Several hours later, Captain George Stacy arrived at the dock with his unit.
The scene was exactly as described and then significantly worse upon direct inspection.
Men in cocoons.
Men with anatomy that had been rearranged.
A corrupt officer zip-tied to a container with his badge visible.
The cages in the secondary section, now empty, with the women inside already being processed by the responding officers who had arrived first.
"Are these Han Jiao's people?" one of his officers asked, looking at the men on the floor.
Before Stacy could answer, another officer came running with a piece of paper, and before he could read it a voice came from nearby.
"Captain. If it would help, I speak and understand Japanese fluently."
Stacy turned.
The speaker was young.
Early twenties at most, possibly younger.
Dark hair, direct eyes, the kind of posture that suggested someone who had been raised around law enforcement and had absorbed the professional bearing without the years of institutional caution that eventually softened it.
"Your name, Rookie?"
"Yuriko Watanabe."
Something in the name registered. "Any relation to John Watanabe? Kenneth Watanabe?"
"My grandfather and my father," she said, with a pride that was not performed but simply present.
"Both served the NYPD. I am following in their footsteps."
"Good officers, both of them." Stacy nodded once, the kind of nod that means something rather than nothing.
"I expect good things from you, Mrs. Watanabe. Follow the officer and handle the translation."
"Yes, sir."
"CAPTAIN!" One of his people was pointing at something near the far containers.
Stacy looked.
Han Jiao, one of the senior figures in the Japanese organized crime network operating in this borough, was suspended from a post above the dock in a web cocoon, arms and legs bent wrong, conscious and very unhappy about it.
But it was not the man himself that had caught his officer's attention.
It was the shadow the man cast on the surface behind him, which with the angle of the dock lights resolved into the unmistakable silhouette of a figure with its arms extended and something at its back that might have been a cape or might have been webbing, and a shape to the head that was neither human nor animal but something between.
Stacy looked at it for a long moment.
He had been a police captain for a long time.
He had spent that time being realistic about what the law could and could not reach, and there was a category of criminal that the law had never been well-designed to address because the law required evidence and witnesses and chains of custody and all the procedural architecture that made it fair to the innocent while making it manageable for the guilty.
The shadow on the dock wall did not operate under those constraints.
He was not going to think about that too directly.
But something that had been quiet in him for a while was less quiet than it had been a few minutes ago.
He turned back to the scene and got to work.
--------
Baxter Building, his lab.
He heard Cortana say the serum analysis was approaching completion while he was still swinging and moved faster.
He came through the duct access, stowed the suit, and crossed to the workbench.
A beep from the analysis machine.
"Peter," Cortana said, materializing fully. "It is done."
He was out of his chair and at the machine before the word done had finished.
"The animal trials are complete and successful," she said.
"Selina, the Bombay cat, has not only recovered fully from malnutrition but is demonstrating cognitive capacity significantly above the standard range for her breed.
The first two rat subjects showed minor rash symptoms and subcutaneous accumulation with the earlier serums, but those issues are absent in the current formula. I also ran trials on chimpanzees."
She paused in the way she paused when the next thing she was about to say was genuinely significant.
"Of the three serum variants we developed, ALZ-1-1-2 is the closest match to Steve Rogers' original enhancement, at 99.97% equivalence."
Peter stood at the machine for a moment.
Then he took a breath.
"Yes," he said, quietly.
He reached in and removed the ALZ-1-1-2 serum from the machine.
A note on the subjects, because it was relevant.
Selina he had found in an alley six days ago, abandoned and thin, and had brought her to Baxter, treated the wounds that needed treating, fed her enough to make the formula viable, and used her as the primary test subject because a cat was both small enough to be manageable and cognitively complex enough for the results to be meaningful.
She was currently in her enclosure in the corner of the lab, watching him with the specific attention of an animal that has decided a person is interesting.
Caesar the chimpanzee had been a different situation entirely.
The discovery of Caesar had come during a patrol near a place in the Kitchen where certain illegal operations involving exotic animals were conducted with the confidence of people who had never encountered a consequence for them.
They had encountered one.
Several of them had encountered multiple.
The chimpanzee had been the only subject small enough and young enough to transport without making the return to Baxter eventful, and he had been in residence for four days now and had already demonstrated the cognitive capacity that Cortana had flagged in her report.
He was currently sitting on a platform in his enclosure watching Cortana's holographic interface with the patient attention of someone who is learning rather than being entertained.
"Show me the full trial data," Peter said.
A holographic projection unfolded across the lab space.
He watched the chimpanzee performance sequence, which included a cognitive tower puzzle that Caesar had completed in fifteen steps without visible hesitation.
"Name him Caesar officially and open a dedicated monitoring file," he said. "I want continuous behavioral data going forward."
"Already running."
"Good." He picked up the serum and looked at it. "Now let us do this."
He filled eight vials from the primary solution and connected them to the robotic arm assembly Cortana controlled.
Then he took off his shirt and his trousers, lay down on the table in his boxers, and looked at the ceiling.
"My body is ready, ma'am," he said.
"That sounded significantly worse than you intended," Cortana said, and there was something in her voice that was not quite exasperation but was in the same family.
She was clearly also trying to understand what process had led him to that phrasing.
"Beginning preparation. I studied the original Super Soldier Project documentation extensively and identified the gaps in their methodology relative to what the technology of that period could support.
With the benefit of current knowledge, I can guarantee 98.95% retention of the enhancement capacity with a considerably less traumatic delivery process."
"It is still going to hurt," Peter said.
"Yes," she said. "It will hurt considerably. Good luck, Chief."
The robotic arms attached the restraints, which were made from the Richards materials and were strong enough to hold someone with significantly enhanced strength without cutting into the skin.
One of the arms produced a folded cloth and placed it between his teeth.
"Relax your muscles," Cortana said. "Take a deep breath. It will be over before you know it. Possibly."
The needles broke the skin simultaneously, eight injection points across the major muscle groups and vascular pathways, and he felt the serum enter his bloodstream with the specific burning quality of something that is changing the thing it is moving through.
He bit down on the cloth.
Then the arm with the electroshock device appeared and he had just enough time to register what it was before the Vita Ray discharge hit and activated the serum in his veins, and after that there was a period during which he was not tracking time with any particular accuracy.