Chapter 9
Somewhere between the morning, when Peggy had left Sharon in Hollywood, and the early evening, when she made her way to the Los Angeles SHIELD offices in Koreatown, her niece had showered and changed into more comfortable SHIELD gear. Sharon's blonde hair was pulled up in a ponytail at the back of her skull, and she looked as if she hadn’t slept for days.
“I had to wash it all off of me,” she said, cryptically, rubbing at slightly purpling eyes as she settled into the small conference room they had taken over. Peggy watched her with concern, pushing a plate of street tacos in front of her. The smell alone seemed to revive her niece, as she practically inhaled one as soon as she took the food, stopping chewing only enough to swallow some water so as not to choke.
Peggy was hesitant to ask. “Did you find out any more on the site?”
Sharon nodded, chewing quietly and swallowing before answering. “The site was consistent with all the others thus far; high energy explosion, signs of an extreme heat signature, but in a small, contained blast area, no radiation and no evidence of other explosive materials or a casing.”
Absolutely none of that explanation made sense. “How is any of that even possible?”
“Now you know what has had people so stumped for months with this case, even me.” Sharon began her second taco more slowly than her first. “The explosions don’t make sense because there is nothing that destructive that is easily contained and doesn’t leave a trace.”
“Unless AIM thought of something,” Peggy offered, nodding to the quiet office they had put Maya Hansen in as they waited for Sharon to arrive. Sharon glanced at it, nodding as she sipped her water and finished her taco.
“You do know that AIM is one of the many companies hired by the military to do research for them, right?”
“That hasn’t stopped other companies from doing ridiculously silly and underhanded things in recent years,” Peggy returned, pointedly.
Sharon snorted. “The US tax dollars at work! And they get all up in arms about not trusting SHIELD.”
“Well, pot, meet kettle, I suppose.” Peggy passed over her tablet. “I had Cassandra pull up files on AIM for you. For the most part, it all seems above board, but notice who did the recent upgrades to James Rhodes’ armor and programming.”
“Yeah,” Sharon frowned, studying the screen, using one of her non-greasy fingertips to scroll up and down. “What is this ‘elite human enhancement program’?”
“I am not certain, but I can take a wild guess,” Peggy growled, darkly, pulling from her own water bottle. “I suspect that AIM, much like MST Pharmaceuticals, got in on researching Erskine’s serum.”
“Jesus Christ,” Sharon muttered, pushing the tablet moodily back towards Peggy and reaching for her third and last taco. “Who in the hell didn’t play with that?”
“I imagine we will find everyone had a finger in it. Erskine’s formula had far more applications than just creating super soldiers and everyone wanted a piece of that.”
“Unfortunately for them, there was only one of them that ever turned out…or fortunately for us, I suppose.”
“Hmmm,” Peggy agreed, her thoughts turning to Steve and the silence from him and Romanoff thus far. Wherever they were, it was clearly deep. “In any case, I wanted you there when we spoke with Doctor Hansen. Also, considering her field of research, I’m pulling Betty into a conference call. She’s the one person I know who is close and would at least understand what Hansen was doing for AIM.”
“That’s all right by me,” Sharon agreed, finishing her food and wiping her hands, looking better for having had something to eat. “I have Jake finishing up with the FBI and LAPD in securing copies of their evidence findings. They are going to be weeks, if not months, doing it, but if the preliminaries align with Kuwait, London, and the other sites, I may not need much.”
“Perhaps the answers you’ve been looking for are with AIM,” Peggy offered.
“Let’s hope, because I need to pin this son-of-a-bitch to a wall and use him for target practice,” Sharon replied, darkly.
Peggy only nodded by way of agreement.
“Come on,” Sharon sighed, pushing herself away from the conference table and picking up her plate. “Let’s see what this Dr. Hansen has to tell us.”
The office they had put the woman in was quiet and low lit, out of respect to the poor woman’s still throbbing head wound. She sat quietly inside as a SHIELD tech fiddled at a large monitor in the wall, setting up a camera and glaring at the overhead lights. He looked up when Peggy and Sharon entered, shrugging apologetically. “Sorry, Director Carter, the light on this is going to be wonky.”
“Will they be able to see me?”
