Chapter 172: Dr. Zola
The first canister going missing had apparently not triggered anything.
The fifth had.
Jake heard the boots before he saw the soldiers — a hard, purposeful rhythm echoing off the manufacturing floor's concrete walls, coming from two directions simultaneously. He had time to count: six HYDRA soldiers rounding the eastern corner, weapons up, the distinctive blue glow of Tesseract-derived energy weapons already charging in their hands.
He didn't have cover. He had momentum.
Jake's toe caught the edge of the nearest energy rifle — one of the ones he'd pulled from the storage rack during the confusion of the first guard — and flicked it upward into his hand in a single motion. He didn't stop moving while he aimed.
The trigger response was different from a conventional firearm. Lighter. Almost too responsive.
Biu — biu — biu —
Three shots. The sound was wrong — too clean, too quiet for something that did what it did. Three of the six HYDRA soldiers simply ceased to exist. No impact, no recoil, no body to deal with afterward. Just a pulse of blue light, a brief shimmer where a person had been standing, and then nothing.
The remaining three scattered for cover.
Jake was already moving.
He grabbed the nearest thing with enough mass to be useful — an iron security gate, roughly thirty kilograms, hinged off the wall — tore it free and held it in front of him as he advanced into the return fire. Blue bolts hit the gate and ate through it in smoking craters, the metal dissolving at the contact points with an efficiency that was deeply unpleasant to watch from three feet behind it. But it bought him the distance he needed.
At ten meters he dropped the gate and accelerated.
The gap closed fast enough that the soldiers' ability to aim became a theoretical concern rather than a practical one. Jake hit the first man with a straight right that connected with the chest plate and sent him into the wall hard enough to leave an impression in the plaster. The second he caught mid-pivot — a grab, a redirect, the man's own momentum used against him in a way that deposited him on the floor with significant conviction. The third got a knee to the midsection that folded him in half before he could finish raising his weapon.
Before the enhancement, Jake had been able to handle a firefight at close range through technique alone. Now technique had a significantly better engine behind it. The difference was not subtle.
He stood among the six downed soldiers and took a breath.
The energy weapons were scattered around him. He looked at them for a moment with the mild professional dissatisfaction of someone assessing a tool that underperformed its specifications.
"Energy rounds are impressive aesthetically," he said to no one in particular, picking one up and examining the charge indicator. "But as a practical infantry weapon they're inefficient. Slow reload. Inconsistent impact. A standard round is cheaper, faster, and more reliably lethal." He set it back down. "They're burning Tesseract energy on bullets. That's like using a fusion reactor to run a desk lamp."
The irony being that he'd just stolen a significant quantity of that same energy for his own purposes, which he chose not to examine too closely at this moment.
The alarms were getting louder.
Steve was having a productive evening.
With Jake occupying the attention of the majority of HYDRA's security response on the manufacturing floor, the prisoner compound had been almost entirely undefended by the time Steve reached it. He'd moved through three checkpoints and two guard stations, and the guards he'd encountered had been looking in the wrong direction because all the noise was coming from somewhere else.
The prisoners were alive. Most of them were in functional condition. The 107th Infantry — Bucky's unit — was among them, gaunt and roughed up but intact.
Steve got them moving.
He didn't think about the uniform he was wearing — the one that had been designed for a touring show, complete with the wings on the helmet that he'd been mildly embarrassed about since the costume department had revealed the final version. Tonight it turned out that the uniform was useful in a different way: every soldier in that compound knew exactly who had just walked through the door without needing an introduction, and that recognition converted immediately into cooperative urgency.
They moved fast.
Bucky wasn't there.
Steve checked every cell block in the compound's layout twice. He checked the infirmary. He checked the solitary confinement annex. He came up empty each time, and the base was on full alert now, and he had several hundred men to move, and he made the tactical decision to get the living out rather than keep searching for someone who might not be alive to find.
It was the right call. It didn't feel like one.
Jake heard the Red Queen's voice through the earpiece he'd calibrated before the jump.
"Life signs. Room on your left. Thirty meters."
He'd been working his way back toward the extraction point, keeping to the service corridors, when the signal came through. He changed direction without breaking stride, found the door — reinforced, locked with a mechanism that looked serious until you applied approximately four times the force it had been designed to resist — and put his shoulder into it.
The room was small. Medical equipment. A chair with restraints that had clearly been in use recently. And Bucky Barnes, wrists secured behind him, conscious but operating at significantly reduced capacity, looking up at Jake with the guarded wariness of a man who had been having a very bad few weeks and wasn't prepared to assume the next thing that happened to him would be an improvement.
"Who are you," Bucky said.
"Steve's friend."
Bucky processed this. The wariness didn't disappear entirely, but it reorganized itself into something more functional. "Okay."
Jake broke the restraints and got him upright. Bucky swayed once, found his feet, and followed.
But before extraction, there was one other item on Jake's list.
He'd mapped the facility's research section from the intelligence Steve had compiled, and he knew which office belonged to the man he was looking for. The alarms made the corridor approach straightforward — everyone was moving toward the disturbance, not away from it, which meant the research wing was emptying out rather than filling up.
He found the office and opened the door without knocking.
Dr. Arnim Zola was at his desk, collecting data with the focused speed of a man who had already decided that tonight was a good night to have his most important files readily portable. He was short, round, and possessed of the particular nervous energy of a brilliant person who had spent their career in proximity to people who would not hesitate to remove him if his usefulness ever ran out. He startled badly when the door opened.
He turned. He saw Jake. His expression cycled through several stages before settling into something between recognition and very controlled fear.
