The underground tunnels beneath the fortress were a maze.
Passages branched and doubled back on themselves with no apparent logic, the corridors identical in width and height, lit by the same pale strip lighting at the same intervals. Anyone relying on memory or instinct alone would have been spinning in circles within minutes. Even Thor, with all his centuries of battlefield experience, would have been useless down here.
Nolan had brought David.
Beyond that, the tunnels provided their own grim navigation system. The bodies of Doom's Defence Force teams marked the route in irregular intervals, soldiers who had gone ahead and run into things they could not handle. Some had been punched through their carapace armour by concentrated superpower blasts. Others had been pulled apart. The wounds were not clean. Nolan stepped around one without looking down and kept moving, magnetic boots clicking steadily against the concrete.
Tyberos walked beside him, Terminator armour filling the corridor nearly edge to edge, chainaxes Hunger and Thirst hanging loose at his sides.
The passage opened without warning.
They stepped through into a vast underground square, a space large enough to swallow several city blocks, the ceiling lost in shadow far overhead. Hydra personnel moved between equipment stations at the far end, purposeful and quick. Standing among them, arranged in rows along the back wall, were the missiles.
Dozens of them. Five or six stories tall even in their launch cradles, the casings dull grey under the work lights. Cruise missiles, each one broad enough across the body that two men could not have linked hands around the circumference.
Nolan assessed the scene in a single sweep. He understood immediately.
"David." His voice was flat and immediate inside the helmet. "The missiles. Don't let them launch, don't let them detonate in place."
David moved without a word, angling toward the launch consoles at a controlled jog.
Nolan and Tyberos were already moving.
There was no signal between them, no spoken coordination. They had fought beside each other long enough. They closed the distance to the Hydra line at full charge, and the line broke into frantic motion, personnel scrambling to weapons and cover.
A superpower on the left side of the formation raised both palms. Metal darts crystallised out of nothing, cross-shaped, spinning, and launched in a stream toward Nolan's chest. He kept walking into them, ceramite taking the impacts with flat cracks, and raised the Heart of the Furnace from his hip in the same motion. He squeezed the trigger without aiming carefully. There was no need to.
Blue plasma balls erupted from the barrel in a rolling tide, three, four, six, more. The heat hit before the light did. Elite Hydra soldiers in the path of the salvo became ash before they could finish raising their weapons, the burning air carrying nothing of them outward but carbon and the smell of scorched fabric.
The superpowers with faster reactions scattered. Most of the regular soldiers did not.
On the right flank, Tyberos hit the Hydra line like a freight train. A superpower threw themselves directly into his path, arms spread, some kind of shielding ability crackling around their body. Tyberos's lightning claw swung once. The crackling stopped. The Terminator armour did not even slow. The next two defenders who tried to buy time with their bodies bought precisely nothing, torn upward and apart by the second claw in a single backswing, blood tracing wide arcs across the concrete before the pieces came down.
He carved through the formation in a straight line, leaving nothing intact behind him.
At the far end of the square, David reached the launch console and drove a metal palm into the housing. The blue light in his eye sockets pulsed rapid and deep, data streams moving visibly through his systems as he worked against whatever countdown or trigger sequence Hydra had already engaged.
Nolan crossed the square. The magnetic boots stepped over the remains of what had been Hydra soldiers minutes before. Here and there a piece of armour, a weapon, a hand, nothing connected to anything else. He reached the far wall and turned.
The applause started slowly.
Three claps. Four. Unhurried, deliberate, the sound bouncing off the concrete in the sudden quiet.
He came out of the shadow between two equipment housings. A tall man, lean under the black cloak, completely bald, with a mechanical eye set above the bridge of his nose. His right arm was mechanical too, articulated at every joint, dark metal against the black fabric of his sleeve. He walked at an easy pace, as though he had been waiting somewhere comfortable and was in no particular hurry.
Baron Strucker let the last of his applause die.
"As expected of the Guardian of Terra's reputation," he said. The tone was conversational, almost complimentary, as if he were discussing something mildly impressive at a dinner party. "I spent considerable energy and time developing and cultivating that particular group. The superpowers took years to produce. You cut through them like ripe grain at harvest."
He glanced toward David at the console.
"And there is no point letting that artificial intelligence waste its effort." His voice did not change. "I started the launch sequence before you arrived here. Those men you just killed were performing for you, giving you something to look at, something that looked like a threat you could still stop. A small comfort. That was all it was."
He paused, something that might have been courtesy.
"I should mention: every missile in this room is loaded with death spore bombs. The name is dramatic, but it is accurate enough. Technically a fungal spore with an affinity for the concept of death, or possibly something older than classification. If even a single warhead reaches ground and detonates, the spores will disperse on the wind. From there, the spread to the entire surface of the Earth is not a question of if." His mechanical eye caught the light for a moment. "By the time anyone understood what was happening..."
Nolan and Tyberos were already moving.
Not in response to any particular word, not in answer to the speech. They moved because waiting had stopped having a purpose. The charge was immediate and hard, power armour and Terminator armour crossing the distance between them and Strucker at full stride.
Strucker's expression shifted. The calm broke. Something hot and genuine pushed through the composed surface and his voice rose to fill the square.
"Scum! You have no respect for death! Then you can be buried with me!"
The mechanical eye flared, a dark red pulse, one beat. Then the beam erupted.
Orange-red, sharp-edged, silent, no heat signature at all. It came at Nolan's centre mass and he had no intention of stopping to absorb it, but the crisis sense hit first, the deep animal signal that his body had learned to trust, and his arm was already coming up. The Warscythe's blade intercepted the beam cleanly, edge-on.
The beam fractured on contact, scattered into a spray of bright sparks that drifted outward like embers off a fire. Where the sparks touched the ceramite of his armour and the concrete of the floor, the surface aged instantly, the material greying and crumbling at the contact points as though decades had compressed into seconds.
Nolan looked at the Warscythe. The necrodermis blade was unmarked.
He dropped his left hand to his hip and pulled out the Heart of the Furnace.
Strucker had bought himself a half-second while Nolan absorbed the decay effect. He did not get a third. Nolan levelled the barrel and pulled the trigger.
Plasma balls in a tight cluster, azure and burning, crossing the distance before Strucker had completed his next breath.
Tyberos, already inside striking distance with lightning claw raised, pulled the blow back cleanly, opening the firing lane, letting the plasma through without breaking stride.
Strucker's eye went wide. Whatever he had prepared to say, whatever slogan he had chosen as his last words, it did not make it out in full before the plasma tide arrived. The sound was brief. The result was thorough.
The heat dispersed slowly in the still underground air.
Nolan held the position for a moment, then holstered the Heart of the Furnace. The mechanism rotated once with a soft click and settled.
The underground square was very quiet.