Intertwine

56 - Wrestle With That Alligator

Alina nodded. "It must be how they can pass it onto more than one person."

"It's clearly the putting it into someone else that's causing them issues." I looked at where the voice had come from. Bruce Banner was walking into the room, papers in his hands. I hadn't seen him since he'd turned into the Hulk. I still felt the anger, all around him, but it was diluted. It was as though he had a choke hold on it and wasn't letting it go. "I've been looking at the science of how they're able to do that, and I think I'm close. The information I need is in their labs though, it's in their diffuser. The memory chip Ro got for us is useful, but I'd need to take it apart. There are probably other things they use as well."

Nobody spoke as Bruce seated himself on a couch, passing his findings to Tony Stark, who began flipping through them. "This technology would be advanced." Mr Stark muttered. "And expensive."

"When Tony says something is expensive," Rhodey looked round at us, eyes wide for emphasis, "you can bet your ass it's expensive."

"How did they get the funding?" Natasha asked.

"The two people who might know aren't here right now." Wanda said. "Roara had a long talk with Gunn, and Loki viewed their operations for months."

"Loki wasn't allowed much information." Alina explained. "He might know, but he might not."

Steve leant forwards, "Well they aren't here right now so that's not a route we can take. That's got to be our next mission. Finding out how they have funding, where it's coming from."

"Even if we stop their funding, and stop their ability to produce and transfer more power," Vision speculated, "we will probably have to still face the agents that they've already put through the process. We don't know how many that is."

"So we need to find out about funding, work out how large their organisation is, anything else?" Alina sighed. "Invite them round for dinner? Reduce Tony's ego? Get Steve to listen to One Direction?"

"It's not that impossible." Bruce insisted.

"Hey." Steve gave Alina a side-eye. "I listened to One Direction! I just wasn't a fan."

"Bruce, we get it, you want to take them down, we all do, but maybe this approach isn't the best." Rhodey crossed his arms.

"What else do you expect us to do Rhodey? They're always one step ahead when it comes to everything else." Alina countered. "I'm not saying Steve's wrong. I'm just saying it's going to be hard. They're secret, we have no way in. But, God I'm going to hate myself for saying this, Steve's right. Now we need plan, a proper plan. We can't just keep trying to attack them as they come up, waiting for their move. We need to write down everything we know about their leadership, low level officers, tactics that we've already seen. We need Aditi to write down her experiences with Gunn, we need to work out how they found her, how they found the others. My hunch is they have a way into our system. We can't keep going on the defensive. We need to get one step ahead of them." She rubbed her fingers against her temples. I could feel her mind working through her emotions, cutting through everything else, like a sharp knife moving through a mist. 

"Steve." She looked up, Steve looked back. "Do we still have that map of hierarchy we found at the house they near the building site, the one they took Roara from, there was a Cog listed right?"

"There was. And we do." He replied.

"Right I want that. I want all footage we have of their sites. I want to go back to England and get all we can from that house, search it top to bottom, whatever they've left there, if anything, we take it and we analyse it. I'm talking fingerprints, photos, dust particles. The fucking lot. I want to go back to where they had the diffuser too, in Austria."