The Ultimates: Against All Enemies (21 page)

Steve came through the hole and settled next to where Clint lay in a sniper's prone firing position.

"Been a long time since someone said I was only pretty fast," he said.

"All in your frame of reference," Clint said, never taking his eyes off the hallway.

"Okay," Steve said. "Where do we go?"

"Not we."

"No?"

"No," Clint said. "I've got orders to stay right here. Nobody's supposed to get out this way. Good thing you're trying to Come in. Nick didn't say anything about that."

"So where do I go? And is that a Russian gun?"

Now Clint did look away from the sight of his rifle. "It's a cheap-ass Chinese knockoff of a Russian gun, and no, I'm not happy about it. But what you're supposed to do is follow those tracks, Sherlock. And do me a favor. Whatever's on the other end, see if you can flush some of it back my way. I don't want to lie here all day and have nothing to show for it but a headache."

"Will do," Steve said. "By the way, I should have taken you more seriously the other day."

"About what?"

"Cynicism," Steve said. He started walking down the hall, thinking of how very much he would like to kill the alien masquerading as Admiral Esteban Garza. "I've got a lot to learn about it."

"You're talking to a Ph.D.," Clint said from behind him. "Stop on back anytime for a lesson." Around the corner, the boot prints divided. Some went through a fire door, and some kept going until they came to the blown-apart remains of what had been a vestibule between two heavily secured steel doors. Both of the doors were now lying bent and scorched on the floor, and the bodies started to pile up there as well. The acrid stink of gunfire hung heavy in the air. Steve went through the vestibule unarmed and alone, passing into a computer lab that looked as if the invading force had dedicated itself to demolishing each and every terminal, server, and peripheral. Several low fires burned, adding their fumes to the already-fouled air. The sprinklers, it appeared, had come on and then cut out; everything was wet, but not wet enough to put out the fires. Steve sneezed. Among the bodies of human lab techs and code monkeys, he saw a number of Chitauri beginning to decohere. It was hard to tell which were invaders and which had infiltrated Stark beforehand.

Which, of course, they had. It was plain idiotic to think that they hadn't. If they could get into the Joint Chiefs of Staff, they could get into Stark Industries. And if they could do that... The truth is, Steve thought, I'm the only guy I know who I'm sure isn't a Chitauri. Fresh gunfire erupted ahead, on the other side of another set of blown security doors. Steve hunkered down and called in, using the number that would link into General Fury's SHIELD comm. "General," he said. "I'm in a lab on the target floor. There's small-arms fire ahead. Orders?"

"We're out in the main lobby, about to push straight into the lab where you're hearing shooting. That's where the amplifier is, according to Tony. No idea of enemy strength on the inside, but Clint reports upwards of fifty kills on their way in and he just caught the end of the break-in. So look for... hang on." The line went dead for a moment. When General Fury came back on, he said, "Go, Cap. We'll meet you inside."

Steve went in shooting, like he was an old-fashioned commando again in an old-fashioned war. At about the same moment, General Fury's platoon of next-gen super-soldiers came in the front door. The Chitauri forces had anticipated the frontal assault, but their rear guard was thin and distracted by something out toward the center of the enormous lab space, which appeared to have a hole in the floor surrounded by six-foot railings. Glancing up, Steve saw that the floor above was the same. One of those labs that occasionally had to work on something tall, from the looks of it. But why Tony's amplifier was in here was anyone's guess. He'd said it was small enough to fit on the meeting table in the Triskelion. Picking off two Chitauri trying to cover their rear, Steve circled around along the wall, trying to stay out of Fury's field of fire while still doing some good. This was one of those times when he wished he had the suit and shield instead of jeans and a Brooklyn Dodgers T-shirt he'd paid forty dollars for. Incredible, he thought as he nailed a Chitauri about to throw some kind of grenade into the shaft cut through the middle of the floor. Forty dollars, and the clerk called it retro and rolled his eyes. The grenade rolled about three feet and went off, demolishing a bank of what looked like chemistry equipment. A beaker, miraculously unbroken, came skipping across the floor in Steve's direction, looking so alive in its motion that he almost shot it.

