Duty (An Armorer/Paladin Story)

Creepy crawlies

The night before Bucky left, we were in the rec room and he asked me to look at his hand as he felt there was a little hesitation when he moved it. I took his hand (people seem to expect me to touch whatever it is that I'm working on; they don't seem to get it that I don't need to) and looked down deep. Sure enough, there was a small amount of dust in the middle joint of the index finger and a bit in the wrist as well. I frowned; the joints were supposed to have been sealed with a special lubricant that Research had whomped up; this seemed to be deteriorating. I shook my head, explained this to Bucky, and we chatted as I surveyed the other connections in the arm. Son of a gun. There were a lot of them, and they all showed signs of coming unsealed. This would warrant an immediate action from Research. Somehow we got onto the topic of his HYDRA work, and when he said a familiar name, I straightened up, cracking my head against his jaw. I hadn't realized he was watching so closely.

I apologized quickly, then looked around, motioning Nick over. Everybody else in the room floated over in his wake. "Bucky just mentioned Sess," I told him urgently. So far we hadn't had a lot of luck finding any information about any of the baddies in that group. I finished removing the dust from the joints and let go of the metal hand. Bucky leaned back and thought.

"I know HYDRA was interested in recruiting his group," he said slowly. "That guy was a herpetologist, made money on the side catching snakes for their venom. He was working near the uranium mines in Australia when he was careless and bitten by one of the snakes he was trying to bag." Radioactive snakes. Great. "He chose his name because it sounds like a snake's hiss. Poser," he said disdainfully, and I repressed a snort of laughter. "It apparently gave him an immunity to poisons of all kinds, but he's working with venoms, specifically. Weaponizing them."

"Peachy," Nick said. "What can you tell us about the others?"

"Not much, I wasn't tasked with recruitment. Ballista can move a baseball-sized thing like an ace baseball pitcher; with smaller projectiles, she can achieve speeds almost as high as bullets fired from a gun. Nepthys is mostly just muscle for the group, I'd say as strong as Hulk but not as big. Necros is also muscle, but he enjoys killing. He made HYDRA's outreach officer very nervous; apparently he said that Necros gets a sexual thrill from blood flowing over his hands." I wasn't the only one grossed out by that. "Namitar is the one to really watch, though; he's apparently the brains of the group as well as the leader. It seems his background is in medical research, although he's pretty coy about it. None of them talk much at all about their pasts, so intel is really poor. His thing at the time--and this was a couple years ago--was infectious diseases, specifically trying to find a way to key bacteria or viruses to a specific person. Maximum suffering, minimum public health risk. There were a lot of people who wanted to know more about the group. They named their team Night Terror." He looked around at us. "How did you get to know about them?"

"We encountered them on a mission," Nick said grimly.

"It's not good to be on their radar," Bucky said flatly. The other Avengers started discussing this new information and what it might mean for us. Nick and Steve sat down and I moved away, first emailing Research about the breakdown of the lubrication and then listened to the others. Tony joined the group around the couch, listening to Bucky.

"That is a highly unpleasant group of individuals," Vision said, prompting wry chuckles at the understatement. Bruce was silent and I knew he was thinking about radiation-induced mutations and the implications of weaponizing toxins and disease. I was worried about that myself. Weaponizing anything would mean very virulent diseases and in this case toxins as well, and probably in different forms--liquids for ingestion or injection, aerosol forms, probably. Biological warfare had been around for a long time, but the Cold War probably represented the bulk of the research on both sides. This was a nightmare. I remembered after my accident, I'd run through my savings with doctor bills seeking a cure or treatment. I'd been sitting in a waiting room when a young woman came in. She had looked like shit, to put it mildly. She'd been backpacking through India and been bitten by a king cobra. Her description of the animal was scary enough--about nine feet long, able to move fast even when the upper third of its body was raised, and it had growled at her before biting--but she had nearly died from the venom. She'd actually stopped breathing on the way to the hospital, which had no antivenom; they'd put her on a respirator though, which had kept her breathing long enough for the muscle paralysis to wear off. Then she'd picked up a nosocomial infection, and they'd returned home right after she was pronounced fit to fly. And some guy wanted to weaponize that? Insane.  I listened for awhile as the gang talked about tactics; we were united in the desire to get these guys before they did something dreadful, but I thought that if HYDRA and us couldn't find much information on them, we were at a big disadvantage. We'd have to wait for them to come to us, which we'd proven we would do given a plausible situation. Nope. Nopety nope. Not good at all.