Jemma Simmons leaned so close to the reinforced plasteel containment cylinder that her breath fogged the cold glass. She reached up, absentmindedly shoving a stray lock of brown hair behind her ear before adjusting her safety glasses.
"Alright, you beautiful, terrifying little anomaly," Simmons murmured, her fingers flying across the holographic diagnostic keyboard. "Let's see what makes you tick."
Inside the pressurized vacuum tube, the captured Lasher symbiote thrashed furiously. Stripped of Adrian Toomes and contained within a high-voltage electrostatic field, the alien was reduced to a roiling, basketball-sized mass of putrid green and blood-red sludge. It slammed against the glass, flattening into a jagged maw of translucent teeth, but the transparent aluminum didn't even vibrate.
The entire lower deck of the S.H.I.E.L.D. Globemaster was converted into an active quarantine zone. Per Coulson's strict isolation protocols, the science team couldn't move the specimen to an off-site laboratory.
Ten feet away, Leo Fitz practically had his nose pressed against his own workstation monitors. He was running a side-by-side molecular comparison, cross-referencing the writhing green mass in the tube with the microscopic, dormant symbiote fragments extracted from Spider-Man's blood sample.
Fitz aggressively scratched his scruffy chin, his brow furrowed in deep confusion. "This doesn't make any sense," he muttered, his thick Scottish accent clipping his vowels.
"What doesn't make sense?" Grant Ward asked.
The HYDRA-infiltrator was standing near the armory cages, his hands wrapped in heavy white athletic tape. He drove a brutal, practiced right hook into a hanging leather heavy bag. Thwack. The heavy chain rattled.
"The biological residue in Spider-Man's blood is completely inert," Fitz explained, tapping his stylus against the screen. "It's asleep. But this thing?" Fitz pointed a thumb over his shoulder at the thrashing green sludge. "The Lasher organism is actively broadcasting. It's emitting a highly specific, rhythmic electromagnetic frequency. Like a localized sonar ping."
Ward threw a heavy left jab. "You mean it's calling for backup?"
Fitz hesitated, shaking his head slowly. "I don't know. But if it's coordinating with the other escaped specimens, we have a massive tactical problem on our hands."
"Or, we just round them up and burn them out," Ward grunted. He stepped into a heavy roundhouse kick, but he misjudged the swing of the eighty-pound leather bag. The bag rebounded sharply, catching Ward squarely in the side of the head and knocking him a half-step sideways.
Simmons covered her mouth to hide a snort of laughter. Even Coulson, standing by the command table, allowed a faint, brief smirk to cross his usually stoic face.
Ward simply sighed, rolling his jaw to pop the joint back into place. "What? I'm just being practical. They're puddles of space-slime that melt when you play loud music or light a match. Let's just track the signal and put bullets in them."
"We can't track it horizontally," Fitz said, his fingers flying across his keyboard as he isolated the telemetry. "The decay rate on this electromagnetic frequency is absurdly fast. It shouldn't be able to travel more than a few miles before degrading into static. But... wait." Fitz leaned closer to the monitor. "It's not broadcasting outward. It's broadcasting straight up."
Simmons, Ward, and Coulson simultaneously tilted their heads, staring up at the thick metal ceiling of the cargo bay.
"So... what, they're calling the mothership?" Ward asked, unwrapping the tape from his knuckles.
"Spider-Man explicitly stated these creatures are defectors," Coulson noted, his arms crossed over his chest. "They fled their own kind. They aren't trying to phone home to an alien armada. He said their primary objective on Earth was to locate their missing god."
Coulson stepped away from the command table, his eyes narrowing as his legendary tactical mind began connecting the disparate threads.
"Fitz," Coulson said, his voice dropping into a low, commanding register. "Spider-Man told Director Fury a very specific piece of lore. He claimed the Symbiote God was cast down to Earth centuries ago after being struck by lightning."
Fitz blinked. "Right. Lightning."
"And what historical mythology centers entirely around a god of thunder and lightning?" Coulson asked.
"Norse mythology," Simmons gasped, her eyes widening. "Thor!"
Coulson turned back to the monitors. "Fitz. Can you isolate similar frequency bands on Earth? Something matching the rhythmic electromagnetic pulse this thing is putting out?"