“They should,” he nodded in the affirmative. “I’ve got the connection to Stark Tower up and running.”
“Thank you,” she assured him as on the screen, a grainy connection was made to Stark Tower. On the other end, in a brightly lit lab, was Betty Ross, who waved at the camera once she saw Peggy enter onto her screen.
Peggy turned to Maya, who watched the proceedings with curiosity, a little less pained than she had been a few hours before. “Doctor Hansen, thank you for agreeing to talk to us.”
“Well, thank you for agreeing to protect me,” she replied with a small smile. “And thanks for the medics who checked me out downstairs. Whatever they gave me helped.”
“I’m glad.” Peggy turned to Sharon beside her. “This is Agent Sharon Carter, she’s been working on the Mandarin case for SHIELD for several months now.”
Sharon held out a hand to Maya, who took it firmly. “Pleasure to talk to you, Doctor Hansen.”
Peggy waved a hand to the monitor across the room. “And this is Doctor Elizabeth Ross, she works with the Avengers team. I asked her to sit in on this meeting, as she is more of an expert in this area than either myself or Agent Carter.”
“Dr. Ross,” Maya waved, clearly recognizing her, or at least her name. “I know your work! I’ve followed your research down at Culver.”
Betty for her part looked surprised and somewhat flattered. “Wow…thanks. I mean, I was…am at Culver. This is my last semester before becoming a full-time consultant for the team.”
Peggy clarified Betty’s comments. “Dr. Ross is joining the Avengers on a more permanent basis.”
A calculating expression flickered across Maya’s face as she weighed this. “You worked extensively with Dr. Banner and he’s on the Avengers. I read a lot of your work together on cellular structures and gamma radiation. It was helpful in some of my research.”
“I’m glad to hear it was helpful for someone,” she smiled, glancing over her shoulder. “Bruce is around here, he’s manning some other things at the moment, so I’m the expert for this one.”
Peggy guessed that was Betty’s tactful way of informing her that Bruce was either manning the search for Tony or was looking into what evidence Tony had found before his house exploded. “You are the one we need, Dr. Ross. I wanted to get started with who you are, Dr. Hansen, and what sort of research you do for AIM.”
Maya straightened in her seat, slowly unscrewing the top of her water bottle and sipping from it as she pulled herself together. “Right…well, that is a bit of a story, and it’s part of how I came to know Tony Stark in the first place.”
“I think you’ll find we have the patience if it leads somewhere,” Peggy offered, pointedly.
The other woman studied her for a long moment, then nodded. “So I assume that since you run the Avengers, you are aware of the super soldier serum that makes Steve Rogers what he is, correct?”
Peggy only just did manage not to snort out loud at that, vaguely pleased that this woman didn’t know who she was. “Project: Rebirth? That I am very familiar with.”
“So am I,” Betty chimed in from across the video in New York.
“That saves part of this explanation then,” Maya continued. “Erskine’s formula was lost, everyone knows this, and it’s been the sort of holy grail for biological researchers for decades. I didn’t go into my research initially looking for that, though. I was initially just interested in the idea of regeneration, of understanding the mechanisms behind why some cells can regenerate and others couldn’t. I worked under Doctor Malcolm Anderson at MIT. He was doing groundbreaking work in the field of DNA encoding and repair when he worked for MST Pharmaceuticals in England. He heard some of my ideas and suggestions and brought me on board to work under him.”
Peggy only just did manage not to shoot a shocked glance towards Sharon, but she could feel her niece’s gaze flicker towards her, as she was sure Betty’s had on the monitor. “MST Pharmaceuticals? The same group that was hit by one of the Mandarin’s bombs several months ago?”
“Yeah,” she muttered, running a nervous hand through her dark hair. “Though, I should clarify, this has nothing to do with Mal. He retired years ago and hasn’t been associated with this since. This…this one is all on me.”
“How so,” Sharon pressed, leaning in intently towards Maya.
