While the ERO teams moved in on Anya, Sharon turned her attention to the impossible problem of Dr. Thorne. He leaves no heat signature and no physical trace. Conventional tracking was useless. She stood before the main console, her mind running through the variables.
"He's a man in a state of quantum flux," she murmured to herself. "His file said the process was unstable."
"JARVIS," she commanded. "Run a deep data search. Cross reference all atmospheric and quantum level sensor data within a thousand mile radius of the last confirmed breach. Filter out all known background radiation and natural phenomena."
"Query understood," JARVIS replied instantly. "Specify new search parameters."
"I want you to search for a repeating pattern of micro scale and non- random quantum fluctuations. A signature that would indicate an artificial disruption of spacetime. Essentially, JARVIS, I'm looking for his footprints."
"An elegant hypothesis, Commander," JARVIS noted. "The query is complex, but I am processing it now."
For the next hour, the tactical display remained blank. The hunt was for a signal so faint it was statistically almost nonexistent.
Then, a tiny icon blinked into existence on the holographic map. It was followed by another and another, forming a straight line.
"Pattern detected," JARVIS announced. "A chain of correlated quantum fluctuations, appearing and dissipating in picoseconds, has been detected moving along a freight rail line in western Nebraska. Shall I display the projected path?"
A smile touched Sharon's lips. "Got you," she whispered.
On the ground in Kansas, the ERO teams closed in on the blacked out town's central power station.
Inside, Anya was cackling, drawing the raw power of the grid into her body, her hair standing on end, her skin crackling with blue energy. She was a living bomb, ready to detonate.
The first ERO operator fired a specialized grenade that detonated with a soft thump, releasing a cloud of ultra non-conductive carbon fiber dust.
The microscopic filaments instantly clogged the air, shorting out the ambient electrical charge she was trying to control.
As her power sputtered, a second operator fired. A net, woven from insulated materials, enveloped her.
A third shot followed, a dart containing a fast acting sedative. Anya collapsed, her power neutralized, her threat ended.
The entire operation was a textbook example of using superior technology and tactics to defeat raw power.
The final target, Dr. Thorne was the most dangerous. He was hiding inside a sealed container, phasing through the walls, believing himself to be invisible.
Bucky and Pietro were deployed for the final takedown. Pietro ran alongside the speeding train, easily keeping pace.
"He's in the third car from the front," he reported, his own enhanced senses able to perceive the faint shimmer of Thorne's phasing.
"On it," Bucky's voice came over the comm.
High above, a stealth jet matched the train's speed. Bucky landed on the roof of the train car. He moved to the front of the car and planted a shaped charge on the heavy steel.
Thorne, startled by the explosion. He phased down through the floor of the train and onto the tracks below, his ghostly form passing through the solid railroad ties as if they were smoke.
He started running, a shimmering distortion in the air, believing himself to be utterly untouchable.
He was fast. But he wasn't fast enough to outrun a thought.
Pietro was waiting for him a hundred yards down the track. He didn't try to punch him; that would be like punching air. He knew he couldn't physically interact with the phasing man.
As Thorne ran, believing he was escaping, Pietro moved. He was simply everywhere.
In the space of a single second, he ran a crisscrossing pattern around Thorne, planting a series of disc shaped devices into the ground on either side of the tracks.
They were "Phase Dampeners," experimental gadgets designed for this exact contingency.
Thorne saw the silver streak zipping around him but couldn't process what was happening. Before he could react, Pietro was a safe distance away and gave the activation signal.
"Now," Pietro said into his comm.
The discs hummed to life, projecting a high-energy field between them. The field was designed to disrupt the unstable quantum state that allowed him to phase.
For a critical nanosecond, as Thorne passed through the center of the field, his intangibility failed. His quantum state was forcibly collapsed.
In that instant, Bucky's attack came from above. He had leaped from the train. He struck the ground in front of him with the force of a falling cannonball.
The impact of the advanced metal on the earth created a localized shockwave. The ground buckled violently.
Thorne, solid for just that moment and caught completely off balance, was thrown from his feet, his head cracking hard against a railroad tie. He was dazed, his concentration broken.
It was all the time they needed. Before Thorne could recover and attempt to de phase, he was hit by three separate ERO operators firing specialized 'stasis' rifles… weapons designed to lock a target's quantum state in its current form.
Dr. Thorne, the man who could walk through walls, was now frozen in place.
Back in the Sentinel Complex, the red alerts on the map blinked out, one by one, replaced by green "captured" icons.
The entire operation, from the initial breach to the capture of the final target, had taken less than six hours.
Five of the world's most dangerous enhanced fugitives had been hunted down and captured across half a continent, with zero civilian casualties and a near total media blackout.
Aryan watched the final report come in, a look of quiet satisfaction on his face.
He looked at Sharon, who was coordinating the transport of the prisoners, at Pietro and Bucky, who were giving their after action reports from the field. He looked at the council members around him.
"Chancellor," Aryan said, turning to the Leader. "Inform the transport teams. The Phantom Zone is ready for its first inmates."