"I... I can try," Fitz stammered, his fingers flying across the console. "I'm networking our receivers to the S.H.I.E.L.D. orbital research satellites. But like I said, the signal degradation is too severe. Unless the target is actively broadcasting back with a massive power source, we won't see it."
"Point the entire satellite array at Northern Europe," Coulson ordered. "Focus the data on the Scandinavian region."
Fitz didn't argue. He bypassed three levels of atmospheric security, hijacking the orbital lenses and angling them down toward the frozen expanse of the Nordic circle. He ran the symbiote's specific frequency through the global noise.
A sharp, repeating ping echoed from the console speakers.
A massive topographical map of the Scandinavian glaciers appeared on the main monitor. Deep beneath the ice, a massive, dormant, rhythmic pulse was blinking in bright red.
"It's not just a signal," Fitz whispered, staring at the screen in absolute awe. "It's a heartbeat."
Thousands of miles away, the shrill bell of Midtown High School echoed through the crowded hallways.
Peter Parker leaned his head against the cold, dented metal of his locker. The smell of floor wax, cheap teenage cologne, and cafeteria tater tots filled the air. He was desperately trying to memorize the periodic table of elements for his chemistry midterm when the encrypted burner phone deep in his backpack began to vibrate violently.
Peter glanced around. Seeing the hallway mostly clear, he ducked behind the open locker door and pressed the phone to his ear.
"Talk to me," Peter whispered.
"Hey, kid," Tony Stark's voice crackled through the tiny speaker, dripping with his usual, arrogant casualness. "S.H.I.E.L.D. just dug up something highly weird, and I figured I'd pass the memo along to the neighborhood watch."
Peter's grip tightened on the plastic casing of the phone. "I'm listening. What did they find?"
"A massive, biological electromagnetic signature buried deep in the ice up in Northern Europe," Tony said. I hear clinking glass in the background, like Stark was pouring himself a drink. "Matches the exact frequency of that green sludge monster you stuffed in a jar last night."
Peter's blood ran cold. The ambient noise of the high school hallway completely faded out.
"Wait," Peter breathed, his heart rate spiking. "They found Grendel? The symbiote dragon?"
"Whatever you want to call it," Tony replied dismissively. "S.H.I.E.L.D. invited the Avengers and Reed Richards' little blue quartet to take a trip upstate—way upstate—and check it out. Figure we'll thaw the overgrown lizard out, hit it with a concentrated repulsor blast, and nip this alien invasion in the bud."
"No, no, no, Mr. Stark, do not do that!" Peter practically yelled into the receiver, earning a weird look from a passing sophomore. Peter lowered his voice to a frantic hiss, his knuckles turning white. "You don't understand how their biology works!"
"Enlighten me, Shakespeare."
"Symbiotes are connected to a cosmic hive-mind!" Peter explained, his mind racing through the apocalyptic comic lore. "If you kill a symbiote, its consciousness doesn't just vanish. It instantly uploads back into the collective network. If you guys actually manage to kill Knull's dragon, the psychic feedback will act like an alarm clock. It will wake Knull up! You'll pull the King in Black's consciousness directly to Earth, and he'll bring an entire planet's worth of symbiotes with him!"
There was a long, agonizing pause on the other end of the line.
"Oh," Tony finally said. It was impossible to tell if the billionaire was actually taking the threat seriously, or just humoring him.
"Mr. Stark, I'm serious," Peter pleaded. "Do I need to skip geometry and catch a flight to Norway?"
"What? God, no," Tony scoffed, the casual arrogance returning in full force. "Don't you have a Spanish quiz or something? Listen to me, kid. You don't need to punch your ticket for this mission. Keep your boots in New York. Stop a mugging, help a cat out of a tree. The adults are going to go look at the frozen space-dragon. We've got this handled."
Click.
The line went dead.
Peter slowly lowered the phone, his mouth hanging slightly open in utter bewilderment. His spider-sense wasn't actively buzzing, which meant he wasn't in immediate physical danger, but a deep, nauseating pit of dread had settled in his stomach. The Avengers and the Fantastic Four were about to poke a sleeping, apocalyptic bear with a very short stick.
Peter shoved the burner phone back into his backpack and slammed his locker shut.
He couldn't sit in a classroom and wait for the sky to turn black. He needed to talk to someone who actually understood the symbiote hive-mind. He needed to consult an expert.
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