Industrious: Engineering Marvels - Chapter 12 (Patreon)

In the quiet moments between sleeping and waking, when the world seemed to hold its breath, Steve Rogers wondered if the life he now found himself living was just a fever dream brought on by one too many knocks to the head in back alley fights.

It felt that way, often enough, at least.

After all, he'd gone from a scrawny normal guy from the streets of Brooklyn to being a dancing monkey on the national stage to leading an elite strike force fighting an occult super-science division of the most evil state to have ever existed.

He'd also gained a foot of height, a few dozen pounds of pure muscle, and... well, a few inches somewhere else, too.

Which I really wish Bucky wouldn't have brought up.

It was awkward enough suddenly being a supersoldier just on the merits of his everyday appearance and dealing with the looks of envy and lust from men and women, respectively. Well, okay, mostly respectively. Having Bucky rib on his other enhancements in the showers was a few steps past that. Especially when it felt wrong to bust Bucky's balls over the same possibility.

The effect of whatever variant of the serum those monsters had forced on him was much more subtle than what had been used on Steve. It had taken a complete once-over with trained medical staff to pick out the changes, but they'd been there. Bucky was three inches taller than when he'd sat for his exam in boot camp. His muscle mass had picked up by more than ten percent as well. There were a litany of other small changes, like his night vision and hearing being several degrees better as well.

The problem wasn't the improvements, though.

It was the sheer violation of it.

Steve had gone into Project Rebirth willingly, with both eyes wide open. He knew the risks. Dr. Erskine, General Philips, Captain Carter, and two JAG guys had sat him down and had a long talk about the potential risks.

Bucky had been dragged from a cell after being worked half to death and strapped to a table before being injected with God knows what.

Steve thought Bucky would have been taking the whole thing a lot worse if it weren't for Ray.

The other young man was an enigma at the best of times, so often hanging at the edge of conversations and gatherings with a slight grin on his face as he nursed a bottle of some of the strongest stuff the bar had. It wasn't any secret that he and Dumdum had a pissing match going on, but as long as it didn't get out of hand Steve wasn't going to come down on it. Men dealt with stress in different ways and both of them were careful not to cross certain lines.

Personally, and he'd never tell another soul, but he thought Dougan was scared of Ray.

Really and truly scared of the younger man who walked like a jungle predator and displayed the kind of casual grace of a seasoned killer right beside the unquestioned excellence of a high-tier academic. Dougan wasn't an idiot, none of his men were.

Well, mostly. At least not any worse than normal army grunts.

But they knew not to seriously poke dangerous things. And they knew Ray was dangerous. For as much shit as the team gave him for looking like a kid, none of them had made him hit the mat yet. The way he fought was a kind of effortless fluidity that took your breath away, and Steve hadn't even seen him in real combat yet. Bucky had, though, and the testimony he'd given a few drinks in had been telling.

Even Logan and Victor, two of the hardest hard-asses he'd ever met, knew better than to truly start shit with Ray. There was an unspoken respect between the brothers and the time traveler, which made him believe the other two men were more than met the eye as well. You weren't simply given the kind of wariness a young man like Ray treated you with, you had to earn it.

He'd even asked Ray about it, casually enough.

The other man had laughed and shook his head, then replied, “Not my monkeys, not my circus, not my story to tell.”

Which implied he knew something about Victor and Logan from his life in the future. Personal information like that, though, was one of the few things Ray didn't speak at length on. He actively avoided it, in fact. Steve knew that Ray had some dirt on J. Edgar Hoover, for instance, but didn't know what that dirt was. Outside of that restriction, though, Ray was happy to speak at length on any subject under the sun, and often did.

History, politics, economics, criminology, anthropology, archaeology, ecology, technology...

