The taste hit first: bitter and foul in equal measure, something that had no business being in a living mouth. Nolan closed his eyes.
The gene detection neural network stirred to life. It moved through him in a slow, deliberate way, the way a tide comes in rather than a switch being thrown, and then the memory fragments began to arrive.
They came in black and white at first, soundless, and there were hundreds of them. Centuries of a complicated life compressed into images that arrived and passed faster than normal memory could process. Madam Gao's life had been long and layered in ways that Nolan had not fully appreciated. There were things in those early fragments that surprised him: references to somewhere called the Seven Cities of Heaven, flickers of places with names that carried a weight of old tradition, an inheritance of immortal weapons and the people who carried them across generations. And somewhere in the deep background of those early years, a detail that landed with a particular clarity: Madam Gao had once been the daughter of the Crane Mother of Crane City, one of those seven cities. She had turned away from it. Had chosen the world's wealth and influence over whatever obligation that lineage carried.
Old secrets. Possibly important ones, in a different context. Not useful here.
Nolan accelerated through the fragments.
As the memories approached the period closer to her death, the quality changed. Color bled into them, imperfect and flickering, and sound arrived in fragments: incomplete, interrupted, but present.
"Being loyal to our Lord Primarch is your only responsibility now. He has given you a new life."
Her voice. She was recruiting. A group of Gang Dogs stood in front of her, and she was laying out the terms of service with the brisk clarity of someone who believed what she was saying.
The fragment shifted.
"Our lord will not tolerate your games. The leader must be punished. Your stupidity disappoints me."
A reprimand this time. The figures in front of her were indistinct, the fragment damaged, edges fraying. He could not make out faces.
The flow slowed. Nolan had begun to prepare for nothing useful at the end, for the fragments to dissolve into the ordinary noise of a life cut short before it could record its own ending.
Then the final image arrived, and it was not ordinary.
The same office. The same desk. The same window.
Several Gang Dogs stood on the other side of the desk, their faces arranged into the particular ugliness of men who have made a decision and are now committed to it. Their expressions were wrong for a meeting. Their body language was wrong. And behind them, half-concealed, the shape of laspistols held in hands not quite ready to draw.
They had come to kill her.
The confrontation was building. Voices raised. Madam Gao had risen from her chair, and then something pulled her attention to the window: a sound, perhaps, or a movement, something that penetrated the immediate threat in front of her and made her turn her head.
The sniper round took her before she could process what she had noticed.
The bulletproof glass gave way. The window exploded inward. And then the fragment ended.
Nolan opened his eyes.
He worked his jaw twice and spat: brain matter and saliva, what the scarab remnant had carried with it, expelled onto the office floor without ceremony. He stood, one hand moving the heavy chair with the headless body aside to clear his path to the wall behind the desk.
He found the round embedded in the plaster. His fingers worked it loose: a sniper bullet, deformed by its passage through a skull and the resistance of bulletproof glass beyond, but largely intact. He held it up briefly, then sent it through the air with a light wave of his palm.
David caught it without looking up.
"Analyze the material and likely origin," Nolan said. "And tell Doom to accelerate the mobilization of the First Company."
"My lord." David's eyes tracked blue. "Have you found something?"
"My earlier theory was mostly correct." Nolan walked slowly across the room, his armored steps careful around the debris. "Madam Gao was killed by a sniper firing from outside the window, almost certainly from a Quinjet running active camouflage. The visual signature was suppressed. The engine noise was not, which is how she knew something was there before the shot arrived."
He paused.
"But the sniper was not the only threat in this room. At the moment she died, several of her own Gang Dog confidants were already here with weapons. They intended to kill her themselves." His voice stayed even. "Whether or not every Gang Dog in that contingent participated directly, or merely knew and said nothing, the result is the same. They are finished. All of them. Pull them back to the training ground on any pretext and complete the clearance."
David's eyes pulsed once.
"Already underway, my lord. A prepared reason has been distributed. The First Company is airborne. Doom has been informed of the scope."
Nolan stopped pacing.
"After this is resolved: brainwash all senior Imperial Heavy Industries staff. I will not have this happen again." He exhaled slowly through his nose. "We may also need political commissars. People whose specific role is to monitor loyalty and reinforce it before it erodes." Another pause. "Offering people a vision of humanity's future and a considerable salary still leaves too much room for the human mind to wander. It is a more complicated problem than I gave it credit for."
He said it without particular bitterness. A data point, duly noted, filed for consideration.
Three kilometers away, on a crowded midday street in lower Manhattan, Natasha moved through pedestrian traffic without leaving a trace of herself in anyone's attention. Different cap, different coat, different posture. The kind of disguise that worked because it assumed people only noticed what they were looking for, and gave them nothing to look for.
A tall figure in a black cap walked into her from the side, shoulder to shoulder, the kind of collision that happened fifty times a day on a busy New York street. She had already begun to rotate into a defensive response, one hand coming up, when the other person turned and pressed something into her palm: a coffee cup, wax paper, ice cubes rattling inside.
"Natasha." The voice was warm, unhurried, the voice of a man who had been genuinely worried and was covering it with the tone of someone who had not. "I thought you were dead. I had started mentally planning a funeral. Nothing too elaborate. You would have hated elaborate."
Natasha let the response posture drop. She fell into step beside him without breaking pace.
"Clint." A corner of her mouth moved. "How are Laura and the kids?"
"They miss you. Laura keeps asking when you're coming for dinner." He glanced sideways at her. "Given that you're walking around Manhattan without looking over your shoulder every ten seconds, I'm guessing you're not particularly worried about S.H.I.E.L.D. accountability right now."
Natasha lifted the coffee cup and took a sip. The expression that followed was not quite a wince.
"Clint. This is terrible. Where does the rest of your S.H.I.E.L.D. salary go?"
"Laura. Kids. Farm upkeep." He said it without apology. "You didn't come here to critique my coffee choices. What do you need?"
She kept walking. Her eyes moved across the street ahead, checking windows, checking reflections, the habit too deep to turn off.
"I changed employers. My new one treats me well." A pause. "He also sent me to you with a specific purpose: if things go the way I hope, you will help us avoid a situation where S.H.I.E.L.D. provokes someone it genuinely cannot afford to provoke. That someone would be my employer."
Clint Barton said nothing for a moment. His expression had shifted from warm to attentive, the face he put on when a conversation had moved from reunion into something that mattered.
"Nat." His voice was still easy, but underneath it was not. "I knew the moment you bumped me that you weren't here for old times' sake. So tell me what you need."