Leg shots broke legs. Center-mass shots ended the conversation. Steve moved through the deck crew without changing his rhythm, working through the math of it with the same calm he brought to any problem where the variables were simple and the only question was speed.
He was on the last cluster when the sound behind him changed.
A boot on metal grating. A rifle being leveled.
Steve stopped. He didn't turn. He didn't need to — the angle was wrong for the shot to land cleanly, and not firing immediately was the enemy's first mistake. He was already calculating how to turn before the moment resolved itself on its own.
A single suppressed shot. The pirate behind him folded.
Rumlow came over the railing with his parachute harness half-off and his sidearm up. "You're welcome," he said, before Steve could say anything.
"Thank you."
"Seriously, what would you do without me?" Rumlow dropped the harness and moved up beside him. "The answer is 'fine, probably.'"
Natasha came up from the port side a moment later, falling into step as if she'd been there the whole time. "So. The new world. Any romantic prospects?"
"Let's get to the engine room first."
"I can walk and talk."
Steve kept moving. He thought briefly of Peggy Carter — of the voice on the other end of the phone that had aged into something thin and careful, a woman who recognized him but existed in a different frame of time now. The wish that had slipped through his hands at the tournament. Next time. A phrase that had started to feel like a habit.
"After the engine room," he said.
Natasha turned toward the lower decks without breaking stride. "Multitasking is a skill, Rogers."
In the kitchen, the mood had been bad for a while and was getting worse.
Two of Bartók's men were arguing the economics of the situation. The first had been pushing the idea since they'd boarded: "The Super Soldier Serum is back in S.H.I.E.L.D.'s hands. I told Bartók — that's worth more to us than three billion in cash. Use it ourselves, sell it on the right market, it doesn't matter. Bartók's already enhanced. This takes everyone else up with him."
The second wasn't convinced. "The boss wants a number he can split. You can't divide a syringe ten ways. And maybe your intelligence is wrong — maybe S.H.I.E.L.D. planted that information specifically to make us try something stupid."
"I'm telling you—"
"And I'm telling you the boss wants cash. To show S.H.I.E.L.D. we're serious, we kill one of them." He looked at the line of bound figures against the far wall. Stood up, leveled his weapon at the nearest hostage. "You want to eat a bullet, or you want to sit still?"
The hostage sat still.
The pirate kicked another one's feet out of the aisle. "Pull your legs in."
Sitwell kept his expression professionally neutral. He'd run field operations for years. He understood how rescue timelines worked. If S.H.I.E.L.D. was coming — and someone was coming, he could feel it in the quality of the silence outside this room — then the primary objective was to not become a problem for the extraction team. Don't stand out. Don't give anyone a reason to use you as a demonstration.
He looked at his bound wrists and waited.
Up on the bridge, Bartók had his phone out.
"Call Durand. Tell him to have the engines ready — the moment the rescue arrives, we move."
His man dialed. "Durand. Engines now."
The line dropped.
Bartók looked at the phone.
In the engine room, Durand had just set the receiver down when someone said "Hello, sailor" from directly behind him.
He turned around.
Natasha put him down in two moves and didn't slow down. The engine room had more people than the pre-mission count suggested, which told her the ground intelligence had been conservative. She worked through them quickly — dual pistols for the first line, then close-quarters for the ones who'd gotten inside her range. A flying kick cleared one. A wrist break disarmed another. She grabbed a length of pipe off a bracket and used it to end the third engagement, then tossed it.
"Engine room clear," she said into the channel.
Steve had Bartók's position from the window angle. He gave it ten more seconds while the rest of the team confirmed ready.
"Commandos in position."
"Natasha?" He waited. "Natasha, report."
"—many more than expected." Her voice came through clipped, mid-action. A thud. A short pause. "Engine room sorted."
"Everyone on my count. Three. Two. One."
