Outlaw relentless a marv.., p.1
Outlaw: Relentless, A Marvel Heroines Novel, page 1
Outlaw: Relentless
A screech split the air: a Wakandan airship, aerobraking hard. Atlas Bear.
“Awaiting instructions,” Atlas Bear radioed us.
“Weapons free,” Neena said.
“Hey, I’m down here–” I started to say.
A too-brilliant light erupted from the airship’s ventral hull. Tracer bullets streaked across the night, slammed into the containers next to me, and raced along the deck. I felt each impact in my boots, like hammer blows. And the sound was more pain than noise.
Firelight spilled out from the rents Atlas Bear’s bullets had torn in its sides. And it was getting brighter by the second. Just the kind of day I’d been having.
The container had a good sense for dramatic timing. It waited just long enough to let me curse before exploding.
FOR MARVEL PUBLISHING
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Special Thanks to Jordan D. White, Gail Simone, Mike O’Sullivan, and UDON Studios
© 2021 MARVEL
First published by Aconyte Books in 2021
ISBN 978 1 83908 074 6
Ebook ISBN 978 1 83908 075 3
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
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Cover art by Joey Hi-Fi
Distributed in North America by Simon & Schuster Inc, New York, USA
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To those on the outside looking in and those on the inside reaching out.
Prologue
“Inez,” my dad always told me, in a voice a little too serious for what he must have thought of as telling a joke, “never grow old.”
He would say this as he was coming back from the pasture with a hitch in his step, hiding a limp. Or after grunting loud as a steer as he pushed himself off his recliner to make Elias and me dinner. Or when I found him sitting in that same recliner at six in the morning, heavy rings under his eyes, unable to sleep.
I nodded solemnly. He acted like he was waiting for me to crack a smile, but I never did.
He only called me by my first name when he was serious about something. Otherwise, it was always a nickname, something nice and embarrassing. I’m not even sure he realized the difference. But I sure did.
Even as a kid, I never figured I would grow old. Not in the sense that I was immortal. Just in the sense that I wouldn’t make it.
I don’t remember when I started thinking that.
But I definitely remember why.
One
I didn’t figure I should be going out on this job, not as exhausted as I was. But that inner voice of caution was too easy to ignore. The fact was, I’d been in worse states before. Hell, I’ve even been shot – more than once, on the same occasion. And you know what I did afterward? I got right up and kept fighting.
Because that was the only thing I could do. Because nobody gave me any other choice.
Easy enough to get back in that mindset. All I had to do was tough it out again. I’d come out of it eventually. Always had before.
This is one of the many troubles with being a mutant. Anything medical in general. Aging, especially. It’s hard to find an old mutant, if you follow what I’m saying. Nobody understands our bodies, not really. Not even us.
I just wish I weren’t so tired all the time.
I hadn’t had to deal with that before. Not like this. Aging has been on my mind a lot lately. There was no other way to say it other than that I’d been dragging. Every morning when my alarm went off, I felt like I’d fallen asleep only five minutes before.
’Course, a good fist fight has a way of waking me up. Adrenaline will soothe over a lot.
•••
I had just started up the narrow, corrugated stairs when he passed me by. Crew-cut man, olive skin, big bundles of muscles. Didn’t think much of him. I’d blustered my way past a dozen like him on this job already. I was on my way to the container ship’s bridge, focused on my destination.
Something must’ve tipped him off. He took a look at me as I passed. Then a quick double-take. He reached for his belt, where he had a radio handset.
Even tired, I’ve still got my reflexes.
I’m no stranger to pain. I’ve got my favorites. The sweetest kind stems from my knuckles and radiates down into my bones like heat from a fireplace. Better than coffee, bacon, and pancakes. Almost as good as Neena’s puppy¹ pushing his nose into the side of my neck at three in the morning whenever I stay over at her place.
1 His name is Pip – and by “Neena,” Outlaw is referring to the mutant merc more popularly known as Domino. –Ed.
The goon staggered into the bulkhead. The back of his head slapped it with an audible metallic bang. Satisfying.
’Course… another good way of waking up is a punch on the chin.
I didn’t see his counterpunch coming. He followed up the first punch with a second, harder, in the center of my forehead. Stars swam over my vision. Good training, this man. I was fully awake now.
If the rest of his training was as good as his fighting skills, he’d be calling for help soon. Couldn’t let that happen. Couldn’t take the time to be staggered. I followed up with a hard punch to his gut, just below his ribcage. It knocked the wind out of him. Just in time, too. His mouth was already open, halfway to calling for help.
I had some unfair advantages over him. Big and bulky as he was, he was just an ordinary person.
Me? I’m a mutant.
Pardon my manners, they’re usually atrocious. My name is Inez Temple, but most folks call me Outlaw.
