The Ultimates: Against All Enemies (29 page)

"Current plan is to let the water take care of that," General Fury said. "The amount of damage you've done to the floor, it should give way. If you want to tip it over before you head out, though, that might be a good idea."

"Yes, sir," Steve said. He looked over at the rocket. It wouldn't be too hard to knock it down once Tony arrived. "Two Garzas," he muttered to himself He was looking at the body of one of them, in a graceless heap near one post of the scaffolding. He'd never heard of two Chitauri assuming the same human form.

"One Garza, one Loki," Thor corrected him.

Steve shook his head. "I guess."

"No guessing," said Thor. "Loki has a way of getting the last word in. This time, we thought—well, I thought—he was trying to undermine us. Now I'm thinking he decided to sabotage the Chitauri—he wanted that sub destroyed."

"I don't get it," Steve said. "I thought he had it in for you." Thor shrugged. "What Loki wants is chaos. Every once in a while that puts him on the right side of things. Could be he doesn't like the Chitauri because of their fetish for order."

"Could be he just wants to push your buttons," Clint said. "Family. My kids do the same thing." Thor chuckled, but there wasn't much humor in it.

An enormous crackling sound, like lightning directly overhead before the thunder sounds, rolled through the room, and a huge icefall gutted the center of the ceiling. All four of them ducked away from it, but when the collapse hit the already-broken floor, the impact knocked them off their feet. Steve took the fall on his shoulders, cradling Jan's tiny form in both hands with the shield slung over his back. Its edges cut painfully into his shoulder blades, and a wash of displaced sea-water drenched him. The whole floor of the chamber was moving now, and when Steve looked up he saw that the scaffolding had begun to tilt. A column of light shone down like something out of a UFO abduction movie, and the feet of the Iron Man suit appeared as Tony slowly descended into the chamber.

"Invigorating," somebody said. Steve had a little water in his ears, and didn't place the voice right away.

"That's one word for it," he said, and got to his feet. Then he froze as he placed the voice.

"Time to go, boys and girl," Tony said. "I'm running on fumes here, but I can take two. Thor, you mind giving someone a ride?"

But Thor wasn't listening to him. Neither was Steve. They had both turned to see Garza staggering to his feet, the side of his head grotesquely caved in but his eyes still malevolently alive. He was starting to decohere in the area of the wound inflicted by Steve's shield; as he spoke, a reptilian tongue flicked out between broken fangs and one of his eyes turned over in its shattered socket, revealing a slit pupil.

"Great goals require great sacrifice," he said, gaze locked on Steve. "You are one. I am another." In one hand he held a small rectangular box, much like the sample container Tony had planted on Nick Fury back when this had all started. With a whickering sound, eight shards of ice cut through the air and buried themselves in Garza's head and the hand holding the box, but he didn't drop it, and his gaze never wavered from Steve.

"The long view," the Chitauri said, his voice gurgling around an ice splinter sunk under his jaw, "is something at which we excel." His thumb flicked a switch on the box. Again, Steve thought. It all happens again. The rocket, the Chitauri, the ice. He remembered thinking, not too long after his encounter at Andrews, that they were a step behind the Chitauri, and now realized that he hadn't taken the thought far enough. They hadn't just been a step behind. They'd been led.

"Ah," Thor said. "Of course. Well played, my brother." He spread his arms as if to welcome what was to come.

And the world disappeared in fire and ice.

Tony sank in darkness. Around him the suit tried to repair itself, but his batteries were almost gone, and every motion of arm or leg cost him energy that he needed for the nano-sized oxygen exchangers. He nearly started moving anyway, to speed the whole thing up, because Tony Stark had failed and he wanted to die.

Over and over the loop played itself in his memory:

He looked down at the tableau of Thor, Steve, and Clint, shadowed by the looming rocket and its slowly tilting support scaffold. Knock the rocket over, hell, he thought. It'll take care of itself before long. He saw the Chitauri get up, and zeroed in on the object in its hand, and understood. He pivoted in midair, reaching down. Thor would save himself, and Clint was a soldier... but he had to save Steve. Too many people needed Steve, and Tony Stark might have been a vain, alcoholic, dying playboy with no evident moral fiber or ethical beliefs, but he would have given his life in that moment to save Steve Rogers.

