Duty (An Armorer/Paladin Story)

I thought that I was done with gym class

We were called up for a mission in the Mediterranean where a group of baddies was holding an entire government's ministers hostage. Per my usual mission requirements, I sat in the quinjet and listened to the op as it went down. We'd gotten blueprints of the building before we left, so I remembered the details and was able to follow who was where, making the situation much more interesting for me. From what I could hear, my teammates had the situation in hand, although they were finding it harder going than they'd anticipated; the defense was better that it should have been. They had mutants of their own. Ever since the mission where Thor had knocked out Wanda, where it had been determined that Vision had turned off the coms, nobody but me was allowed to touch the communication array in the quinjet during a mission. In a time where nothing was going on, I put in an earpiece to hear the team's chatter and began slowly changing the channels on the receiver, allowing time for decryption if a coded channel was being used. And there was; the baddies had their own chatter. I noted five names that seemed to be the core group as well as some mercenaries. One of the core group was apparently absent, as he was referenced as being "at home." It was nothing specific that was said, but I started to have a bad feeling about this bunch; it felt to me that this was kind of a scrimmage rather than a regulation game.

I turned around and sidled toward the rear of the quinjet after hearing a slight sliding sound, but was surprised by a man who matched the description of the mercenaries, all in black, with a black mask that covered the entire face and head except for the eyes. He grabbed for me, but I liberated a parachute first and smacked him as hard as I could across the face with it. He staggered, then hit me. Yeah, it hurt, but I fell into a fire extinguisher, which I wrenched free and smacked the guy with it like it was a baseball bat. My adrenaline was way up, and it was good that it hit the guy's shoulder first before it made contact with his head or I probably would have killed him. I zip-tied the crap out of him and left him on the floor, closing myself into the cockpit. When the others returned to the jet after turning over the mercs to the local authorities--the real conspirators having escaped--they were bemused to see my captive.

"There's a couple inches here that doesn't have a zip tie," Tony said, pointing. I curled my lip at him.

"Are you ok, Emma?" Steve asked, ignoring Tony.

"Yeah, he hit me, but not too hard," I said, touching my cheek. I knew there wouldn't be any marks on it.  Natasha gave me a cold pack anyway, and it did feel good. The ride home was pretty quiet as we were all working on our after-action reports for Nick. For only the second time, I had some excitement of my own to describe.

At the debriefing, Nick ran through the direct action, using the projector to provide a three dimensional view of the building and the locations of the hostages, bad guys, and good guys. I listened as Nick asked for clarifications and amplifications, then required everybody who had responded to amend their after-action reports to include them. Then we got to my part of the narrative.

"The quinjets can decrypt signals?" Clint asked, and I stared at him.

"Yeah, didn't you know?"

  "No," he said, looking frustrated. "How do you know?"

"It's in the book," I said blankly.  "I'm working on the new quinjets, so for background, the engineers gave me the book that has the specifications for all the equipment. It's in there." Clint muttered something I didn't quite catch. "Stop by my workshop after and I'll give it to you."  Then I got to identify our core baddies of Ballista, Nepthys, Necros, and Sess.

"The other one, apparently a man with the code name of Namitar, sat this one out, doing something at their home base or whatever. Some of them appear to have mutations, but I'm not sure exactly what they are; Ballista moves projectiles, Nepthys, I don't know, Necros, I don't know, Sess, I don't know. I Googled them; there's nothing about these particular individuals, but Nepthys was an Egyptian goddess of death and decay and Namitar was a Mesopotamian god of disease. Necros, there's just the obvious allusion to death, and I don't have any idea about Sess. I got the feeling that this was more of a test rather than its own objective," I said. "I'm not sure, but I think that it was a chance to go up against the Avengers and see how you responded, what they could expect if this was just the warm up rather than the main event."