Outlaw: Relentless, A Marvel Heroines Novel, page 3
“Technically true,” Mr Stark answered. “But if you’ve never told engineers or scientists that they have to reverse engineer something, but they’re not allowed to take something apart to study it because we only have one of them – well, now’s your chance, because they’re right here.”
The angry-looking folks behind Mr Stark took their turn to erupt at us.
I groaned, massaging my forehead. I wished I had my hat to hide my eyes. My head was still spinning. I wanted to blame the explosion and shockwave, but the truth was this was the same type of tired that had weighed me down on the bridge. If anything, now that the adrenaline had faded, it was worse.
Sometimes I hate being so darn honest. It’d be nice to be able to lie to myself about how I felt, at least. Thanks bunches, Dad.
•••
My memory had gotten jarred around by the shockwave. I was still trying to piece it together. The explosion on the Little Miss Ironsides’s deck hadn’t knocked me out. But it had stunned me, put me into a state of strange awareness where I saw and heard everything around me as if through a fog. Sparks drifted through the air like the aftermath of a fireworks show – debris falling back to the ship. Flaming shards of twisted steel littered the deck. Something hot had struck my elbow, burnt and blistered it.
My ears were ringing so loudly I couldn’t hear anything. When I could, I pulled myself to my feet, grabbed my radio, and told Atlas Bear to stop shooting. I couldn’t hear squat, but she could. No more tracer bullets flashed by overhead.
Next important thing to verify: how fast the fire was spreading. A fire on a container ship loaded with potentially volatile weapons wasn’t gonna stop just because we wanted it to.
I scanned for lifeboats. I’d taken note of them while coming aboard the ship, but forgive me for being a little disoriented. If we couldn’t stop the fire, then we would have to try to save as many people as possible. A.I.M. folks included.
I hate getting involved in fights with acronyms. The bloodshed is too depersonalized, too abstract. Give me the heat and the hate of a personal grudge any day. When people get involved with acronyms, it seems like they lose part of themselves. It starts to get clinical, and not very fun at all.
Evil as A.I.M. is, it’s also a big organization. The big names at the top need plenty of muscle, goons, and pen-pushers. Most of the people on the Little Miss Ironsides probably fit that description. Not all of them could be true believers. Some people come from hard luck backgrounds and will do whatever they feel they have to do to get their paycheck. I know what that feels like.
Sure, we’d hurt and killed people coming aboard, but that was business. They’d do the same to us. Not saving people from a burning boat would’ve been… just nasty.
We couldn’t help the true believers. But the ones on the border – well, they might be a little more willing to talk if we got them out of here.
A sharp yellow light reflected off the edges of the next containers. The deck rattled an instant before the sound clapped my ears. Nothing worse followed – this time. Sooner rather than later, this was going to end in a chain reaction that would take out most of the ship before we could blink.
The smart thing would have been to leave.
Now, I don’t want to say you can’t be smart to be mercenary. You have to be awfully clever. But there are certain kinds of smart it doesn’t pay to have. The kinds of smart that would have you think twice about choosing such an awfully violent profession, for example. I don’t often make what other people might call smart decisions.
I staggered back in the direction I’d come from. Found the man I’d clobbered with the thrown pistol who was rocking on the ground, cradling his forehead. I grabbed his hand, yanked him to his feet. His eyes widened when he saw my face, but all I did was point toward the nearest lifeboat. He seemed to get it. Truce accepted. He turned, and, dizzily, started walking.
All around the sides of the boat, crew were running toward the lifeboats. They paid no attention to me, or anything but the fires. Some of them had dropped their weapons. Others still had them holstered. I hoped the ones who’d kept their weapons were smart enough not to fight when our employers came for them. But that part of the op was out of my hands.
Had to focus on what I could control. Pick up the pieces.
•••
I crossed my arms and glowered at the debriefing table. None of this was going anywhere I liked. The weight of the stares was too much.
But it wouldn’t have been right of me to try to get away from it or deny what had happened. Had to cope with what was.