She eyed Sharon warily, but continued. “It was while I was working under Mal…Doctor Anderson…that I began work on a project that I called ‘Extremis’. It was based, in part, off of Doctor Anderson’s work. He believed that DNA in the human body worked the same way that computer coding does, that it follows a logic depending on what function the cell in the body is meant to do. Looking at how STEM cells operate, his theory is sound. The thing is that outside of STEM cells, no other cells can reproduce different kinds of cells; a skin cell can only reproduce a skin cell. Cells also can’t fix themselves if their DNA code is broken, which leads to things such as cancer and mutations. STEM cells can serve as a work around in cases when new, unbroken cells are needed for regeneration, but they come with a lot of controversy. So I developed Extremis as an alternative. At first, all it could do was rewrite the DNA code of broken cells, say those damaged by radiation or injury. In that sense it worked similar to Erskine’s formula, except that it didn’t require a serum and large amounts of radiation to activate it.”
Peggy looked to Betty, who was seemed fascinated. “Have you heard of Dr. Hansen’s Extremis work, then?”
“I mean, some of it, but I admit, I didn’t look into detail. I’d heard of Extremis, but I thought it was supposed to be a new technology that allowed for the regeneration of missing body parts and lost tissue.”
“It does, or, at least I am getting to that,” Maya offered, looking sheepishly to Peggy and Sharon. “I had to lay the groundwork out for you, else the rest of it doesn’t make sense. See, once I figured out that I could fix damaged human cells, the next big hurdle was figuring out how to regrow cells that were lost all together, say from amputation. How do you replace cells that are just simply gone now? So I began using nanotechnology, essentially creating a bio-computer that could read a living organism’s DNA profile and figure out what was supposed to be there. It could then utilize the organism's own bio-electricity and tissue to regenerate what was lost. The theory was sound enough that I was cleared to attempt it on plants, at first, and initially showed a lot of promise. The plants that we tested the initial serum on did wonderfully. They grew back severed pieces, at first slowly, and as we tweaked the Extremis formula, more quickly, but there was a glitch. The amount of energy the plant harnessed to grow back the missing cells was massive, and if it happened too quickly and uncontrollably, the process would backfire. The kinetic energy would become too great and the regenerated portion would explode.”
The weight of the scientist’s words hit them all into shocked and stunned surprise. Betty on the other end of the conference call actually gasped. Peggy turned to Sharon, who stared back at her with similar horror. These explosions weren’t bombs at all.
“That would explain so much,” Sharon said, simply, to the unspoken realization that had hit Peggy.
Peggy turned back to the guilty looking scientist sitting in front of them. “How did we get from exploding plants to people dying, Doctor Hansen?”
The other woman blanched at Peggy’s words, twisting her fingers together fretfully in her lap. “When the glitch in Extremis kept happening, I knew I needed to get outside help. I kept running into dead ends and couldn’t figure it out. This was in ‘99, so over a decade ago. I was invited to present at a conference in Bern, Switzerland, and planned to show some of my findings in the hopes of seeing if anyone would bite, maybe drive up interest to find people who’d want to come on board to work on it, perhaps even find someone to fund it. I had a few people interested, but the biggest fish who was biting was Tony Stark. He was curious as to how the nanotechnology worked and how it tapped into the organism’s bio-electricity. He said he could think of a few different applications for it. I was, admittedly, just dazzled enough by him to think he was truly interested and that he would want to fund further research into it, which was why - and I fully admit this - I let him in my bed. I maybe foolishly thought he was as interested in me as he was in my work. As it turns out, he was interested in neither. I mean, he offered some helpful suggestions, and it wasn’t a wasted night, but…yeah.”
The mutinous lift to her chin said she wasn’t about to apologize for her actions, and frankly, Peggy mused, that wasn’t the point of why they were there. “Be that as it may, Dr. Hansen, what does this have to do with the current situation?”
