See, the thing was, for this operation to get as far as it had A.I.M. had to be convinced everything was going perfectly. A.I.M. wasn’t dumb. They knew how many people would stop their operation if they could, and so they had built failsafes. There were explosives in the containers. If A.I.M. became too suspicious, they could obliterate everything.

  We needed to get the weapons A.I.M. was shipping. Then the eggheads could study them and develop countermeasures before A.I.M. cooked up anymore.

  So, we’d left the buyers alone, for now. The A.I.M. crew had checked in with them all along their trip, getting the right code phrases, making sure their sale was still good to go. It had only been here, at the handoff, that our employers could get into a strong enough position to attack without tipping A.I.M. off first.

  All this led to a second problem: the good guys couldn’t afford to let A.I.M. get anywhere near the buyers. Too much risk of those weapons getting loose. Nor did we want to get into a firefight in a public harbor with gaggles of civilians around. Even at night, ports were busy.

  So my job was to get this ship pointed toward a private pier where our employers had a reception party waiting for them. If I did my job well, no one on the aft decks would notice until it was too late.

  In short – too many damn acronyms on this job. The important thing was that this was the first big job my team had taken at the behest of the Avengers. The biggest good guys in the world don’t often trust mercs like us. To say we’ve got checkered pasts would be a bit of an understatement. For some of us, it’s more black than white. But, lately, Neena had been making more of a play to get into the heroism business. And I was backing her on that, all the way. I’d spent enough of my life sitting out on the sidelines while the world spun out of control. If we pulled this job off, it could open up opportunities for us down the road.

  ’Course, having a former Avenger like Black Widow on our team helped those odds, too.

  Black Widow was with her old teammates, the Avengers, at the pier. Neena, Rachel, and I were the only ones aboard right now. They had their own jobs. Rachel² was mining key corridors and hatches to cut the A.I.M. goons off from different parts of the ship once the trap was sprung. And Neena should’ve been in place among the containers, there to stop anyone who clued into the ambush and tried to destroy the cargo. I say should because I still didn’t know what Neena’s message meant.

  2 Rachel is more popularly known to the rest of the world by her callsign Diamondback. –Ed.

  If something went pear-shaped, the only other person who could get in a position to help was Atlas Bear. She was a Wakandan exile, but she hadn’t left Wakanda empty-handed. She brought along her heavily armed airship – which was waiting with our employers at the ambush site. Mr Stark was there, too, heading up the operation.

  I studied the container ship’s controls and mapped them out onto what I’d learned during the mission briefing. There were always differences between the instruction manuals and reality. The labeling on the backlit buttons had worn off with years of use. But they didn’t swim around anymore, and, before long, I found what I was looking for. Rudder and engine controls, and the screens to help me shift the ship’s bearings oh-so-slightly.

  It was delicate work. Delicacy isn’t my strong suit, but I can manage, and I did it fine then. I flattened my boot heels against the deck, to feel for any shifting. If I noticed anything, I’d been too aggressive. But there was nothing. I’d done my job well enough. Nobody would know about the course correction unless they were paying attention to the instruments, and the instruments were up here.

  After a while, I had to kick the hogtied man to keep him from getting too loud through his gag. Not very heroic of me, but sometimes the ends really do justify the means.

  Someone had left a pair of binoculars on a ledge underneath the front windows. I scooped them up. Our bearing had shifted subtly, and we were headed toward one of the darker parts of the harbor. Good. I radioed the code phrase – “Two o’clock and all’s well” – and waited.

  No answer. If everything was going all right, there wouldn’t have needed to be an answer. But Neena’s last message stuck in my craw. Something was going sideways somewhere, and she couldn’t tell us what it was. Not without giving away the game.

  I hate waiting. I gripped the sides of the control console tight enough to leave finger dents in the plastic. The Little Miss Ironsides crept closer to the shadowed pier.

  The tension started to get to me. It wasn’t fear, not exactly. But being on edge all the time takes a toll. Something on the bridge was ticking. Click click click. It took me too long to identify that it was coming from an analog clock in the corner. It played my nerves like a bow on a violin.

