She teleported back to the liaison point and played the patient for two more days. "Christmas break combined with medical recovery" was the official reason she gave for going home.
Two things happened in those two days, neither particularly minor.
The first: the earthquake drew attention. A US observation post not far from the epicenter sent a five-man patrol to sweep the area. Morale was low, Christmas was close, and the soldiers did exactly the kind of thorough job you'd expect. They found nothing.
The second was uglier. To restore unit cohesion and burn off accumulated fury, the two generals deployed a full strike force against the tribe that had originally maneuvered Daisy's team into the Mandarin situation. It was a completely one-sided affair. The fighting, such as it was, at least gave the soldiers who'd been jumping at shadows something to feel functional about again.
Back home, Daisy's first move was putting the severed finger in cold storage.
She checked in quietly through internal channels: Victoria Hand had not returned. Apparently the woman had declared she wouldn't come back without the Hulk, and was currently in some wilderness somewhere, eating field-kit meals. Daisy found this genuinely admirable, in a disturbing sort of way.
She kept a low profile. Caught up with a few people. Had some meals. Then she turned her attention to the Atomic Cutter.
She tried half a dozen approaches. The ring ignored every one of them.
The Mandarin believed it was magical. Daisy knew better — this was technology. And technology could be reverse-engineered.
She didn't tap SHIELD's resources for this. Instead she called in a favor with the X-Men's resident genius, Beast. Hank took one look at the ring, disappeared for two days, and came back with a device he called a data reader. It looked like a pair of clamps. When the jaws closed around the ring, it translated the ring's internal architecture into some kind of signal, which rendered on screen as text.
Alien text. Entirely non-terrestrial writing system.
Decoding alien languages was not Hank's specialty. It was one of Daisy's. She had an AI and a willingness to throw statistical brute force at any problem until it cracked.
The complication was that Crisis was still running quietly in the background on Professor Xavier's systems. Pulling serious computational resources without drawing the Professor's attention was going to require patience and careful rationing. Daisy gave Crisis the order: work on it, but work invisibly. The timeline stretched accordingly.
The Mandarin's wall inscriptions went into the same queue.
She spent a quiet Christmas with her maid. The gemstones from the hideout were sold; the maid handled the details efficiently. After two more days of rest, Daisy flew back to Afghanistan.
One month later, the fifth town along her surveillance grid — a place called Korama — had a massive blackout.
Daisy ran the numbers on the power draw. That was the Mark I. It had just activated.
She immediately deployed her network of contacts across the region. It didn't take long. They found Tony Stark in the desert, roughly 20 kilometers (12 and a half miles) north of the southern border, alone.
The man who had once walked through every room like he owned the air in it was unrecognizable. Face and head wrapped in his own shirt. Hollow-eyed with exhaustion. The moment he spotted the aircraft, he started waving with both arms — frantic, completely uncalculated, like someone who wasn't sure it was real. Then his legs gave out and he went face-first into the sand.
Without Daisy's sharp eyes, they would have flown right over him.
She turned to Rhodes. "He's located. The rest is yours."
Rhodes frowned. "Why aren't you coming?"
"I have other assignments. Don't mention us to Stark." She kept her voice level and professional.
Internally, she was deeply annoyed. She'd been looking forward to a moment like this. But Fury's priority order had come down hard: no contact with Stark. Couldn't be helped.
Rhodes studied her expression — the practiced classified look that veteran agents wore so well — and filled in the blanks himself. He came to attention and gave her a sharp salute.
Daisy took her team on the other helicopter back to the SHIELD base in Afghanistan, then transferred to the Quinjet for Washington. Autopilot on, she opened an encrypted channel to her maid.
Tony Stark rescued. Begin shorting Stark Industries stock immediately. All available capital. After Stark returned and shut down the weapons division, she'd have the timing advantage — enough to triple the investment at minimum.
She had Crisis quietly sweep every trace of the transaction. Split across hundreds of accounts scattered coast to coast, the pattern would look like coincidental scatter trades to anyone without an equivalent AI trying to trace them.
She got back to HQ to find Fury's summons waiting before she'd even set her bag down.
She walked into his office and found she wasn't the only one called in. Victoria Hand was already there.
The woman looked rough. A long field operation on bad rations and worse odds had that effect. Her left arm was in a splint, strapped across her chest. For a command officer who mostly worked from desks, hunting the Hulk in the wilderness apparently carried some professional hazards.
Hand saw Daisy and let out a small contemptuous sound. She didn't bother hiding it.
Fury looked as warm as cast iron. He had two folders on his desk. He was reading them with visible irritation. He slammed both down hard.
"You want to explain to me what happened out there?"
He picked up the first folder. "Victoria Hand. This is your operation." He read it like an indictment. "Brazilian police killed: ninety-five. US Army: two hundred and seventy. SHIELD agents: twelve. Civilian casualties — not yet calculated. Property losses — not yet calculated."
Daisy stood to the side and allowed herself a moment of private satisfaction. The smile was just beginning to form —
"Don't." Fury's eye turned on her. "Don't you dare. You. Kandahar. Eighty percent structural loss. Four F-22s destroyed. Three hundred and more US personnel dead. Equipment losses beyond count. The Pentagon is calling me. What exactly do I tell them?!"
He went on for a while. Grievances. Implications. Interdepartmental politics. The full inventory.
Neither of them gave him much. Victoria Hand gazed out the window at the DC skyline. Daisy managed her short position on her phone.
Twenty minutes later, Fury reached the actual point: both operations were terminated. Stark Industries liaison was reassigned to Phil Coulson. The Hulk file was being placed on indefinite hold. He waved them out before either could respond.
Back at her apartment, Daisy showered, ate, and turned on the television. She pulled up the Stark Industries press conference and settled in to wait.
She was, if she was honest with herself, a little worried. Tony Stark had a gift for ignoring the obvious and doing something completely unexpected. If he came out of captivity angrier than expected and decided to expand the weapons division as some kind of defiant overcorrection —
All the money she'd quietly built up through SHIELD work, painstakingly accumulated over months, would be gone. Just gone.