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The black Audi A8 pulled over to the side of the road.
Gwen unbuckled her seatbelt, pushed open the passenger door, and stepped out. She looked across at Hawk, who was already emerging from the driver's side.
"I'll head to the airport on my own tomorrow."
"Hm?"
"Just pick me up after you finish dealing with this."
Gwen spoke quickly, then leaned in to kiss him. She patted his chest and met his eyes. "Get this handled fast. I really don't want to see multiple versions of you running around."
Hawk raised an eyebrow, held her gaze, and nodded.
The next second, Hawk vanished.
A sonic boom echoed from high above. A beautiful vapor cone blossomed against the night sky, marking his passage through the sound barrier.
Gwen watched for a moment, then climbed back into the car and drove toward Bleecker Street.
....
Meanwhile—
Australia. Alice Springs.
A small desert city in central Australia, surrounded by endless red sands and low, rolling hills. The dried-up bed of the Todd River cut through the town, its exposed stone forming a strange landmark in an otherwise arid wasteland.
And somewhere in that vast, unremarkable expanse of red desert, a battle was unfolding.
WHOOSH!
A rocket streaked through the air, trailing fire. It slammed into a desert vehicle and detonated in a roaring fireball. The shockwave hurled four nearby SHIELD agents through the air before they even had time to react.
RAT-TAT-TAT-TAT!
Gun barrels protruding from beneath the sand spat streams of bullets, sparks flying as they laid down a dense web of suppressing fire that kept the SHIELD aircraft circling overhead from getting any closer.
The pilot wanted nothing more than to press the button and drop a bunker-buster straight down.
But—
He couldn't.
This was suspected to be HYDRA's cloning facility. Command had ordered them to capture it intact, not reduce it to rubble.
The problem was that out here in the open desert, HYDRA had cover. SHIELD didn't.
"Natasha."
"Go ahead."
"Hawk's on his way."
"How long until—"
"He's here."
Hawk materialized silently behind Natasha, his voice cutting through the chaos. His Sixth Sense expanded instantly, sweeping across the battlefield and plunging deep underground, mapping everything within his perception.
He saw it—a HYDRA base hidden beneath the desert, shaped like a honeycomb of interlocking chambers.
He saw the HYDRA operatives inside, their expressions tense and anxious as they paced back and forth in the narrow corridors.
He saw a man in a white lab coat, wearing glasses, looking scholarly and mild-mannered—but with something unsettling beneath the surface. A familiar stranger.
Dr. Merrick.
And Hawk saw something else.
In the hidden HYDRA facility beneath the sand, he saw containers that looked disturbingly like the cloning chambers from countless sci-fi movies.
Don't ask how he knew these were cloning chambers.
Because inside several of them, he saw himself. Sleeping. Suspended in fluid. Multiple versions of himself.
"..."
"Found you."
Hawk's mouth curved upward. He pulled his gaze back and looked at Natasha. "No undercover agents inside this base, right?"
Natasha, seeing Hawk's arrival, immediately understood what he was planning.
She shook her head.
"None."
"Good."
Hawk's psychic power flared. Behind him, the projection of a burning phoenix unfurled its wings.
Suddenly—
The scene that had played out at SHIELD's Triskelion headquarters repeated itself here.
One by one, the HYDRA operatives cowering in their underground bunker—thinking themselves safe—were teleported to the surface by Hawk's Sixth Sense: Psychic Transmission.
Lined up in neat rows.
Before any of them could even register the change in their surroundings, a blazing phoenix beam was already bearing down on them.
The Phoenix Ray swept across the desert. In the blink of an eye, over two hundred HYDRA operatives vaporized on the spot, leaving no trace behind.
"Done."
"I'm heading down."
Hawk's eyes returned to normal. He spoke to Natasha, then took a single step forward and vanished—Sixth Sense: Instant Movement—reappearing inside the training chamber deep beneath the desert.
His gaze locked onto a massive containment pod filled with glowing blue liquid.
Inside the pod, curled up in a fetal position like a sleeping infant, was a figure that looked exactly his age.
Another Hawk.
The next moment, Hawk tore his gaze away and turned toward a man in a white lab coat whom he'd yanked telekinetically from the command center.
Dr. Merrick had realized who was standing in front of him the moment he'd been pulled into the room. He kept his head down like an ostrich, barely daring to breathe.