“The other person who was interested in my work was Aldrich Killian,” she shot back, flatly, and just as defiantly. “He had tried to catch me the night before, before Stark whisked me away upstairs. I had his card, and when Stark left Switzerland without so much as a ‘goodbye’, I called Killian. He had just started AIM as a think tank and had been trying to recruit Stark to join it. I mean Stark was young, high profile, and wealthy, and it would have set up AIM for a long time, but Stark blew him off like he did everyone else. I suppose you could say the pair of us bonded over our shared rejection. Killian wanted to turn AIM into a research center, but he couldn't get the money for it. Back in those days, Killian wasn’t precisely the suave, personable guy he is now, and getting anyone to take him seriously was difficult. I was the one who had the MIT connections, though, and so I made him an offer; if he was willing to help me fund my research and get a team together to work on Extremis, I would use my contacts to see if we couldn’t score some funding in the form of high paying contracts. So, he agreed to it. I did what I could, called in some favors, and got him in front of people at the Pentagon who listened to what he had to offer. At the time, Stark was their weapons dealer, but they were always in need of people to do research for them, especially for things they wanted off the books. Killian made his money off of government contracts and poured it back into the company, and I got a research team to help me develop Extremis. Within a few years, I moved from plant trials to live animal trials, then to human ones. Killian was the one who figured out how to tap Extremis into the human brain, of the untapped potential possible there, and thought that by targeting that, we could plug Extremis into the human nervous and endocrine system, allowing essentially for the human mind to control Extremis in repairing the body’s missing parts. He felt so confident in the product, he even took it himself. He had congenital issues that had left him crippled most of his life. Extremis worked like a charm, it gave him the mobility he never had before.”
“But what about the glitch,” Sharon shot back, her expression cutting, her dark eyes narrowed to pinpoints of cold anger. “You know, the exploding issue you had with the plants? Something tells me that was never quite worked out.”
Maya cringed, looked down to her twisted fingers, her voice soft. “No…not really. We tried for years, but we couldn’t get around the problem. If the serum ran too fast, it caused the metabolism to run too quickly, overheating the body and causing it to explode. We tried…everything, but we couldn’t crack it. The problem was two fold: first, the patient’s body had to accept or reject the serum, just like with any foreign substance introduced. If the endocrine system rejected it, it would attempt to fight it and…lead to catastrophic failure.”
“Explosion,” Betty’s voice was a ghostly murmur from over the monitor, her pale face stark white on the screen.
“Yes,” Maya confirmed, matter-of-factly. “If the patient didn’t reject the serum, if the body accepted it, they could control it, consciously, particularly the amount of heat their body generated. But they had to be careful. If they got too hot or didn’t regulate it carefully, then…well the same result would happen.”
There was a long silence after her explanation, the stillness of it ringing around them. The electronics hummed, the air stirred, but otherwise they all sat, staring in vague horror at Maya, who stared at her scraped knees under her knit skirt, her mouth working as she held back whatever thoughts were running inside of her head. Peggy didn’t know if she knew what to say. The idea that there were people who could just explode from something this woman created made her feel vaguely ill.
She considered Project: Rebirth and Erksine’s formula, the uncertainty about it, and the fear that they all felt for Steve in that test. They knew all too well what had happened to Schmidt when he had taken it and the possibility of that occurring to Steve. Howard had privately confided in her the day before that he wasn’t certain that a strong, healthy man would come out of the Vita Ray chamber alive, let alone someone as sickly as Steve, and more than one conversation was had with Erskine about calling the whole thing off for fear of the results if it didn’t work. It was a testament both to Erskine’s confidence in his formula and Steve’s stubbornness - perhaps, even, his character - that it came out all right in the end.
Sharon found her voice first, low, soft, and filled with rage and disgust. “You willingly gave that to human subjects, knowing what would happen, knowing what it could do?”
“I didn’t countenance that,” Maya returned, quickly and heatedly. “That was not my idea. I wanted to do more non-human testing, I wanted more time to work on it, but Killian was impatient. After he took it and saw what it could do, he thought of all the possibilities of how he could use it. I told him it wasn’t ready, but he pushed through human testing. He found some volunteers, all amputees, mostly vets from Iraq and Afghanistan. At first, the tests seemed promising, but in every group there was at least one of them that couldn’t control it. Killian waved it off, said it was the cost of scientific discovery. He had them all sign waivers acknowledging the risks. What he told the families about them and what happened…I don’t know.”
Sharon exhaled, loudly, her jaw working as she turned to stare at Peggy. For her part, Peggy sat, unmoving, too sickened to speak. All she could think about in the moment was the innumerable ways Steve’s own experience could have gone horrifically wrong, and the sudden upswell of guilt that caused. She didn’t dare look at Betty on the screen or her reaction. She was perhaps the only other person in the room who could understand Maya’s situation.