  That deep-behind-the-eyes tiredness was coming back. The thing about that kind of tired is that knowing about it doesn’t help you fight it. I gritted my teeth and bit the inside of my cheek. That didn’t help. I leaned against a bulkhead, took my cap off, and rubbed my forehead.

  I don’t know how it happened. Last I knew, there was no one else on the bridge.

  Something sharp and heavy smashed into the back of my neck, right above my shoulder blades. It would have struck my head if I hadn’t bent to massage my forehead at that moment.

  My breath woofed out of me like a horse bolting from the barn. It didn’t want to come back in. I crashed into the side of the workstation ahead of me. The fog in my head cleared. I reacted without thinking. I levered my foot around, lashed it out.

  The kick found nothing but air. My assailant caught my leg and twisted. My combat instincts caught up just in time. I grabbed onto the side of the console. The leverage let my other leg stay on the ground. I swung my elbow backward.

  My jab landed in something soft. Could’ve been a cheek, could’ve been a throat. Couldn’t tell. By the time I managed to right myself and turn, my attacker was stumbling away.

  I should’ve been cued in by the hogtied captain going too silent. He’d gone rigid, his breath tight. He’d seen whatever was coming up behind me and tried not to give it away.

  My attacker was another goon in an A.I.M. costume, a woman. Like the bound and gagged skipper, her hood was hanging from the back of her neck. Short-cropped hair dyed black, and a muscular frame. She stumbled into one of the workstations.

  The deck underneath us rumbled. Somewhere far to the aft of the ship, the engine sound cranked up. Damn it.

  “Outlaw!” my radio barked. The clipped voice sounded like Iron Man himself, Tony Stark – though, through the static, it was hard to be sure. Whoever he was, he was breaking code protocol. “What the hell are you–?”

  My attacker was clutching her face, but I saw her eyes dart to my radio. I saw the gears in her head clicking together.

  She lunged for another workstation. Rudder controls. Before I could stop her, she grabbed a lever and jammed it all the way over to the right.

  Now, a container ship is damn big. Even a “smaller” ship, with minimal cargo, took a lot of power to move. There was never any danger of the ship knocking us off our feet. But we did feel the clank of all that metal shifting. The hull groaned as the rudder shoved through water much faster than it had been intended to. And we also felt the change in direction – a shift deep inside our guts.

  And if we could feel it, everyone else on this ship could, too. A shout echoed from somewhere down a nearby corridor.

  I snarled. The change in the ship’s momentum put a wobble in my step, but it did the same to her. By the time I was on her, she didn’t have enough balance to dodge or duck. I threw myself at her, and we crashed to the deck in a tangle.

  For a while, nothing else but the fight mattered. I was on the attack – where I preferred to be. We struggled for a while, but only because my balance was off. I was the mutant. My abilities included superstrength. I clamped my hand over her face. She tried to bite my fingers, but I was so ticked off I didn’t even feel it. I drew back my fist and slammed it into her forehead. She went limp against me. I dropped her to the deck.

  And then the rest of the world caught up with me.

  My radio was squawking and hissing like a bird chasing a snake out of the nest. Mr Stark wasn’t the only one who’d dropped code protocols. A cacophony of voices was trying to speak over each other at once.

  “Outlaw.” Neena’s voice. “Inez… what’s happening?”

  Rachel’s voice: “–No alarms yet, but it’s only a matter of–”

  Then Mr Stark again: “All teams, stand by for immediate action!”

  “I’m taking this into–” It took me a while to place that voice. Atlas Bear’s. There was a deep, throaty rumbling in the background.

  What a damned mess.

  The hatch behind me was hanging open. That was how my attacker had gotten in. But I’d secured those hatches right after I’d taken out the captain. Those things were so heavy, and the wheels that locked them so clunky, that I should’ve heard if someone had opened it.

  Somehow, somewhere, I’d screwed up. I couldn’t quite piece together what had happened. It must have gone down in that moment when I’d lost my concentration.