Hawk raised an eyebrow.
"Dr. Merrick?"
"Y-yes, sir."
Dr. Merrick's voice trembled. Then, as if suddenly remembering something, he looked up at Hawk. "Mr. Phoenix, this isn't my fault! I was forced! HYDRA made me do it! If I didn't follow their orders, they would've tortured me!"
Hawk smiled faintly.
If his Sixth Sense hadn't already shown him Dr. Merrick barking orders like a commanding officer in the control room moments ago, he might have believed that lie.
But—
He wasn't here to listen to Dr. Merrick's excuses. Whether the man had been willing or coerced didn't matter.
Hawk's thoughts remained cold as he pulled his gaze away from Dr. Merrick—who was desperately trying to shift all blame onto HYDRA—and looked once more at the cloning chamber in front of him. His expression turned curious.
"So is this a success or a failure?"
On one hand, yes—HYDRA had successfully cloned him.
But Hawk couldn't detect even a trace of life energy from the body in the chamber.
To put it bluntly:
The clone in front of him wasn't really a clone at all. It was more like a corpse that happened to look like Hawk, floating in preservation fluid.
He hadn't found any other training chambers in the base, which left him wondering: was this project finished, or had it failed?
Hawk spoke the question aloud, then turned his gaze back to Dr. Merrick.
Dr. Merrick met Hawk's eyes, and his heart sank.
His scientific instincts told him that his answer to this question would determine whether he lived or died.
So, Dr. Merrick swallowed hard, his throat bobbing. When he spoke, his voice was dry and hoarse. "There were successes. And there were failures."
Hawk's eyebrows shot up.
"Where are the successful ones?"
"Destroyed."
"Destroyed?"
"Yes."
Dr. Merrick swallowed again. "There were five successful clones. But after they woke up, their consciousness became chaotic and collapsed almost immediately. We had no choice but to... dispose of them."
Hawk absorbed this, nodding thoughtfully. Then he turned back to the chambers holding the sleeping versions of himself. "And these?"
Since Dr. Merrick had already started talking to save his own life, there was no point holding anything back now.
"These five were scheduled to have consciousness implanted today. But before we could begin the procedure, you found us."
The discovery of this base had been, frankly, absurdly coincidental.
Everyone knew the base was built in the middle of a desert.
Deserts are dry. They lack everything. And with over two hundred HYDRA operatives stationed here, securing supplies had always been a challenge. Back when HYDRA was still in hiding, acquiring provisions had been relatively easy.
But after HYDRA's exposure—and especially after Maria Hill's rapid consolidation of SHIELD—the crackdown on HYDRA remnants had intensified dramatically.
The surviving HYDRA cells were growing increasingly paranoid, terrified that SHIELD would drop in at any moment and haul them away.
Some operatives were starting to waver. That included the HYDRA agents running a factory in Alice Springs that supplied this base with provisions.
One of them—a relatively new recruit who'd only been with HYDRA for three years—decided his future was too bright to waste dying with the organization. So he reached out to SHIELD through an obscure online forum, hoping to turn informant.
If Dr. Zola were still around, his network monitoring would have flagged the communication instantly, and the traitor would have been eliminated.
But Zola was gone. And with him, HYDRA's advantage in cyberspace had vanished.
Natasha's team had moved quickly, dismantling the Alice Springs facility.
Most of the HYDRA operatives in Alice Springs who knew about the cloning base were loyal veterans—and they'd all been killed during the assault.
Under normal circumstances, the cloning facility would have remained hidden.
Except...
Natasha's raid had coincided almost perfectly with the monthly supply run to the hidden base.
When Natasha found a warehouse full of provisions—far more than the factory itself needed—she immediately realized there had to be a secret facility nearby. She ordered her team to clean up the battle site, brought in the HYDRA defector, and had him help set a trap.
When the supply shipment didn't arrive on schedule, the cloning base sent someone to investigate.
And that operative just happened to know the defector personally.
He was captured.
And just like that, the cloning base was exposed.
Hawk caught the note of regret in Dr. Merrick's voice when he mentioned not having time to implant consciousness into the clones.
But—
Hawk looked at the five training chambers holding versions of himself, then turned back to Dr. Merrick, who seemed genuinely disappointed his work hadn't been completed.
Hawk's mouth curved into a smile.
"I'll give you a chance to live."
"Activate them."
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