Chapter 389: An Operation That Goes Too Smoothly
There was semi-automated mining equipment inside the Vibranium mine.
It went unused. The Wakandans Klaue had selected for this operation couldn't drive it -- by deliberate design. He had picked the elderly, the frail, women, children. People whose primary value was as hostages, not as a labor pool.
And even if they knew how to operate the equipment, Klaue would never have let them touch it.
Marcus Slater was a squad captain. His men were out on their rotation, and he had tucked himself into the operator's cab of one of the dormant machines to catch some rest. The fully enclosed cab blocked the cold that came off the mine walls, and the viewing glass let him track his team's movement. He found this arrangement perfectly satisfactory.
He had his eyes closed, curled into the operator's seat, when the cold hit him.
Not just a chill. Something aggressive -- as though the mine's cold was forcing itself through the cab walls, pouring in from everywhere at once.
He cursed under his breath and opened his eyes.
The machine sat in a relatively isolated part of the mine, darker than the rest, without the full bank of floodlights that illuminated the main tunnels. Marcus reached in the direction the cold was coming from, checking the window that he was certain he had closed completely.
His hand met empty air.
The door was still there. But the glass in the door was gone.
He swore again and reached for the door handle in the dark, planning to move to a different machine.
His fingers found a human hand instead.
The hand closed around his wrist the instant he touched it. Before Marcus could process what was happening, an enormous force applied itself to his body and pulled him out of the cab like something being extracted from a socket.
He opened his mouth to shout. The wind stuffed itself into his lungs before his voice could form, and the sound died.
Something hard entered his mouth.
His tongue recoiled automatically but the taste reached him anyway -- metal and mineral earth, mixed together. Something had been forced past his teeth. He felt it press upward against his palate. Then his own body weight began to work against him, his jaw being forced to its widest extent by the object wedged inside it, and the combination of pressure and gravity produced a dull tearing ache along his upper jaw.
Adrenaline arrived in a wave and his mind sharpened immediately. He had been hung. The serrated edge of the mining shovel's blade was caught against the roof of his mouth, and his own body weight was doing the rest.
He began to think through his options. He had perhaps two seconds before --
A needle found a gap in his clothing and pushed through.
The adrenaline that had just surged through him died as quickly as it had come, flattened by whatever the needle had delivered.
"If I let go," a voice said quietly in his ear, carrying no more emotional weight than a man reading a weather report, "you'll hang there until there's nothing left of you."
The cold sweat across Marcus's body doubled. A thin sweet taste reached the back of his throat -- blood from where the serration had broken the skin against his palate.
"I'll give you one sentence to answer. How many Wakandans are being held in this mine?"
Marcus would have answered. His jaw was physically incapable of forming words.
He could only produce a series of desperate grunts, which the voice absorbed in silence.
"You don't know."
The world spun again. His back met the mine wall approximately fifteen meters away, the impact driving the air from his chest. Before he could slide to the ground, a stream of dark webbing crossed the distance and covered him -- his arms, his torso, his legs, his mouth -- pinning him to the stone with no gap to move or breathe audible air.
Batman used black webbing at night and white in daylight, and adjusted the ratio depending on the specific environment -- leaving subdued mercenaries in configurations that wouldn't draw attention from their colleagues.
Marcus Slater was number twenty-nine.
Batman had hacked the mercenary communications network the moment he entered the mine, before he touched anyone. Through those channels, a voice synthesizer was cycling through routine check-ins and patrol acknowledgments, keeping the system sounding orderly. No one would miss the silenced voices.
One hundred and thirty international mercenaries. Ninety-seven in the mine, the remainder in the weapons factory outside. Even combined, they held no numerical advantage over the Wakandans -- Klaue and M'Baku's ability to kill T'Chaka and seize the country had depended entirely on trust, proximity, and the element of surprise.
Batman moved through the deeper sections of the mine, processing as he went.
Klaue understood what M'Baku's first priority would be once the throne was secure. Not the Wakandan population. Klaue himself. The weapons factory sitting outside the mine's entrance had been constructed in recent weeks -- Batman had confirmed this from the freshness of the ground disturbance when he passed it on his approach, and from the layout, which had been adapted from an existing Wakandan facility rather than built from foundations. It was preparation for the inevitable.
Thirty-four subdued. Forty-three. The numbers climbed quietly as Batman worked deeper into the mountain.
Seventy-one. Ninety-seven.
The last of the mine's mercenary contingent. Batman was still for a moment in the dark, looking at the Wakandans further along the tunnel -- still working, still using their hands against the stone, still unaware that the armed men around them were no longer upright.
He didn't approach them. He didn't lead them out. He needed them to discover the situation themselves, at their own pace. The moment of realization had to be theirs. He turned and moved back toward the entrance.
The weapons factory remained. Thirty-three mercenaries. And possibly Klaue.
Something in Batman's assessment stayed quiet and alert.
Too smooth, he thought. Unreasonably smooth.
He stepped out of the mine's entrance.
A man with a face like Lincoln stood waiting, his right hand extended, pressing its palm against Batman's chest. The hand was not a hand. It had been rebuilt -- retrofitted with sonic emitter hardware that ended at the wrist where fingers should have been.
Ulysses Klaue.
In space, the solar storm had arrived with far greater force than Reed Richards's instruments had projected.
High-energy charged particles tore through the Van Allen belt's outer edge at multiple times the predicted intensity, hammering the hull of the research vehicle from every direction at once. The interior became a violence of lurching movement, nothing stable, the deck rising and falling without pattern.
Reed's body stretched in four directions simultaneously as the impacts hit. He was fighting toward the cockpit -- pulling himself hand-over-hand along any surface he could reach -- and being thrown back against the cabin wall each time he made ground.
Susan Storm flickered. Her body moved in and out of visibility with each wave of radiation, cycling from solid to transparent and back again. She hadn't looked at herself. She was facing forward, screaming across the cabin.
"Johnny! You're on fire! Put it out, put it out!"
At the controls, Ben Grimm said nothing. He set his teeth and held the controls with both hands and did not let go. The seat beneath him shuddered constantly, as though something structural in the chair was failing under his increasing weight, the frame compressing toward the shape of something that would no longer function as a seat.