  I snapped up my radio, and had to wait several seconds to find a space where I wouldn’t be speaking over somebody else. “Bridge is under control. Engine problems.”

  “Get that ship back on course,” Mr Stark growled.

  “You know it’s too late for that,” Neena said.

  She was right. I wrenched the rudder controls back to where they were, but ships like this turn big and slow. Once they’d committed to a course change, they had a hard time going back. Even if I got us to the correct pier now, we wouldn’t come in at the right angle.

  Heavy bootsteps clomped down the corridor my attacker had come from. More than one pair of them. Two men, one with a ponytail and the other shaved flat, burst through the door. They were still in their commercial crew disguises. The one with the ponytail looked around frantically. His eyes locked on me as his partner saw the woman I’d taken down.

  Well – I was the one who’d been itching for a little more action. Always look on the bright side of life, Dad used to say. Usually when he wanted to needle me.

  Catching people by surprise is a nice little stress reliever. The man with the ponytail had half a second to see me coming at him, but even if he’d had longer, he couldn’t have expected mutant strength. My first punch cracked his jaw, spun him around and lifted him right off his feet. He crashed into his partner just as his partner was drawing his sidearm.

  There wasn’t much room to maneuver. They didn’t have anywhere to go to get away from me. By the time they toppled to the ground, the fight was pretty much over. From then on, it was a matter of mopping up and knocking out. By the time I returned to the ship’s controls, though, we’d swerved farther off course.

  No way to hide from the crew that something was wrong. My gut curdled. I didn’t know how I’d gotten things so screwed up.

  The guilt would have to wait. We were going to beach if nothing changed. So I did the only thing I could. I cut the engines.

  Rachel’s voice crackled over the radio: “Two of them are headed toward the forecastle.” That was where, while on scouting, Neena had determined the self-destruction switch for the ship’s cargo had been placed.

  “I’ve got them,” Neena answered.

  Even through layers of bulkheads, I heard the sharp reports of two sniper shots, one a second after the other.

  Then the radio erupted again. “Get that airship back down–” Mr Stark started to say.

  “Protect the weapons,” someone else interrupted. It sounded like one of the Stark Industries eggheads. “We need to capture them. Capture–”

  To fit in with the mostly unarmed crew, I’d had to come without any of my guns. I grabbed the weapon off the man who’d tried to draw on me. It couldn’t be something as conventional as a Glock. Nooo, nothing’s ever as simple as it should be. A.I.M., stuck-up techheads that they were, had to make everything a gizmo. This pistol had no trigger. Just a shiny black bar. Fingerprint scanner. Damn thing was biometrically locked. Of course.

  I kept it anyway. Just habit. When things went bad, I felt naked without some kind of weapon.

  No point in staying here. With the engines shut down, it would take time and coordination to start them up again. If the A.I.M. crew found the former and had the ability for the latter, we were sunk anyway. I charged out the hatch my attackers had come from.

  The walkway I emerged onto was high up on the bridge castle, and it would have given me a good view if my eyes had been adjusted to the night. The deck lights highlighted flashes of color. This ship wasn’t as full of cargo as a lot of container ships coming in from overseas, but there were still enough things below to make a labyrinth of reds and greens and blues.

  Neena was watching the front of the ship, where she thought the self-destruct switch was. She’d taken the sniper role on this mission so, unlike me, she’d been able to come armed. The problem was that all these containers meant that there were plenty of corners and shadows she couldn’t cover.

  My eyes gradually adjusted to the dark. From here, I saw at least three people running through the containers, headed toward the forecastle. No matter where Neena was, she wouldn’t have clear shots at them all.

  A narrow steel staircase zig-zagged down the side of the bridge castle. Steel support struts fastened it to the hull. I grabbed the closest strut and started sliding. A story off the deck, I leapt. The landing staggered me, but not so much to keep me from catching up with the closest A.I.M. goon.

  I couldn’t make out his features in the shadows, but he sure was startled to see me. I no longer fit in, anyway. I’d forgotten my cap back on the bridge.

