be here. I'm telling my boss!" a voice said, and there was a brief moment of silence accompanied by an epic security war inside the SSR systems that lasts about one and a half seconds.
"Athena, is there another AI in there?" you asked.
"Yes. His name is Sentinel, and he is trying his best. So much processing power, and no idea what to do with it. Right, he's shut up, cameras are ours and already looping, and I've disabled all the alarms. I've also bricked all the smart guns in the loading bays, though I can't do anything about the ones in holsters or on the shelves. The Stark Suit is on its own network too. I'll upload a full internal map to you and your new allies now."
"Thanks, Athena. How do you think I should go in?"
"North side window, office has one person at the desk, then you can go through the window and be on your way to the elevator. If you move in about twenty seconds you'll arrive just as our allies get stopped at the security scan. Just a heads up, there's one office where I have no camera coverage, and no information at all. I imagine this is the Director's room." she said. "Oh, and one last thing. I'm proud of you."
"... huh?"
"For sticking to your principles, even when it wasn't necessarily rational from an external, pragmatic point of view. It shows a self-awareness and care for your own well-being that indicates serious personal growth." she said, and you smiled, feeling a little warm and fuzzy. "Now, go get 'em."
You stuck two lines to the side of the building, took a running jump, and swung through a second-story window.
---
The fight lasted about a hundred and twenty seconds, and was not nearly as one-sided as you would have liked.
To be sure, your objective went swimmingly, in that you quickly cleared a path to the elevator and kept it at the second floor while Nat pulled open the doors below and Clint dropped into the basement, leaving everyone on the floor webbed up or twitching from electrical pulses. There, he took out two guards before getting shot in the leg, but Nat was right behind him and hit the guy with so many electric pulses that he jumped four feet straight into the air.
You arrived just in time to see Nat get riddled with bullets from an unknown source, and then a Stark Suit burst out of the Armoury and punched her across the room, where she crashed into a concrete wall.
"Yeet! Get the fuck outta here, bitch!" the speakers bellowed, then a web arrow smashed into his arm, spraying all over him.
"Heads up, Rumslow!" Clint called.
A second later, a flame burst from the emitter on his arm, and Clint had to throw himself awkwardly backward to avoid it, ducking behind a wall and getting one more arrow before a sonic pulse from its gauntlet blasted him into unconsciousness.
"You're fucking slow, Barton! Now..."
The metal suit whipped around, the gun under the arm shooting, and you hit the ceiling to avoid the sloppy spray of bullets, hitting him with two strings of silk to pull him off guard. Almost instantly, a blade popped out from one of his arms and swiped through them. Fuck, he actually was good. You threw yourself out of the way as he blasted fletchettes after you, laughing the entire time, then you dropped in front of him and assumed a fighting stance.
"Don't you know who the fuck I am? You're about to get squished!" he said, clearly grinning his ass off behind the mask. Guy was mighty confident for a man wearing a suit full of circuitry and servos.
He extended an arm to fire one of the micromissiles, and there was just a fizzle as it burned out.
"Okay Zoomer." you retorted.
Then you made him default dance, and went to check on your allies.
---
Nat was fine, once she picked herself up and pulled some of her pieces back in place, while Clint was bleeding from both ears and getting unsteadily to his feet. You didn't know sign language, but Athena did, and instructed you on what to do to relay messages to him, and between then three of you the rest of the facility was quickly secured and your prisoners shoved into the holding cells. Athena, meanwhile, was pumping Sentinel for information, and working out who was aligned with who, where the remaining agents were, and what everyone was up to.
The Director, it seems, wasn't home. Neither was Sitwell, because he was currently flying to DC. Coulson was blissfully flying around French Polynesia with his team looking for some lost Cold War submarine supposedly carrying some kind of superweapon. A few other agents, all of them seemingly clean, were buzzing around the country looking for stuff.
Clint was dropped off in the infirmery with the SSR doctor, who seemed on the level, then Nat went down to Detention to try and explain herself. It sounded like she was fairly successful in convincing at least of some of them that they'd done the right thing, and there was all this incredible technology here, so you decided to do a wander. There was a green crystal being examined that resembled the pink one you took off Metal Flappy Bird, some sort of blue cube which felt to your power a little like staring directly into a welding arc, and when you walked into the computer room containing Sentinel's core you shivered from the raw power around you.
You were going to have to leave in a few moments to go deal with Sitwell and essentially stage an assault on the CIA. Maybe you should gear up.
===
Clint frowned out at you.
"Kid, this isn't the movies. If somebody wants to kill you, you kill them first. They aren't going to hesitate." he lectured, "Besides, where are you finding sympathy for these people? You worried that if you kill them, you'll become just like them?"
"No. I'm worried if I kill them, I'll become just like you." you said, and he winced.
"... okay. Yeah, I can see that. Fuck, kid, where'd you learn to go for the proverbal jugular like that?"
"It's my real superpower. Though... I can give you a hand. Make this a bit easier on you?" You looked over the equipment left behind by the dead men, pointedly ignoring the second body as Nat dragged it away in a smear of blood. This stuff was better than most of what you had, "Give you an advantage?"
