The Ultimates: Against All Enemies (25 page)

"I don't think I will, Nick," Hank said, ignoring Janet. "In fact, maybe I'll eat him the way the Hulk was going to eat me. Remember that? Remember how he ripped the hell out of Manhattan? He's still on the team, Nick. You keep him in a box, but he's still around. Nobody ostracized him."

"Take your meds today, Hank?" Clint said.

"You go to hell," Hank said, and threw Clint as far as he could out into the bay. Janet screamed something, and Hank dropped to his hands and knees so he could get his face closer to hers. "He another one of your boyfriends, Jan? Couldn't wait until the divorce went through?" Faintly the sound of Clint Barton's splashdown reached Hank's ears. "Did you tell them you thought the team needed me back, Jan? Yes or no? I just want a straight answer."

"No," she said. "I never told them that."

And then she disappeared, and at almost the same instant Hank's eyes lit up with the pain of her stings.

"Janet!" he roared. "Don't start this again, Janet!"

He could just barely see her, as whispers of motion in his peripheral vision a split second before she stung him again. Hank flailed at the air around his head, shouting at her to stop. Once he felt the back of his hand graze her, and heard her tiny grunt at the impact. "I'm not trying to hurt you, Jan, but stop this!" he shouted.

Then a line of bullets stitched its way across his left leg and he forgot all about Janet. Dropping briefly to one knee, Hank looked at Nick Fury and said, "Shooting me, Nick? Is this what it's come to?"

"Had to get your attention," Nick said.

"Ah," Hank said. "Of course. I understand." He took one step to his right, ripped the flagpole out of its concrete base and hurled it like a spear through the Triskelion's front door. The bulletproof glass went off like a bomb, and the flagpole buried itself at the base of the rear atrium wall after splintering the reception desk. "Now," Hank said. "Did I get your attention? Go ahead, shoot me again, Nick. I can take it."

"How about this?" a voice said from behind him. Hank spun around to see who it was, and just had time to glimpse the gleaming head of Mjolnir before it crashed into the point of his shoulder. His arm went numb, and Hank stumbled toward the broken door. "Thor, buddy, I thought we always got along," Hank said. "Guess I was wrong about that, too." With his good arm, he swatted Thor away and returned his attention to Nick. "Tell me something, Nick," Hank said in the brief pause. "Have you ever made a mistake in your life?"

Still pointing the gun at Hank, Nick said, "Sure I have. But that doesn't mean I assume I'll always be trying to get everyone else to go along with it. My mistakes are mine—I should never have gone to D.C. when I knew what was going to happen, and I for damn sure should have played smarter by anticipating the Chitauri tactics sooner." Nick raised the gun. "But you I was right about. Stand down." Hank saw Nick's gaze flick up and back, an instant before the back of Hank's neck lit up with Jan's stings. "Dammit, Jan!" Hank said, hunching away from the stings and swiping his arms around his head again. "Stop it!"

"Stand down, Hank," Fury said coldly. "Last chance."

"Last chance?" Hank repeated. Inside his head was a great black emptiness, a lack of hope so absolute that he couldn't even imagine what hope might feel like. He took a step toward Nick, and didn't even pause when Nick squeezed off a shot that hit Hank square on the knee. "What the hell do you know about being out of chances?"

"I know enough," Nick said, "to know that you had yours. Do it, big man." For a split second, Hank took that as a challenge; then he realized that Nick had been talking to someone else. A crackle of energy lit up in the corner of his eye, and he turned to see Thor, Mjolnir at the ready. He got one arm up as Thor started his swing, and then—far too late—he thought,
Where's Tony
?

Simultaneously, Mjolnir slammed into Hank's jaw and a force like Hank had never felt crushed him down from behind to the steel deck of the Triskelion. He tried to get up, and heard Tony's voice, amplified through the Iron Man suit: "Stay down, Hank."

"No," Hank said. All of his anger evaporated. The impact of Mjolnir still rang in his head, and he felt as if Tony's force beams had crushed all of the air out of his lungs. Janet's stings still burned all over his skin and in his eyes. He'd never hurt like this in his life.

"No," he said again, and pushed himself up to his hands and knees. Like a bomb going off in Hank's head, Mjolnir slammed him back to the ground. His eyes, already swelling shut from Wasp stings, wouldn't focus.

