92 Parasite

The war room of Avengers Tower was quiet, not because there wasn’t anyone present, but because of the serious nature of the conversation that they were about to have. For once, there were no sarcastic remarks from Tony, no quick-witted quips from Clint, and not even a passive-aggressive jab from Natasha. Everyone sat in grim silence, gathered around the central table. The holographic projection of the SHIELD insignia floated above them like a ghost.

Thor was the only one absent, having returned to Jane in London. The rest of Earth’s mightiest heroes were here, but their usual confidence had been replaced by uncertainty.

They were here to discuss the rot festering inside SHIELD. Project Insight was days away from launch. But with SHIELD compromised by a hidden parasite, the same network could easily become a weapon of mass oppression.

The real problem? They still didn’t know who the enemy was.

Harry, seated at the head of the war table, looked toward Clint. “You’ve been following Sitwell. What’s the update?”

Clint leaned back in his chair with a long sigh, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “I’ve got nothing concrete. Been trailing him for a while now, and he’s our only halfway-decent lead, but the guy’s cleaner than a monk at a detox retreat. No shady meetings, no dropped packages, no secret dead drops. The most suspicious thing he’s done lately is double-parked, apart from that brothel visit a few days back.”

Steve frowned slightly at that. Natasha, next to him, tapped her knuckle against the table, clearly unsatisfied.

“He met a few senators, but that was under assignment,” Clint continued, shrugging. “Standard SHIELD protocol. We’re often on protection duty during sensitive sessions. It’s boring, predictable, and Sitwell is doing it completely by the book. Either SHIELD really is clean, or, and this is the part I’m not thrilled about, all of SHIELD is compromised. I don’t know which.”

There was a subtle twitch of Tony’s jaw at that. He didn’t say anything, but the edge in his posture suggested he had a few thoughts on what a fully compromised SHIELD might look like.

Harry’s gaze didn’t waver. “What about the agents? Anyone acting strange? Talking to third parties? Leaks?”

Clint shook his head. “Nothing out of line. No signs of external contact, and no agents slipping away to make secret calls. The ones I’ve watched, hell, they’re playing the part so well it’s either textbook training or they really believe they’re doing the right thing.”

Bruce shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “That’s concerning,” he murmured, mostly to himself.

 “Nat?” Harry asked, glancing toward her.

Natasha didn’t hesitate. “SHIELD’s compartmentalisation policy is a nightmare. I’ve been using my level 7 access to dig through mission reports and intel logs, trying to spot anything that doesn’t align, but there’s very limited visibility on high-level operations. Even I’m not cleared for anything relating to Project Insight.”

She crossed her arms as her tone grew sharper with each word. “I tried a few discrete workarounds, checking access under other agent credentials to see if different clearances had different pieces of the puzzle, but even that came up empty. The deeper I dig, the more I realise no one knows the whole picture. Not even the top brass.”

Steve’s brow furrowed at that. “Not even Fury?”

Natasha shook her head. “Especially not Fury. If I had to guess, the real information’s been compartmentalised from him, too. Someone’s playing chess with the whole organisation, and we’re all on the board without seeing the full layout.”

Tony let out a low whistle and muttered, “Creepy and efficient. Got to respect the commitment.”

“Let’s not,” Bruce added, expression tight.

“So, another dead-end,” Harry said thoughtfully, fingers steepled beneath his chin. “What about missions? Anything SHIELD’s taken on recently that feels off-pattern?”

Natasha shook her head. “Not from what I’ve seen. Everything of high and low priority follows SHIELD protocol. Standard intel gathering, infiltration ops, occasional black-bag assassinations, R&D developments, VIP escorts. Business as usual.”

She leaned back slightly in her chair. “Nothing stands out. No sudden shifts in strategy or anomalies in the mission logs.”

Harry rubbed his temples. “Steve, what did you find?” he asked, turning toward the super-soldier.

“SHIELD’s compromised,” Steve said bluntly.

That made everyone sit up a little straighter.

“Clint’s been trying to sniff out rogue agents, and Natasha’s chasing a paper trail. I took a different approach. I assumed the rot was in the foundation itself. SHIELD hosting the parasite rather than being infected by it.”

The quiet in the room deepened as eyes turned to him.

“What did you find?” Harry asked, intrigued.

Steve leaned forward slightly. “I wouldn’t have found anything if I didn’t know what I was looking for. I tried to think like the enemy. If I were embedding a parasitic operation inside SHIELD, I’d make sure I had access to major assets and hardware. So I started checking where the resources were moving.”

“So... you followed the money?” Clint asked, raising an eyebrow.

Steve gave a small smile. “I’m not that good at numbers. I followed the boots. And the weapons.”