"The Dark Council," he said.
Jake raised an eyebrow. "You know us."
"Schmidt has an open file on your organization." Zola's small eyes were moving — taking in Jake, the door, the corridor behind him, the available exit angles — in the rapid assessment of a man running probability calculations in real time. "You've appeared twice. Once with the girl. Now with the American soldier." He paused. "It suggests a pattern of selective intervention. Which raises the question of what you actually want."
"What do you think we want?"
"World domination through a religious framework?" Zola offered, with a carefully calibrated expression that was attempting sincerity and landing somewhere adjacent to it.
"Nothing that complicated." Jake took two steps forward, which put Zola neatly between himself and the desk. He set his fist down on the desk surface with a moderate amount of force. The solid wood dented visibly.
Zola looked at the dent. Looked at Jake's fist. Made the comparison to his own skull with visible reluctance.
"We're building something," Jake said. "Long-term. The kind of long-term that most people don't think about because they're too focused on the next five years." He paused. "Someone with your particular skillset would be an asset."
Zola was quiet for a moment.
Jake knew what the doctor was thinking, because Zola was predictable in the specific way that genuinely intelligent, genuinely self-interested people were predictable: he was calculating the value of the offer against the risks of the alternatives, and the alternatives currently included being captured by the SSR, being abandoned by HYDRA in a facility that was increasingly on fire, or both.
"I'm approaching forty," Zola said finally, with the candor of a man who had decided that dignity was a luxury for people who weren't in his current situation. "I have a strong preference for continuing to exist beyond that."
"Understandable."
"The work I've done here — the Tesseract energy extraction, the weapons development — that's years of research. I'd want that work to continue."
"We have a laboratory," Jake said. "Better equipped than this one."
Zola looked at the dented desk. Looked at Jake. Looked at the door.
"When you say long-term," he said carefully, "how long-term are we discussing?"
Jake smiled slightly. "The kind of long-term where what happens in this building tonight becomes a historical footnote."
Zola was quiet for exactly three seconds.
"I accept," he said.
The transit was fast — Jake had learned to make it fast, had trained himself to execute the dimensional shift with the efficiency of a practiced motion rather than an effortful one. Zola had approximately two seconds to understand that something very unusual was happening before the Wasteland materialized around him and he doubled over on the stone floor of the lower corridor, the trans-dimensional nausea doing what it always did to first-time travelers.
Jake stepped over him.
"Furiosa."
She appeared from the adjacent corridor within twenty seconds, which meant she'd been nearby and paying attention, both of which were exactly what he expected from her.
He gestured at Zola, who was on his hands and knees making a series of deeply unhappy sounds. "New research staff. He needs a room, food, and a clear understanding of where the boundaries are."
Furiosa looked at Zola with the expression she used when assessing things she found unimpressive but operationally necessary.
"How much latitude does he get?" she asked.
"Laboratory access only until further notice. Everything else goes through you."
She nodded once. The nod communicated that Zola's latitude was going to be precisely the amount she decided it was, and that he would reach this understanding quickly. Jake had no concerns about the implementation.
He transited back.
The HYDRA base was significantly more on fire than it had been fifteen minutes ago.
Steve had the rescued prisoners moving in a column through the eastern perimeter, engaging the rearguard with the focused efficiency of someone who had been building toward exactly this kind of moment his entire adult life and was now, for the first time, operating at full capacity without anything holding him back.
Jake came in from the west with Bucky and fell into pace alongside Steve without preamble. Steve looked at Bucky. Something moved across his face that he didn't try to contain or explain, and he gripped Bucky's arm once, hard, the way you grip something you were afraid you'd lost.
Bucky said something quiet that was lost in the noise.
Then Steve pulled himself back to operational mode, because the base was still on fire and they were still inside it.
"We need to move," Jake said.
"Agreed." Steve looked at the column of prisoners, then at the walls of the building around them, where the structural damage from the internal explosions was becoming increasingly legible. "Everyone who can run — run."
His voice carried through the firefight the way it always did — not because he was the loudest person in the room, but because there was something in the quality of it that cut through noise and landed with the clarity of a direct instruction.
The soldiers of the 107th turned.
They saw Steve — Captain America, in the field, in the middle of a real operation rather than a war bond stage — and they saw Jake beside him, and several of them clearly recognized something about the dark coat and the bearing even if they couldn't place exactly where from.
Then they ran.
It was common knowledge in certain circles — the kind of frontline information that traveled faster than official communications — that the 107th had been pulled back from a very bad situation several months ago by a young woman connected to the Dark Council. And there had been photographs circulating — grainy, taken at distance, clearly not meant for publication — of Captain America shaking hands with a man in a dark coat outside an SSR facility, both of them apparently on good terms.
The men of the 107th looked at Jake, made the connection, and ran faster.
The base burned behind them as they cleared the perimeter.
Above the treeline, the distant sound of a plane's engine — Howard Stark, keeping his word and his schedule, circling at altitude, waiting for his passengers.
Jake looked up at the sky and allowed himself, briefly, to feel the clean satisfaction of an operation that had gone mostly according to plan.
Then he thought about Zola, currently being supervised by Furiosa in the Wasteland.
Then he thought about the vibranium in his kit bag.
Then he thought about the Tesseract energy canisters he'd relocated.
There was a great deal of work ahead.
He walked out of the treeline and into the open field and waited for the plane to descend.
[500 PS unlocks 1 Extra Chapter]
[10 Reviews unlock 1 Extra Chapter]
Thanks for reading—reviews are appreciated.
P1treon Soulforger has 20+advance chapters