He walked Steve to the van, then stuck his head in and told the two techs prepping the dead Chitauri for the drive to walk around the block. When they were gone, Fury climbed into the back of the van and motioned for Steve to shut the doors behind them.

"All right," he said. "I hate pep talks, so this isn't going to be one. You want to say something to me about Tony's inventions, or Beltway bullshit, or anything else, now's the time. I'm sick and goddamn tired of having to wonder what's going on in your head all the time. You're not suited to keeping secrets, Cap. Don't ever play poker for money."

Steve was looking down at the floor while Nick delivered his short speech, and he kept looking at the floor long enough that Nick almost started talking again. But then Steve said, "General, I don't like feeling as if we're not doing everything we could."

"You don't think we are?"

"No, sir. I don't."

"You think we should have gone ahead and developed Tony's tech, and just used it ourselves?" Another long pause, during which Nick could actually see Steve wrestling with something that he wanted to say but couldn't quite bring himself to. Then Captain America looked Nick in the eye and said, "I'm having a hard time with that, yeah."

"Remember last week, when you told me there were some things people didn't want to know?

Boogeymen under the bed, I think you said. Well, this is what you were talking about. Then you told me that in America, we don't keep people scared. And so what do you do? You go on TV and stand there while people talk about terrorist attacks." Fury paused to consider exactly what he was going to say next.

"I've given you a lot of rope, Cap, but the last thing in the world—literally—we need right now is dissent inside the team."

Steve nodded. "Yes, sir," he said, but he wasn't looking Nick in the eye anymore, and Nick could see him trying not to say something again.

"And we don't need secrets, either," Nick said. "So why don't you just tell me whatever it is that's on your mind, and we'll get it all out in the open and see where we stand?" Red-eyed and obviously miserable, Steve looked up at Nick again and said, "I can't do that, sir." Nick held the look for a long time. Then he stood up, or at least as much as he could inside the van, and put a hand on the door latch. "Then you and I are going to have a problem down the road, Captain." Pushing the door open, he said, "I think it's time for you to go to the doctor." 21

Status Report

Assimilated assets in place report that publicized screening technology manufactured by <SKR TechEnt> is being installed at the following locations:

Military facilities

<White House> and other national political offices in <Washington, D.C> Federal, state, and county government buildings Airports served by commercial passenger carriers In the majority of cases, new screeners replace existing screeners, lessening added inconvenience to human populations. <Steve Rogers> appears less willing to provide a popular face as political cover for a possibly unpopular security initiative; reconsideration of asset investment in cultural production has produced the conclusion that such investment is unwise and unlikely to yield desired rewards. Assets will monitor progress of security installations and continue to provide information regarding future installations. Progress of the human ordering project is partially keyed to locations at which this technology is in place. Comprehensive intelligence in this regard, driven by assimilated -assets in place, is deemed critical to mission success. Concern exists over scientific advances made by <Henry Pym> involving control and management of large numbers of arthropods, order <Hymenoptera>. Proposals to retard development of Pym's project are under consideration.

Mission Report

Operation located at and near residence of <Janet Pym> achieved planned goals. Sequential loss of assets in place is deemed likely to yield desired results with respect to actions of <Steve Rogers> and other members of the <Ultimates>. Mission timeline:

-.001944 solar year: Assessment of security and surveillance obstacles surrounding <Janet Pym>.

-.010837 solar year: Formulation of mission parameters and selection of necessary assets.

-.004107 solar year: Intentional loss of first asset due to interception by <Esteban Garza>.

-.000342 solar year: Observation and surveillance of <Esteban Garza>'s interactions with <Steve Rogers>.

-.000185 solar year: Arrival of <Esteban Garza> and <Steve Rogers> at residence of <Janet Pym>.

-.000183 solar year: Mobilization of second asset.

-.000171 solar year: Intentional loss of second assel.

Operation required exact timing and placement of assets; success suggests that assets are reaching optimal functionality. Timetable for human ordering project is adjusted accordingly. Adjustment is also deemed prudent due to possibility that the <Pym-Hymenoptera> technology will compromise operations critical to human ordering project.

22

That night, after the medicos finally determined he wasn't a threat to the survival of the human race, Steve called Bucky. He hadn't seen his old buddy since Bucky had gotten out of the hospital, and even though Bucky was home, he clearly didn't have much time left on this Earth. There were no friends like old friends, and Steve wasn't going to let his friendship with Bucky lapse now. It turned out that Bucky was having a nephew of his over for dinner, but he was anxious to see Steve. "Hey, if there's enough for four, there's enough for five," he said. "Come on over."