Tony chuckled. “Ah, good old-fashioned detective work. You still using notepads and shoe leather, Grandpa?”

Steve gave him a dry look. “Sometimes the old ways work best.”

Natasha smirked. “That’s his version of ‘I told you so.’”

“What discrepancies did you find?” Harry asked, genuinely curious about Steve’s old-school approach.

Steve leaned forward, his hands folded on the table. “My first red flag came when I was reviewing files related to the AIM incident. Maya Hansen was supposed to be arrested and transferred to a secure facility after the takedown. But when I followed up on her transfer logs… There was nothing. No intake records, no transport logs that matched, no surveillance footage. Just a black hole. On paper, she was processed. In reality, she vanished.”

Tony raised an eyebrow. “You sure it wasn’t just buried under a thousand folders of red tape?”

“I thought so at first,” Steve admitted. “But I cross-referenced every possible location SHIELD might use for high-value detainees. No one has seen or heard a word about her. And then I checked the usual SHIELD procedure, she was supposed to be flagged for regular psychological evaluation, like all detainees. Not only did she miss every one of those checks, but her name was wiped from the rotation entirely.”

That made a few brows furrow around the table.

Steve continued, now warming to his train of thought. “That got me thinking, if someone inside SHIELD could disappear a person like that, what else could they hide? So I shifted focus. I started reviewing physical resource transfers.”

He tapped the table for emphasis.

“I started with the Chitauri tech we recovered in New York. Most of it was supposed to be under lock and key at SHIELD-run R&D labs. But the more I looked, the more gaps I found. Some of those labs were shut down months ago. Others had reports of transfers to unknown destinations. And not a single one could account for the Leviathan remains.”

Bruce nodded. “That same one that are the size of a building.”

“Hard to misplace something like that. And yet, no transport logs, no storage manifests. Just... gone.” Steve replied

Harry frowned. “And the scepter?”

“That’s the most alarming part,” Steve said grimly. “After the battle, we handed Loki’s scepter to Sitwell’s team. At the time, that didn’t raise any flags. But after we started suspecting him of being compromised…”

“That’s when you asked me to find out where it was being stored,” Tony added.

Steve nodded. “I did some fieldwork. Infiltrated the last known site that had it. The lab still had some leftover Chitauri artefacts being studied, but no sceptre. And the scientists on-site had never even seen it. No logs, no storage room, no tracking ID. As far as they were concerned, it was never there.”

He looked around the table. “That’s not bad bookkeeping. That’s a cover-up.”

A heavy silence settled over the room.

Steve continued, “And it’s not just the sceptre. This pattern holds for all the Chitauri tech. Some pieces are here, but many are unaccounted for after the clean-up. It’s like the most powerful artefacts, especially something as massive as the Leviathans’ carcass, vanished overnight. For an object that significant, SHIELD would need a large compound to house it, and I’ve swept through every possible location. But I have found nothing.”

Clint exchanged a grim look with Steve, while Bruce’s eyes darkened with concern.

“I can back up what the Captain’s saying,” Tony added, cutting in, his tone unusually serious.

“What do you mean?” Harry asked, turning toward him.

Tony laced his fingers together, elbows resting on the table. “While Romanoff was digging through field reports and active files, I went spelunking through the digital archives. Deep dives, buried servers, encrypted logs, stuff that hadn’t been touched in years.”

Natasha frowned in thought, while Bruce leaned forward slightly, the analytical part of his brain kicking in.

“What I found didn’t make sense,” Tony said. “Certain R&D projects, big ones, the kind SHIELD sunk millions into, were suddenly marked as non-viable or shut down just as they were nearing completion. Not because they failed. Not even because they were dangerous. It was more like someone didn’t want them finished.”

Steve’s brow furrowed. “Sabotage?”

“Worse,” Tony said. “Repurposing.”

He tapped a few keys and brought up several project headers on the holographic display. “Take Project PEGASUS. All the Tesseract energy readings, the quantum studies, gone. Not misfiled. Gone. And this isn’t ‘Loki blew up the lab’ gone. This is ‘someone wiped the backups and deleted the logs’ gone.”

He flipped to another screen. “Same deal with the hammer drones you recovered from Hammer Tech, Romanoff. And the Whiplash armour Vanko cooked up? Declared ‘inconclusive’, conveniently right after the site was compromised.”

Natasha’s lips twitched with restrained fury. “There were secure servers in those labs. That data should’ve been triple-replicated.”

“Exactly,” Tony said, pointing at her. “It’s like someone with Level 10 clearance scrubbed the entire history. Not just buried it, erased it. Thoroughly.”

Steve’s jaw tightened. His fingers curled into fists against the tabletop. Clint let out a low whistle, but said nothing.

