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Inside the Humvee, the air felt solid with pressure.
Natasha sat in the back row, gaze drifting—apparently idle—over the driver: a plain-faced white male, eyes locked in, movements crisp.
But she'd seen that face.
She slid a look to the co-pilot.
Same face.
Same hairline, same bridge of the nose—down to the shape of the earlobes.
A cold weight dropped into her stomach.
Coincidence?
No.
When the convoy halted and more soldiers dismounted from the other vehicles, the thought shattered.
One face. Two. Ten…
Every soldier wore the same features.
As if cast from a single mold—expressions, motions, even that glacial aura they carried were near-identical.
A word flashed through Natasha's mind.
Bioweapons.
She dismissed it at once.
These men were too present—too alive—to be mindless puppets.
That left one possibility—one far more chilling.
Clones.
An entire unit built from clones.
Cold climbed up her spine. She glanced at Coulson and May, finding both already grim, both having clocked the same horrific truth.
"Mission parameters need a hard rewrite," Coulson murmured, voice iron-flat. "He's deeper than the file suggests."
May said nothing, simply tightened her grip on her weapon.
Felix and the man called 6547 stood waiting ahead.
"Move," Felix said, turning away.
They had no choice but to follow.
They crossed barren sand and broken stone, silence broken only by their boots whispering over grit.
Twenty minutes later, they rounded a massive rock formation—
—and all three S.H.I.E.L.D. aces stopped dead.
A sprawling, ultramodern military base sprawled across the desert floor, as if it had grown there from steel and shadow.
Gunmetal structures threw back a cold sheen under the lights. Arrays of unknown antennas and sensors rose like a forest of steel. Automated turret carriages slid soundlessly on tracks, red scan-beams combing for threat.
On a distant strip, several vertical-lift craft sat like props out of near-future sci-fi.
Coulson's breath stuttered.
He'd wager his Captain America autograph that this place outclassed any U.S. forward installation he knew—maybe even certain S.H.I.E.L.D. black sites.
To build this—out here, in the Empty Quarter—took manpower, materiel, and money on an astronomical scale.
How?
He forced himself calm, drinking in everything—layout, fields of fire, radar geometries. Every detail was solid gold.
Natasha, meanwhile, was staring past the base—toward a deeper darkness off its flank.
A valley. A vast, shadow-choked cut in the earth.
Her instincts screamed.
This site choice was wrong.
The base sat on open ground—easier to build, harder to defend.
That valley? Narrow throat, high walls—nature's fortress. Any competent commander would anchor there.
Whoever built this wasn't incompetent. The engineering alone proved it.
Unless…
They didn't want to be there.
They couldn't be there.
Why?
Natasha's pulse quickened.
There was only one answer.
Something was in that valley.
Something more critical—or more dangerous—than any defensible position.
This base wasn't for garrison.
It was a watchpost. A prison.
She relayed the read with micro-signals. May and Coulson caught on at once.
They looked again at Felix, his back limned in the base's cold light, his silhouette growing stranger, heavier, more unknowable.
A shared glance passed between the three.
May's lips barely moved. "Have the trailing unit probe the valley."
Direct. Correct. Better to see than guess. Their tailing strike team was still staged kilometers out—more than enough for a scout run.
Coulson didn't answer. He fell a half-step back, one hand slipping into his pocket—fingers flicking across a micro-encrypted transmitter.
A short, silent burst went out:
[Team C — Objective: Valley behind base (flank). Task: Recon. Priority: Alpha.]
He straightened a heartbeat later, face unreadable.
6547's voice cut cleanly through the air. "Stay with the Commander."
No edge. No anger. Just a prompt—a prompt that felt like an order etched in iron.
All three agents reined in every extra motion and closed up fast.
Felix and 6547 led them to the base's face.
A slab of alloy—absurdly thick—parted without a sound, revealing a corridor of light and steel.
Metallic walls, bright overhead strips—bright as day, yet stripped of life.
Patrol squads passed them by.
Every face was 6547's face.
Unblinking, perfectly drilled, moving with the eerie unity of a synchronized program. The hairs along Natasha's neck prickled.
They reached a freight elevator—large enough to swallow a tactical buggy. Felix stepped in; the rest followed.
6547 keyed a long, intricate string, then iris and fingerprint.
The car sank smoothly.
Dash marks on the panel ticked past—-1, -5, -10…
Coulson kept count.
When it settled at -25, his heart cinched tight.
Two hundred fifty meters down.
Deep enough to shrug off most bunker-busters.
The doors opened on a cavern of glass and machinery.
They stepped into a command gallery overlooking a vast cylindrical shaft—an abyss braced by concentric gantries. Suspended rigs hung over a black void, studded with winches, arms, and articulated cranes. Along the gallery walls: armored viewports into sealed labs and staging bays, each buzzing with life—researchers in slate-gray, engineers piloting remote manipulators, D-Class in orange moving under barked instructions.
And running silently through it all: the Worker-Ant drones—sleek-bodied engineering bots gliding on rails or skimming on thrusters, arms blooming into saws, nozzles, and prongs as tasks demanded.
A holomap bloomed from the central dais—terrain contours of the valley Natasha had marked, painted in precise LIDAR detail. A throb of red occupied the valley floor: a spreading, veinous stain that crept outward in time-lapse, then recoiled when a pale-blue wash flowed over it.
"Operative feed," 6547 reported. "Valley subject matches SCP-307 spread pattern. Perimeter is held with ultra-low-temp saturations at intervals. Rhizome density remains high beneath the talus. Regrowth half-life at current temperature is eight minutes, nineteen seconds."
A wall-length viewport iris dilated.
Cold breathed across their faces—industrial, antiseptic.
Below, the valley opened in stark illumination. Frost smoked along the ground in a ragged ring. Beyond that ring, something green-black writhed—an ocean of braided vine-muscle, every surface studded with glistening leaves, every edge bristling with barbs. Tendrils probed the cold line, recoiled, probed again, a ceaseless, hungry intelligence trying angles, weights, timing.
A Worker-Ant descended on a cable, its armatures blossoming. It fired a fan of pale mist; rime bloomed where it kissed the ivy, the living weave slowing, crisping—then cracking as cutters swept in and a vacuum maw gulped the frozen pulp into a cask below.
Natasha felt the weight of it—the scale, the method, the machine-calm of an operation designed for monsters.
Coulson said nothing.
For once, even May's eyes widened.
Felix broke the silence.
"Project Hollow Gate," he said mildly. "Emergency footprint. The permanent facility will take time."
He turned to them at last—calm, almost gentle—and for the first time since New York, he smiled like a host opening a door.
"Welcome to my world."
A chime. Operators snapped into faster motion. 6547's head ticked toward a comms display.
"Recon ping—external," he said. "Unidentified thermal cluster entering the valley approach. Vector aligns with an aerial drop three klicks west. Possible hostile or… curious party."
A tiny pause. His eyes didn't move, but Coulson felt them.
Felix didn't even look at the screen.
"Keep the perimeter blue. If the vines bite, freeze them. If guests bite—disarm, detain, warm them up someplace polite."
He paced a few steps along the glass, watching the Worker-Ant finish its cut and swing to the next node.
"Also," he added, almost as an afterthought, "spin up our nuclear inventory for audit."
Coulson's stomach clenched.
Felix glanced back over his shoulder, the smile returning, faint and unreadable.
"We wouldn't want any… missing warheads complicating my valley, would we?"
No one answered.
Only the soft hiss of cold and the patient whisper of steel.
(End of Chapter)
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