The Ultimates: Against All Enemies (28 page)

No answer from them. "Hold, Tony," Nick said. "We're—"

"Forget it," Tony said. One of his visor readouts tracked all of the team members. Steve and Janet were still moving in Clint's direction. "I'm not holding while they're buried down there." He arrowed off over the Weddell Sea, still fulminating. "I cannot believe you would tell me to stand there with my thumb up my ass while the entire works down there might be collapsing. What the hell is wrong with you, Nick?"

"If you'd shut up a second, I'd tell you," Nick said mildly. "You mind?"

"No." Tony pulled up into a hover directly over where the readout said Clint Barton was, below two hundred-plus meters of ice. "Go right ahead."

"I was about to suggest," Nick said as Tony fired up the force beams, "that you take the direct route. See how we can agree?"

Tony's reply was lost in the thunder of the force beams cratering the ice. 41

"Oh," Janet said. "It was you."

She'd almost run smack into Thor coming around a bend in the tunnel, even though she'd seen a glow that she now realized was coming from Mjolnir. "Loki is near," Thor said.

"So is Clint, and Steve is back down this way." "That's the way I was heading," Thor said. They turned and moved back the way Janet had come. She realized she was getting cold, her tiny size working against her even in the relative warmth of the tunnel, and she returned to normal size just to have her added body mass working for her for a while. A split second later she remembered that she was naked except for her scomm, a specially miniaturized model that fit inside her ear no matter what size she was.

"If I even think you're staring at me, I'm going to sting you like I was mistletoe and you were Baldur," she said. They were at the tunnel junction, and she led him to the left and down. Her feet were freezing against the ice, but the rest of her felt a little warmer. She'd burned a lot of energy stinging today, though, and wasn't sure how much she had left.

"Not funny," Thor said. "And don't take this the wrong way, but I've seen naked women before." The words had hardly left his mouth when they heard a rolling boom from back up the tunnel she'd first come down with Steve. Thor looked over his shoulder. "Sounds like the party's still going on up there," he commented, and they kept walking. A few minutes later, though, a trickle of water appeared at their feet. It quickly grew into an energetic stream, and then they heard a building roar.

"Shrink, Janet," Thor said.

She did, and seconds later he was swept away by a wave that nearly filled the tunnel. "Thor!" she screamed after him, but the sound of the water swept her voice away, too. The water almost caught her then, but she pressed herself to the icy ceiling until, just a few seconds later, the water receded to an ankle-deep stream. Janet put it together: the explosion must have melted a lot of ice near the end of the hall where they'd come in, and that meltwater raced through in a flash flood. How far would it carry him? He was a god, or at least sometimes it seemed that he might be. And they were getting close to Clint and Steve and whatever the Chitauri were doing down there where the bottom of the ice shelf met the midnight sea. Janet stayed small, and raced down the tunnel, feeling the beginnings of exhaustion in her wings but knowing she had to carry on.

Tony's batteries started complaining before he'd blasted his way through fifty meters of the ice. He couldn't just go full-bore, for fear that he would collapse whatever chamber existed below—or that the shock waves would propagate and shatter the ice floor that kept Clint and Steve and Janet out of the Weddell Sea. At least he hoped it was keeping them out of the Weddell Sea. "I don't travel for funerals," Tony said.

"What?" Nick said.

"Nothing. Talking to myself" Calibrating the force beams one more time, Tony started drilling again. And he started talking again, too, but only in his head. Don't you dare collapse, ice shelf. And don't you dare die, my friends. None of us dies today.

Between the force of the water and the lack of anything to get a grip on in the tunnel, Thor was carried quite some distance before he got himself turned around and planted Mjolnir's spike in the tunnel wall. The water roared in his ears and nearly pulled his boots off, but he kept his grip on Mjolnir and almost immediately the water started to recede. A moment later it was gone, rushing ahead to its reunion with whichever ocean lived below the ice, and Thor worked Mjolnir out of the tunnel wall. He slicked his hair out of his eyes and got his bearings. He listened for the faint buzz of Janet's wings, hoping that she'd had time to shrink before the water caught her; if she hadn't, she was probably ahead somewhere, wherever the tunnel opened out into a wider space inside the ice.

