"Don't run! You cowards!"
The Sandman had a severe aversion to water. Even after reforming his mass, he hadn't dared approach the shoreline. Instead he threw up an enormous reaching hand and tried to drag Zephyr One back down—the aircraft barely half a meter (1.6 feet) off the ground when the grip attempted to close.
The Mark V had no missiles. What it had was repulsor blasts. Tony worked both palms, hammering the sandy arm over and over, buying Zephyr One the seconds it needed.
"Everybody brace!" Hawkeye yanked the stick to its limit. The aircraft lurched skyward with a roar.
From the windows, the kids watched in silence, hearts still hammering with residual adrenaline.
Below, a wall of water materialized out of nowhere and rolled toward the island at a deceptive pace—appearing almost slow from altitude, though it absolutely was not.
The Sandman had swollen to nearly twenty meters by then—a squat, towering mass of compacted grains that barely resembled a person. Then he saw it.
"Get away from me! Get away!" His voice thundered out like a crack in the sky, rattling eardrums from half a kilometer up. He grabbed trees and boulders from the island and hurled them at the approaching wave.
They vanished into it without slowing it down.
The wave hit the island like a fist.
The Sandman screamed as the water saturated him, stripping cohesion grain by grain. His control over the separated particles failed. Tons of wet sand collapsed, tumbled, and settled.
The grains still twitched. They didn't reintegrate. They lay where they fell, bloated and inert.
He was still alive. Seawater could only slow him—not finish him. When the tide pulled back and tomorrow's sun baked the island dry, he'd rebuild himself from scratch. Daisy sent in two more waves to be thorough, washing the island front to back.
The Sandman shrank. The core mudpile—the part that was definitively Flint Marko—lost two-thirds of its bulk. What remained, a few hundred pounds of stubborn, grain-level resistance, weathered every rinse with grim persistence.
Still alive. Stalled, but alive.
Back on Zephyr One, the agents had already started running searches on whoever had flagged the island in SHIELD's database.
"Clearance denied." "Clearance denied." "Clearance denied."
Sharon tried. Hill tried. Black Widow tried. Three separate access levels, all blocked.
"What? Use my credentials." Daisy came aboard and went straight to the main terminal. Whoever had done this—if they were still breathing—was going to regret the day they were born.
Her credentials pulled the record.
A dark-complexioned man with an eyepatch stared back from the file photo.
Daisy laughed. The kind that was roughly ninety percent exasperation. "Get me Washington. I want to see how he explains this."
Direct line to Nick Fury.
She wasn't the only unhappy face in the room—Stark was there, expression tight. Hill, Black Widow, and Hawkeye each wore their own version of the same look, sharpened by the specific frustration of interrupted vacation. Even Coulson, reliably warm and good-natured in essentially every circumstance, was somewhere he'd rather not be. Together they had the collective energy of a tribunal.
Fury wore a distinctly amused expression—the look of a man who'd been caught but hadn't quite decided to stop being entertained about it. He cleared his throat. "So—what happened?"
"What happened." Daisy turned the camera toward the windows and showed him the island, freshly washed, glistening, emptied of its Sandman. "That scenic designation. I found the person responsible."
The agents watched him in silence.
He could read the room. After a moment, he spoke.
"That island was used for nuclear weapons testing. Flint Marko wandered in by accident. The radiation fused him with the sand—current technology can't cure him and can't kill him. The island was the only containment option available."
A pause.
"You picked that one by coincidence. No way to predict it."
He could see it wasn't landing. He mentioned something pressing and cut the connection.
"So he just... stays there?" Hill asked, in the tone of someone asking mainly because the question needed to be asked.
Daisy conferred with the others briefly. No one had a better answer. She ran her own numbers: full-force sustained strikes could probably sink the island entirely—but the coast was too close to Florida. A real tsunami would leave tens of thousands of casualties in its wake. Not worth it.
Flint Marko, the Sandman, would be left on his nuclear test island. Indefinitely.
The vacation would not end over this. They found another island, and Baldy swore on his remaining eye that this one was genuinely scenic. Any problems whatsoever, and they were all flying back to Washington to settle it with him personally.
Ball games, poker, barbecue, surfing, swimming, skydiving. They stretched the holiday two more weeks, rolling back into New York just before Christmas break ended.
Work had piled up in the interim. Daisy cleared the backlog item by item, and by the time the last urgent matter was sorted, the calendar read January 20th, 2009.
Obama's inauguration.
Everyone who'd worked to put him in office had gathered for the occasion—a glittering coalition of contributors attending in various capacities. While the new President stood under the winter sun going through formalities and listening to the requisite speeches, the movers and shakers had retreated to the shade to catch up with each other.
Daisy spent a long stretch talking with Norman Osborn. The Kree corpse-derived serum had shown exceptional results for physical recovery—Black Widow had used a single vial, and it had repaired roughly sixty percent of her old internal damage. The problem was supply: the bodies were finite, Baldy was hoarding a substantial portion for his own uses, and synthesizing a substitute wasn't something SHIELD had the capability for on its own.
Oscorp was the largest biotech-genetics firm in the world. Their research library was staggering. Daisy proposed a joint project under SHIELD's name: Oscorp's R&D capacity in exchange for access to the compound's basic structure and whatever SHIELD could contribute in support. A proper substitute—reduced effectiveness, but scalable. Finding the right formula meant filtering through tens of thousands of possible combinations; SHIELD didn't specialize in pharmaceuticals and tackling it alone would take years they didn't have. This was a temporary fix anyway. Once she got around to hauling in a few hundred Kree prisoners down the line, the supply problem would solve itself.
Osborn read through her requirements, asked his questions, and agreed. He had his own reasons—a hereditary condition that conventional medicine couldn't address—and the prospect of partial treatment wasn't something he was in a position to decline. The broad strokes were settled; specifics could be left to the respective teams.
The new President completed his oath, walked into the White House, and began what would turn out to be eight turbulent years in office.
The gathering shifted venues. The conversation continued.
General "Thunderbolt" Ross wore his new title—Secretary of State—with the air of a man who had been waiting a long time for exactly this. Sharp-eyed, iron-backed. The cold satisfaction in his expression was the kind that made people instinctively check for exits.
To balance his influence across both the military and political spheres, the new President had retained a Republican-aligned Secretary of Defense from the previous administration. This happened to be the same man who had effectively driven Ross out of the military—and Ross knew it perfectly well, which made the two of them near-enemies seated at the same cabinet table. Their mutual antagonism was maximized; the President's leverage over both was maximized in turn. Elegant, in a quietly ruthless way.