My next punch lifted him right off his feet. I knocked him clear up to the shoulder-width landing halfway between this deck and the next. He crashed into the bulkhead and dropped with a gasp. I’d felt something snap. For his sake, hopefully just ribs.
Not that I had much sympathy for A.I.M. agents.
The acronym stands for Advanced Idea Mechanics, which is an awfully dull way to say “evil superscientists.” They’re a bunch of scientists with plenty of brainpower but no hearts. Their latest play for power was designing a bunch of nasty weapons to distribute to nasty folks worldwide. That was what this container ship was carrying. They were going to sell them to any terrorist organization, militia, or criminal group who meant to use them, and then swoop in afterward and take advantage of the chaos.
I stepped up to where he was silently lolling and writhing, grabbed the back of his head, and cracked it against the deck. He went still. I tried my best not to kill him, but with head injuries there was no guarantee. Mutant strength is a little hard to control.
There used to be a time when I wouldn’t have thought twice about introducing him to his maker, but Neena and Rachel have been trying to be better about that kind of stuff lately. And what do you know? Their attitude has rubbed off on me.
Still – sometimes it wasn’t easy.
OK, a lot of the time it wasn’t easy. But I was learning.
At least this man was still breathing. No guarantee as to his long-term prospects, but it was better than what I once would have done. He wouldn’t have extended the same favor to me – not unless it was to preserve me to dissect in a lab somewhere.
I searched him quickly. He had an ID card, a radio, and a phone. I pocketed the card and smashed the other two. He didn’t have any weapons. Most of the crew didn’t go around armed, probably to avoid drawing attention. For the same reason – and to fit in among them – I’d had to come unarmed, too. I usually carried a pair of Colt revolvers everywhere I went. I didn’t feel like myself without them.
I hate wearing clothes other than my own. I hate espionage, subtlety, and sneaking around. I was aboard the cargo container ship the Little Miss Ironsides, disguised as a member of her crew. Ugly navy-blue jumpsuit, zipper in the front, and a cap with the ship’s name, logo, and just enough shade to hide my face. Or at least hide my face from a distance. My hair was more of a problem. My long blonde braid ain’t exactly seagoing regulation. I had tucked it into the back of my uniform, inconspicuous as possible.
On a commercial ship, I might not have had to worry about keeping appearances shipshape. But this wasn’t just a commercial ship. Not by a long shot.
This crew was military, and their uniforms just as much a disguise as mine. They were A.I.M. soldiers. It was weird to see them out of their garish yellow beekeep
Here’s a long mission briefing cut very short: the Little Miss Ironsides was powering right toward Boston Harbor. The cargo containers on its deck were full of not-so-nice weapons that A.I.M. intended to sell to other not-so-nice people. My friends and I had been hired to stop them. We’d split up to take different parts of the ship.
I looked around for some place to stash the body. All the hatches in this corridor were closed.
The fog in the back of my head hadn’t quite dissipated. I’d studied this ship’s schematics in the mission briefing along with everybody else, but, in my exhaustion, the details vanished. I couldn’t remember where I was.
I didn’t hear any shouts or pounding bootsteps. No one had heard the bangs. Or at least no one had been alarmed by them.
I closed my eyes, tried to focus. Imagined the blueprints of the ship splayed out on the table in front of us at Avengers HQ. Tony Stark’s hairy wrist as he pointed out target after target. Me biting my tongue, trying not to say anything that would get us into trouble. My best friend Neena had been standing beside me, arms folded, with the rest of our little posse – including Black Widow, trying not to look too wistful at being back in Avengers HQ after so long away.
Focusing on the senses usually helped me pluck whatever else was missing out of my memory, but not this time. The deck schematics were a blur.
I had other problems, anyway. Even if I found a safe place to stash Sleeping Handsome here, it would only be a matter of time before someone noticed his absence. We were on a harsher timetable now.
I unclipped my own radio from my belt. “Hard wind blowing in,” I said. Code for trouble brewing. At least my memory hadn’t fogged that over.
Neena’s staticky voice answered me: “Don’t pay it any mind.”
Decoded version: she was running into trouble, too. Even more decoded: it was only a matter of time before our cover was blown anyway. I should focus on getting into position rather than on hiding the evidence.
She didn’t elaborate on the cause of the trouble.
The number of grimy bootprints on the corrugated deck said that this was still a high-traffic area. One of the hatches had a window. I peeked in, and saw a brightly lit, compact chef’s galley. It was empty. No guarantee that anyone wouldn’t come in, of course. But it was somewhere to deposit the body. I dragged him into the galley and left him behind a counter.
When I came back out I still saw no one, heard no one. I exhaled, tucked my cap tighter over my head, and carried on.
Seeing the galley had stirred my memory. I still didn’t remember the cabins around me, like I should have, but now I knew I was about a deck below the bridge.
