The Ultimates: Against All Enemies (5 page)

Steve tapped on the door. "Hey, Buck," he said.

No answer.

Two steps into the room, Steve was certain Bucky was dead. He lay on his back, mouth open, tubes and needles everywhere... but the monitor next to the bed ticked off a steady heartbeat. Steve took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and settled in the chair next to Bucky's bed. He wondered where Gail was. Usually when Bucky had to go into the hospital, she spent most of her time there with him.

"Ah, Buck," he said softly. He didn't want to wake Bucky but he couldn't stop himself from talking. He had to talk, even if it was just to hear himself thinking things through.

"I need you on your game, pal," he said. 'You want tactics and strategy, bad guys taken out and objectives accomplished, I'm the guy. But what do you do, Buck?

What do you do when you might be walking past the bad guy on the street, and there's a way to find out but they won't let you use it?"

Bucky snorted and shifted a little in the bed. Steve waited to see if he would wake up, but then Bucky's breathing settled back to normal. He hasn't got much left, Steve thought, listening to the shallow, wheezing breath of his oldest friend, and his eyes started to sting.

"They're not with us, Buck," he said. "Everyone wants shades of gray, but that's what it boils down to. We're fighting the bad guys, and they're not with us."

The monitor chirped, and Steve heard a whir and click as one of Bucky's machines dispensed meds. For a while Steve couldn't think of what else to say. Then it came to him.

"All enemies foreign and domestic, right?" he said.

"Right," came a voice from the doorway behind him.

He turned, and there was Gail. "All enemies," she said again. "Foreign and domestic. You do what you know is right, Steve."

"Yeah," Steve said. He looked down. "But the thing that I know is right... it's against the law. It's wrong." She stepped over to him and put a hand on his shoulder. "We have to trust someone to know when to make that decision. We have to trust you, Steve."

His cell phone rang. Gail whacked him half-seriously on the shoulder, where her hand had just been resting. "You get out of this ward with your phone. They're not supposed to be on in here." Steve muted the phone without looking at the call. A passing nurse stuck her head in the door and said,

"Turn your phone off in here."

"Already did, miss," Steve said. "Sorry."

"No you didn't", she said. "I can still see the display. Either turn it off or you're going to have to leave the ward."

"Okay, I'm turning it off." He flipped the phone open and as he was hitting the power button, he saw that the call had come from Admiral Esteban Garza, one of the top members on the Joint Chiefs. He stood up. "I have to take this one, Gail."

"Go," she said, and he was struck by how strong and dignified she was in her old age. Would she have become the same if he'd never hitched a ride on that rocket?

Wrong question, he thought. All the questions he came up with were wrong.

"Take the call," Gail said, shooing him out the door. "Then turn your phone off and come back, and we'll talk until he wakes up."

The cell phone prohibition extended out into the main corridor, and Steve kept on walking until he was outside. Why was Admiral Garza calling him instead of Nick Fury? The soldier in Steve didn't like circumventions of the chain of command. He called Garza back, though, as soon as he'd gotten away from the crowded sidewalks around the hospital.

Garza picked up on the first ring. "Captain Rogers," he said without preamble.

"Admiral," Steve said. "I was visiting a friend in the hospital."

"Is he dying?" Garza asked.

"Not right now."

"Then get to the Triskelion. I'll have a chopper there. I need you at Andrews pronto." Three hours later, Steve was walking alongside Garza down an underground hallway that could be entered only through a triple-keycarded steel door in the basement of an anonymous Quonset hut set all the way out at the western perimeter of the base. "This was brought in to us last night," Garza said, "and the first time I saw it was this morning. I believe you'll be able to offer an expert opinion." They came to a dead end, with another featureless steel door in front of them. It had been a long time since Steve saw a sign. We're off the map, he thought. This place doesn't exist. Remembering his conversation with Fury the night before, he thought: this is where the boogeymen live. Admiral Garza slid his keycard through a slot. A panel opened in the wall, exposing a keyboard, and he entered a long alphanumeric code. The door opened to reveal a small room, and Steve followed Garza into it. Garza's keycard was waiting in a tray on the other side. The room was a white cube with a single workstation and another door on the wall opposite the one they'd come in. At the workstation sat a pale woman with gray-shot blond hair and haunted eyes. She stood when they entered.