So Steve did, and found when he got there that in addition to Bucky's nephew Grant and his wife Sharon, there was a fifth guest: an immense Newfoundland dog named Hobbes. Steve had never been much of a dog person, growing up in a small apartment and then shipping off into the Army, and he'd never even seen a Newfoundland before. Hobbes was some dog. Clumsy, overbearing, but so friendly at the same time that you had a hard time holding it against him when he knocked over your drink or drooled on your pants. Something about having a dog around also cleared away the hovering sense of doom about Bucky's cancer. Bucky looked awful; he'd never been a big man, and now he looked so wispy that Steve could have done wrist curls with him even before the super-soldier program came along. Dinner was simple but hearty, just like Bucky had always liked it: meat loaf, mashed potatoes, green beans. Sitting there with his best friend, ex-girlfriend, and a young married couple with a happily rambunctious dog, Steve longed for a life he was never going to have. And on the heels of that longing, he renewed his commitment to protecting those people who could have hearth and home and family. And dog, he added as Hobbes thumped his muzzle against Steve's elbow.

"Hobbes," Grant admonished. "Go lie down." Hobbes did, but he didn't stay lying down for long. Bouncing to his feet again, he came over and sat next to Steve, tail swishing like a dust mop across the wood floor at the edge of the dining room rug. His head was a foot higher than the dinner table.

"He's decided you're the weak link, Steve," Grant said. "Don't feed him, or you're going to have to take him home."

"I don't think he'd like it," Steve said. "He'd hardly be able to turn around in my living room." Bucky coughed, and everyone fell silent. When someone as sick as Bucky sounded sick, even for a moment, it seemed that everyone else stopped existing until they figured out whether Bucky was going to keel over dead. This time he didn't, though. When he was done coughing, he said, "What I was going to say is, how come you don't get a bigger place, Steve? God knows you could afford it."

"What, so I can have a giant dog? Nah. I like living where I grew up. Reminds me of where I came from and where I am now, both at the same time. Everything's kind of... " Steve trailed off, then shrugged. "I like it where I am."

Hobbes woofed, as politely as a dog of his size and ebullience was able. "Go lie down," Grant ordered him again, and again Hobbes did. This time he left them alone long enough that they got back into conversation, mostly about Grant's work—he was a midlevel executive with a mutual fund specializing in sustainable industries—and Bucky's recent hospital spell. Bucky was in surprisingly good humor for a man measuring his life expectancy in weeks; he was one of those people who refuse to let knowledge of their coming death interfere with their enjoyment of what life they have remaining. "Hell," he said a few times during the course of the meal, "I'm gonna die, but that's no excuse to get everyone else all depressed."

He'd just said it for the third time when Hobbes jumped up and turned quickly around twice, snuffling at the floor, before sitting down and gnawing at one of his hind legs. "I told you he needs a bath, Grant," Sharon said.

Hobbes yelped and stood up again. Steve looked back over at him.

"What the hell's gotten into your dog?" Bucky wanted to know. He was peering at Hobbes from his seat all the way at the other end of the table.

Grant got up and went over to Hobbes, who was now chewing on one of his front paws. "Hey, buddy," he said. "What the matter, fella?" He put his hand on Hobbes's head... and Hobbes growled.

"Whoa," Grant said, pulling his hand back. "What's that all about?" He squatted down next to Hobbes and reached for Hobbes's paw. At that moment Steve saw, coming out from the heating vent in the corner where Hobbes had been curled up, a line of big black ants.

"Grant," he said, standing up and pushing his chair back, "take a step back, there, okay?" Grant looked up. "What are you talking about? Something's really bugging him."

"Grant," Steve said again. Hobbes growled.

"Easy, buddy," Grant said, and Hobbes looked up at Steve. Should have known, Steve thought. If they can take the form of a person, why not a dog?

At that moment, Hobbes lunged and seized Grant's throat in his jaws. Sharon screamed and jumped out of her chair, knocking over her wine glass. Grant got both of his hands into the ruff around Hobbes's neck and tried to push him off Steve was already reaching for the dog—no, the Chitauri masquerading as a dog—and Hobbes gave Grant a single hard shake. A warning. Grant gurgled and stopped trying to push Hobbes away.

Steve stood where he was. "You got bigger problems than me, bucko," he said. "How many more ants are going to come through that grate? I hear those bullet ants have a sting like a gunshot wound. How many can you take?"

Hobbes growled, and kept its eyes locked on Steve. He hadn't been lying about the ants. A thick column of them flowed up through the vent and disappeared into the dog's thick fur. Won't be long, Steve thought.

"Ants?" Bucky said. "Steve, what did you say about ants?"

