Coulson stared at the unconscious Vin-Tak for a moment, then at Smith.
"There's more we could have asked him."
"We already have what we need," Smith said. "The Inhumans aren't a threat to be eliminated. They're part of Earth's defense force. I know enough about them."
Sif had been watching this exchange with the particular composure of someone who has just had their professional judgment overruled by someone with considerably more authority.
"With respect," she said, "the Kree modifications were designed to produce weapons. That is what they are. History supports treating them as dangerous."
Skye, standing at the back of the room, kept her face still.
Smith shook his head. "Earth will handle its own affairs. The Inhumans stay."
Sif held his gaze for a moment. She knew the Kree. She knew what their military programs had produced elsewhere in the Nine Realms and beyond. But she also knew what she was looking at when she looked at Smith Doyle, and she knew where the actual weight in this room sat.
"My mission is complete once the Kree agent leaves Earth," she said. "That is what the God-King asked of me."
"Then you'll be done shortly," Smith said.
Vin-Tak woke up beside a stream somewhere outside the city, sitting in clothes he didn't recognize, with no particular memory of how he'd gotten there. He looked at his hands, at the creek, at the trees, and worked through the situation methodically.
Sif was standing nearby.
"This is Midgard," she said. "Earth. You appear to have arrived here under some kind of mission, though the details are unclear."
"Why would I come here?" He looked around at the unfamiliar vegetation, the unfamiliar sky. "And in these clothes?"
"I couldn't say. What I can tell you is that this world is under Asgardian protection and is not a recommended destination for unannounced Kree visits." She kept her tone level, diplomatic but with an edge underneath it. "Given the circumstances, I'd suggest returning to your ship."
Vin-Tak thought about this. He had no particular reason to be on an alien planet with no memory of his mission and an Asgardian warrior watching him with the kind of attention that suggested leaving would be the prudent choice. His ship was responding to his locator.
He called it, boarded, and left.
Sif watched the vessel clear the atmosphere, confirmed via Heimdall that it was on a course out of the solar system, and then let herself be taken home.
She had lost her memory in a fight with a Kree agent, been found in a Portuguese police station, and had to have her recollections restored by the agent who'd taken them in the first place. Lorelei knew all of this. There was no scenario in which going back to the embassy was going to be anything other than deeply unpleasant.
She went directly back to Asgard instead.
The Airbus.
Coulson knocked on Smith's temporary office — the rooftop space that he'd already identified as useful and mentally flagged for the Capsule Corporation conversion — and came in when Smith looked up.
"They've both confirmed departed, sir."
Smith nodded and set his tablet down.
Coulson stood in the doorway for a moment. "The Inhumans. Skye's people at the Afterlife base — they're the same thing Vin-Tak was describing."
"Yes," Smith said. "Not every enhanced individual is an Inhuman, but Skye's community is the product of the Kree program. They call themselves Inhumans. Their abilities span a wide range."
Coulson sat down across from him. "Do we need to prepare for any specific consequences? If there's a distinct population with Inhuman genetics — if they start identifying as a separate group — does that create a division problem on Earth?"
Smith looked at him. "Earth already has more races and nations than most of the universe can account for. There's room. And with me in the picture, anyone with ambitions that run outside reasonable boundaries will find that poorly considered."
He let Coulson process that.
"The more realistic concern isn't separation," Smith continued. "It's exposure. If general knowledge of the Inhuman genetic line became public — that there's a population whose descendants have a guaranteed path to enhancement — the response would split two ways. Some people would try to marry into it. Others would try to eliminate it."
"The entire team maintains highest secrecy on this," Smith said. "No records. Skye continues to be treated as a standard enhanced individual. That's the position, and it holds."
Coulson nodded.
"One more thing," Smith said. "The awakening signal that brought Vin-Tak here — it came from someone using the Diviner. Track it back. Start with the underground temple. The Afterlife community likely has most of the missing Diviners, but the activation that triggered the signal came from somewhere else. I want to know where." He paused. "The Obelisk that left SHIELD custody during Fury's tenure — either he knew what he was doing or he didn't, and either answer is relevant. One of those missing Diviners is what started this."
He stood.
"The Malick family — Gideon Malick, patriarch, generational HYDRA. The whole family is in. Don't leave any of them operational, and don't leave their black stones behind — those are Obelisks, and I want them recovered." He opened a wormhole. "Bring me the list when you have it."
He stepped through and was gone.
One week later.
Smith walked into the Avengers briefing room and looked at the assembled faces.
"Before anyone says anything — I know."
Tony pointed at him. "Seven weeks. Count them."
"SHIELD business. There was a Kree incursion."
"There's always something with you. Other people manage full-time jobs and save the world. I'm just saying, it can be done."
Smith sat down. "What are we hitting?"
Steve stood and brought up the tactical display. "Strucker. He's been running HYDRA's reconstruction out of a base in Sokovia, along with Dr. List. We burned the Antarctic facility two weeks ago and tracked the surviving command structure here." He indicated a compound set into a hillside, extensive underground, multiple defense layers. "We go in, we shut it down."
Thor was already on his feet, Mjolnir in hand. "We should leave now. Finish quickly enough to make dinner."
Nobody disagreed with the timeline.
HYDRA Base. Sokovia.