Ahead he heard a sudden tumult of voices, and although he guessed that this was because a group of Chitauri had been surprised by the same mini-flood that had just given him such a carnival ride, he started to run, because the commotion might have been due to Janet arriving in the water. Or, if she'd shrunk and was still back up the tunnel, there was still Steve's presence to consider. He'd been ahead of them, and perhaps avoided the water entirely, depending on what happened in the tunnels. Thor's guess was that he wasn't too far from the chamber Steve and Janet had been heading for to back Clint up, which meant that the Chitauri were there, too... which in turn meant that a fight was about to start, and Thor wanted to be there when it happened. A hundred Chitauri, maybe more, he had killed today, but he was not finished. Not until he found Loki would he be finished.

And Loki was near.

Three signs told Steve knew he was getting close: the sounds of machinery, the pale light that began to infuse the walls of the tunnel, and the sprawled bodies of dead Chitauri littering the tunnel floor over the last two or three hundred yards. Clint's work. Then tunnel had leveled out, and a little water pooled on its floor. Six hundred feet of ice over my head, Steve thought. I've been here before. He checked to see if he could still get Clint's location, and was surprised to find that he could; Clint was dead ahead about forty yards, and apparently hadn't moved in nearly a half hour. Steve moved slowly, staying on the inner bend of the tunnel and creeping forward to get a view of the situation before he got himself all the way into it.

First he saw steel scaffolding, reaching from the floor maybe fifty feet up to the ceiling of a huge bubble in the ice. Steel mesh covered the floor, and Chitauri nimbly ran up and down the scaffolding, some in human guise and others in their natural forms. Steve shifted his weight and leaned to take in more of the room. Looking down to make sure of his footing, he saw a trickle of water running by his right boot. He glanced back, wondering if Janet was close and whether she'd tracked Thor down, and just had time to register the wave front boiling around the previous curve in the tunnel before the water knocked his legs out from under him and spilled him out into the room. The rush of meltwater lasted only fifteen seconds or so before spreading out into a pool on the expansive floor of the room, but it left Steve scrambling to his feet on the steel mesh with maybe a hundred Chitauri looking at him the way dogs look at a squirrel that falls off a tree branch into their kennel.

Things happened fast then. Steve registered the presence of a rectangular hole in the floor, reinforced by a steel frame, and what looked like a conning tower coming up out of the water in the hole. He also registered something long and steel and gleaming supported by the scaffolding he'd seen from the mouth of the tunnel. And then the Chitauri were on him, and he was fighting for his life. They came at him in waves, and from the scaffolding they fired down on him with some kind of energy weapon that vaporized the ice in basketball-sized chunks. He caught some of the shots on his shield, and felt his forearm burning even though the shield diffused heat as fast as any material known to man. Luckily the Chitauri on the scaffolding weren't the best shots, or maybe they were just willing to sacrifice accuracy for rate of fire, but a large number of their shots hit their own forces. Or so it seemed, until out of the corner of his eye Steve saw a glint of light and it dawned on him that some of the Chitauri around him were going down courtesy of Clint Barton, who with his typical virtuosity had turned little ice chips into lethal weapons.

"Clint," Steve grunted into the comm. "Where the hell have you been?"

"Lying low waiting for you. I couldn't get 'em all with ice chips, Cap. What do you think I am, some kind of Super Hero?"

And then something else went whizzing by Steve's head, and another of the Chitauri fell and spasmed on the floor. Janet. "Was wondering when you'd show up," Steve said. He'd started to get the rhythm of the shots coming from the scaffolding, and he angled the shield to deflect one so that it blew the guts out of a Chitauri taking a swing at Janet.

"Aren't you sweet," she said. "I brought company."

And here came Thor, scattering the Chitauri and their works with sweeping arcs of Mjolnir. Over the din, too, Steve heard some kind of booming crack in the ceiling. He wondered how much the ice shelf shifted at a time, and how stable this bubble in its bottom was.

"Thor!" Steve shouted. "The scaffold!"

General Fury's voice cut in on the comm. "Goddammit," he said. "Where the hell has everybody been?

And what are you seeing?"

"We've had to be quiet, sir," Steve said. "And we're seeing a submarine, some kind of rocket on a scaffolding, and a whole lot of Chitauri."

