The isolation barriers had come down automatically when the alarm triggered: thick blast doors designed to compartmentalize the Hub and contain any internal threat. The ten rings solved them before Nolan had to slow down. Metal tore away in fragments that scattered across the corridor floor, and he went through the gap without breaking stride, the Terminator team following a pace behind.
The method for distinguishing S.H.I.E.L.D. agents from Hydra in a corridor full of panicked armed people came down to a simple test: whoever pulled a trigger first was answering the question for themselves. Rogers had suggested, before they went in, that a speech to the agents might help. The results at the airport perimeter had already given a preliminary assessment of how much weight that suggestion carried.
Anyone who held fire was, most likely, a frightened intelligence analyst who had been told to stay at their desk and was now experiencing a very different day than expected. Anyone who raised a weapon without waiting to identify the target was almost certainly Hydra, because S.H.I.E.L.D.'s civilian personnel, which made up the bulk of the Hub's population, were not trained for instinctive aggression. The distribution of casualties on the S.H.I.E.L.D. side would reflect this. It was an imprecise system. It was the only one available in a building where no one was wearing identifying colors.
Nolan pulled the masterwork bolter from his hip and moved.
The operations hall was large, tiered, built for the kind of coordinated monitoring work that required many people watching many screens simultaneously. Most of those screens were dark or showing error states. Most of those people were under cover behind overturned furniture and equipment racks, suppressed by Hydra agents who had prepared firing positions before the alarm had fully sounded.
Solid rounds came in the moment Nolan entered. He was not wearing the helmet, which meant the ten rings carried the load, five of them rotating into a defensive spread in front of him while the other five changed angle and moved forward over the heads of the agents firing at him.
The rings went through metal bunkers the way a blade goes through paper. The bunkers were not proof against them. Neither were the agents behind them.
The S.H.I.E.L.D. personnel pinned down on the floor of the hall had, collectively, stopped breathing for a moment. Nolan did not look at them. He looked at the corridor exits on the far side of the hall: four of them, leading to different sections of the base. He held up his arm and swept it forward.
The five Terminators moved past him and took the side passages, two to the left, two to the right, one covering the rear approach. The center corridor remained open.
Nolan put the bolter away and pulled the chainsword from the power pack mount.
He walked into the center corridor.
The red alarm lighting pulsed from above in a rhythm that had no meaning beyond urgency, splashing across the vibranium surface of the armor as he moved. From a distance, in those conditions, he probably looked like something that did not belong to any category anyone in this building had been trained to handle.
He stepped over the bodies of agents who had made the wrong decision and kept walking.
The corridor opened into an underground chamber that was not on any floor plan Nolan had reviewed, because it was not finished yet.
The helicarrier dominated the space.
It was partial, framed rather than complete, the skeletal work of a vessel that was still in early construction stages. But the scale of it was already clear: the width of the hull under construction, the mounting points for engines that had not yet been installed, the internal structural skeleton visible through open sections of plating. The specific engineering ambition of building something that could put a mobile command platform into sustained flight above any point on the planet's surface. Nolan looked at it for a moment longer than was strictly tactical.
"After this is finished," he said to himself, mostly, "we discuss whether Rogers can be persuaded to part with this. And if not, David can look at whether the design schematics are recoverable."
He filed it.
The engine sound reached him before the vehicles were visible.
A dozen armed jeeps came out from behind the helicarrier's rear section in a column, each mounted with a heavy machine gun, the lead vehicles already accelerating toward him. He could see Crossbones in one of the middle vehicles before they had closed half the distance.
He did not wait.
The vibranium armor's mag-locks engaged and he was already moving toward them, closing the gap from his end. The heavy machine gun operators on the lead vehicles opened fire, tracers crossing the distance in less time than it took to register them visually.
The ten rings went forward instead.
They did not block. They attacked: ten metal bands carrying enough force to compete with a Warscythe, moving at a speed that the operators had no frame of reference for, passing through the exposed gun crews in the lead vehicles before anyone had time to realize the threat had changed direction. The rounds stopped. The operators did not.
Two freeze grenades came off Nolan's hip without him breaking stride. He judged the angle and released them under the lead jeep.
The detonation was not explosive. It was expansive: cold spreading outward and upward from the chassis in a sudden bloom of ice and icicle formation that locked the lead vehicle in place in less than a second. The vehicle behind it had no time to brake. The vehicle behind that one had no time to react to the vehicle that had failed to brake. The column compressed itself against the ice barrier in a sequence of collisions that left the remaining vehicles at various angles across the chamber floor.
Nolan landed on the ice with both feet and pushed off.
The chainsword came down into the second vehicle's roof with the sound of a machine tearing through material it was designed to tear through. He pulled it sideways. The Hydra agents in the vehicle had raised weapons by reflex, and the reflex had not helped them.
The ten rings swept the column from the side as he worked through it, passing through doors and panels and anything else that represented cover for the agents trying to exit the crashed vehicles and engage on foot.
When the noise of it contracted to something close to silence, the chamber was mostly still.
Mostly.
A door kicked open from a vehicle near the back of the column, the metal panel bent outward from the force of it. The figure that came through was large and moving fast, both forearms encased in mechanical cross-braced devices that carried the specific look of something designed to hit hard rather than protect against being hit.
Rumlow. Brock Rumlow, who operated as Crossbones, who had run Hydra's operational arm under Pierce, who had put Madam Gao on a list and sent a Quinjet with a cloaked flight plan to execute the item on that list.
He covered the distance between the vehicle and Nolan with the speed of a man who had decided that the gap between himself and an armored opponent needed to be closed before he could think about what came next.
His eyes were wide open.
"Hail Hydra!"