He reached, and Steve was gone, and the explosion overwhelmed Tony's sensors and gyros, pinwheeling him across the room to smash into the far wall. Dampers in the suit, and the damping gel, saved his life, but at a cost of that much more precious energy. From reflex, he put his hands out, but the floor was gone, and in the next moment a million tons of ice carried him far down into the Weddell Sea. The ice lifted away, and briefly Tony rose too, in the drag of the ice's buoyancy. Then came a moment of perfect suspension, and perfect darkness, before Tony spiraled down and came to rest with a faint grinding sound of the suit scraping the seafloor sediment.

He damped the heaters, and bought himself another hour of oxygen. The cold immediately seeped in, first at the joints of the suit and then spreading to his hands and feet. He felt himself slowly going out, guttering like a candle flame on the last strands of its wick. Above him were sounds of ice, cracking and shifting and collapsing, grinding the bodies of his friends and colleagues together with those of his enemies. Tony grew colder, and listened.

And then, after enough time had passed that he had lost track of time, and felt his limbs grow numb and his mind grow slow, came a light.

The minisub breached the surface amid icebergs, scaring a gathering of penguins who shot off into the water, leaving pale bubble trails that faded into the water's dark gray. Clutched in the minisub's robot arm, head and shoulders out of the water, was the Iron Man suit with either Tony Stark or Tony Stark's body inside. Nick gnawed on a cigar and watched as a SHIELD helicopter took up a position over the minisub. Two men rappelled down to hook the suit, and the helicopter drew Tony up to its belly before swinging over in Nick's direction, where the ice was solid enough for it to land. As soon as it was on the deck, two techs hopped out and started working on getting the suit open, while a med team stood by. Another team put up a tent over the whole scene and fired up a space heater. This was all just triage; if Tony was alive, they were going to get him in the copter and up to
Algol
pronto. Nick waited until the tent was set up, then went inside.

They'd had Jarvis send the suit specs, but this new version was trickier to open from the outside than previous iterations. Also, the dead servos and freezing temperatures didn't help. But SHIELD hired only the best, and pretty soon the techs had the helmet off, and as the air inside the tent warmed, the rest of the suit started to come off more quickly.

"He's alive," said one of the medics. "Core temp's way down, though. Get some hot blankets, and we need him on the copter yesterday."

Tony had started talking incoherently as soon as the helmet came off and trying to move, but even though the techs had gotten the arms and torso of the suit unlocked, he didn't seem to be able to move his arms. Medics wiped the inertial gel off and got him wrapped in blankets while the techs moved on to his legs. Abruptly, as if some kind of switch had been flipped in his metabolism, Tony started to cry and talk at the same time. "All, God, I couldn't save him," Tony sobbed. "I didn't quit, Nick, I just couldn't save him."

"Be easy," Nick said. He squatted down next to Tony.

"I tried, Nick, I just didn't ha—have the juice. And then—"

In a gesture so unlike him that even Nick had a hard time believing he was doing it, he put a hand gently on Tony's shoulder. "We know what you did. And everyone got out."

"Wha... ?" Tony's eyes rolled in Nick's direction. His skin was still terribly blue. "Everyone?"

"Yeah," Nick said. "Thor got them out."

Tony was having trouble focusing his eyes. "Thor," he whispered. "That crazy son of a bitch. He did, huh?"

Nick nodded. "Yeah, he did."

"Good for him." Tony started shivering violently. This was a good sign, Nick thought. It meant he was warming up enough to waste spare energy on shivering. Hypothermia victims often relapsed after rescue, though, as heat loss from their breathing caught up to them.

"I'm going to quit this robot suit business and become a Norse god," Tony said through the chattering of his teeth.

"The way Thor comes and goes, we could use a backup," Nick said. Thor had in fact disappeared as soon has he'd showed up on the flight deck of
Algol
with Steve, Clint, and a nearly frozen Janet. Tony was the second case of hypothermia they'd dealt with in the last sixteen hours. "But right now," Nick went on, "you're going to get into a warm bath and do nothing for a while." The techs were working the last of the suit's clamps and seals open, and Nick saw Tony's hands moving under the blankets. "Okay, let's get moving here," he said. "I've had about goddamn enough of Antarctica."

