SHIELD Has a Secret
New York, United States
March 2011
“Enough. With. The. Moping.”
“Darcy, I am fine.”
“You are not fine. You haven’t left your lab in four days - what, I take take a promo and suddenly you turn into a freaking zombie? Have you even slept?”
“Yes!”
“When?”
“Ah…”
“Exactly. Don’t make me regret switching to PR.”
Jane didn’t answer.
Darcy rolled her eyes, walked over to Jane’s desk, and closed her laptop.
“Darcy!”
The brunette sniffed. “You’re ridiculous. Okay? This is exactly why I didn’t want to accept Stark’s promotion. Come on. You’re going to eat and put on lady clothes and we’re going out.”
“Don’t you dare turn down that promotion, I know you missed your weird soft science stuff. Also, the last time you tried to get me to go out, Thor showed up and dumped me!”
“So maybe this time he’ll come back and say you were right and he’s defied his daddy,” Darcy said agreeably. “We’re going.”
“No.” Jane turned away and started going through papers.
Darcy hopped up onto the counter and dramatically flopped down across Jane’s piles of papers.
Jane threw up her hands. “Seriously?”
“Yes, seriously,” Darcy said. “You’re done. You need food and-” She sniffed and made a face. “Dude, when was the last time you showered?”
Jane looked away.
Darcy sat up and felt her face pinching slightly with worry. In front of most people, she would’ve hidden it behind her joking, irreverent mask, but not Jane. Not her best friend.
“Fine,” Jane sighed. “But we’re not going out.”
“Deal,” Darcy said. She was a poly-sci major; she knew how to take a compromise. “Though it is a shame to waste this sexiness on a couch, I will concede to a movie night. With lots of ice cream. We will watch terrible horror flicks and eat sweet things.”
Jane heaved a sigh and started powering down the computers and machines. Darcy hid her relief; she’d been getting worried about Jane. The scientist tended to cope with any sort of emotional turmoil in her life by throwing herself into her work with a fanatic and, honestly, kind of scary focus.
Jane stopped at the door when she realized Darcy wasn’t following. “What are you doing?”
“I’m going to clean up a bit,” Darcy said. “Your new interns are clearly nowhere near my genius. And if you think I’m going to share my twenty-dollar fuzzy blankets with you until you’ve showered, you are dead wrong. Come to my place in forty minutes. Bring popcorn, I ran out last week.”
Jane heaved a sigh, but she must have decided it wasn’t worth arguing, so she went on her way.
As soon as the doors hissed shut, Darcy kicked off from the desk and spun wildly across the room, whooping as she went. She’d have to thank Stark for the soundproof lab. And the spinny chairs. This thing was like suitable for a starship captain.
Hey. That could be fun.
“All hands on deck!” Darcy shouted, sweeping a hand across the table. “Land ho!” Papers flew up into the air, and she shoved the chair again, grabbing them as she went. Her old organizational system from before the days of working in Stark’s PR department - a promotion that had come her way just two weeks before - came back to her easily, and she started sorting Jane’s scattered messes with ease into piles near their respective instruments.
Spiky Box of Doom readings, definitely, none of the other graphs have so many colors… This is probably related to the Icy Death Tornado in Canada last year, I know that address, where was the rest of that data? Oh yeah, blue filing cabinet… Shit, the idiots moved her papers on anomalies… And this is that weird formula thing she cracked last year… for tracking energy anomaly things...
Wait.
Darcy looked back over the papers and frowned. While many of the interns and scientists at Stark dismissed her as a silly, ditzy assistant that Jane had hired out of pity, she knew exactly how intelligent she was, and that she’d picked up on plenty during a year and a half as Jane’s official employee. This data was definitely out of her field, but she could tell (vaguely) that there was a veeerrrry interesting energy thing happening out in the desert of the southwest.
Darcy cracked her knuckles, flicked open her Mac, and opened Google Maps.
Twenty minutes and a ridiculous amount of coding later, she had a few pieces of the puzzle. Hacking was only a hobby for Darcy, and she didn’t know enough to put together everything, but honestly she was just proud that she’d managed to sneak past any of SHIELD’s firewalls. Was that because Stark was already spying on SHIELD and she was in his network? Absolutely. Darcy was not too proud to accept help.
Because that’s what she had found. SHIELD had a base out in the desert. And they were pumping a crapton of moolah into that little hidey-hole, not to mention the hack job she found lurking on Google’s servers, writing over the satellite pics of the area. Darcy had only gotten blurry photos, but they told a damning story: SHIELD base, high energy readings, lots of funding, lots of personnel.
What are you cooking out there?
Darcy slipped into the SHIELD network and changed its log of her IP address, tore through Stark Industries’ network and erased any record there of her hack, and wiped her laptop clean of any trace. She’d been subtle, and only skimmed the surface of their network. Probably no one would even notice she’d been there, and if they did, well - corporations and government agencies deflected low-level hack jobs every day. Hopefully it would read as just a Stark janitor getting bored and dicking around on a computer and stumbling into something he shouldn’t.
Humming, Darcy carried her laptop out of the room and headed for the elevator. It was movie night. She’d sort all this out tomorrow. As the junior PR liaison, she had enough access to Stark’s oh-so-valuable time to bring it up, once she figured out what she was going to say.