---
The three of you piled back in the van an hour and a half later, loaded with new supplies. Clint had a quiver full of new arrows, tipped not with thermite or tungsten or high explosive, but with silkshooters. One rigged with a smart proximity sensor so it'd burst into a web ahead of the target, expanding and then suddenly contracting with an electric pulse, while the other would simply burst into a blast of thick, expanding superglue-like foam. Nat already had her taser fists (so fucking rad!) so you did some pretty basic work and pulled apart one of her coil-carbines to make what you could best describe as an electric webshooting taser PWD. They looked skeptical, but you did your best to explain your reasoning, including that they could be a lot less discriminant with them and not need to worry about consequences.
"If we burst into an analyst's office and we don't know who's who, blasting everyone might cost us potential allies. With these things... tase 'em all, we'll sort it out later." you explained, sitting in the back seat and filling Nat's magazines as you drove. It was a lot trip, after all, and the more ammunition you could make, the better. "So what's the plan?"
"SSRHQ is located in a very boring small office building at the outskirts of town, which is supposedly the offices of a private car reseller. It's a good cover, it explains why weird vehicles are always coming and going. There's underground labs and containment facilities, but most of the work just happens in cubes like it's a regular old office."
"But why Albany?" you asked. You still couldn't wrap your head around why anyone would set up anything there.
"Rent's cheap." Nat said flatly, and you laughed.
"That's hilarious."
"Nah, it's true. The SSR wants do to everything in the smallest possible financial and bureaucratic footprint. Instead of a government building somebody might ask questions about, somebody working for us just pays property taxes on some old building, collects income from phantom sales that cover and launder the money we use, and life goes on. Nobody asks questions, and it's such an unbelievably boring cover story that we don't get anyone snooping around. It's not even somewhere you might consider breaking in for the cash, because it's just some cube farm, and the vehicles are all in a secure parking garage. Onsite arc reactor supplies power whenever they need more than would seem plausible from the grid." Clint said.
"Wait, arc reactors are real?" you asked.
"Eh... kinda. They work, but they're super temperamental, super expensive, and they don't scale well." Clint said, sounding very casual about it.
"But... as advertised? More power out than they take in, no fuel, fuck thermodynamics?" you asked. Supposedly, the arc reactor was supposed to work by exploiting the ill-understood, recently discovered fifth fundamental force, quintessence, which was... well, it was a lot of things, but the lay explanation that CNN had gone with was "It's the thing that keeps time moving forward instead of backward, and in doing so creates dark matter." Supposedly, it was energy being fed into this universe from other, contracting universes, like a hydraulic pump, an asynchronous cycle of crunch and bang, and the arc reactor widened the normally subquantum passageways the interaction happened through.
Or something.
"Yep, he actually got it to work. It's a janky piece of shit, though." Clint said. "But it's really useful for when we need to cut stuff apart with the big laser in the basement hunting for alien bits."
"Last I heard, they were considering having it get 'bought out' by an automated server company, fill the upper floors with boxes, and move the office underground." Nat added, "Oh, we also have some private jets and a cargo plane up at Ogdensberg, so that's our transportation, when we aren't just riding economy from Albany International."
"Despite having the ability to literally print money whenever we want it, SSR can feel really shoestring." Clint explained, "Because the existence of the organization is the secret, more than anything we have, it constrains us a lot."
"... that is so stupid it wraps back around to being kind of awesome." you admitted, "So what's security look like?"
"There's a security team on-site, which is the reserve for Tactical. Five guys under the command of Brock Rumlow..."
"Hate that guy." Nat added.
"Yeah, me too. He's this Navy SEAL who thinks he's hot shit because he's our youngest-ever recruit. Thinks its a fucking video game. He operates the team's Stark Suit, so I'd really rather avoid dealing with him if he gets suited up."
You heard of him. He was in Korea, was twenty-three or somewhere around there, won a pile of metals and then 'died' in a hunting accident. Stark Suits were the evolution of those DARPA exoskeletons, and they'd first seen use in Korea. Basically, picture a Gothic knight with a backpack full of batteries that could carry his horse above his head for six straight hours. Most of the Stark Suits used overseas were paired with rifles made out of M2 machine guns.
"Yeah, they don't exactly walk around in the things, they're at the armoury down the elevator. I figure our goal is to secure the armoury, take out whoever we need to, and then... work it out from there." Clint said.
"Wonderful plan. This is going to go great." Nat added.
"So... what do I do?" you asked.
"You're a computer type, right? Hacking and stuff? You were giving the phone a run for its money." Clint asked.
"Yeah, that's me." you said.
"Go ahead of us, get on the roof, and cut the alarm if you can. If you can't, don't worry about. Slowing their reaction time will be vital. Then you take the top floor, we'll take the ground floor, and we head for the basement?" Nat said.
Okay, you could do that. The sad grey and brown smear on the upstate landscape was coming into view behind a horde of billboards, so it looks like you were almost there. Time to get suited up.