Neena stared down Mr Stark. She wasn’t going to give up sticking up for me. But it was a rearguard action.
Mr Stark told her, “And you were the one who gave the order for weapons free.”
“If I hadn’t, we would have given them time to organize a defense, and to hit the kill switches in the containers. Then we’d have nothing, and you’d have lost a lot of your people in a firefight that didn’t need to happen!”
All true. But she was only doing her job – taking responsibility, as team leader, for anything and everything that happened under her watch.
“Not everything goes perfectly in every op,” Rachel added. “That’s one of the advantages of working with us. When things go sideways, we’re flexible enough to finish the job.”
It was hard not to notice that the other members of our team were being pretty quiet. They stood behind us. I sure felt the weight of their stares, too.
I suppose some introductions are in order.
Our names get a little complicated. In this business, if you don’t have a callsign or code name, no one takes you seriously. Like I said, my name is Inez Temple – but I’ve been Outlaw since the days when I was freelancing.
So: here’s Neena Thurman. Better known to the outside world as Domino. A real mercenary’s mercenary. Just about every merc looks up to her in one way or another. Even Deadpool, though he’d have to be in a real pinch to admit it. It used to be she was in it for the guns and money rather than the heroism, but lately that’s changed. Like me, she’s a mutant. Her powers don’t tend so much toward brawn, though she’s got plenty of that.
No, she’s got something beyond cool. Her power is luck. And if your first reaction is to say, “Luck isn’t a super-power,” you haven’t seen her in action. I’ve watched someone pull a gun on her, have it jam immediately, get it kicked out of their hands, bounce off the ceiling, and crack them in the head. All in the space of half a second.
She’s the leader of our little posse. And my best friend. She’s jagged on the outside but, once you get on her good side, she’s sweet as peaches. I’d say that if anyone wanted to hurt a hair on her head, they’d have to get through me first – but Neena can take care of things herself. I might still kick them in the head to teach them a lesson, though.
Then there’s Rachel Leighton. Her other name’s Diamondback. She’s been with us since the beginning of the group. She used to run with a gang of ne’er-do-wells called the Serpent Society, though she has her regrets about that now. She’s our explosives expert. She dresses better than anyone else I’ve ever met. She’s always got an appropriate get-up for any mission, and is deceptively combat-capable, too.
Any stereotypes you might have about country folk and fashionistas might make you think we wouldn’t get along. Forget them. Rachel’s a gem. I love her. We might not have gotten along so well on first blush (happens an awful lot to super folks the first time they meet), but, after that little battle was out of the way, we clicked like pineapple and Canadian bacon on pizza. Not everybody’s favorite, but definitely mine.
The others and I weren’t quite on a first-name basis yet, even if we knew what they were. They were newer to the team.
I already mentioned Black Widow. Aka Natasha Romanoff. She’s the biggest name on our team, and sometimes it’s hard to shake the feeling that she’s slumming it with us. See, she used to be an Avenger. She left that team around the time when she needed to fake her own death and joined our posse when we were saving the world from the Creation Constellation. (It’s complicated. Things in this business usually are. I may have nearly ascended to godhood and gotten humanity destroyed by the Celestials, but I got better. Honest.)³ She needed a new home to drift into, and we gave her one. Neena, Rachel, and I got the impression that there was some kind of emotional tangle that kept her from going back to the Avengers. She never denied it, but she never wanted to talk about it. She looked mighty uncomfortable here. Tony Stark tried to meet her eye, get her to acknowledge him a couple times – but, from the way he looked away quickly, he never found what he was looking for.
3 The superlative Hotshots Vol. 2! –Ed.
I’m not sure we’ll ever feel comfortable with Black Widow as a part of the team until we know she’s here to stay. We’re not a rebound super hero team. We’re mercs more than we are heroes. For the most part.