"Admiral Garza," she said, then looked Steve up and down. "And you must be Captain America."

"Steve Rogers," he said, and extended his hand.

She didn't take it. "I assume you're here to observe the specimen?" she asked Admiral Garza.

"No, Justine, we thought we'd take you to lunch. Cap, meet Justine Ichesco." Garza walked over to the other door.

This time access involved a complicated series of key-card readings, code entries, and simultaneous turnings of physical keys. Everything but a secret handshake, Steve thought. The door opened and they went into a larger room, one wall of which was obviously one-way glass. So we're being observed, Steve thought... and then his attention was riveted to the thing on the steel laboratory table in the middle of the room.

It had the rough shape of a man: bipedal, bilaterally symmetric, and so forth. But it was more than seven feet tall, and its limbs were deformed, each a different length than the other and each jointed in a slightly different way. But it was the face that Steve couldn't look away from. Scrambled somehow, as if a late Picasso had been given flesh, the face brought to mind another malformed humanoid, in the Arizona desert, with fire and falling steel all around...

"They do that when they've been badly injured," he said, keeping his voice level. "Lose their cohesion."

"So you're sure it's Chitauri?" Garza asked.

"I'm sure," Steve said.

"Sampling matches existing specimens of recovered Chitauri tissue," Justine said. Garza stepped closer to the strapped-down body. "Well, this one's a ways past injured," he said. "We killed it on the base perimeter last night."

"Then you can expect its shape to scramble even more," Steve said. Justine walked around to the other side of it. "How many of these have you seen?" Steve remembered starships falling from the desert sky.

The Chitauri opened its eyes.

Steve felt the adrenaline shock like a punch in the chest, his super-soldier overdrive kicking in. The Chitauri snapped the straps holding it down, wrenching the table loose from the floor. One of its hands shot out and caught Justine around the throat; the other reached for Steve, but he was already pivoting out of the way when he saw the first twitch of muscle, and he caught the arm at full extension and broke it across the edge of the table. The snap of the fracture was counterpointed by the crunch of the Chitauri crushing the life out of Justine Ichesco. Garza had fallen back and drawn his sidearm; out of the corner of his eye Steve saw the admiral stepping to the side to look for a better shot. In front of him the Chitauri sprang from the table. He saw it looking at him, and could have sworn—in the split second before it shifted its focus to Garza—that he saw recognition in its eyes.

A bell went off in his head as the Chitauri caught him with a roundhouse kick, using the momentum to get a running start at Garza. The admiral began firing, emptying the nine-shot magazine of his old Browning. Each of the shots hit the Chitauri and froze it in place for an eye blink before it drove forward once more. Until Steve tackled it, crushing its head into the floor. Already he could tell that its shape was decomposing. Where the human flesh was peeling back, some recognizable Chitauri features shone through, and in other places the only thing visible was an anatomical mishmash. Between the bullets and its weakening hold on its human shape, the Chitauri looked like some of the bodies Steve had seen in the aftermath of an artillery barrage in Europe. But it could still fight; it threw him off into the one-way glass, which rang with the impact but didn't crack. Back on his feet, Steve saw it closing on Garza again, and reflexively he drew his arm back to throw his shield.

He had no shield.

The lab table would do just as well.

Tearing the twisted steel tabletop loose from the frame, Steve flung it Frisbee-style. It hit the back of the Chitauri's head with a wet crunch.

The creature's arms shot straight out and its back arched. Momentum carried it forward to slam into Admiral Garza and bear him down to the floor, but Steve could tell it was dead before the thud of their impact reached him.

On the other hand, that's what Garza had thought last night.

"Admiral," Steve said, pulling the limp body off Garza. "You injured?" The door burst open and a response team fanned out, weapons trained on Steve and the admiral. Garza put out a hand, palm down, and the team lowered the muzzles of their rifles. With his sleeve, Garza swiped at the Chitauri blood on his face. "We'll need a medic for Justine," he said. "But I don't think there's any hurry." One of the response team was already kneeling over her where she lay, the table frame tipped over onto her body. I did that, Steve thought. He felt as if he'd defiled her somehow, even though he could hardly have been concerned with where the frame fell. He'd had a Chitauri to kill. This is where they keep the boogeymen, he thought. I was right.