Harry’s expression darkened. “So someone inside SHIELD has been deleting every technological breakthrough that could give the world a fighting chance.”

Tony nodded grimly. “Not just deleting. Rewriting history.”

“What else did you find?” Harry asked, bracing himself for more.

Tony leaned back in his chair, letting out a slow breath. His usual levity was gone. “Like Cap said, once you know what to look for, the patterns start jumping out. I started combing through SHIELD’s internal comms, old memos, encrypted messages, black-ops mission logs, and secure chat transcripts. The kind of stuff that’s meant to stay buried.”

The room went still. Bruce stopped fidgeting with his pen. Even Clint sat up straighter.

Tony’s voice dropped lower. “I looked into agents embedded inside terrorist networks and rogue states. The kind of operations that were supposed to be about surveillance and counter-terrorism. But I found orders. Real ones. With proper clearance codes. That didn’t make sense.”

He paused, locking eyes with each of them.

“There were directives instructing agents to escalate conflicts. Feed bad intel. Sabotage peace efforts. Fan the flames.”

Natasha’s eyes narrowed, her arms crossing tightly across her chest.

Tony continued, “A few things lined up with historical hot spots. SHIELD agents were present during the early stages of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Others pushing arms and information during Gaddafi’s rise in Libya. And even a couple of operations that helped destabilise Iran in the late ‘70s.”

Bruce blinked. “Are you saying SHIELD helped trigger those events?”

“I’m saying someone inside SHIELD did,” Tony corrected. “And it was sanctioned. Like it was just another Tuesday at the office. However, they are so well concealed that I can’t determine who gave the orders. The only source that I can determine is Alexander Pierce, but that feels like a red herring.”

He paused for a beat before finishing, “At first, I thought it was bad foreign policy. Another Cold War chess match. But now? I think those weren’t SHIELD operations at all. I think they were the parasite’s operations. Coordinated moves by whoever’s infested SHIELD from the inside. Designed to make the world more unstable, more divided and more afraid.”

The silence that followed was deafening.

“Yes, but… what’s the endgame here?” Natasha asked. “So, they’ve infiltrated SHIELD. They’re using their resources, escalating conflicts all over the world. But to what purpose? What do they gain from keeping the world in chaos?”

She leaned forward.

“And more importantly, how does Project Insight fit into all of this?”

The question hung in the air like a loaded gun.

For all the tactical minds in the room, no one had an answer.

 “Divide and conquer,” Steve said at last, his voice low. “They create chaos so people demand control. That’s when they strike. Maybe the new Helicarriers are the metaphorical gun,” Steve added grimly.

Harry gave a small nod, then turned toward the scientist across the table. “Bruce, what did you find on Project Insight?”

Bruce cleared his throat, sitting up a little straighter as the room’s attention shifted to him. “Project Insight,” he began, “deploys three satellite-linked Helicarriers. Each one armed to the teeth. The official brief says they’re designed to neutralise threats before they happen.”

He tapped a few keys on the console in front of him, and the table’s central hologram changed, displaying schematics of the Helicarriers and a sprawling web of satellites surrounding the Earth.

“It’s all based on a predictive algorithm,” Bruce continued. “A piece of software that’s supposed to identify threats using a subject’s entire life profile. We’re talking about financial transactions, internet searches, emails, school records, voting history, even standardised test scores. If you’ve ever typed your name into a form, this thing’s tracked it.”

Everyone exchanged uneasy glances. That much, they’d already known in theory. But hearing it laid out like that made it feel more invasive.

“But here’s where it gets messy,” Bruce said, adjusting his glasses. “The version of the algorithm we’ve been given by Fury? It’s fake.”

The room went still.

“What do you mean it’s a fake?” Steve asked.

Bruce exhaled through his nose, his frustration surfacing. “Exactly what it sounds like. It’s incomplete, at best. At worst? A deliberate misdirection. I've been combing through the code for months, analysing data structures, mapping logic trees, trying to find the decision-making core.”

He turned to face the hologram again. With a few taps, the projection zoomed into lines of code that looked like a branching neural network.

“I understand the idea behind it. We live in an age where algorithms already guess what we want to buy, what video to watch, who we might date. So sure, with enough data, you can predict behaviour to some extent. But what I don’t understand is how this thing claims to determine who qualifies as a threat to global peace.”

Bruce’s voice grew more concerned. “What’s the threshold? What’s the logic? Are we talking about a terrorist cell leader? Or a seventeen-year-old who ranted online after a breakup? A dictator with nuclear weapons? Or a geneticist trying to cure cancer with experimental retroviruses that could technically be repurposed into a plague?”

He looked around. “Because right now, the algorithm doesn’t differentiate. It just flags. And the worst part?”