"No," he said one more time, and started to rise.

Janet's voice came to him, from near his head. "Don't," she said, but he couldn't see her and he wasn't doing it for her anyway. He got almost to his knees again.

"Stay down, Hank," Nick said. "Tony warned you."

"Tony," Hank said, and spat blood. He got one of his feet under him. No one said anything, but Hank felt the static charge in the air—the moment before Tony's force beams sledgehammered him into the deck again. Still he tried to get up again, but he couldn't make his limbs work, and he could feel consciousness slipping away.

As Hank faded to black, the last thing he heard was Tony saying, "I just heard Cap over the comm. He's found them for sure, but there's nowhere for him to land. We need to... "
Take me with you
, Hank tried to say.

37

SHIELD helicarrier
Algol
was a big sturdy ship, but even it was having trouble with the storms boiling off the Antarctic coast here in the dead of the Southern Hemisphere winter. Antarctica was the driest place on Earth, but the wind sure did like to blow around whatever snow did fall, and it was all blowing right now, as Steve tried to figure out what was going on around the Chitauri base at the edge of the Weddell Sea. The best thermal imaging technology SHIELD could offer had only confirmed the existence of an artificial heat source, and because the Antarctic cold and wind dispersed the heat so quickly, SHIELD

scientists were having trouble coming up with any kind of ballpark estimate of how big the heat source really was, which meant that nobody had any idea how large a space was being heated... which meant that there was no way to tell how many Chitauri were down there.

"You can't bring us any lower?" he asked the pilot for the dozenth time since he'd landed on
Algol
twelve hours before.

"Nope," the pilot said. "You think the wind is bad up here, try it along the face of the mountain there. We could probably handle it—well, we could maybe handle it—but we'd only get to be wrong once. And my orders from General Fury are to avoid contact with the enemy."

Which, since they didn't know what kind of surveillance capability the Chitauri had down there in their nest, meant that the captain was going to play it safe. Steve was annoyed with himself for asking, since he'd known the answer before he opened his mouth, and also since that kind of pointless repetition lacked discipline. He resolved that he'd asked for the last time.

"What's the ETA on the rest of the team?" Steve asked. General Fury hadn't shared that bit of information with him, an omission Steve attributed to the general's lingering anger and disappointment over Steve's recent actions. And I deserve it, too, Steve thought. I haven't been worthy of my commission.

"Last I knew, Iron Man should have been here by now," the pilot said. "The rest of the team is due in the next two hours, give or take."

Steve looked out through the window at the swirl of clouds on the face of Vinson Massif
Algol
held its position level with the top of the mountain, at about sixteen thousand feet, and maybe ten miles out over the Weddell Sea. From this high, it was practically impossible to tell where sea ended and land began. It was all ice— more specifically, the six-hundred-meter-thick Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf, and all of the glaciers that fed it—until the black stone face of the mountain reared up. And even the mountain was mostly covered in snow and ice. In Antarctica, a surface had to be pretty steep to not get a coating of the white stuff

I've always wanted to go here, Steve thought. When he'd been a kid, Scott, Shackleton, and Amundsen had been names to conjure with. And now he was here, after his own time spent frozen, but he wouldn't get to enjoy it much. Battling enemies of the United States and of freedom brought a certain kind of satisfaction, but it wasn't fun.

Although neither was polar exploration, to judge from most of the stories.

"So Tony's supposed to be here by now?" he said, just to be saying something. The nerves he was feeling weren't normal for him. This was a big show, for sure, but it wasn't like he hadn't been in the big shows before. The difference now was that Steve felt like he had to redeem himself. He had to prove himself worthy.

Specifically, he had to find the Chitauri who called himself Admiral Esteban Garza, and he had to settle things.