"Captain Rogers," Garza said. "Follow me."

Five minutes later they'd returned through the three security-keyed doors and were in a ground-level office framed off from the rest of the Quonset hut by naked two-by-fours and drywall. "We're under construction here," Admiral Garza said. He was still rubbing at streaks of blood on his hands.

"Admiral," Steve said. "Is this the first time you've caught a Chitauri on base grounds?"

"Caught? Yes," Garza said. "I suspect there might be others." He paused, picking at one thumbnail.

"Captain?" he said.

"Yes, sir."

"Can I count on you to get Tony Stark's toy to the right person?"

"With all due respect, sir, I think Tony's the right person."

Garza looked him in the eye. "Noted. Now can you get Tony's toy to the person I am about to tell you to get it to?"

In other words, Steve thought, are you willing to commit industrial espionage against an American company for the benefit of Americans? Is this what it's come to? Once he'd had an argument with Thor about the point at which it became necessary to contravene your ideals so that other people could believe that those same ideals still existed. In other words, at what point do you grant yourself the privilege of knowing better than other people what's best for them?

Now, I guess, Steve thought. I guess that time is now.

"Yes, sir," he said. "I can."

"Good answer," Garza said. He handed Steve a business card. "Memorize it." Steve did, and handed it back.

"You know why Stark can't have it, right?"

"I'm guessing it has something to do with politics," Steve said. All at once he couldn't look Garza in the eye.

"Politics," Garza repeated. "Damn right. If Tony Stark built these things, the next day Nick Fury would be walking sentry duty in Barrow, Alaska. That's how things work down here." There was a long pause. Steve looked at his hands, heard again the sound of the table crushing the Chitauri's skull, hunted around in his mind for words that weren't there.

"You know, Cap, there are people in this government who think like you do. And like I do," Garza said.

"But there aren't enough of them, and they aren't always in the right places."

"Someone has to stand up," Steve said.

"Right. But that someone can't always stand up in front of everyone. Not right away. It's not the way we'd like to do this, but it's the way we can make it work. Know what I mean?" Steve didn't like it. No. That wasn't true. Part of him did like it, the part that wanted to act, to be done with rules and procedures. You saw the enemy, you hit the enemy.

But then there was the part that knew the consequences of acting before you knew what you were doing. Last year's Hulk incident was all the proof anyone would need of that.

"I know what you mean, sir," he said.

"Good," Garza said. "And the name I gave you? I can't give this to Fury, for the same reasons I just outlined. He's too vulnerable. The Hill doesn't like him anyway. They think he's too much of a loose cannon. But you—you're untouchable politically. Anyone who goes up against Captain America better be planning to retire."

"I understand, Admiral," Steve said.

"And what the hell, we need a loose cannon here and there. Can't all be deskjockeys like me." Garza grinned and chucked Steve on the shoulder. "Time for me to move along. Good work in there today, Captain Rogers. Make this happen."

"Yes, sir," Steve said. "I will."

8

Tony spent most of his morning running through quarterly reports, and then he went downstairs to see what the R&D boys had come up with for the new Iron Man prototype. And lo and behold, when he got there, who should he find but Nick Fury?

"General?" Tony said. "To what do I owe this unexpected pleasure?"

"Well, let's see." Fury started ticking off points on his fingers. "SHIELD is curious about how Stark is spending all of that money we got for you; I'm curious to see what this new toy can do; and I want to make sure that you understand the ramifications of what Washington told me yesterday."

"Ah." Turning to the assembled tech team, Tony said, "Ladies and gentlemen, would you excuse us?" When they'd filed out, Tony sat on the stairs that led up to the prototype staging area. The new suit loomed over them. He'd had it redone in darker colors as a whim, but on the inside there were real innovations to be excited about. The new battery could deliver 15 percent better acceleration, a full eight g's, and (luckily for Tony's brain) the team had come up with better acceleration-damping gel. His turning capacity was improved, the servos and condensate hydraulics had finally caught up with the tensile strength of the armor plates... "It's a doozy," Tony said when he'd finished listing all of the new gadgetry.