I hadn’t slept well the night before. Now, I’ve gotten pre-mission jitters before. In this business, the best way to tell who’s really tough and who’s just faking it is to see who will admit to getting them. But it wasn’t jitters that had kept me up. I didn’t know what it was, but it had been going on for a couple nights.
Well – maybe more than a couple.
This kind of tired was new to me. It wasn’t a forty-eight-hour-stakeout tired, nor a running-so-hard-you-want-to-puke-up-your-guts tired, or even a spent-all-night-clubbing-two-nights-in-a-row tired (gotten more and more used to that one since I joined Domino’s posse). This was a deep-in-your-bones tired, a weariness more akin to an ache.
And here’s something that never happened to me before: sometimes, I couldn’t remember falling asleep. I wouldn’t wake up in my bed. I’d find myself waking up on a couch, or a floor, or even the back seat of my rental car, with no memory of having decided to go there.
And then there were the dreams. Dreams of places I’d never go again. My childhood home in Texas. My father’s grave.
I didn’t want to talk about it. Talking wasn’t gonna fix it. I sure didn’t want to see a doctor. I just had to grind through.
My destination was up one more staircase. The hatch was even labeled “Bridge,” just to make me feel like a panicky idiot. I breathed out, pushed the bill of my cap down to hide my face, opened the hatch and stepped through.
It wasn’t much to see. If ‘bridge’ makes you think Star Trek, prepare to be disappointed. Commercial container vessels like this don’t have the big, complicated electronics. The cabin on the other side of the hatch was more like an elongated closet. It was as narrow as the corridor outside, quite a bit shorter, and crammed full of junk. Boxy old control stations, fresh from the 1980s. Backlit white square-shaped buttons, rows of switches, and five greenscreen displays on old CRTs.
The view was good, at least. Big-paneled stormproof windows lined the front wall. Last time I’d seen outside, everything had been coal black. (That had been hours ago, when my little stealth pod had nuzzled up to the Little Miss Ironsides like a feeding piglet.) Now the horizon was a fierce orange. Only it was still three in the morning. This wasn’t a proper dawn, but light pollution. Orange pillars of light spiraled from the horizon and reached up into an overcast sky. We were getting close to the port.
There were no seats. This was a place where big, faceless corporations put people to work. The real captains of container ships were investors and executives, not the schmoes who lived and suffered on these crates. At least, that would’ve been the case if A.I.M. hadn’t bought the ship. But I had a suspicion that A.I.M.’s hierarchy wasn’t all that different. The big boys at the top were nowhere near here. They sent their grunts and goons to take the risks and do the dirty work, and took all the profits and glory if it paid off.
Case in point: the only other person here, a middle-aged Japanese man, didn’t look anything other than tired. A real middle-manager type. He didn’t wear a disguise, though. The windows must have been tinted on the outside because he was in his bright yellow A.I.M. uniform. The only thing missing was his face-obscuring helmet, like a radiation suit’s, which was hanging from the back of his neck.
“You all have work you need to do,” he said, sounding bored. “And get a new cap. That one’s too small. It won’t hide your ugly face from anyone with binoculars.”
Now that had just been unnecessary. “Sorry, skipper,” I said. “Just looking for supplies. Know where I can find any rope around here?”
“Dumbass.” He hiked a thumb toward one of the rear hatches. “Supplies are right back there. You should know.” After a moment’s consideration, he asked, “Why?”
I’ve never been able to stand a bully. “Just have to tie someone up is all.”
He needed a second to put that one together. By the time he did, I’d already crossed the distance between us.
He wasn’t much of an obstacle. Didn’t think his heart was in the fight, really. By the time he caught his breath after the sucker punch, I was halfway through hogtying him.
His feet smelled something awful, which made it too bad for him that his sock was the best gag around. Not that I was feeling too broken up. “Nothing wrong with my face,” I said, surprising myself with how irritable I was. Exhaustion left me brittle. I left him shoved in a corner, steaming mad but unable to do anything about it. After securing all the bridge’s hatches, I studied the ship’s controls.
I wasn’t much of a sailor. I liked swimming well enough, but, tell the truth, ships made me a little seasick. Still, our pre-mission training had been thorough. Our employers – a combined task force of members of the Avengers, Stark Industries security, and old S.H.I.E.L.D. hands – had the deck plans for this model of ship on file. Pictures, training manuals, everything.
The ship’s controls fogged in front of me. They jumbled together, as complicated as they were meaningless. Levers, dials, blinky screens. Nothing made sense.
I closed my eyes and took a breath. This had to be nerves. If I could just wait it out, I’d be fine.
When I opened my eyes, everything straightened out again. I knew what I was looking at. The ship was on course toward port. It wouldn’t need much manual steering until it got closer in.
My part of the operation was simple: change the ship’s course subtly enough that no one noticed.