Thor appeared in the middle of things. He was singing some Nordic song in a hearty baritone, slinging alien bodies all over the place and—if Steve was not mistaken—not being overly careful with his backswing when it might damage some expensive goodies belonging to the global corporate hegemony. How many people on the team were crazy, Steve wondered? Thor, Banner, Pym .. . heck, how sane was Steve, if by sane you meant
well-adjusted to your surroundings
?

Screw it, he told himself and fought his way over toward Thor. "Ah, Steve!" Thor shouted. "Enjoying our little service to humankind and its multinational overlords?"

"Can it," Steve said. "Where's the amplifier?"

Thor actually did a double take. Steve thought that as long as he might live, he would never see anything quite so strange as a Norse god doing a double take... if, that is, he was going along with the proposition that Thor was a Norse god.

"Amplifier?" Thor said. "So you don't know?"

"Know what?"

"According to Loki, there is no amplifier." Thor held Mjolnir aloft and brought a stroke of lightning down through the shaft to incinerate the Chitauri against the railing.

Great, Steve thought. According to Loki.

"So where's Loki now?" he asked, laying down cover for a pair of next-gens pinned behind a tool cart. They scampered back to more substantial cover with the main body of General Fury's unit.

"I haven't looked for him," Thor said. "But you can bet your flag he's somewhere watching the show."

"Bring down the lightning again!"

"I'm not sure I can," Thor said, looking up the shaft. "It's hard to keep it small, and you don't want to see what would happen if it got a little too big inside a nice skyscraper like this." The look on his face said different, though. "You're nuts," Steve said. "You do want to see what would happen, don't you?"

A grin spread across Thor's face. "Well, now that you mention it," he said. "What a show it would be." He glanced over at Steve and shrugged. "What can I say? Us gods are capricious, you know? All the stories say so."

The two of them were wedged into a narrow space between an industrial-sized refrigerator containing God knew what, and the railing around the shaft. Bullets hammered into the fridge, and Steve wondered what was leaking out. He was about to say something to Thor, along the lines
of give me a break
, when three people in Stark Industries lab coveralls appeared along the railing on the next floor up, directly over Steve's head. A cold feeling came over him. They were too calm, and he had no angle to get a good shot, unless...

Before he could complete the thought he was up and running, and then he leapt up and out over the shaft, pirouetting in midair to empty the clip of the junk commie AK-47 he'd liberated from a dead alien... all just an instant too late. The three targets crumpled and died in the split second after each had shouldered and fired a rocket-propelled grenade into the heart of General Fury's position. The explosions, nearly simultaneous, drove through Steve like a punch from the Hulk, and he fell. 32

In the sixty seconds between what Nick hoped would be his final conversation with Tony and what Nick hoped would be a quick and decisive elimination of the Chitauri force that had gouged its way up from MTA and Long Island Rail Road tunnels into one of Tony's main testing laboratories, Tony—being the finicky CEO type—found a reason to call back.

"Say, Nick," he said over the SHIELD comm, which only Tony and Nick were wearing. "It occurs to me that Clint's little massacre down in 2-B has given me an opportunity. How about I go downstairs and get my suit on?"

"Be my guest," Nick said. "If you can get there."

"Oh, I can get there. I've got an elevator line, powered separately, that takes me straight from home to lab. So go ahead and cut the power or whatever the SWAT manual says you should do. I'll get along fine."

"So why are you calling? I got aliens to shoot."

"Right, I know. Do you think they've figured out yet that there's no way they can get what they came for?"

"Tony, I have to go. If you're going to go get the suit, go get the suit." Nick hung up as something exploded inside the lab. "Wait a minute," he said, before he remembered that the phone was dead. What did Tony mean, they couldn't get what they'd come for?

Don't go there, he told himself "Boys," he said to the assembled dozen or so next-gens, and also to Thor, who had happened to be at the Triskelion when the call came in, "I don't know exactly what we're going to find in there, because the management won't tell me." A smirk from Thor. "But I do know that the enemy cannot go back the way he came in. We've got that sealed off He may or may not know that. If he does, they may fight just to get out through us, and I can't let that happen, so we're not going full penetration. Get positions as close to this door as you can, hold them, spread gradually through the room only when Thor has softened up areas. We can expect reinforcements from Captain America fairly soon."

