The energy guns and laser tanks that Red Skull had developed back in the day using the Tesseract—they were all here.
Unlike the U.S. military, which had been stalled by S.H.I.E.L.D. and opposed by a coalition of nations, forced to shelve its energy weapons, Baron Strucker had been researching his for seventy years.
S.H.I.E.L.D.'s science division ran chiefly on coasting along on seniority, with a sideline in swindling research grants—a whole crowd of experts and professors killing time on the job.
HYDRA was different. Here, failing to produce results meant death. The research staff struck Daisy as wound up like clockwork, breaking into a jog at the slightest provocation, timing themselves even on bathroom breaks.
Under conditions this brutal, failing to develop something would be an insult to all those who'd been sacrificed.
Even without the surpassing genius of a Stark or a Reed Richards, they'd managed to complete the energy weapons through collective ingenuity and put them into active deployment. That one achievement alone was testament enough to their capabilities.
Carefully dodging the research personnel—light refraction only kept her unseen; her body still took up space, and one bump would give her away.
Her reflexes were far quicker than this crowd's. Dodging left and right, an actual living person threading through a mob of white lab coats, she drew no one's notice at all.
A direct hit from an energy weapon or a large-caliber firearm would still hurt her. But she didn't need to be faster than the bullet—only faster than the one pulling the trigger. Curious, she lingered to watch as the researchers, fully absorbed, calibrated the energy output.
Several of the parameters the staff were measuring looked awfully familiar. She thought about it—weren't these the specs of the Arc Reactor she'd built?
The mystery resolved itself. These people were using the reactor to charge the weapons. No wonder a shot at Hawkeye would only take off a chunk of flesh, lacking the old might that could blast a man into ribbons with a single shot.
The lethality of the energy guns dropped a notch in her estimation, and she turned to look elsewhere.
Hammer Industries' mechanical soldiers and anti-Magneto mechanical soldiers—there were several units here. For the former, they had the blueprints and the process documentation both; for the latter, a great deal of technical data had been leaked too, and the staff were running a reverse analysis.
Everyone held shares in everyone else; thieves within the household were impossible to guard against. That one she had no good fix for.
The Iron Monger armor and the Iron Tyrant—two of each here as well. As for the data on Stark's Iron Man armor, an incalculable amount had been recorded, and they'd even produced a prototype. It was just rather crude, for lack of engineering know-how.
Combining the technologies of Hammer Industries, Stark, and Obadiah, Baron Strucker had already equipped his soldiers with exoskeleton armor—cruder than the kind Crossbones wore at the opening of Captain America: Civil War, but it had the basic functions down.
What you could buy on the open market, they had. What you couldn't buy, they had too.
HYDRA's war potential was immense. If they weren't so fond of playing at schemes and intrigue, the world situation would surely be in violent upheaval right now.
Daisy wasn't like the righteous heroes who lob a bomb the moment they spot an enemy arsenal. To her, all of this was humanity's collective property—far too wasteful to destroy on a whim.
In the spirit of returning one courtesy for another, she planted a Trojan horse in their main control computer.
Walking out of the research zone, she took a look at the soldiers' training area. The training methods weren't far off from S.H.I.E.L.D.'s—just more severe, with a rather cruel washout rate built in. The bottom ten percent were eliminated, and here, elimination meant death.
She spotted two of the old-style brainwashing machines, and two units of the new-model emotion controllers installed here as well.
She didn't linger in the training area. The soldiers here hadn't actually been brainwashed—few could withstand the old brainwashing machines, and the new ones worked slowly, taking a week to process a single person. Spending so precious an opportunity on this batch of soldiers, recruited from impoverished regions, would be something of a waste.
Following the training area to the living quarters, she came at last to a place that looked like a prison.
She didn't go barging in. In so many movies and cartoons, the protagonist thinks they've got it all figured out, strolling brazenly into the enemy's prison—then the bars come down, and the villain leaps out gloating, I spotted you ages ago!
The scene was too hackneyed for words. Daisy figured she'd best steer clear of it. Besides, she didn't trust that inside contact—HYDRA had no shortage of double agents.
Walking to an unoccupied area, she let the vibration fade and opened up her senses at the same time.
She still couldn't hear across a dozen miles, but eavesdropping on a single base like this was well within range.
She carefully sorted through the various sound sources, her brain rapidly processing the streams of information.
Caution proved rewarding. She caught people in the prison talking about her.
"Where'd that one get to? A whole living person vanished right in front of you, and after all this time you still haven't found them?" The prison held not only inmates but heavily armed guards. They'd already dug their trap, and now they were waiting for Daisy to step right into it.
A male and a female voice rose and fell in alternation. Their tones were strange—the two pitched their voices like a song, dovetailing with each other: when one went high, the other was sure to go low. This wasn't an affectation but a kind of resonance born of long years together.
"No wonder this base is codenamed Gemini…" Daisy had always assumed Gemini referred to Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver. Now it seemed that wasn't entirely right. Baron Strucker's son and daughter—the mutants codenamed the Fenris twins—were here too.
The pair were, in fact, also relics of the World War II era, much like Sin—that rotten second-generation heir. Both were past seventy years old.
Strucker's grandsons and great-grandsons were probably grown by now, hidden away in some corner of human society, existing as this HYDRA heavyweight's secret pieces on the board.
Daisy looked through with her enhanced vision, her sight penetrating the wall, forcing its way through a mass of steel and concrete, until she made out the two waiting in full readiness.
Though both were past seventy, they still looked young—only their eyes held a touch of madness, a hint of cruelty at the corners of their mouths. Their palms were clasped together, and considering that their descendants had inherited their abilities in full, it was hard to believe theirs was merely the affection of brother and sister.
As for the Aryan racial purity ideology handed down from the Führer and held as gospel by Red Skull and Baron Strucker, Daisy didn't buy it. She only found it perverse and revolting. People like this, whether or not they could defeat the free and democratic nations, would never succeed in the end.
Revolting as it was, she had no intention of leaping into the trap. The Fenris twins' combined technique looked like no ordinary thing, and in a place where every direction was the enemy, she had no wish to throw down with them. There'd be no point.
She observed the enemy's setup from where she stood. Analyzing the scene, the other side didn't know it was Daisy Johnson herself who'd come. What's more, they'd gotten word only a short while ago—evident from the fact that everything mobilized so far was the base's internal defense force. Their preparations had been hasty.
The Fenris twins suffered from serious mental illness, and neither was quite right in the head—you could tell from their conversation. The siblings actually believed they were unbeatable, the strongest in all the world!
The other side was treating her as nothing more than a run-of-the-mill spy or operative. And that handed Daisy far too many openings.