The Inner Circle (Percy Jackson x Avengers)

Chapter 6: The SSR Base

Hello Readers, hope that you are all doing good. Thanks for reading my story so far and feel free to comment and vote for feedback - it'll help me write future chapters! Let's make it spicy.

Steve and Natasha had decided to go to the nearest mall to go to the Apple Store.

It was a public place where they could blend in easily and access free internet and a laptop to access the USB drive.

"The first rule of going on the run is don't run, walk." Natasha said as they briskly walked through the mall, but it felt like Steve was speed walking for the Olympic trials. 

"If I run in these shoes, they're going to fall off."

They were in the same outfits as when they had left the hospital, but the pair of shoes that Steve had found to wear were a bit too loose. He would have to make do.

Natasha slowed down their pace a little in order to blend in, but Steve was still anxious. He kept his head on a swivel and looked for disguised agents in the crowd. His senses were on a high alert after his whole conversation with Pierce and the elevator scene

What's more is that Steve wasn't used to doing all of the spying shenanigans, especially fronting the same calmness that Natasha had as they approached their destination.

She blended in perfectly and it was quite hard to tell that she was in reality, one of the best agents in the world.

There were no doors for the Apple Store but rather, open floor to ceiling glass panels that rotated to allow people through. It looked like they were semi- busy with the amount of people walking throughout the store. There was a good chance they wouldn't be bothered here when they were just going to use a laptop for a few minutes.

Both of them walked in and headed towards a laptop with the right port. Natasha powered on the laptop and began typing.

"The drive has a Level Six homing program, so as soon as we boot up, S.H.I.E.L.D. will know exactly where we are." She was looking into their current S.H.I.E.L.D. status to see if there were any updates on them since they were ordered to be taken into custody on sight.

"How much time will we have?" Steve stood closely next to her to watch her blind side as she was focused on extracting any information she could.

Natasha finished looking at their updated track records and switched tabs in preparation to see what was on Fury's USB drive. "About 9 minutes from now."

She plugged in the USB to the Apple laptop.

The USB's contents began unloading little by little onto their screen. Steve looked over her shoulder at the information.

For a blink of a second the Lumerian Star file popped up before disappearing on the screen.

"Fury was right about that ship. Somebody's trying to hide something. This drive is protected by some sort of AI. It keeps rewriting itself to counter my commands."

From what Steve knew, Natasha was pretty good with computers and extracting information, but they were up against the rest of S.H.I.E.L.D.

"Can you override it?" Steve asked. He moved his hand to his hip and placed his hand on the table as he leaned a little closer. He didn't want anyone to overhear their conversation.

"The person who developed this is slightly smarter than me. Slightly." Natasha squinted at the screen to attempt to find a break in the coding encryption. Then, she began typing furiously to attack the numbers and letters to open the locked files.

After a few agonizing minutes of typing, she decided to try a different method. They had to get something out of this or else S.H.I.E.L.D. would just keep chasing them down everytime they attempted to access the drive.