Atlas Bear, or Shoon’kwa, joined up with us not long after her exile from Wakanda. She has precognition. It’s made a real Cassandra out of her. She can see the future, but only bad futures. Catastrophes that will happen if she can’t stop them. She’d been booted from Wakanda because she’d tried to do too much about those bad futures. Things the Wakandans thought were impolitic, like killing. She’d gotten a little gentler since joining us, when we showed her some ways to fight the future without terminating every source of possible trouble, but her abilities and her exile left her understandably sour.
Her mood was dark most of the time, but she saved her darkest looks for Mr Stark. It was hard to forget the disdain in her voice when, in the middle of that last battle, she’d ignored his orders. She seemed to think she had a beef with him, which was weird, because he’d never shown any sign of recognizing her.
Finally, there’s White Fox. Ami Han. She’s a Korean special agent, and, though she looks human enough from a distance, she can disabuse you of that notion pretty quick if she wants to. She’s a shapeshifter – the last of the kumiho, a kind of magic multi-tailed fox. She linked forces with us during that Creation Constellation fiasco, too, and has been fighting at our sides ever since. Like Black Widow, she has other loyalties, too – but, unlike Black Widow, she is open about them. She still worked for South Korea’s National Intelligence Service.
So far, none of her loyalties had conflicted. I wasn’t sure, right then, that I could say the same thing about Black Widow and the Avengers.
“You got the weapons,” Neena told Mr Stark. “You’ve got A.I.M. prisoners to interrogate. Some of them might even be helpful since we saved them. I don’t see your problem.”
“The problem is that I’ve got a bunch of hotshots screwing things up, who took things into their own hands while leaving the rest of us to sit here, and who treated the plan like it was just a means for them to try to show off.”
“You’ve got a bunch of hotshots,” Neena said, measuredly, “who saw where a plan was falling apart and salvaged a situation that, if anyone less flexible had been in charge, would’ve ended in disaster.”
“If you don’t think this was a disaster, I’d love to see what you think success is like.”
“A success is when you achieve your mission’s goals,” Neena told him.
“She’s gotcha there,” I said.
From the intensity of the hostility shifting toward me from all sides of the room, I probably shouldn’t have drawn attention to myself. Tough. I meant what I said.
Dad tried to teach me not to cuss. That lesson didn’t really take. In times like that, it felt dishonest to hold them under my tongue.
There had been a crane on the Little Miss Ironsides’s deck. A big, yellow monstrosity on tracks. I shot a glance between it, the ship’s deck, and the water. It didn’t take me long to put this stupid, dangerous idea together.
“It looks like you all are in trouble,” Atlas Bear radioed.
“We’re in trouble,” Rachel confirmed.
Atlas Bear’s airship could be whisper-quiet when she chose, but not during combat. That was when she switched on the noisemakers, made it as loud and intimidating as an oncoming train. Its thrusters roared as the airship hovered on a curtain of gray exhaust. The A.I.M. crew flinched away from it.
The airship angled toward the bridge castle. “Get to the top level,” Atlas Bear said. “I can extract you from there.”
“Already there,” Neena said.
“I’m on my way,” Rachel chimed in. “Give me thirty seconds.”
I didn’t chime in. I bolted across the deck, paying no heed to the few crew hustling about. Even if someone recognized me as an intruder, only people with a death wish would try to stop me now. I doubted anyone serving as deck crew, bad guys or not, would be so committed to their bosses’ cause.
’Course, I’m always capable of being surprised. But I wasn’t this time.
The deck jolted. It felt almost like the ship had run against something. An explosion like a cannon shot popped my ears. I couldn’t tell whether this one had come from the containers above deck, or the engine room below. Either seemed like bad news.
“Inez?” Neena asked.
I didn’t have enough breath to answer. That was my excuse, anyway.
I clambered into the crane’s cabin and slammed the door behind me. Just in time. The deck rattled. A fraction of a second later, the sound of another detonation rattled the plastic windows. They pinged and thumped as debris rained down on them like hail. I sat facing the now-scratched and burnt windshield, and tried not to think about how far along the fires had gotten.