  He was at the edge of a short row of containers. He was armed, though his gun was holstered. Instinctively, I drew on him.

  He took a short, quick breath, raised his hands in surrender.

  That must’ve been why I’d taken it. To bluff. Yeah – sure.

  By the time he saw the fingerprint scanner and figured out my problem, it was too late. The pistol was hurling right at his forehead. Clonk.

  Bootsteps reverberated through the deck. Like an acquaintance of mine is fond of saying, it was clobberin’ time.

  The next A.I.M. goon fell to a sucker punch from behind a corner. I ducked around another container just in time to see another of them fall to a crack from Neena’s rifle. Belatedly, it occurred to me that it was a good thing that I’d forgotten my cap. Without my hair, there was little to distinguish me from any of the other crew.

  A screech split the air. It was somewhere between a train whistle and a banshee. I winced, but recognized the sound. A Wakandan airship, aerobraking hard. Atlas Bear.

  As soon as I rounded the next corner, I saw it. A sleek, rounded shadow cut across the sky, studded with projecting fins and blades. In silhouette, it looked like a descending spider. Its shadow dropped against the skyscrapers.

  “Get that airship back,” Tony Stark demanded, for what must’ve been the third time.

  Atlas Bear ignored him. “Awaiting instructions,” she radioed us.

  “Weapons free,” Neena said.

  “Hey, I’m down here–” I started to say.

  A too-brilliant light erupted from the airship’s ventral hull. Tracer bullets streaked across the night, slammed into the portside hull, and raced along the deck.

  I felt each impact in my boots, like hammer blows. And the sound was more pain than noise. It was incredible. Like firing a pistol next to your ear inside a concrete bunker, over and over.

  I dove to the deck just as a tracer bullet streaked overhead and punched into the highest of the two containers stacked beside me. When I opened my eyes again, the gunfire had moved on, but the light had only gotten stronger.

  Firelight spilled out from the rents Atlas Bear’s bullets had torn in its sides. And it was getting brighter by the second. Just the kind of day I’d been having.

  The container had a good sense for dramatic timing. It waited just long enough to let me curse before exploding.

  Two

  “All right,” Tony Stark said, his armored elbows propped on the debriefing room’s table. “Let’s hear it.”

  Rachel, Neena, and I started talking all at once. After several exasperated moments, I cut over them with the truth: “It was my fault.”

  My dad taught me not to lie. And I’ve mostly held true to that. Kinda. I’ve told plenty of lies, but I’ve never been dishonest. If you catch my drift. The lies I’ve told have all been a mercenary’s lies – there to serve a purpose. If I’d lied here, it would’ve just been to make myself look better.

  They knew the problem had started on the bridge, anyway. So I had to tell them. About the hatch that I’d been sure was secured. That, if it had been secured, I should’ve heard open.

  Lots of people stood around us in the debriefing room. Most I’d never met. Only Mr Stark, Neena, Rachel, and I sat at the table. Mr Stark’s people – Stark Industries scientists, Avengers support staff, and old S.H.I.E.L.D. agents alike – were behind him. The other main members of the Avengers were still out on assignment.

  The rest of the posse was here, too – standing behind Neena, Rachel, and me. The posse was all scraped and bruised up. No serious injuries, but anybody looking at us could tell how near a thing it had been. My chest still hurt when I breathed in, and the shockwave had hit me hours ago.

  Rachel set her hand on my shoulder. But I looked Mr Stark right in the eye when I spoke. He’d taken his helmet off, but this was quick enough after the battle that he’d left the rest of his red-gold suit on. Maybe because he hadn’t had time to change. Maybe just to show it off.

  “We got your shipment,” Neena told him. “Most of it.”

  Mr Stark looked at her, eyebrow raised.

  “Half of it,” Neena said.

  He didn’t shift a muscle.

  “We got enough,” Neena said. “I checked the manifests and the surviving cargo myself. We got at least one of every weapon. That’s all your scientists should need to reverse engineer everything.”