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The Punisher Lore

Initiation Ceremony

After their little disagreement in Tokyo, Frank Castle figured he'd never hear from Natasha and her worldwide squad of Red Room spies. But lo and behold, it wasn't even a few weeks after the sky fell apart that she found him in an open-air noodle shop nestled among Shanghai warehouses down by the flood-control walls along the Huangpu River. The towers gleamed in the night sky, their upper floors hidden by clouds. It had just started raining. "Your kind of neighborhood," she commented as she took a seat opposite him.

"Honest working people." Frank said. "Food ain't half bad either. I had better noodles on Canal Street, though. You stop by to tell me I'm wanted in Shanghai too?"

Natasha shook her head. "Haven't checked. I found you because I need a word."

Frank slurped his noodle broth.

"We saw what happened in Tokyo. Maybe we should be working together," she spoke bluntly, causing Frank to crack a smile, just long enough to let her see it.

"I was kidding."

"I'm not."

He looked at her while recalling what he saw in the sky just a few minutes after he took out some rogue androids, apparently blowing up her mission. It looked like some so-called super villain did something to the sky. Like the old days in New York City when something crazy happened every other hour. Then the sky over Tokyo was different, and Frank couldn't kid himself. A lot of other things were different too.

"So what have you been doing since Tokyo?" she asked.

Her tone told Frank that she already knew, so he played it straight. "Went back home for a bit. Cleaned up some criminal scum. Then I thought maybe I could help them more by getting after Doom again. I kidnapped one of his engineers, tried to find out what he's working on in Doomstadt. Learned enough to know that I had to come to Shanghai."

"And do what?"

Frank pressed his thumb on a reader set into the noodle shop's counter. It chirped. He stood and turned his collar up against the rain. "Come on," he said.

By the time they got up on the flood wall, the rain was coming down in sheets. He couldn't see across the river to the old International Concession. "Been here before?" he asked Natasha.

"I've been just about everywhere," she said. "First time I came to Shanghai was back in the 1980s. It's changed a lot."

Frank nodded. Shanghai changed fast, and the 1980s were a long time ago. "I mostly stayed in the States after I got home. But once I got the treatment, life got a lot longer. Thought I had more ... scope, I guess ... to take on some bigger problems, 'cause the more things changed, the more I realized that the world was staying the same...unless I changed it." He stood listening to the rain, thinking about it. He knew Natasha had undergone the same life-extension treatments he had, but in the moment, it didn't seem to bind them together. She'd used her extra decades to retake control of the Red Room and become the leader of an international spy network. Talk about healing childhood trauma. On the other hand, Frank had used his time to escalate his war on criminal scum from street-level punks and neighborhood gangsters to international traffickers. He tracked them patiently, over years, and when he had the right situation, he made them pay. "Sometimes I think maybe I should have stayed in New York."

"They do have good noodles." Natasha joked dryly. "Why are we here, Frank?"

Frank pointed at a row of piers across the Huangpu River, barely visible through the heavy rain and the mist coming up off the river. "Blue hull, single stack, no containers on the deck but it's riding real low. See it?" Natasha nodded. "That ship flies a Madripoor flag, but it's running cargo for Doom. Special cargo this time. It's headed out to the Philippine Sea. When it gets into international waters and it's far enough to avoid anti-missile defense systems, it's going to launch a satellite. Something about locking down any space transport coming from Earth, if the engineer was telling me the truth." Frank chuckled. "Which I think he was."

"More than that, Frank. I think it has something to do with what happened in Tokyo," Natasha added.

"Most likely," Frank knew it wasn't in his best interest to think too hard about the weirder things. Crime was crime, and he gravitated towards problems with permanent solutions.

"Nice work, Frank," Natasha said, a bit grudgingly. "We had the ship pegged, but we didn't know what it was carrying."

"Well, Widow, I might spend most of my time getting rid of criminal scum, but I'm not too shabby at paying attention and gathering intel. I don't always go around indulging my trigger-happy vigilante impulses."

He was giving her a hard time because she'd called him a loose cannon in Tokyo and he was still mad about it. She didn't take the bait. "So sink it," she said instead. "I'm sure you've got a stash of goodies somewhere that'll do the trick."

"Not at the pier. People work there. If I sink a ship at the port, it'll be weeks until they can work." He could see on her face that she hadn't thought about this. "Yeah," he said. "You've got to think about the regular person, the little person. Law-abiding, trying to get through the day. In the Red Room, those people are all just collateral damage, am I right?"

"Maybe in the old days. Now, we're all collateral damage in somebody's plan, Frank," she said, looking him dead in the eye. But he thought he'd made his point.

"Anyway, yeah," he said. "Sinking it is the plan. Just not right here in the port. The other thing is, unless we blow it sky-high, Doom can just salvage the satellite and put it on another boat."

"Noted. So what's your plan?"

"You serious?"

"Yeah," she said. "We'll do it your way. Then I want you to hear me out."

She stuck out a hand. He shook it and she said, "Now can we get out of the rain?"

