The boltgun rounds hit the transformed soldier at center mass and the thing that had been a man came apart in the way that explosive-tipped bolts resolved organic targets at close range. Fragments distributed themselves across the road surface in a wide radius. Nolan looked at the result for a moment, then opened the vox.
"David. Have Tony take whoever is going to the Soviet mutant embassy and push for immediate direct contact with their national command authority. Don't soften the message. Chernobyl is completely uncontrolled and the contamination zone is expanding. Mutant or human, anyone not already clear of the area needs to leave now."
He continued without pausing.
"Get Bucky to bring a Helicarrier over from the European theater. I need the Intelligent Control Corps units aboard it. If the Knights at base have completed their repair cycle, send them along with the White Scars combat team."
David's acknowledgment came back clean.
Nolan activated the armor and moved deeper.
The town was perhaps three kilometers from the plant's outer perimeter. It had been a real town: houses, streets, vehicles parked in the ordinary patterns of daily life. People had received some kind of warning, enough to put a few thousand of them into the streets trying to leave, crowding the routes out in every direction at once.
None of them had made it far enough.
They were still where the gamma radiation had found them: on the pavement, in their vehicles, in doorways. The silence was total. Nolan slowed without consciously deciding to, moving through the frozen scene with the two Raven Guard champions behind him in a silence that felt appropriate even though it cost them time.
He passed a young mother near the edge of the road. She had used her last coherent minutes to wrap her infant in the heaviest biochemical protective material she had been able to find, the kind of suit that existed in this region of the world precisely because certain kinds of radiation had been a known hazard here for decades. She had sealed the suit carefully, tucked the edges, done everything the procedure required.
The gamma had come through the material as though the material were not there.
The mother and infant were on the ground together.
Nolan moved past them without stopping. He filed what he had seen in the part of his thinking that would process it later, when later was available.
What came next required a different kind of adjustment.
The mutants had died differently from the civilians.
Those whose abilities were tissue-based, whose mutations expressed through the flesh, had proliferated the way the soldier on the road had proliferated: uncontrolled growth, the mutation's emergency response to massive cellular assault, running past the point where the body could contain it. Those whose abilities were energy-based had fared worse. Through his eyepiece Nolan read the evidence across multiple sites in quick succession: burn patterns consistent with uncontrolled pyrokinesis, ice formations suggesting the same dynamic in a different register, and several instances of catastrophic failure in abilities that involved pressure or force, the remains expressing what happens when power operates without any governing intelligence behind it.
Almost all of them had moved away from the people around them before the end came.
The distances were not accidents. The evacuation was not random. Mutant after mutant, across the full range of what he was observing, had chosen to die alone rather than die in the middle of a crowd and take whoever was nearby with them. The discipline required to make that choice while the body was failing was not a small thing.
Nolan stopped for a moment and looked at the nearest case: a mutant who had walked two hundred meters from the last cluster of civilian bodies before the energy abilities had finally discharged completely, the ground around the point of death marked in a perfect radius.
"For the people around them," he said quietly. "Not for themselves." He looked at the full sweep of it. "This is a rare thing to see. Whatever else this country is, there is something real here worth preserving."
He turned toward the plant.
"Champions. We move faster. Let's end this."
He stepped into Shadow Step, the dark energy rising around the armor like smoke, and the three of them crossed the remaining distance toward the nuclear plant in a silence that the empty town did nothing to interrupt.
Thunder rolled over Moscow without warning.
The sky above Red Square darkened along a moving front, the clouds building with the characteristic speed of weather that was not entirely weather, and then lightning struck the cobblestones in the center of the square twice in quick sequence before the figure landed.
Thor straightened to his full height with Mjolnir in hand, looked at the Winter Palace across the square, and took one step toward it.
The armored response was already in motion before he had taken the second.
Personnel carriers and light tanks erupted from concealed access points in the square's perimeter, tracks locking into position in a practiced cordon. Airborne mutants came down from several directions simultaneously: fighters with membrane wings, energy constructs, mechanical augmentations, all of them heavily armed, all of them placing their weapons on the single target in the center of the square.
The voice came from a tank that had halted three meters from Thor's position. The hatch opened. The man who came halfway out was wearing a Soviet general's uniform with a considerable number of medals arranged across the chest, and his hair was shaped by some combination of genetics and gravity into two upswept points that gave his silhouette a distinctive and slightly alarming profile. He had a cigar. It was mostly ash. He did not appear to notice.
"Thor. Guardians of Terra." The general's voice had the texture of someone who had been smoking since before Thor had learned what tobacco was. "You entered our airspace and territory without permission. Put the hammer down. You superheroes don't get to come and go across sovereign borders like you own them."
He leaned further out of the hatch.
"And I swear if you're another American telling me to respect international norms, I will personally..."
"I am not American," Thor said. He had the patient expression of someone who explained this regularly. "I am from Asgard. It is a realm. In your cultural framework it corresponds approximately to the Norse mythological concept of the divine, which makes me an alien by your technical definition." He paused. "I am also not here to create a diplomatic incident. I am here because your embassy refused to receive our message, and the message cannot wait."
He held the general's gaze.
"Your nuclear power plant at Chernobyl, or more precisely, the underground detention facility beneath it, has suffered a catastrophic failure. The containment is gone. Whatever was held in that facility is no longer held."