The pilot didn't answer him. Good, Steve thought. By this time, I wouldn't be answering me either. He scanned through his comm channels to see if he could raise Tony, but Tony was either out of range—which shouldn't have been possible, unless he was in outer space or under a volcano—or he was just being his typical drunken idiot playboy self. Amazing, the people brought together to be the Ultimates, Steve thought. A delusional Scandinavian nurse, a scientist who occasionally turns into a nearly invincible freak, an alcoholic with a brain tumor, a manic-depressive wife-beater... they make Clint look normal, and he's a psychotic assassin. Heck, they make Janet look normal, and she's a mutant. He felt a little twinge at that last thought. His feelings for Janet ran hot and cold... well, hot and warm... and if Steve was honest with himself he realized that the reason for that variance was that deep down inside, he felt strange about being with a mutant girl. He was old-fashioned. If he was with a girl for a while, he started thinking about white picket fences and kid-size baseball mitts lying in the yard. What kind of kids would he and Janet have?

None, was the answer. They'd never get that far. They dated sometimes, and that was as far as it would ever go. Janet would never be his twenty-first-century Gail, and that had much less to do with Hank Pym than with Steve Rogers. Another word for old-fashioned, Janet had told him once, was
bigoted
. Well, fine, Steve thought. I'm a bigot. I'm bigoted in the direction of normal, regular life, and if that's a bad thing, then put me up against the wall and shoot me. Until then, I'll keep going out there and putting my life on the line for my bigoted ideals.

Steve's comm popped. "Ahoy there, Captain Flag," came Tony's voice. "I see that you've been calling." Steve was looking out the window, but couldn't see the ion trail left by the Iron Man suit anywhere.

"What's your ETA
to Algol
?"

"Couple of minutes," Tony said breezily. "I took a turn around the South Pole, just to see it, and then I thought I should have a look at the magnetic pole, too, so that was another little detour. But I'm coming at you from the south-southwest right now."

Sure enough, there was the twinkling of the ion trail as Tony neared
Algol
, cutting through the storm like it didn't exist. "This isn't the best time for tourism, Tony," Steve said. "You know, we're supposed to be exterminating a bunch of aliens here pretty soon."

"What, you and me? Or were we going to wait for the rest of the gang and their legions of next-gens?" The ion trail grew brighter, and then Tony streaked overhead. "I'm coming down. Meet me inside so you don't catch your death of cold."

"Go to hell," Steve said. He cut the link and went to meet Tony
in Algol's
rear internal hangar. The latest version of the Iron Man suit had, among its other updates, a quick-exit feature. Basically, Tony gave a verbal command and the suit sprang open. This was convenient for Tony, but not so much for the support crew, since the suit's opening caused a slow-motion flood of inertial-damping gel. All SHIELD

helicarriers kept a supply of the gel on hand. When Steve got to the hangar, Tony was toweling off while the hangar crew scraped and mopped up the gel and got the suit prepped for redeployment. "I'm going to need to siphon off whatever excess power there is until we head out," Tony was saying as Steve walked in. "A quick ten-thousand-mile jaunt is hell on the batteries, you know."

"No problem," one of the hangar crew said. He was already dragging an arm-thick cable from the wall over to the where the suit stood against its frame. "We'll have you topped off inside an hour, as long as we don't have to do anything else."

"And where can a guy get a drink around here?" Tony added.

"Can't help you there," the tech said.

"Barbarians," Tony said. "Steve, I'm surrounded by barbarians. Including you."

"Sometimes it's tough being a libertine," Steve said.

Tony's eyebrows shot up. "Ajoke from Captain Flag, so close to our final confrontation with the alien menace? Ajoke including the word
libertine
? Good Lord. I'm starting to think I'm having an influence on you."

Steve ignored this, not even wanting to contemplate the question of how he might influence Tony, and how any possible channel of influence might run both ways. "Instead of a drink, you ought to have something to eat.

Won't be long
before Attair
and
Alshain
are within range. I think we're going to go tonight."

"Not until tonight? I was hoping to be done by then. Ah well," Tony said. He finished drying off and got into a plain SHIELD jumpsuit. "My dissipated life can resume tomorrow." Forty-five minutes later, as Tony was finishing a sandwich
from Algol's
mess, word came from General Fury that
Attair
and
Alshain
were within two hundred miles. "Favorable winds," General Fury said. "We go in thirty minutes if Tony's suit is ready."

"The hangar monkeys say it will be," Tony said. "So let's get this show on the road."

"Weather being what it is," General Fury said, "we're not going to be able to land with copters. I've got Clint and Janet here, although Clint's a little gimpy from Hank's tantrum yesterday, and four companies of ncxt-gens. We will deploy using jetpacks."