Chapter 141: Hey Vampires, Want an Astartes to Put a Bolt Gun to Your Skull?
The SHIELD notification sat on Matthew's phone screen. He stopped mid-game.
He'd been in the middle of an online session with Ada and Eleanor, nothing better to do late at night, and now wasn't.
Before he'd had time to process what he was reading, a Quinjet drifted into position outside the window and held there.
His phone rang.
"Mr. Lawrence." Natasha's voice. "Does your company have anyone else at the top end of the capability range? Besides yourself?"
"Top end?" A brief pause. "Yes. Though that comes with additional charges."
"And if I'm personally involved, that's calculated separately from whatever the base rate is."
"Director Fury has already factored that in." Her tone was warm in a professional way. "This mission will be settled directly between the two of you, roughly equivalent to the last contract."
"Can you bring your team and move out now?"
"Give me two minutes on the rooftop pad."
"We'll be waiting."
The call ended. The Quinjet outside the window banked away from the building, made a clean arc through the night sky, and settled on the roof.
Inside the Quinjet.
Hawkeye was turning one of his arrowheads over in his fingers. Pure silver, this batch, lower on the hardness curve than standard, but functionally a targeted vulnerability against vampire physiology. The tradeoff was acceptable.
He glanced at Natasha across the cabin. She was doing weapons maintenance. "Natasha Romanoff. Why exactly does the Director need to bring in outside help for this?"
"Isn't this something we handle ourselves?"
He wasn't particularly comfortable with the premise. SHIELD contracting out to a private security firm implied something about comparative capability that he didn't love.
Natasha looked up from what she was doing. "Under normal conditions, yes. A few vampires with known weaknesses is an afternoon of work."
"But conditions aren't normal right now. Most of our people are deployed managing incidents from the vampire disclosure fallout. We're short-staffed by a significant margin. That's why we're working with outside contractors."
She paused, then added: "And I think the Director may have a secondary objective."
"Which is?"
"Testing Matthew Lawrence for Avengers Initiative consideration."
Coulson, sitting at the controls, cleared his throat. Twice, deliberately.
"Just to flag this: if you're going to discuss that particular topic, doing it while I'm sitting right here creates a reporting obligation that I'm not sure how to handle."
Whatever either of them was going to say next was interrupted by movement in the dark outside the hull.
"Looks like our contractors are here." Hawkeye watched the shapes approaching.
The hatch opened.
The first thing anyone saw was two figures in heavy armor, silver-grey, moving toward the aircraft with the unhurried efficiency of things that were confident nothing in the vicinity was going to be a problem.
Rough height: two point seven meters, approximately.
The capability reading off them from a glance was not the kind of thing you could miss.
Part of that was obvious inference: the powered armor they were wearing wasn't built to accommodate ordinary people. Whatever was inside it needed to be capable of moving that weight.
"Sorry to keep you waiting." Matthew, walking behind them, addressed Natasha with a slight smile.
Hawkeye's eyes had locked onto the two figures and hadn't moved.
The two figures were also looking at him. Through their armor's combat analysis systems.
Scanning target...
Muscle density: insufficient. Overall body state: elevated tension. Respiration and cardiac rate: elevated. Assessment: target experiencing stress response.
Weapon designation: primitive bow and arrow.
Assessment: no threat.
Brief eye contact. It was only a moment, but Hawkeye had already concluded that whatever was inside those suits wasn't something he wanted to test.
"These are..." Natasha's eyes had a specific quality to them that she didn't usually show.
"My personal security detail. The strongest operational team in our company." Matthew gestured toward them. "You can call them the Astartes."
"The Astartes."
She studied them seriously for a moment. "Are two of them enough? Should we bring more?"
"Two is sufficient for this kind of operation." Matthew was already moving toward a seat.
Coulson turned in the cockpit. "Departing now?"
He got the nod. The Quinjet turned and disappeared into the night.
Elsewhere.
The vampire extermination campaign had accelerated Blade's capture. Deacon had moved on him earlier than he might have otherwise, and the female contact who had intervened and extracted Blade in the original sequence of events hadn't been present this time. The result was that by the time the ritual reached this point, Deacon had nearly every drop of blood he needed.
Above Los Angeles, cloud cover had rolled in thick, and lightning was hammering the altar runes surrounding the Temple of Eternal Night in a sustained rhythm.
As Blade's blood landed on Deacon's face, the souls of the twelve pureblood elders surrounding him were wrenched free from their bodies by the pull of the runes, one after another.
Then, as if caught by invisible chains, each soul was pulled into Deacon.
The screaming filled every corner of the temple.
Deacon listened and found it pleasant.
He'd had enough of the pureblood hierarchy for several centuries.
Now they were gone, and cleanly. Everything was proceeding exactly as it should.
The power rising inside him was already beyond anything he'd had access to before. Blood-red energy moved under his skin. Something ancient and hungry was waking in the deep part of him, demanding to be fed, demanding to be filled, and when the vessel was full, nothing in the world would be above him.
The Blood Sea would come. Earth would be converted. The era of humanity would end, and something better would begin.
He was calculating where to start when a sound like ordnance landing reached him from directly overhead.
BOOM.
Two impacts.
The dome of the temple came apart in the places where two sets of armored feet had just gone through it, and two towering figures dropped into the temple interior and landed below.
They were upright in the next breath.
From behind their waists, both of them produced weapons, bolt guns larger than any standard grenade launcher, and brought them to bear on the assembled vampires watching from around the room.
"Hello~!"
"Hey vampires. Want an Astartes to put a bolt gun to your skull?"