“It was in the testing phase we found another problem,” Maya murmured, shifting in her seat and clearing her throat, very aware of how much worse this was getting the more and more she spoke. “Extremis is almost like an anabolic steroid in that it employs the body’s metabolism to work. But just like steroids, over time, the body begins to adjust, so you need to take bigger and bigger hits of the steroid to get the body to respond. The bigger the dosage, the harder it is for the subject to regulate it. The problem with those subjects is that they think they have it under control, but they don’t. So, they get their next hit, but it’s finally too big for the body to manage and…and you have seen the results.”
“The results,” Sharon barked, darkly, venom in her voice. “You mean the random acts of terror committed on US forces? You mean the hospitals that were hit, where doctors and patients were killed? Or how about the church that exploded during the middle of a Christmas program, killing everyone inside it and around it? Or how about the mall just a few miles from here, where people were out doing their holiday shopping and watching a movie? Are those the results you are speaking of?”
“I didn’t think it would get this out of hand,” Maya shouted back, tears finally surfacing and streaming down her face. “I…I thought Killian was going to use it for something good, something to help humanity. That was my intent with it! I wanted to heal injuries, cure disease, not create a weapon!”
“So Killian was the one who wanted a weapon?”
“Not at first.” Maya wiped at her face with the cuff of her jacket, sniffing as more tears fell. “I don’t know, I don’t think the weapons idea occurred to him until he understood the glitch and the issue with regulation and heat exchange. He saw it as an opportunity. Everyone kept chasing after Erskine’s formula, trying to create the next Steve Rogers. So he decided to market Extremis as an alternative to Erskine’s formula, a way of creating better super soldiers, ones who could serve as terrifying weapons of war.”
Sharon turned to Peggy, looking even more tired than when she had come in from the bombing site. “You were right! You were right all along, even back in London. You said it had to do with Erskine’s formula and you were right.”
Peggy heartily wished she wasn’t. “I wasn’t precisely correct. I thought that the Mandarin was trying to steal it from MST Pharmaceutical, that they had been trying to recreate it. But that wasn’t what happened, was it?”
Maya shook her head. “No, the MST explosion was just a coincidence. The patient worked in the dockyard nearby. He was a British veteran of the Afghan war, lost both of his legs below the knees. He took Extremis, but he didn’t go back into service. He went home and got a job instead. He needed a bigger hit, and so Killian sent someone with some boosters.”
“But as it turned out, it was convenient for you that it happened right there, wasn’t it?” Sharon’s voice cracked like a whip, making everyone, especially Maya, flinch. “They labeled it as a terrorist attack, the Mandarin come to teach the West a lesson.”
“The Mandarin is fake,” Maya admitted, morosely shrugging in a helpless gesture. “None of it was real. Killian’s team thought it up as a way to cover up the explosions, an evil archetype that would play into all of America’s worst fears regarding terrorism in the 21st century. Killian thought it was brilliant. We could hide the problems with the formula behind a veil of a supposed threat to western powers, and use the fear it generated to encourage the US government to buy their own army of Extremis super soldiers. They wouldn’t need to rely on the Avengers, they would have their own.”
Peggy circled back to the conversation she had with Rhodes the weekend before about the Pentagon and the desire for their own Iron Man, to have a super hero not tied to SHIELD. “AIM worked on the new armor for Colonel Rhodes, didn’t they?”
Maya looked thoughtful, frowning. “Yeah, I believe so. That isn’t my division, but Killian mentioned it.”
Peggy looked first to Sharon, simmering beside her, then to Betty, looking slightly ill on her side of the screen. “AIM was giving the Pentagon their own super heroes, ones they controlled.”
“But Killian wasn’t telling them about the problem with Extremis,” Betty returned, faintly. “He couldn’t, else they would have reneged on any deal. It would be far better to get them sold on the idea and committed to it before they found out, because then they would have to be the ones dealing with the fall out.”
“And by that point they would consider it a necessary risk in order to have a type of super soldier.” For not the first time in her life, Peggy heartily wished that Abraham Erskine had not tried to create his serum, that the idea of super soldiers had never even existed.
“So my question,” Sharon’s tone was hard, sharp and dangerous, “is knowing what you know, Dr. Hansen, why come forward now? Why were you at Stark’s house this morning?”