“Inez,” Neena said. “Talk to me. Tell me you’re all right.”
Finally, I answered. “I’ll be all right.”
For a moment, the crane’s controls swam in front of me, just like the ones on the bridge. I’ve never done any construction work before. (One of the reasons I became a merc was to get out of that kind of thing. The bigger reason was – well, it’s hard for a mutant to fit into civilian life. Trouble and hate come to us like ants to strawberry jam.)
This time, the fog cleared on its own. Most of the controls had obvious functions. And, while I was sure I was missing some nuances, I didn’t need to be precise. And I sure didn’t need to be safe.
The controls were locked. A glowing pad on the right wall had a slot keycard reader and an instructional image of a disembodied hand holding an ID card. I grabbed the card I’d stolen from the A.I.M. goon, swiped it through – and what do you know, it worked.
Its motor started. A deep, guttural rumble like a tiger’s purr shook the seat. The controls were labeled in Chinese, but there were plenty of self-explanatory pictographs. Joystick on the right for lateral controls. Joystick on the left for height.
Bright yellow firelight reflected along the sides of the nearest containers. There were no longer any crew near me. I could have sworn some of the firelight was green. Who knew what kind of materials A.I.M. was shipping in these containers?
A cluster of multicolored containers, two layers high, sat close to the edge of the deck. I had no idea if A.I.M. color-coded by the containers’ contents, but there was at least one of each color here.
Good enough for what I needed.
I yanked the control lever and swept the crane arm to the side. The metal arm shrieked in protest. It wasn’t designed to move this fast, or so carelessly. I drove the crane arm into the stacked containers like the arm was a wrecking ball. It smashed into the containers hard enough to dent them both. Their restraining cables snapped. Three of the containers tipped over the side and crashed into the water. Another clung to the side, teetering uncertainly, and for a moment I thought I’d have to waste time trying again. Then its cargo shifted and it, too, plunged into the sea.
The containers were reasonably airtight. They would float for a while. Maybe. Most likely. If they didn’t, the Avengers and S.H.I.E.L.D. were resourceful. They’d have divers.
Probably.
From her position atop the bridge castle, Neena couldn’t have missed what I was doing. The radio squawked. “Fire’s spreading,” she said. “Get the hell out of there, and up here!”
“Come on down here with me, and we’ll both be fine,” I answered. Neena’s luck power was a sight to behold sometimes. I’d seen her survive frag grenades because all the shrapnel miraculously missed her.
“That’s not how my luck works, and you know it,” Neena said. “It protects me. It doesn’t protect people around me.”
More containers stood by the opposite side of the hull, just within the crane’s reach. If I had enough time, I could get to them, too. Give the Stark Industries eggheads some more toys to pick at.
I glanced at Atlas Bear’s airship. A big, sleek, black-and-violet beetle hovered over the bridge castle. If this whole ship was gonna blow, the airship was still too close. I hoped Rachel was right when she’d said she’d only need thirty seconds to get there.
“Y’all had better go,” I told them. “I’ll find my own way out.”
“Inez…” Neena started.
“Trust me.”
While we spoke, I was wrenching the crane arm over to the last containers. My first strike hit at just the right angle. It sent one tipping forward into the others. Another four of them broke through their restraining cables and crashed into the water. I couldn’t see the impact from this angle, but I heard the splash.
Three
“My own way out” turned out to have been a frantic sprint to the side of the boat and an undignified dive overboard. I’d hardly splashed in when the water above me roiled with the biggest explosion yet. The bubble trails of white-hot debris speared through the water. Some of Neena’s luck must’ve rubbed off. None of it struck me.
I swam my way over to one of the A.I.M. lifeboats, and “convinced” them to stay put and stay calm until they were picked up for capture. Didn’t take more than one or two punches. We coasted in the light of the fire.
The container ship was a flaming wreck, but still afloat. The bridge castle was intact. The people I’d left in there would be shaken, but fine so long as they got out in time.