Visibility in the Huangpu approached zero even in daylight, and at night it was like being in a sensory deprivation tank. Frank couldn't risk garnering attention, so no lights. Instead he used passive sonar. The river bottom was a junkyard, sunken boats and other lost industrial relics stuck in the silt. Frank's scuba suit sported an advanced rebreather instead of an old-fashioned oxygen tank, so he didn't give off bubbles and didn't have to worry about getting air hoses tangled up. The bulk of the ship loomed overhead, drawing maybe twelve meters of water. That didn't leave much space under the keel for Frank to work his way in and set the charges, but he was able to lay twelve of them, six on either side of the keel, and then a bonus thirteenth at the very stern, near the rudder. Each was a kilo of his own explosive concoction shaped to punch inward. One perk of being at perpetual war for decades: you learned a lot about making your own ordnance. Widow had done some advanced surveillance, and the hull wasn't armored. The charges would each rip a hole the size of Frank's van in the ship's hull.

Frogman work wasn't really his style. He'd done it a few times but he wasn't a fan. About a hundred years ago he'd seen a guy eaten by a shark. The guy was murdering scum and deserved it, but that didn't make Frank love being underwater.

After a careful swim back downriver and across to the industrial flats, he stripped off the scuba suit. Natasha helped him stash it near the seawall inside an abandoned car. "Everything go okay?" she asked.

"Yeah," Frank said. "Don't need a bath now."

They didn't want to draw attention to themselves, so they stayed perched atop a Red Room safe house in the old French Concession. Natasha piloted an infra-detector drone that stayed a few kilometers above and behind the old container ship as it wallowed through the Philippine Sea toward international waters. "There it is," Frank said as the ship's deck slid open, revealing a launch gantry that lifted toward vertical. The rocket was small, and Frank snorted when he saw the painted Latverian flag on its nose cone.

"He's got an ego, doesn't he?" Black Widow observed. She held the drone control out to Frank. "You want to do the honors?"

He took the control and patched the visual feed into a visor lens he'd been wearing for hours. The detector's view appeared before him like he was looking down from above and behind it.

Smoke spurted from the inside of the ship as the rocket's engines began their pre-ignition sequence. "Doom, you scum, I hope you're watching," Frank said, and triggered the detonator.

The ocean around the ship heaved and the launch gantry tipped to a twenty-degree angle. A moment later a huge belch of fire blasted upward from inside the ship. The rocket's engine ignited, but before it could lift off the gantry swung again, smashing into the ship's superstructure. Flaming wreckage from a second series of explosions arced into the sky and fell into the sea in blasts of steam. The ship itself was settling fast, heeling over to port as its stern disappeared. The rocket stayed in the gantry, thruster sputtering. Not five minutes after the charges detonated, the freighter and rocket were gone as if they had never existed.

"What's the depth here?" Frank wondered.

"Seven thousand meters, give or take," Natasha said. "That satellite's not coming back up. Doom's going to be furious."

"Better than him being happy." Frank set down the drone control and took off the visor.

"Wait," Natasha said. She picked the control up again and watched the monitor. The water was still churning where the ship had sunk, but now as they watched the ocean's surface really started to boil.

Through the swirling foam, the rocket, and its satellite payload, rose slowly into the air.

"You gotta be kidding me," Frank said.

Wobbling to stay vertical, the rocket cleared the surface. Its thrusters flared brighter and it accelerated upward.

Natasha touched a fast series of commands on the infra-detector's control. The drone ascended in parallel with the rocket. "You planning to crash it?" Frank asked. "That rocket's gonna be way too fast in a minute."

"Yeah," she said. "But I don't need that long."

She stood up from her controls, reaching into her gear with focused swiftness. Within moments, she lifted a massive weapon to her shoulder and took aim as the firearm announced "ELECTROPLASM RIFLE CHARGED."

"Electroplasm rifle?" Partly Frank was wondering why she hadn't mentioned the drone was a flying target, and partly he was wondering where he could get an electroplasm rifle of his own.

"My little failsafe," Natasha said. She breathed deeply and fired the shot.

On the screen, the discharge of the electroplasm rifle whited out the screen as it annihilated the rocket, and the drone with it. From their perch, Frank watched fragments of the rocket spiral out of the sky, below a massive fireball that dissipated into tendrils of smoke. Gobs of electroplasma fell along with the wreckage, crackling as they hit the surface of the ocean.

"A shame to lose the infra-detector," Natasha said, "But a small price to pay to finish the job."

"You didn't trust me to get it done?" Frank said.

"Of course I trusted you, Frank. You said you were going to blow up the ship, and you did." As she spoke, Natasha commanded the agents at the closest Red Room safe house to mobilize. Her spy network would make it disappear. "But I also know we're dealing with Doom here, and if there's one thing we all need to know, it's that when you go up against Doom, you need a backup plan. So." She shrugged. "That's what I did."

He understood, even if he still felt like she should have told him she was doing it. "Guess we ended up working together after all."

"Yeah," Natasha said. "We should do it again."

"Maybe," he said. "If this op is any indication, we got some kinks to iron out. Also, I want an electroplasm rifle."

She gave him a sideways smile, revealing nothing. "I'm putting together a team, you know. A few people who aren't afraid of unconventional methods. Maybe they've got what you might call a checkered past. But now they're trying to do what's right for the little guy. Like those dockworkers back in Shanghai. They'll be able to go to work tomorrow."

"So, doing good, sticking up for the downtrodden? What are we, knights?"

"Beats being driven by revenge and a death wish," Natasha said.

Frank considered this. He'd forgotten what it had been like to not be on the warpath solo. And if the sky was falling, maybe he did need a hand. "If you say so. Yeah. Okay. I'm in."