Here, the other woman seemed to shrink, somewhat, under the weight of Sharon’s righteous indignation. “Because he was the only one I thought who could help.”
Sharon snorted, waving a hand towards Betty. “As Dr. Ross can tell you, Stark isn’t known for being a biological scientist.”
“He may not be on par with most of us, but that doesn’t mean he’s an idiot when it comes to to it.” Maya shrugged, pointed in her defense of Stark. “The human body is a complex computer system, not unlike the artificial intelligence he plays with everyday, He knows more than he lets on, and apparently is even better at it when he’s three sheets to the wind. Thirteen years ago he came up with a formula that maybe could have worked for fixing the glitch in Extremis. He left it in his goodbye note. I tucked it away, admittedly because I was hurt and embarrassed he snuck away out of the hotel room without having the guts to face me. When I thought of it a few years later, half the note had been ruined when something spilled. I’ve spent years trying to recreate it with no success.”
It was Betty who asked the obvious question. “Why didn’t you just ask him before this?”
Maya rolled her eyes, scrubbing at her face fretfully before answering. “I…don’t have a good answer to that. Pride, maybe, anger at him for treating me like any one of the hundreds of women he’s met along the way, I guess. Besides, he wasn’t precisely easy to get a hold of, and I did try over the years. But, I suppose I had time, and I thought I would figure it out eventually.”
“Meanwhile, people were dying as they exploded, unable to control their own body temperature.” Sharon brought it all back to the horrific truth underlying all of it.
Maya flinched, but didn’t deny it. “I know. I guess I sort of excused it all away as part of the process, that they had signed waivers, that they knew what they were getting into.”
It was the sort of rationale that Peggy knew the SSR used when they chose their test subjects for Project: Rebirth, and she felt slightly ill at that. “What changed your mind?”
She was long, pregnant moments before she answered. “Kuwait, the air base, the chapel there. I own my moral ambiguity in all of this, that I chose to explain away the others, the fact that I accepted military casualties in the other instances when someone ran hot. But this time, they were families, spouses and kids. I never meant for anyone to get hurt, not really. I wanted to help people. My work is what killed them. I never thought it would get this far. But now Killian is trying to get Extremis into full production, even though it’s not stable enough for that. He’s getting desperate, and clearly I don’t have the answer. He came out here the other day to try and convince Pepper Potts to get Stark Industries on board in the hopes that he could get their scientists in on it, maybe even Stark, but I knew that it would take too long, and people were dying. So, I threw caution to the wind and went to Stark myself this morning. I didn’t think that he’d make an open challenge on national television, and I certainly didn’t think that Killian would try to have him killed on national television, either.”
“Where is Killian now,” Sharon demanded.
“I am not sure,” Maya replied, an answer no one wanted to hear.
“You have to do better than that,” Sharon snapped, threatening something dark and possibly violent if she didn't.
“I am serious, I don’t know,” Maya insisted, looking to Peggy somewhat imploringly, as if hoping to find an ally there. “Look, Killian is always on the move and even I don’t know all of the places he’s at. He keeps a large portion of his operation secret, even from me, probably for this very reason.”
The whole long saga left Peggy reeling, her head spinning as she attempted to process all of this. How many people now were dead, how many injured, all because of one scientist’s effort to try and capture lightning in the bottle. It felt like a repeated warning thread throughout her life,;just because you could, it doesn’t mean that you should. She looked to Betty, whose expression was painfully thoughtful, and wondered if she herself was thinking similar thoughts regarding Bruce and the transformation he experienced.
It was Sharon who took the lead, however, somehow picking a course forward through all of this. “I should have you arrested on the spot for this and thrown into a holding cell downstairs.”
Maya looked to Peggy, alarmed, but not terribly surprised.
“I did offer her SHIELD’s protection,” Peggy pointed out, quietly.
“I can guarantee you will have it,” Sharon responded, angrily, but not without a hint of compassion. “I have a feeling that once Killian knows you turned on him, he’s going to come after you.”
“He still needs someone to stabilize that formula for him,” Maya said, simply.