The kitchen door went in simultaneously with the exterior charge. Rumlow's team took the room in seconds — two pirates down, a third spinning in confusion, weapon up with nobody to point it at. He was still turning when the door behind him came apart and Rumlow stepped through and shot him.
Sitwell watched the pirate drop and assembled an expression of appropriate relief. "I've always said — S.H.I.E.L.D. doesn't negotiate."
The dead pirate did not weigh in.
On the bridge, the reports had stopped.
Bartók listened to the silence on his radio and understood what it meant. He was already moving when his second shouted "Watch out—"
The window came in.
The shield hit the frame first, changed angle off the metal, and caught the man beside Bartók across the throat. The weapon lodged in the cabinet on the back wall with a solid thunk.
Steve came through the gap before the glass finished falling.
Bartók had the half-second advantage of being on his feet and used it to kick — a solid shot that caught Steve before he'd fully landed and sent him back a step. Then Bartók did the smart thing, which was turn and run rather than press the exchange.
Steve pulled the shield out of the cabinet, checked the deck through the broken window, and went after him.
They found each other on the mid-deck.
Bartók came out of a container gap and launched a flying kick from chest height. He wasn't at Steve's level — not close — but the man was genuinely enhanced, and the kick carried weight behind it. Steve got the shield up in time. The impact still moved him.
A second kick before he'd reset. Shield again. Moved him again.
The third came low. Steve pulled the shield down fast, angled it forward, and the boot connected with the rim. The rebound spun Bartók sideways. He recovered with a roll and came back up with the easy movement of someone who'd trained for exactly this kind of exchange.
"Nice shield," Bartók said. "But that's really all you've got, isn't it?"
Steve looked at him. Then he reached back and clipped the shield to his spine. Took his helmet off and set it on the railing.
Bartók's smile arrived a moment before he did.
The first punch from Bartók was fast. Steve's was faster, landing on Bartók's fist before the extension completed. The second exchange went the same way. On the third, Steve stepped inside the reach and caught him with a short elbow to the cheekbone. Bartók adjusted and went to kicks. Steve read the weight shift before the knee lifted and kicked first — shin to shin, hard enough that the sound carried.
Bartók went down on one leg.
He came back up anyway. Steve closed the distance, got a grip, used the momentum to drive him through a cabin door — wood and frame coming apart — and put him on the floor. One punch to the temple. Bartók stopped moving.
"Embarrassing," Natasha said.
Steve looked up. She was at the desk, a USB drive in the port, a progress bar moving across the screen.
"Rumlow needed backup."
"Rumlow was fine. I watched." She didn't look up from the screen. "This is more important."
"Our mission is hostage extraction."
"Your mission. I have additional tasking." The bar completed. She pulled the drive. "Saving as much as possible before the ship changes hands."
Steve crossed the room and grabbed her arm. "You put the whole operation at risk."
Natasha met his eyes and was about to respond when Bartók, on the floor behind them, moved.
The grenade left his hand before either of them fully processed that he was conscious. It hit the far wall and bounced once.
Steve let go of Natasha's arm, got his arm around her waist, and moved. Natasha put one shot through the window as they reached it — glass out, opening clear — and Steve went through it with her in his arms at approximately the wrong moment.
The detonation hit them in the back mid-air.
They came down hard in the adjacent space. Natasha hit the floor, arched her back, and breathed through her teeth. Even with her enhancements, a close-range explosion at that distance was not abstract pain.
"Okay," she said. "That part was my fault."
Steve was already on his feet, checking the opening they'd come through. Bartók's silhouette was visible for a moment on the exterior railing — one-legged, moving fast — and then it wasn't. A splash. Gone.
Steve turned back. Natasha was upright, rotating her shoulder carefully.
"All of it," he said.
She almost smiled.
With the hostages clear, the intelligence recovered, and Bartók in the water with a broken leg and no ship to come back to, there was nothing left to do on the Lemurian Star. The team assembled on deck, loaded the Quinjet, and Natasha lifted them off the water and pointed the nose toward New York.