The man who had been selected to test the Terrigen crystal touched it, and the crystal's response was immediate and absolute. He had not passed whatever selection mechanism the ancient Kree had built into the process, and the evidence of this was gone in under a minute.
In the training wing, the three who had passed were working through their capabilities. Lambert ran his temperature. Connie moved through a series of timed breath-hold exercises, each one longer than the last, each one accompanied by the blur of her moving through a world that had briefly stopped around her. Raina sat in the corner of the room, spines and all, watching the mist that came and went at the edge of her vision.
She had been seeing more clearly since Sokovia. Not more often — the visions came when they came, not on request — but with more detail when they arrived. She was learning to recognize the difference between what she was seeing and the noise that surrounded it.
The vision arrived without preamble.
Raina stood up quickly and walked out of the training wing.
Strucker was at the command station reviewing the supply inventory when she found him.
"I've seen something," she said. She was not a person who usually looked flustered, and the fact that she currently did conveyed more than the words. "The Avengers. They're inside the base."
Strucker went still. Then: "They traced us."
He crossed to the emergency panel and pressed the purple evacuation indicator without hesitation.
The moment his finger made contact with the button, Raina's memory of the vision completed its playback.
The Avengers breaching the base perimeter. The explosions in the corridor. The specific quality of the light — and there, in the image, the purple button lit on the emergency panel behind Strucker.
The vision had begun the moment he pressed it.
Her face went the color of old ash.
"How much time?" Strucker asked.
She opened her mouth.
The first impact shook the building.
Outside the base.
Natasha pushed the jeep through a switchback in the access road and kept her hands steady while the passenger-side window lit up with weapons fire. In the back, Barton rose from his crouch and sent two arrows through the gap in the guard tower's armor plating simultaneously.
Tony came in over the ridge at altitude, both palm cannons active, working through the exterior gun emplacements in methodical passes.
Thor took Mjolnir on a wide arc and dropped toward the communications tower at the base's northern corner.
An invisible pressure wave hit him broadside — no visible source, no visible trajectory, just impact — and he went through the tower and kept going, the masonry collapsing behind him. He landed in the snow thirty meters from the compound wall and came up immediately, which was the difference between Thor and most things that could knock him off course.
The Inhumans were in the fight now.
Steve came in on the motorcycle — fast, low, threading between the vehicle barriers — and grabbed a HYDRA soldier by the ankle in passing, swinging him into a concrete post. He dropped the bike and came up with the shield ready.
A fireball hit the motorcycle from above. The explosion rolled Steve forward, and he came out of it on his feet, shield arm up, already looking for the source.
Jessica Jones took a sonic burst at close range and felt the symbiote inside her react with something that wasn't quite pain but was a close functional equivalent — a destabilizing vibration that she had to actively suppress to keep the bond from fracturing. She put a car between herself and the emitter and reassessed.
Smith flew above the battle line and read the field below him.
The enhanced individuals moving through the HYDRA positions had a quality distinct from the standard soldiers — the erratic, unpredictable movement of people whose abilities had been active for weeks rather than years, not yet fully controlled, but real. Fire. Sonic disruption. Speed that wasn't speed in the conventional sense.
So HYDRA had the Diviners. He could work backward from there: the temple awakening, the signal that brought Vin-Tak, the empty box in the cave — HYDRA had used the Obelisk to run their own activation program. The signal that had reached the Kree cleanup station was theirs.
A heavy gun emplacement on the eastern tower found his position and opened up.
The rounds hit him in the chest and shoulders and fell away deformed, the metal crumpled at the point of contact without penetrating.
Smith looked at the tower for a moment.
He raised one hand and sent three ki blasts in sequence. The eastern tower ceased to be a problem. So did the two adjacent structures.
Bruce Banner was no longer Bruce Banner. The Hulk picked up the nearest armored vehicle and used it as an improvised bludgeon against a second one, and the resulting collision cleared a forty-meter radius of everything that had been standing.
The division of labor sorted itself naturally: Smith, Thor, and the Hulk absorbed the heavy resistance and the Inhuman opponents with enough capability to redirect their attention. Steve, Natasha, Barton, and Jessica managed the secondary lines and paid for the privilege in degrees.
Connie moved through Steve's blind spots .
SHIELD's new operational suits — the upgraded material specifications from the Fraternity's anti-penetration weave — handled everything she threw at his torso. His neck was a different question.
Connie exhaled. Re-entered normal time. Positioned.
Smith was already there.
He had seen the pattern three exchanges ago: the brief gaps in Steve's threat awareness, the way objects shifted position in ways that didn't track to visible movement, the angle of approach that kept coming back to the same vector. He moved as Connie committed.
Her dagger came down at Steve's neck and hit Smith's open palm instead. The blade fractured against it.
Connie looked at the broken handle in her hand. Then at Smith's other hand, which had found her neck.
He ended it quickly, which was the only merciful thing about it.
Steve Rogers stared at the space in front of him. From his perspective, Smith had appeared between him and empty air, and then there was someone unconscious — dead — in Smith's grip. It had taken under a second.
"I didn't see anyone," Steve said.
"You weren't going to." Smith stepped back. "Keep moving — there's still work to do."
"Thank you," Steve said.
Smith was already airborne again.