Duty (An Armorer/Paladin Story)

Frankly, it's just not a good day

I paced in the quinjet as I listened to the chatter over my headset. I could picture the action as I listened to Cap position the team, and their comments on the action. Bruce had been with me until just recently, when they'd needed him to take out a couple of machine gun nests that the army had set up as a last resort and the bad guys had captured. We were on a beach with jungle coming right up to the sand. It made spotting and neutralizing the bad guys difficult. We had a homegrown religious fundamentalist on our hands with a cult of followers; we'd been told it was a Jonestown type tragedy and gone in to help with body recovery and cleanup; instead of poison in the Flavr Aid, there'd been an unknown compound that made them all-for lack of a better word--crazy. Crazy and strong and tough to kill; they'd wiped out a detachment of the country's army. We were trying, with fresh military, to contain them to their compound while a solution was researched, but it was tough going. They were hot to get out into the world and spread the word. And the word was their particular brand of fanaticism combined with the substance they'd ingested, so everybody was most insistent that they stay put.

The radio crackled; we had a contingent of doctors coming in from our Seattle facility to get samples to help figure out what was done to these people and determine if it was reversible. Personally, I had a bet with Wanda that the effect of whatever compound would wear off. She thought I was crazy--not without justification, as I'd been mutated myself and the changes had been on the cellular level--but from what I'd seen, permanent mutations just didn't come from digestion. The GI tract is pretty tough.

The battle seemed to be winding down. The army had brought some of its engineers and they'd erected a metal palisade around the compound. The hard part was getting the cultists back in it, but it sounded like most people had been rounded up. There were a few fatalities of the altered cultists, and these were being set aside for the professionals' arrival. The army would stay; they were bringing in doctors of their own to assist ours and learn from them. They were also figuring out logistics for supply and continuing containment.  Hopefully that wouldn't be necessary.

The doctors were about half an hour out, so there'd be time to finish mopping up before they landed. I acknowledged this information and told the team. Steve confirmed that they should be largely done by then. I put a mark by Hawkeye's name on my list; he'd just cussed again when taken by surprise by a rogue cultist and bapped the guy over the head with his bow. The swear jar was still kind of a joke, but we had gotten the TV we'd originally planned on already. This engagement might just put us over the top for another party after everybody settled up at the end of the mission. Tony was snarking as he encouraged a group of cultists through the gate with stinging rubber bullets from his suit's armament and I heard a woody crack as Thor brought down a tree with his hammer. Why? Dunno.

"He heard somebody coming his way and wanted to turn them," Cap said in exasperation before anybody could ask. He went to check on the situation, which is when it blew up.

"Get ready for incoming, A," Cap instructed me tensely. Shit. That meant it was one of ours, and I put down the rear gate of the quinjet. Over the headset, Thor was frantically apologizing, Steve was exasperated, and Vision was really blasting Thor verbally. Finally Cap told me Vision was coming in. I confirmed and waited until Vision showed up carrying Wanda; without being told, he set her on the treatment table and I activated the AI.

"The doctors are about twenty minutes out," I told him as he hovered. Literally. "Can you get on the com and let them know what the situation is?" The AI sprang up and Vision reluctantly turned away as the scan began. Wanda was unconscious and bloody, which I felt was consistent with having a tree dropped on her. The AI had a robust male Australian accent, one Tony had developed for his personal  system but found it irritating; the rest of us liked it, and it was repurposed for our medical AI. The AI didn't see anything that was awful and life threatening, and Vision consented to sit with Wanda until the doctors showed up. I mopped up some blood after snapping on some treatment gloves, cleaned the worst cuts, and used butterfly bandages on the ones that would need stitches. Which, fortunately, I wasn't going to have to do. I'd been kind of pushed into my impromptu medical role since I'd started coming along on missions as The Armorer. I sat in the quinjet ready to fix things if they went awry, but I'd only had to pry Tony out of his Iron Man suit once, and since I was there, I picked up operating the AI system as well. This was the first time I'd actually used it.