There were plenty of jokes like "toilet paper procurement department" and similar nonsense, but Victoria Hand didn't care. Upon receiving the order, she immediately sprang into action. Perhaps the shadow of betrayal had never truly lifted—her actions were swift and never revealed the isolation and desperation she felt during HYDRA's rebellion. There was no need for excessive probing; she quickly selected her deputy to carry out the plan. She had been waiting for this day for a very long time.
From the very day Solomon officially recruited her, the monarch of the Eternal City had revealed this astonishing secret to her. That day—her day of resurrection—was when Victoria Hand first felt just how heavy the monarch's secrets truly were.
She spent years preparing, constantly verifying that none of her subordinates had been replaced, and ensuring she could launch an assault at any moment. The under-manned Black Armored Interrogators couldn't arrest all the Skrulls immediately, because not all of the Skrulls masquerading as loyal S.H.I.E.L.D. agents had been tucked into those joke departments. For the first time, Victoria Hand willingly donned the ornate black powered armor adorned with the golden hand insignia, personally leading a special squad from the First Secret Battalion of Fimbulwinter—armed to the teeth—along with her most trusted agents, to apprehend those on the list.
"Thirty seconds to rendezvous with the Royal Guard," she said as she pulled the trigger of her explosive pistol. Alien flesh and blood splattered across the corridor's walls and ceiling in the wake of the blast. She stepped over another corpse without hesitation—the sheer weight of her stomp crushed the Skrull's body into a mess of meat pulp and bone fragments. The Wakandan researchers who had been shouting moments earlier fell completely silent. It was unclear whether they were shocked by Victoria Hand's ruthless decisiveness or by their colleague's true identity—either way, no one dared to protest now.
Victoria Hand didn't care if these Wakandans would tattle to research department director Shuri. This time, she had been authorized to kill Wakandans. No one could stop her actions; only a path too littered with corpses to tread could halt her. "We must carry out a thorough cleansing," her voice buzzed through her helmet's speaker and respirator grille. "Impose the monarch's will with blood and gunpowder."
"I made some biochemical modifications to those bear cubs—they'll grow bigger, stronger, and smarter. Their daily meat consumption is already terrifying. I'm thinking about becoming a bear cavalryman myself, as long as they stop ruining the lawns…" Solomon and Stephanie took thirty-two minutes and forty-six seconds to complete their inspection of the Skrull settlement. They didn't make contact with the surveillance agents, instead completing the operation from the blind spots of those agents' sight lines. Solomon didn't trust the surveillance agents unless they were cleared of suspicion. Before the arrival of the soldiers, two agents were publicly assigned to replace the surveillance agents, while an assassin was covertly dispatched to ensure the handover went smoothly.
The inspection results matched satellite reconnaissance reports: the Skrulls had cleared out land in the forest and established bases. These bases were constructed according to S.H.I.E.L.D. bunker standards, with ordinary concrete buildings above ground. Even a fool could guess that those seemingly mundane concrete buildings were riddled with passages leading to the bunkers. Solomon had seen more than once the flicker of gun muzzle flashes behind unoccupied windows. One-way reports from surveillance agents confirmed that the Skrulls were already preparing for war, and Solomon verified the authenticity of some of this intelligence.
These aliens seemed to believe they had a right to live on Earth.
If an alien species could dedicate itself to the future of humanity, Solomon believed an alliance wouldn't be out of the question. But considering they had once killed humans and assumed their identities, believed Earth belonged to the Skrulls, and factoring in their malicious habits and tendency to infiltrate and manipulate other species' societies, the Skrulls were no longer candidates for any form of alliance.
The Skrulls' weapons and technology had already been extracted through the Black Armored Interrogators' methods, and technical personnel had evaluated and reverse-engineered their weapons as well as technologies left behind on the space station. The logistics department had also conducted combat loss assessments, but Solomon still favored simple and effective tactics. He didn't want his soldiers entering the bunkers to engage in close-quarters combat with the Skrulls—otherwise, he wouldn't have insisted on bringing the Gustav-class siege cannons.
Veterans' lives were too valuable; the Eternal City still needed time to train new soldiers. Their lives were far more valuable than those of the Skrulls. So Solomon chose to spend money—to use numbers in financial games to preserve the lives and experience of veterans, to buy time for rookies to grow using digits earned through artificial intelligence—first with bunker-busting bombs to crack open the concrete, granite, and alloy-plated rooftops of the bunkers, followed by carpet bombing with siege cannons, fire support from assault transports, and finally, mechanized infantry would move in for the final sweep. There would be no prisoners in this operation; Maya Hansen already had more than enough experimental materials, and the Eternal City already had all the intel it needed.
This was a judgment—a judgment upon the crimes these Skrulls had committed against humanity, a judgment for the lives these green-skinned parasites had personally snuffed out.
There would be no more life—only ashes.
Solomon hoped the Sisterhood would go about their operations a bit more gently, and also that the U.S. military wouldn't be so tightly wound.
The North Island Naval Air Station in California was extremely important. The Sisterhood's operation would inevitably trigger backlash, and it was possible that the McClellan Command Post—also located in California—would respond reactively. Solomon didn't want to start a world war, so he had already arranged for a spokesperson to immediately claim responsibility for the attack after it occurred. According to the ideologies proposed by non-governmental organizations funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, those extreme environmental groups declared that "humanity must go extinct." Their actions embodied slogans like "destruction is the best solution" or "the most well-meaning disclosure," making them the perfect scapegoat for a terrorist attack.
The group claiming responsibility for this attack would be a completely fictional extremist organization. The announcement would state that the main motives for the attack were environmental protection, vegetarianism, and animal rights. Simultaneously, it would declare support for the rights of minorities, women in the workplace, the LGBTQ+ community, non-binary, agender, and gender-fluid individuals—even for, goddammit, armed attack helicopters—fifty-six genders in total. It would also claim that the U.S. military was insufficiently diverse, insufficiently vegetarian, and insufficiently feminist, and would demand that the military recruit soldiers and generals in accordance with the above values.
Such a news story would keep the American political scene and general public busy arguing for years.
Even before the planned time of the operation, this fabricated organization had already received money from the National Endowment for Democracy.
Not much, but it was real—and this greatly surprised Stephanie, who had deliberately stayed hands-off to avoid suspicion. However, the payee was fake, the organization was fake, and even the reports and office buildings submitted to the foundation were all fabricated by an AI manipulating the internet. When the intelligence department traced the remittance further, they found that the money given to this fictional organization by the NED originated from a newly-emerging lab-grown meat company.
But that wasn't the full amount—less than fifty percent of it actually made it to the fake group's account. There was also a transfer from Wall Street. The owner of that company had once studied at Columbia University and may have even been involved in the Frankfurt School or Skull and Bones. Yet even that payment didn't fully go to the fake organization—only thirty percent, and it required sending an auditor every six months for review.
This made Solomon lament just how pervasive corruption was in the American government—skimming off even this kind of money.
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