Credits

• Writer: Ed Brubaker
• Artist: Steve Epting and Michael Lark
• Colorist: Frank D'Armata
• Letterer: VC's Randy Gentile
• Assistant Editors: Wiley and Lazar Schmidt
• Editor: Tom Brevoort

Quick Summary

Mother Night is heading the London unit, and she's a little bit in denial... when she hears gunshots!

SHIELD is planning its counter-operation for Paris, with a contact squad already en route to the London site. Sharon tells Steve to get some rest before Paris; he's been up all night, and she'd like him fresh when they hit the target.

Steve has a flashback to a false memory of his last mission with Bucky, but realizes that what he thinks is a memory is wrong. Before he can examine it too closely, he's called up to the command deck.

In London, Union Jack is about to lead an assault on the London team, but they find that their target has already been taken down - lethally, including Mother Night - and snatched the incendiary device. SHIELD dispatches a crime scene unit to see what they can find, and Sharon and Cap proceed to Paris.

As they close on the target site, they see that they are not the first - an A.I.M. commando team has arrived in a hover-jet to reclaim their property from the Red Skull's group. Cap leaps from the SHIELD vehicle and lands on the hover jet, and he uses a small bomb taken from his belt pouch to send it crashing to the ground. A.I.M. troops spill out, and Cap takes them down.

After interrogating them, they conference call with Fury - the A.I.M. group in Paris claims they had nothing to do with the London site, and were just trying to reclaim their ordinance from the splinter group which sold it to the Red Skull. Fury confirms that the Red Skull's body is a DNA match.

Steve and Sharon spend the night in Paris, playing tourist. Steve recounts how much he likes Paris, and admires the French, who displayed rare courage and daring during the Nazi occupation, and the price the French paid in blood for their resistance.

Meanwhile... Jack Monroe is in a bar outside Pittsburgh, mildly snockered. He steps outside to his car, and is about to open the trunk, when an assassin shoots him in the chest, stuffs his body in the trunk(and we can make out the Nomad, not Scourge, uniform), and drives off with it.

Commentary

• Who is the cyborg, and what is General Lukin's agenda? Does the cyborg have his own agenda? Is it the cyborg who killed the Red Skull's London crew, and stole the WMD firebomb? Was it the cyborg who has apparently killed Nomad?
• Jack Monroe dead - perhaps short-term, but does anyone really stay dead in the MU? I mean, I can think of half a dozen ways to undo the death as done - starting with LMDs and working my way outward to Space Phantoms...*grin*
• Are the false memories caused by General Lukin and his mostly-depowered Cosmic Cube? Is he looking to re-power it - and if so, how? If its his men who took the firebomb from London, he'd have the death-energy transmitter...