"Warm bath," Tony murmured. "Long day... " He fell asleep, or passed out, and the medics moved Nick out of the way.

"Respiratory loss, General," one of them said. "We've got to get him up to
Algol
right now."

"Go, then," Nick said. He stood back until Tony was stretchered onto the copter and secured inside a heated medevac tent, and then he climbed aboard and watched the Antarctic landscape recede as the helicopter powered up and wheeled away into the sky.

42

For a while he would call someone he knew at McGuire and informally requisition an F-16, just so he could see for himself. It was an eight-hour flight, with three refueling stops along the way, and Steve had a little tinge of guilt about the cost to the taxpayers... but he had to see for himself. He had to fly over the shallow depression in the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf, and tip his wings at the SHIELD personnel stationed out at the edge of the shelf where it calved into the Weddell Sea. And he had to circle the iced-over crater where SHIELD missile strikes and a perimeter of next-gens had made sure that the Chitauri had nowhere to go but down. Then, after he had seen all of this, he would know again. For a little while. It haunted him that he had made the problem worse before he had made it better. That wasn't what soldiers did, and it wasn't what Captain America was supposed to do.

And it haunted him that he had come so close to being entombed in ice again. He dreamed sometimes that he was waking up in the year 2249, or 3188, or 9999; the year didn't matter. Every time he had the dream, he awoke in an unrecognizable future, and was never able to become part of it. Then, every morning, he woke up and did everything he could to make a lie of the dream. He went out to the movies instead of staying up with Turner Classics; he read a book once in a while if the
Times Book
Review
suggested be should; he kept up a desultory kind of relationship with Janet until she told him one morning over eggs benedict that she thought they'd both be better off trying to find someone who really made each of them happy, instead of just keeping a place warm for someone else who was really never coming back. He'd argued at first, but only the way you argue when you know that the other party will be angry if you acquiesce too easily to what's obviously the right thing to do. And so they didn't talk much anymore.

It was all fine, it was going to be fine. The Chitauri were gone completely, as far as anyone could be certain. Tony had succeeded in buying his radio stations, and along with a steady diet of top-40 hits and boilerplate talk, each broadcast alerted all the ants within range to attack and destroy a certain alien invader. So far—and it had been three months since Antarctica—not a single confirmed hit had been reported. Steve was beginning to let himself believe that they'd really gotten rid of the Chitauri this time, which also meant that everything he'd said about the triumph of human ingenuity was, for the moment, vindicated.

Until the next threat came along, which was where he still had a problem. If he got up in the morning and looked at himself in the mirror with the kind of ruthless honesty he expected of himself, Steve Rogers had to admit that he'd been seduced by the idea that he knew better than the people he was sworn to protect. He wanted to believe that he'd never fall for the same scam again, but how did you know?

General Fury had no answers.

How did you know?

The answer, perhaps unsurprisingly, had come from Gail. Bucky was in the hospital again, and although the doctors said he would get out, every time they signed Bucky in, Steve confronted the cold fact that the world was too damn full of people he was going to outlive. One night, not too long after he'd found himself on the flight deck of SHIELD helicarrier
Algol
with his eyebrows singed off and one of Thor's meaty arms draped around his neck, he'd confided in her. "I blew it, Gail," he said. "They used me, and I let them, and I let myself think that I was bigger than the flag. Now everyone in SHIELD knows I did it. How do you... I mean, why should anyone ever trust me again?"

"Because you did it for the right reasons," Gail said without hesitation. It was late fall, three full months after Antarctica, and for some reason she'd wanted to walk from Mount Sinai down through Central Park to the petting zoo. They were feeding two Vietnamese potbellied pigs, all by themselves in the late afternoon chill.

"Everyone thinks their reasons are the right reasons," Steve said. "That wasn't good enough this time."

"It might be next time," she said, and moved on from the potbellied pigs to a pen full of various goats. Petting zoos, Steve thought. What are we doing here? I'm the one who's lost in time, and Gail's acting like a ten-year-old. "And it might not," he said.