“Any man willing to allow innocent people to die because of that formula clearly isn’t thinking straight enough to have any common sense about any of this,” Sharon pointed out, just containing her ire. “At least here in SHIELD’s custody he would have to come through an entire building and a bevy of SHIELD agents to get to you.”
Maya didn’t look as if she felt reassured by that.
“How many test subjects are out there right now,” Sharon pressed.
“Thirteen of the original thirty.”
Peggy mentally added up the number of Mandarin attacks to the number of deceased Extremis test subjects and found the numbers off. “What happened to the others not accounted for in the Mandarin attacks?”
“All the test subjects who went hot died, but not all of them got as much notice.”
“So some of them exploded, but no one assumed it was a terrorist attack?”
Maya nodded. “One was thought to be a house fire, one a gas explosion, another was believed to be a soldier with PTSD who tragically blew himself up. Killian let those go, seemed better than trying to tie them to the Mandarin.”
“What about the others that are still alive,” Sharon brought the subject back to her question at hand.
“Most work for Killian,” she replied, shrugging. “There are two or three who don’t, who took the serum and retired, but the rest are on his payroll.”
“So they will all need to be captured and contained before they explode and kill anyone else.” It wasn’t a question out of Sharon, but a statement. “You think you could provide that list?”
The other woman nodded in the affirmative, uncertain and worried. “They won’t come along willingly, and capturing them is next to impossible, not with the heat they can generate. Most of Killian’s crew have trained themselves how to regulate and use the excess heat. They employ it like a weapon.”
“Great,” Sharon muttered, but looked to Betty. “What are your thoughts? Do you think between yourself and Banner, you could maybe come up with something to help us neutralize the threat?”
Betty didn’t look nearly as sure as she sounded when she spoke. “I mean, perhaps, but we don’t have access to Dr. Hansen’s work.”
Sharon was undaunted by this. “How much of your work do you think you could recreate, Dr. Hansen, just off the top of your head?”
She considered that carefully. Who could blame her, really? She didn’t have many options open to her, and yet, to do so would be to open up her work to SHIELD. “I mean, almost all of it. Why?”
“Because I have an option for you,” Sharon said, simply. “Rather than throwing you in a holding cell, I will allow you access to one of our labs downstairs - with encrypted and limited computer access of course. The only person you will be able to connect with, as a matter-of-fact, will be Dr. Ross and Dr. Banner in New York. Between the three of you, perhaps, you can come up with a way to neutralize the threat of those with Extremis, at least enough so we can bring them into custody without anyone else getting killed. You will be guarded and under surveillance, of course.”
Maya didn’t look particularly surprised by Sharon’s last statement. “Of course.”
“And if you so much as think about reaching out to warn Killian, I’ll have you thrown into a holding cell so remote, no one will be able to find you, and SHIELD has some very secret, very remote places it keeps things. Do I make myself clear?”
Peggy only just did manage not to stare, open-mouthed, at the ruthlessness coming out of her niece. She chose instead to remain neutral, swallowing the sickened horror inside until they stepped outside, the tightness of her clenched fingers the only signal of her anger, shock, and disgust. She waited, instead, for the scientist to nod her understanding at Sharon’s ultimatum, wilting into the couch she sat on.
“Good,” Sharon nodded, firmly. “I will send someone to sit in here with you while you chat with Dr. Ross. I will make arrangements. Do you mind, Betty?”
The other scientist shook her head, pushing her curtain of dark hair over her shoulder. “No, I just need to let Bruce know. JARVIS is online again, and I think he’s seeing if Tony left anything we can track him down with.”
That would be her next course of action. Peggy looked to Sharon, who seemed to agree their interview, for now, was over. “I’ll leave you in Dr. Ross’s capable hands, for now. Don’t make me regret my decision, Dr. Hansen.”
With that, Sharon rose, storming out of the office. Maya looked to Peggy, somewhat imploringly. “I didn’t mean for any of this to go this far, Director Carter.”
“I know,” Peggy murmured, numbly. “In my experience, few scientists ever do. You think you are creating something good and positive, and that isn’t what happens. Even Abraham Erskine created Johann Schmidt.”
“But he created Steve Rogers, too.”
“That he did,” Peggy agreed, quietly. “Perhaps we all got lucky there.”
With that, she turned and left the room, off to find Sharon.