Bruce turned back to the group, his tone grave now.

“Project Insight is supposed to be our answer to intergalactic threats. That’s the justification Fury signed off on. Protection against another Loki. But there’s nothing, and I mean nothing, in this code that deals with that. No filters for alien physiology. No adaptive response protocols. No detection algorithms for non-Earth technology. Not even basic contingency routines for identifying extraterrestrial tech signatures.”

Natasha frowned. “So it’s not built to stop a Chitauri invasion. It’s built to stop us?”

Bruce nodded. “It’s human-centric. Obsessively so. The logic is grounded in Earth-based digital records, human behavioural psychology, and standard societal metrics. It doesn’t even register with people who’ve never used a phone or a computer. And if you're off the grid? You're either invisible or you're flagged as high risk because you're off the grid.”

Steve muttered under his breath, “That’s not protection. That’s targeting.”

“Tony,” Harry said, turning toward him, “were you able to get your hands on the actual algorithm?”

Tony exhaled sharply through his nose, shaking his head. “No. And not for lack of trying, either.”

He leaned back in his chair, fingers drumming against the table in an erratic rhythm. “I cracked open every digital vault I could find. Scoured SHIELD’s mainframe, their off-grid blacksites, even their disaster recovery servers. Nothing. No storage logs, no transfer records, no source code. It’s not on their servers, drives, or even their cloud architecture. And trust me, their cloud is deep. Paranoid-deep.”

He paused, brow furrowing.

“There are no comm logs referencing it. No internal memos. No version control footprints. No changelogs. No backup redundancies. Nothing. It’s like the thing doesn’t officially exist. As far as SHIELD’s systems are concerned, Project Insight’s algorithm is just a bullet point on a whiteboard, if that.”

Clint let out a low whistle and muttered under his breath, “Spooky.”

Steve’s jaw tightened. “You’re saying SHIELD built a global assassination system… without a paper trail?”

Tony’s expression turned grim. “I’m saying I don’t think SHIELD built it at all.”

That drew a round of alarmed glances from around the table. Natasha shifted in her seat, her eyes narrowing as she processed the implications.

Harry leaned forward, brows furrowed. “Then who did?”

Tony gave a small shrug, though his eyes remained focused and calculating. “That’s the billion-dollar question. Whoever created this algorithm knew better than to leave fingerprints. And more importantly, they knew SHIELD’s systems inside and out. They didn’t just hide it. They ghosted it from the ground up. Like it was always meant to sit in the shadows, plugged in when the time was right, and vanish if anyone got too close.”

Bruce crossed his arms, frowning. “If there’s no metadata, no build history, not even a checksum trail, that’s not just clean code. That’s surgical.”

“Exactly,” Tony said, snapping his fingers. “Which means this wasn’t some rogue SHIELD programmer going off-script. This was planned. Long-term. With institutional backing and top-tier security access.”

“So how do we find this algorithm?” Harry asked, scanning the room.

Tony tapped a few keys on the tabletop console. Soon, an angular, heavily armored vessel hovered above the table. “This,” he announced, “is the Lemurian Star.”

Clint leaned forward, his brow furrowing. “I know that ship. Sitwell’s been posted there recently.”

Natasha crossed her arms, one eyebrow lifting in a knowing arch. “Well, if Sitwell’s involved, this close to the launch, we are on to something here.”

Bruce leaned in, adjusting his glasses as he studied the 3D schematic. “The Star is more than a floating fortress. It’s SHIELD’s primary satellite launch platform for installing the targeting arrays for Project Insight. If the real algorithm exists anywhere, that’s where it’s being transmitted or stored.”

Steve asked. “Where is it now?”

Tony’s fingers danced over the controls again, and the map zoomed out, tracking the ship’s current coordinates. “Indian Ocean. About four hours from the African coastline. No escort, standard patrol detail. They are keeping it low-key to not attract attention.”

He leaned back in his chair with a crooked grin. “In other words... ripe for the taking.”

Clint let out a low whistle and grinned. “So... we’re hijacking a SHIELD warship?”

Natasha didn’t blink. “Hijacking is such a negative term.”

“We’re reclaiming,” Bruce offered, deadpan.

“A rescue operation,” Steve said flatly, but with a glint of mischief.

Harry leaned back in his chair, eyes glinting with amusement. “Technically, we’re just extracting data, not hijacking the whole ship.”

A beat passed before Clint smirked. “Still sounds like pirates stealing treasure to me.”

Harry returned the grin, voice dropping into a playful growl. “Aye. We’re gonna be pirates.”

Laughter broke the tension. For the first time in hours, the weight hanging over the room seemed to lift. No more running. No more reacting.

The Avengers were going on the offensive.