But so far they hadn't seen what Steve was looking for. Where was Garza?

Thor cocked his arm to throw Mjolnir... and froze.

"The scaffolding, big man!" Janet sang out. "Let's do it!"

"A rocket under two hundred meters of ice?" Fury was saying into the comm. "Team: the submarine is your first priority. We are trying to dig you out."

"Dig us out?" Clint said.

"The Chitauri blew the mouth of the tunnel you came in through," Fury said.

"So you want us to take out the sub? How about we just commandeer it instead?" Clint came back.

"We're coming to get you. "ybur objectives are to destroy Chitauri assets and prevent them from getting out. Worry about extraction later."

Tony Stark's voice came across the channel for the first time in a while. "I'm on the extraction, boys and girl. Never fear." His comm fuzzed out for a moment as another boom echoed through the ice.

"Thor!" Janet screamed. "Throw the goddamn hammer!"

"Loki, my brother," Thor said, and bared his teeth in a predatory smile. "Clever as always." Steve tried to follow Thor's gaze, and there on the second level of the scaffolding, near an open panel on the body of the rocket, stood Garza. His vision narrowed to a laser focus, and determination to kill Garza absorbed his whole mind; he was still killing Chitauri, but the blows of shield and fist were automatic. Steve broke free of the knot of fighting and sprinted toward the scaffolding. From the corner of his eye, he saw Thor coming with him, but this was his show. The rocket, the Chitauri, the ice... it was all happening again.

"Cap," General Fury was saying in the comm. "The submarine first." Steve let his shield fly, straight and true. It hit Garza square in the head, edge-on, with a sound like the seismic shifting of the ice over their heads, hammering Garza off the scaffolding with all the pent-up anger of fifty-seven years lost to a block of ice. His broken body rebounded off the wall and tumbled to the floor.

From above, another boom, sounding closer this time. A huge sheet of the ceiling sheared away and fell, crushing a number of Chitauri who were running for the submarine. The impact broke the floor into a number of shifting chunks, barely held together by the steel mesh. The water of the Weddell Sea surged tip through the cracks, slopping in waves over onto the shattered floor, and the conning tower of the submarine rocked back and forth. A Chitauri on the deck slipped and was crushed against the ice. Steve took all this in, his fury momentarily blown away by the titanic sound of the falling ice in the enclosed space... and then, on the conning tower of the sub, he saw Garza. Again.

And next to Steve Thor was at last letting go of Mjolnir, which crashed into the base of the conning tower with all the force of the thunder god's anger. The tower buckled, and Garza teetered against the railing for a suspended moment before toppling headfirst into the turbulent water. The submarine rolled, its hull heaving up against the confines of its pen and wrecking die steel framework. Water rushed in through the gaping hole left by Mjolnir, and the submarine kept rolling until it had capsized. It settled slowly into the water and was gone.

In the aftermath, the chamber was quiet except for the grinding and crackling of the ice. "Jan? Clint? You still there?" Steve called. He was still confused.

Jan buzzed up next to him, landing clumsily on his shoulder. "Steve," she said, and he noticed she was slurring a little. "It's over, right? I'm about stung out."

He cupped her in the palm of his hand. She was so cold, he couldn't believe she was still conscious.

"Yeah," he said. "I think it's over." Janet was already slipping into sleep, her tiny body having burned the last of its reserves.

Clint appeared from a seam in the ice, where he'd apparently been the whole time. He moved gingerly, and held shards of ice between all of his fingers the way a nervous woman holds her keys in a parking lot late at night. "Man," he said. "Holding still on ice sure makes the knees creaky." He scanned the room for targets, and seemed to relax ever so slightly.

"Gang," Tony's voice came over the comm. "I'm about to come through the roof. You might want to move off to the side."

"Excellent, the cavalry arrives." Clint headed toward the scaffolding, and the rest of them followed. It stood under an angled part of the wall, and seemed best protected from falling ice boulders. Plus, Steve noted as they all followed Clint, the floor was more stable in that area.

"I take it from the banter that everything is all right down there," General Fury said in the comm.

"Correct, sir," Steve said. "The submarine is destroyed. We don't see any Chitauri survivors. We'll need to take care of this rocket thing, though."