At one point Steve had gotten curious how the young man seemed to know so much and asked him about it. The concept of an 'internet' television service that let you pick your own content and allowed you to swing between instructional materials on virtually any subject, to endless reels of cute baby animals playing with each other, to extreme political rants seemed more than a little nightmarish and possibly dystopian, though. The more frightening part of that story had been when Ray had chuckled and agreed, telling him to imagine a content service run by a Robber Baron that you allowed to live, rent-free, in your pocket all day, every day.

Bucky, staring open-mouthed at the time traveler, had asked point-blank, “Why the hell would anyone let them do that?”

Ray had shrugged. “Mostly for the porn.”

Which... Steve could admit, privately, he understood. It always bugged him how holier-than-thou politicians could be when ranting about prurient interests or excessive vices one day and then be caught in a scandal about the same thing the next. If there was a way to secretly get any kind of nudie mags and dirty films you wanted delivered to your door without anyone knowing, most people would turn the other cheek and ignore it after putting up a token protest.

Steve shook his head, pushing away the thought and digressing back to his original point.

The entire team knew that Ray's life was bullshit of some fashion. They were each prodding the man to see what fell out in their attempts. Even if the answer so far wasn't much. He was simply too intelligent, too widely-read, and too clever to be the backwoods country boy he portrayed himself as. That said, it wasn't as though Ray tried to hide he was lying all that well, either. The suggestion of, 'talking to the General,' if they thought he was some kind of double-agent was telling enough that the men of the platoon had quickly figured out Ray was a double-agent.

Just, one sent by the American government, not a foreign one.

Ray's saving grace was his closeness with Steve and Bucky, though. He was treated with suspicion, yes, but tolerated because he'd saved both of their lives. So while Ray might be a shady dealer, he was their shady dealer.

Steve hoped that feeling would cement itself after this mission.

“Really think they're going to pull this off?” Jim Morita asked as he looked through his pair of binoculars.

Next to him, Bucky chuckled under his breath. “They've still got five minutes until go-time. I wouldn't worry.”

Steve hummed, nodding. “We should get ready. Have you checked over the jeeps?”

Morita nodded, visibly putting aside his disbelief. “Yeah, would have liked to have had those for the trip over instead of having to hoof it.”

Bucky shook his head. “They're all stolen kraut shit, so they're good for the assault but the resistance can't get caught with them outside of an operation. That means no taking them into town.”

Morita grunted, opening his mouth to reply-

-when the Hydra base lit up in a wash of fire and light, the noise of the explosion reaching them a second later. Then, before they even had time to move, another pair of explosions rocked the landscape. Steve watched, stunned by the blast for a moment as blocks of concrete, bodies, and hunks of machinery were blasted across the open field before them. Then, blinking the light out of his eyes from the fireball, he stood and turned to the men surrounding the jeeps. “Let's go! Go-Go-Go!”

In moments the vehicles were started and, instead of breaking into two groups to attack as they'd planned, Steve made a call in the heat of the moment to order the group of five cars and one flatbed straight forward down the road.

“Think that's a good enough distraction, huh?” Bucky joked, raising his rifle as he took potshots against the nearby checkpoint. The shots weren't enough to hit anyone, but Bucky could put enough bullets in the building to stop anyone from coming out.

“That was the general idea, yeah,” Steve called back over the roar of the engine as they rammed through the gate. Out of the corner of his eye, his now-superhuman sight picked up the momentary glint of a fruit-sized orb falling through the air.

A few seconds later and the ensuing explosion confirmed his guess. Absently, he pegged the thrower as Dougan. The man had a certain love-affair with heavy weapons and explosives.

“Take out the entire base!” Steve shouted over the oncoming din of men screaming and fires roaring. “We can't afford to waste any time!”

Those weren't quite the orders General Philips had given him, but he couldn't bring himself to repeat those word-for-word. Ray had explained, at length, how Arnim Zola had started Hydra back up stateside and corrupted the US government from within. It had been utterly horrifying to listen to the story on tape, to learn that an alternate future version of him had to fight these same monsters on the homefront and stop them from using the cold calculus of electronic programming to predict who would cause them problems. All to rain death from above in order to take over the country.

