The Lamenters moved in the same instant.
Ceramite plate met ceramite plate as the assault team dropped to one knee in unison, the sound of it rolling down the passage in a short, dense percussion. Bolters came off hips and rose in a single practiced motion, muzzles settling on Nick Fury with the unhurried precision of warriors who had been pointing weapons at things that deserved it for centuries. The second assault team fanned to either side, covering every Skrull in the room without consultation, without overlap.
Jessica stayed airborne. She moved her helmet slowly across the alien device, eyepiece working through its angles, looking for the thing that would make Nick Fury's threat a bluff. The machine's exterior offered her nothing obvious: active power feeds, sealed housing, the cable bundles running to the Cube's interface still pulsing with energy. She kept looking.
The Stormtroopers were not visible. They had not been visible for some time.
Doom came forward through the assembled Lamenters, Wanda a step behind him, her red ceramite plate dark in the low light. His cloak settled as he stopped, and he looked across the space at Nick Fury with the calm of someone who had already decided how this conversation would end.
"Nick Fury." His voice was measured. "You colluded with an alien race. You refused to stand down. You are now threatening to detonate a cosmic-level power source in a confined space." He tilted his head slightly. "Did you do all of this deliberately? Or did it simply accumulate, one decision at a time, until you were here?"
He paused.
"Answer plainly. Do you believe you are leaving this room alive?"
Fury's face did something complicated. The numbness cracked, and what came through it was not fear. It was the expression of a man who had been saving something up.
"Human supremacists." A short, hard sound that wasn't quite a laugh. "That's what I used to call people like you. And I thought I was radical." His bloodshot eyes moved across the armored figures. "Compared to the Guardians of Terra, I'm practically a moderate."
He shifted his weight, and his voice picked up force.
"Yes, you're powerful. Yes, your equipment is beyond anything Earth has produced. You can do whatever you want and call it protection. But you have no concept of the actual scale of what's out there." He gestured upward, through the ceiling, through the rock and soil and city above it, toward the sky. "The Shi'ar Empire. The Kree. The Asgardians. The Eternals. Symbiotes. Races that measure their territory in light-years, that have been expanding across the galaxy since before human beings had language. And we haven't left our own solar system."
His voice rose.
"The Skrulls were offering us a guide. Someone who knows how the universe actually works, what you can say, what you cannot, which lines get your species erased. And your response is to hunt them down and burn everything they touch." He was nearly shouting now, his dark face flushed. "Wake up. If humanity walks into the cosmic age with this xenophobic arrogance intact, we will not last one day. We will become dust. We will become a footnote that nobody translates."
The passage held the echo of it for a moment.
Then Doom's helmet moved, the faintest shake, and when he spoke again his voice was almost conversational.
"I expected something more considered than this."
He let that land.
"Do you believe we are ignorant of the universe's scale? That we kill without reason, for pleasure, out of some provincial human pride?" He spread one hand slightly. "Meanwhile, you, having heard a version of the universe's true nature from an interested party, woke overnight and appointed yourself mankind's savior. A man who spent his career deciding which people were expendable."
His voice did not rise.
"Ask the Skrulls around you right now. Ask them, plainly, whether they intend to assist the human race into the cosmic age without reservation, without conditions, without prioritizing the welfare of their own people first. Ask them." He waited a moment. "Because I can tell you the answer: every species in the universe places the survival and advancement of its own kind above all else. That is not cynicism. That is the only law that applies everywhere, without exception."
He took one step forward.
"You are not a visionary. You are not a pioneer. You are a man who betrayed his own species for a comfortable story, and you are standing in a collapsed room holding a weapon you cannot fully control, surrounded by people who have no reason to negotiate with you. That is what you are."
He turned his head slightly toward the Lamenters.
"Tell him who the real pioneer of mankind is."
Every Lamenter in the passage responded at the same instant, the sound of it hitting the walls and compounding into something that filled the underground space completely.
"Lord Primarch! Long live Nolan!"
Jessica's power scythe went up above her head without thought, the blade catching the light.
"For the Emperor! For Sanguinius!"
The echo carried it deeper into the base, bouncing off collapsed ceilings and broken walls, returning in overlapping waves. Fury's face moved through several expressions in quick succession, none of them settling. The Skrulls around him had gone very still.
Doom faced Fury again.
"There is the answer." His voice dropped back to its normal register. "Hand over the Cosmic Cube, and I will give you a quick and painful death. That is the only offer I have."
He began walking forward.
The magnetic boots came down in a steady rhythm, each impact deliberate, and the sound of it traveled across the floor and up through the Skrulls' feet and into the space behind Fury's sternum where the threat had been living. The momentum of Fury's bluff was bending under it, cracking at the edges.
"Stop." Fury's voice cracked on the word. He steadied it. "Stop. I'm not bluffing. Did you hear what I said? If you take one more step, I will"
"Nick Fury." Doom stopped. "Have you not noticed yet?"
His voice was perfectly calm.
"I have been talking to you for a reason."
In the depths of the base hall, behind Fury, behind the ring of Skrulls, behind the alien device, five Stormtroopers in auxiliary power armor rose from concealment in perfect silence, their figures materializing from the shadows of the collapsed space as if they had simply always been there.
And along the floor, moving without sound, spreading out from the passage entrance and across the floor in thin, low-lying tendrils, strands of scarlet energy moved forward close to the ground, secretly spreading to the front, back, left and right of the alien mechanical creation.
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