The Ultimates: Against All Enemies by Alex Irvine Page B

and three soldiers. The Triskelion had an irregular hole in its side sixty feet wide and extending up through the third floor over the loading dock where the explosion had occurred.
    The fires were almost out, and already the grim work of recovering remains had begun. Choppers circled overhead. New York City fire department boats had come and gone, their offers of help rebuffed for security reasons. Now came cleanup, and the painstaking reconstruction of how this had happened. Except Steve already knew the important thing: two Chitauri suicide bombers had left a smoking hole in the Triskelion, sixteen families grieving, and SHIELD with a black eye whose consequences none of them would know until the media vultures had finished picking over the corpses. And if Tony Stark's screeners had been installed at the loading dock, none of it would have happened in the first place.
    Before coming down here to work with the fire and cleanup crews, Steve had replayed the security tapes. Frame: the boat eases into the dock. Frame: a forklift comes out to start offloading pallets. Frame: one of the boat's crew says something to the forklift operator. Frame: the crewman hops on the forklift and picks up a pallet. As he turns it around, another member of the boat's crew hoists a stack of three large totes.
    Right there, Steve thought. No man can lift three of those when they're loaded, especially not a skinny fifty-year-old, which was what the man had been. Correction: what the man had looked like. Frame: the two crewmen stop for a brief conversation with Master Sergeant Antonio Cullen, who grins and waves them through.
    I can reconstruct that one, Steve thought. Hey, this isn't on the manifest. Yeah, I know, it wasn't scheduled till tomorrow, but common carriers, who knows when anything's going to get anywhere
    ... and now Sergeant Cullen was dead.
    Then a different camera. Frame: the forklift stops about ten feet inside the intake door. The man with the totes—the Chitauri with the totes, Steve corrected himself—drops them and rips the top off one. The forklift driver loosens a cable from inside the shrink-wrap holding the boxes together on the pallet. The two of them bend over a small black box.
    The view dissolves into static.
    From the outside camera: Sergeant Cullen and four of the contractors hired to move freight around inside the Triskelion are annihilated in a stop-motion bloom of fire threaded with black smoke. The camera washes out. When its light meters stabilize, the dock area is in ruins. Small fires burn on the boat, one slowly catching on the clothing of an unconscious or dead crew member. The hole blown in the side of the Triskelion has cross-sectioned three floors. Papers from upstairs offices flutter out over the Upper Bay, wafted by the scorching updraft from the fire burning in the intake warehouse. A woman lies dead near her desk, one of her arms dangling over the edge of the exposed floor. Major Christina Akinbiye. Steve had poured her a cup of coffee three weeks before in the Triskelion cafeteria. After that he couldn't look at it anymore. When he'd gotten downstairs, response teams were already reporting nonhuman remains.
    Some of which he was still cleaning up. Steve gritted his teeth and let slip a curse that Gail would have slapped his face for.
    Since nobody knewwhat the hell would happen if a seagull happened to fly by and pick up a snack of Chitauri tissue, every cell needed to be collected and accounted for. They were still, almost a year later, doing final cleanup on the Arizona site. Getting the Triskelion shipshape wouldn't be nearly as big a job, which wasn't much consolation since it sure wasn't the kind of job for which Steve was suited. But he was here and General Fury wasn't, and Banner was still locked up downstairs until they put him in front of a firing squad. So instead of hunting down the aliens, Steve was picking up pieces of them. It wasn't his job. He was wasted here.
    "It's like a Willie and