Captain's Hart

Chapter 4 Germany

Steve continued to look around the base in awe as the two women led him and Dr. Banner onto the bridge. Arianna kept glancing back at him, looking amused. Both Steve and Dr. Banner paused at the entrance, staring around while Natasha walked on ahead. Arianna paused beside Steve, although she gave him plenty of space as he gazed about.

Steve had to admire the place as he looked around with wide-eyes. The whole floor was lined with high-tech computers and each computer was manned by an agent, all of them searching urgently for the missing Tesseract and Loki.

While Steve wandered around the bridge, Dr. Banner kept his distance, sticking to the outskirts of the room. Arianna glanced at him a few times, but her orders were with the Captain so she settled for just sending a few kind smiles at the shy, anxious scientist whenever they accidentally met eyes. He seemed unsure how to respond, but gave a small smile in return each time.

Arianna walked up to Steve as he walked over to the huge windows at the front of the room. "Impressive, isn't it." She asked, and he nodded, mouth still wide with wonder. "I've never seen anything like this." He murmured and Arianna chuckled.

"It gets better." She told him and he looked at her questioningly. She just nodded outside at the engines, and he looked at them curiously as they heard Maria call: "We're at lock, sir." And then Fury's order: "Good. Let's vanish."

Steve watched with wide eyes as every inch of the ship's surface switched to reflecting panels, making the ship invisible to the naked eye. Arianna smiled at his blatant amazement, and she then nodded towards the conference table that was set up in the far corner of the bridge.

He walked over, still looking around in amazement. Dr. Banner was already there, and Fury joined them at the table as he called: "Gentlemen." Steve wordlessly reached into his pocket, withdrawing a tenner. He handed it to Fury, who smirked amusedly, and Arianna chuckled while Steve continued to stare around curiously.

Arianna then snorted as she saw Maria glance up as Steve walked over, giving him a quick once over. The older agent heard her and raised her brows as Arianna paused beside her. "Don't even try telling me you didn't look as well." Maria said lightly and Arianna replied teasingly: "I never said I didn't."

Steve joined them again, asking Arianna curiously: "So, we're invisible to the eye, but are we invisible to radar, too?" Arianna nodded, leading him back to the others as she explained: "We have signal jammers and beacons. Basically if anyone tries to find us, they'll find their scanners aren't working. It's not perfect, but it works against most things and we're equipped to deal with anything else."

He nodded, and they caught the end of Fury's conversation with Dr. Banner as the scientist asked: "Where are you with that?" Fury nodded over at Coulson, who stood on the floor with the searching agents. Coulson explained: "We're sweeping every wirelessly accessible camera on the planet. Cellphones, laptops."

Arianna saw Nat pause by one of the agents' computers and her heart sank as she saw Clint's face on it. They'd exchanged brief words outside and neither woman was happy with the lack of progress on the case. Coulson finished: "If it's connected to a satellite, it's eyes and ears for us."

Nat looked up and she pointed out: "That's still not gonna find them in time." Arianna couldn't help but nod in agreement, but looked over as Dr. Banner commented: "You have to narrow the field. How many spectrometers do you have access to?" He asked Fury, who replied coolly: "How many are there?"

"Call every lab you know," Banner told them as he removed his jacket and got ready to work, "tell them to put the spectrometers on the roof and calibrate them for gamma rays. I'll rough out a tracking algorithm based on cluster recognition."