Annoyed looks among the next-gens at this news.

They didn't like Steve, considered him out of date and ridiculously naive. The next-gens were super-soldiers for this time and place. To them, Steve was their own origin myth, alive when he shouldn't be, walking the earth that rightfully should have been theirs.

"Was that Tony on the comm again?" Thor asked. Nick nodded. "He planning to join us, or is he in a meeting?"

"I think," Nick said, "that you might be in for a surprise." Surveying his troops, he said, "All of us might be. Okay, on my go."

Boom, through the door with the pieces still flying from the set charges. Return fire came immediately, from well-defined and well-chosen points through a space that Nick assimilated all at once: broadly rectangular, with their access point near one corner. The center of the room had no floor, and no ceiling, as if it had been designed with a missile launch site in mind. Diagonally across the room was another exit door, destroyed along with part of that wall. Nick counted a dozen workstations, and more kinds of equipment than he could recognize. The next-gens were doing their thing the way they'd been trained, concentrating firepower on specific areas to enable a small advance, then consolidating that gain. Thor surged straight out into the mass of Chitauri defenders, leveling anyone who got within arm's length. There were no worries about target differentiation; whichever members of Tony's staff hadn't already gotten out were dead or dying on the floor.

Thirty seconds after insertion, Steve Rogers came in through the back door, and the dynamic of the fight changed. Thor had already cut a swath through the Chitauri almost all the way across the lab, leaving both bodies and wreckage in his wake, and when he and Steve met up, Nick thought,
Good
. Now we squeeze.

And then he saw Steve look up. Following Steve's line of sight, Nick spotted the three Chitauri and their RPGs, and in the instant before they fired, too many things happened in his mind for him to be able to keep track. Hell of a move by Steve, he thought as Steve danced out over the central shaft and drew a bead on the shooters. At the same time he was thinking how bizarre it was that the Chitauri had gone from emulating the Third Reich to adopting the tools and tactics of every insurrection from the Viet Cong to Iraq. And then he was ducking for cover as the three Chitauri fired, the heavy whoosh almost swallowed by the din of automatic-weapons.fire, and the world around Nick went up in flames. Things were a little scattered when he'd come to his senses. There was blood in his eyes, and he could tell that he was deaf. He tried talking into the comm to see where Tony had gotten to, but although he could tell he was making words, could feel the vibrations in his throat, Nick knew that he wouldn't be able to hear whatever Tony said in response. Cap was gone, Tony was God knew where, most of the next-gens were in bad shape... there were more holes in the floor. Nick's left leg was dangling over one. Could be one of the RPGs had dug through the floor before going off Where was everyone? Dimly he could tell that his eardrums were registering sound, but he couldn't hear, dammit, and when he wiped his good eye it hurt like a son of a bitch. I don't want to be blind, he thought, and wiped again and again until he could sort of focus on what was around him.

The Chitauri were coming down from the floor above. Thor was killing them by the ton, but more were coming. Where was Steve? Where was Tony? They couldn't actually be losing here. They'd gone in with three Ultimates—four, if Tony ever got around to showing up—and two dozen next-gens, and Nick could not believe they were going to lose this battle. They could not lose this battle. Then a light flared in the central shaft, so bright that at first Nick thought Thor had called down lightning again, and out of the light rose Iron Man. With a sweep of his right arm, Tony brought down the entire far side of the floor above, and with it the bodies of Chitauri crushed by the force beam and falling wreckage. From Tony's left hand hung Steve Rogers, and Steve flipped into a somersault that carried him back over the railing and into the fray once more. With both hands free now, Tony turned the force beams on what remained of the floor above, and then he went to work on the floor above that, and Nick blacked out for a bit. When he'd come to again, Thor was carrying him back out into the lobby of Stark Industries, where a SHIELD medic whose name Nick could usually remember was mouthing words that Nick thought were
Sir, can you hear me
?

"I sure as hell cannot," he said, and blacked out again.