America wasn't perfect. Even without the things that Ray had told him, he knew that. You didn't get the shit beaten out of you by jerks for nearly two decades and still believe the world was all sunshine and rainbows, but... there were good people, and they were putting up a fight against the bad ones, still. Steve had to believe that, at least.

So, 'We don't have time!' would be generally understood as, 'We can't take prisoners.'

I'm sorry, it has to be this way. We're a commando team, we can't drag dozens of people back, even if they weren't so dangerous. I'll go to confession after this, I promise.

Swallowing the bitter apology, he made his peace with himself as he pulled the trigger on a man running from the flames, his clothing still on fire. Steve shouted more orders as his men unloaded, leveling their guns on people emerging from the building as they attempted to get the inferno under control.

“Jesus!” Dougan shouted. “What the fuck did those assholes do, set the gas tanks on fire!?”

Steve opened his mouth to shout in reply before the sound of rat-tat-tat gunfire caught his attention as he leveraged his shield against-

Bucky scoffed. “I think they got the armory, too!”

A man behind him, Nick Fletcher if he remembered correctly, laughed briefly before raising his rifle and, after a moment's hesitation, pulled the trigger. “How are we supposed to find Ray, Logan, and Victor?”

Morita snorted as they ducked behind some rubble as more ammunition cooked off and a few men carrying guns began to stagger out in good order. “If they can do this, I think they can take care of themselves!”

“We press forward around the left flank! The fire's not bad there and they'll be regrouping anyway!” Steve shouted over the confusing din, waving a hand and pointing towards the left.

“Get a move on!” Bucky shouted shortly afterward, running in a crouched position along a line of wreckage as he led the-

“JESUS FUCK!”

Steve wasn't a man to normally take the Lord's name in vain, but he silently agreed with whoever shouted that as a-a-

-as something broke free from one of the lesser-damaged portions of the building.

“What in God's name is that?” Another one of his men shouted, and Steve lunged forward to raise his shield against a sharp, claw-like leg as it threatened to spear the soldier who'd spoken.

It was... about twelve feet tall, twice that of the tallest of his men. Its body was covered in a kind of jagged gray scales that reminded him more of rock than anything alive. In between the plates, though, there was this kind of pulsing mix of purple tissue and gold orbs stuck into hollow sockets. He felt its attention as, horrifyingly, several of those gold orbs blinked and Steve realized they had to be eyes of some kind. The most immediate concern, though, was the long, sinuous tail-like structure which hung underneath the bulbous body suspended by eight claw-tipped legs like some kind of spider or crab.

What hung below it, though, was obviously some kind of... stinger? It glistened in the light of the fire, swaying with a mind of its own as it coiled back to-

“Kuzuryusen!”

There was a flash of motion, almost too fast for even Steve to follow, but the image of ten swords was burned into his mind's eye as Ray darted into the monster's range before striking in a viciously-fast attack. The blades connected and instantly faded from existence as the creature shrieked from an orifice Steve couldn't-and didn't want to-see. Still, Ray appeared to have accomplished his mission as the massive beast was sent tumbling as some of the blows disoriented it and threw it off-balance enough that it fell to the ground in a scrambling panic.

“What the hell is that!?” Steve shouted, turning to an evenly breathing Ray as he watched the beast with a focused gaze.

“Kill monster now, talk later!” Ray barked. “It spews acid from its tail-stinger, so don't let it point it at you! My sword is only chipping its hide, so try to aim for joints and weak spots!”

“Right!” Steve called back, forcing himself to focus on the threat as well. “Where are Logan and Vic?”

“Still inside! We split up after the thing broke out! Seems it likes me best!” Ray shouted back, then darted forward and raised his blade to parry a randomly-stabbing claw-foot as the creature attempted to right itself with another horrible screech. “Goddamn comic-book Nazi shenanigans!”

“What are you idiots waiting for!?” Dougan shouted over the horrible screaming. “Shoot the fucking thing!”