---
You ended up using one of their own security cameras to get into the system, which you thought was very clever. At first you just tricked the cameras into pausing as you passed, but then you pulled apart the casing on one and pulled a phone into it.
"Okay, the system is mine... oh, hello there."
"You aren't supposed to be here. I'm telling my boss!" a voice said, and there was a brief moment of silence accompanied by an epic security war inside the SSR systems that lasts about one and a half seconds.
"Athena, is there another AI in there?" you asked.
"Yes. His name is Sentinel, and he is trying his best. So much processing power, and no idea what to do with it. Right, he's shut up, cameras are ours and already looping, and I've disabled all the alarms. I've also bricked all the smart guns in the loading bays, though I can't do anything about the ones in holsters or on the shelves. The Stark Suit is on its own network too. I'll upload a full internal map to you and your new allies now."
"Thanks, Athena. How do you think I should go in?"
"North side window, office has one person at the desk, then you can go through the window and be on your way to the elevator. If you move in about twenty seconds you'll arrive just as our allies get stopped at the security scan. Just a heads up, there's one office where I have no camera coverage, and no information at all. I imagine this is the Director's room." she said. "Oh, and one last thing. I'm proud of you."
"... huh?"
"For sticking to your principles, even when it wasn't necessarily rational from an external, pragmatic point of view. It shows a self-awareness and care for your own well-being that indicates serious personal growth." she said, and you smiled, feeling a little warm and fuzzy. "Now, go get 'em."
You stuck two lines to the side of the building, took a running jump, and swung through a second-story window.
---
The fight lasted about a hundred and twenty seconds, and was not nearly as one-sided as you would have liked.
To be sure, your objective went swimmingly, in that you quickly cleared a path to the elevator and kept it at the second floor while Nat pulled open the doors below and Clint dropped into the basement, leaving everyone on the floor webbed up or twitching from electrical pulses. There, he took out two guards before getting shot in the leg, but Nat was right behind him and hit the guy with so many electric pulses that he jumped four feet straight into the air.
You arrived just in time to see Nat get riddled with bullets from an unknown source, and then a Stark Suit burst out of the Armoury and punched her across the room, where she crashed into a concrete wall.
"Yeet! Get the fuck outta here, bitch!" the speakers bellowed, then a web arrow smashed into his arm, spraying all over him.
"Heads up, Rumslow!" Clint called.
A second later, a flame burst from the emitter on his arm, and Clint had to throw himself awkwardly backward to avoid it, ducking behind a wall and getting one more arrow before a sonic pulse from its gauntlet blasted him into unconsciousness.
"You're fucking slow, Barton! Now..."
The metal suit whipped around, the gun under the arm shooting, and you hit the ceiling to avoid the sloppy spray of bullets, hitting him with two strings of silk to pull him off guard. Almost instantly, a blade popped out from one of his arms and swiped through them. Fuck, he actually was good. You threw yourself out of the way as he blasted fletchettes after you, laughing the entire time, then you dropped in front of him and assumed a fighting stance.
"Don't you know who the fuck I am? You're about to get squished!" he said, clearly grinning his ass off behind the mask. Guy was mighty confident for a man wearing a suit full of circuitry and servos.
He extended an arm to fire one of the micromissiles, and there was just a fizzle as it burned out.
"Okay Zoomer." you retorted.
Then you made him default dance, and went to check on your allies.
---
Nat was fine, once she picked herself up and pulled some of her pieces back in place, while Clint was bleeding from both ears and getting unsteadily to his feet. You didn't know sign language, but Athena did, and instructed you on what to do to relay messages to him, and between then three of you the rest of the facility was quickly secured and your prisoners shoved into the holding cells. Athena, meanwhile, was pumping Sentinel for information, and working out who was aligned with who, where the remaining agents were, and what everyone was up to.
The Director, it seems, wasn't home. Neither was Sitwell, because he was currently flying to DC. Coulson was blissfully flying around French Polynesia with his team looking for some lost Cold War submarine supposedly carrying some kind of superweapon. A few other agents, all of them seemingly clean, were buzzing around the country looking for stuff.
Clint was dropped off in the infirmery with the SSR doctor, who seemed on the level, then Nat went down to Detention to try and explain herself. It sounded like she was fairly successful in convincing at least of some of them that they'd done the right thing, and there was all this incredible technology here, so you decided to do a wander. There was a green crystal being examined that resembled the pink one you took off Metal Flappy Bird, some sort of blue cube which felt to your power a little like staring directly into a welding arc, and when you walked into the computer room containing Sentinel's core you shivered from the raw power around you.
You were going to have to leave in a few moments to go deal with Sitwell and essentially stage an assault on the CIA. Maybe you should gear up.
===
[ ] Liv uses the active camo material and noise cancelers Black Widow uses to add a stealth mode.
[ ] Liv uses the alloys and materials to reinforce her legs and suit. She'll be much tougher and effectively bulletproof.
[ ] Liv starts pulling computer parts to build a new system for Athena that will make her a lot more powerful.
[ ] Liv carefully studies the Arc Reactor. She might be able to build her own to power her suit and increase her strength.
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