Insubordinate or not, Steve realized that Dougan probably had a point as he tucked his shield over his back and brought out his rifle.

As he unloaded shot after shot of ineffective gunfire on the thing, Steve saw Ray fluidly sheathe his blade out of the corner of his eyes and pull the collapsed bow Howard had made their mutual friend off his shoulder. Unfurling it with a trick release, Ray was bringing it to bear just as the creature screamed one more time before rolling itself right-side up.

Steve felt baleful intent wash over them as Ray drew back the string and took a single deep breath. Watching the tail-stinger lash about, he pulled the trigger on his last round before dropping the rifle and going for his shield and sidearm. “Ray!”

The tail swiveled and, pointing towards the pair of them-

Steve leaped, tackling Ray as a jet of some foul substance sprayed where they had been standing a moment ago. Distantly, he saw the arrow fly in the instant before he made contact with the other man, a hint of a yellow stripe standing out against the chaotic firefight and burning base in the background.

What were they? Howard said red was a flare, blue were grapples, white were electro-something, yellow were-

“Duck!” Steve heard himself shout the order a moment before the thought fully formed. Sure enough, there was a shrieking cry from the monster as the arrow impacted directly into one of the gold eyes. That was the last thing Steve saw as he brought his shield up and rolled himself and Ray to optimize their meager cover.

In the wake of his scream, another resounding explosion shook the battlefield, this one accompanied by an uncomfortably meaty aftershock as the creature staggered away, it's acid-stinger and one of its legs blown off.

Below him, he finally registered Ray chuckling, grinning like a madman. “Broke into the wrong goddamn rec-room, didn't you, ya' bastard?”

“It's not dead yet!” Bucky shouted out as he and Ray hauled themselves to their feet, the latter still laughing. “Grenades!”

Ray shook his head, even as a heavy German vehicle rolled out of the building and through one of the remaining walls before panning its gun-

-Steve tensed to duck, Ray pulling another arrow-

Before the massive barrel of the tracked armor, some kind of Dicker, he thought, passed right over them before sighting on the still-staggering creature and opening fire with a massive burst of sound and displaced air. Almost immediately, the beast exploded into a variety of small chunks and the battlefield was relatively calmer as the Allied platoon gave a ragged cry of victory, still stunned at the sudden appearance of a giant monster.

Just as Steve was about to order attention back to the Dicker, though, the top popped open and Victor sprang out with a wave of his hairy hands. “Oi! Don't shoot us after we just saved you, assholes!”

“About fucking time!” Ray shouted back, twirling his arrow before sticking it back in the quiver and collapsing his bow. “What the fuck took you so long!?”

Victor laughed from his perch atop the tracked gun. “Had to find something bigger than your puny sword to hit it with! There was a second vehicle bay we missed!”

As if on cue, another series of explosions rang out, shaking the very ground beneath their feet.

Ray and Victor shared a look, then burst out laughing again.

“Alright men, let's get this finished up!” Steve shouted, redirecting their attention. “Form up and sweep what's left of the base! Keep an eye out for any more of those things, too!” After a moment’s thought, Steve turned to the young blonde private. “Fletcher! Get some pictures of that thing! Dougan, go with him and make sure it’s dead!”

Captain America sighed as his men hurried to follow his command, Victor rising from the innards of the machine as Logan followed his brother out, a bottle of something alcoholic in his hands that Steve decided he didn't want to know the providence of. Instead, he set about interrogating the three men on exactly what the hell had happened.

~~~

Oh Steve... you sweet summer child, you.  The madness is just getting started.

And more violence!  Another chapter of almost pure combat!  Enjoy!

Next chapter will be something of a cleanup for this little arc and moving into a breather before going after another Hydra base.

In terms of what's getting the next chapter, I'll be posting a new update to the Code Geass quest either late Sunday or early Monday.  Hopefully sooner, but I don't know about the timetable for that.

Regardless, I hope everyone has a great weekend and know that all your help is really appreciated!