"Long story, Bucky," Steve said. Hobbes let out a long moan and started to tremble. He was drooling on Grant's neck, thick saliva running down into the collar of Grant's shirt. One of his eyes twitched shut, and when it opened again, Steve was looking into the slit pupil of a Chitauri. Grant gasped, and blood threaded the saliva on his neck. Then the Chitauri began to transform in earnest. Hobbes threw himself up onto his hind legs, with a crack of rearranging joints, and great swathes of his skin and fur peeled away to reveal scales. Grant scrabbled backward on the floor away from this sudden monster, and Steve threw himself at it. There was pandemonium in the dining room as Sharon ran to help Grant get up off the floor and Gail pulled Bucky's wheelchair away from the table and backed up with it into the kitchen. The Chitauri, which in mid-transformation looked kind of like a grizzly bear given an infusion of dinosaur DNA, roared as it grappled with Steve, and its jaws snapped near his ear. "Not a spitter like your friend was yesterday," Steve said, then grunted as it raked claws down his left side. They wrestled into the corner, slamming hard into the wainscoted wall. The impact knocked pictures to the floor all over the room. Steve was landing good hard shots on it, but the Chitauri was giving as good as it got—and as an added complication, dots of intense agony started to appear up and down Steve's arms and legs as the bullet ants, overwhelmed by being thrown around and crushed in the fight, started stinging everything they could get a stinger on. Most of those stings hit the Chitauri, which was losing progressively more of the dog shape, but enough of them got Steve for him to feel like he was skinny-dipping in a pool of acid.

"You brought some unwanted guests," Steve grunted as the two combatants crashed through the side table holding the serving dishes with the rest of the night's dinner. Now he was covered in gravy and mashed potatoes as well as cuts, bruises and ant bites. "Enough already," he said. "Nobody starts a food fight and brings bugs to Bucky's house. You're going to have to go." Jaws agape, the Chitauri slipped out of Steve's hold and bit down on his shoulder. The pain made Steve forget all about the ants. When the alien reared back for another bite, Steve caught one of its jaws in each hand. "Didn't you ever see King Kong? he said. "That big mouth is what gets you lizards in trouble."

He pulled hard. Something cracked. He pulled again, and felt the flesh in his bitten shoulder tear, which made him angrier. The Chitauri's tail, suddenly regrown, snapped out of nowhere and pounded him on the side of the head, but Steve kept his grip. One, two, heave... and he felt something give in the alien's skull, its lower jaw breaking loose and twisting as Steve shoved it back into the Chitauri's throat. Its tail lashed furiously, and its claws left deep bloody furrows in Steve's forearms, but it was already getting weaker, and when he gave the broken jawbone another shove into its neck he felt something give way again and it went limp in his hands.

"Jesus, Steve," Grant said after a long silence. "That was my dog."

"That hasn't been your dog for a long time, Grant," Steve said. He let the dead Chitauri fall to the floor.

"I'm sorry."

"But what is it?" Sharon asked.

Steve looked at her. "An enemy. That's all I can tell you. It's not the only one out there. They must have used Hobbes as a way to get close to me." He looked back down at the dead Chitauri, which was swarming with ants. Doctor Pym, he thought, we're going to need to have a talk.

"It has ants all over it," Grant said in the oddly childlike voice of someone slipping into shock.

"I know it does. They'll go away in a minute," Steve said. "Do you two mind going in the other room? I need to make a phone call."

"Okay," Sharon said. She helped Grant to his feet and the two of them went into the kitchen. Steve got his cell phone out and was about to call General Fury when Gail came back in from the kitchen.

"Steve," she said. He caught a slight tremor in her I voice, and saw that she was struggling to keep her com-S posure. "I think we need to get Bucky to a doctor."

Steve snapped his phone shut. "Okay, call an ambulance right now. I need to go outside for one second, 1 but I'll be right back."

He burst out onto Bucky's front stoop and looked up and down the street. Pym's headset didn't have much range, he knew that; it shouldn't be too hard to figure out where the good doctor was. Tomorrow morning was scheduled street sweeping in this part of Brooklyn, and the opposite side of the street was empty except for a single old Chevy Monte Carlo near the corner to the right. Just around the corner from it was a police car. The near side of the street was bumper to bumper except for the standard gap around the block's fire hydrant.

Steve took a closer look at the Monte Carlo. Someone was leaning up against the window. Then that someone took a step back and leveled a gun at whoever was in the car, and Steve was tearing across the street shouting at the top of his lungs for Hank to get down.

23

Got 'em, Hank thought.

He'd run ant survey missions around all of his teammates... well, former teammates... and come up empty every time. Either the intensity of ambient odors in New York was overwhelming the ants' ability to isolate the Chitauri signature, or the aliens were being more clever than they usually were about disguising their presence.

Or they were following him and making sure that if he was around, they kept their distance. Hank preferred not to think about that possibility, since it led in too many negative directions. If they were watching him, that meant they were figuring out how he was controlling the ants—although they might well already know that from whatever reports they'd received from Greg. Also, if keeping tabs on Hank Pym was one of the Chitauri's ongoing tasks, then he wasn't going to be able to swoop in and rescue anyone with his millions of myrmidons, and Hank wasn't about to lie to himself A big part of the reason for his commitment to this project was the prospect of being accepted back into the team. If there was any possibility of that, any possibility at all, he was willing to walk around with a target on his back for a while.

And now he'd struck gold. Steve Rogers might think I'm a gutless punk, Hank thought, but he can't deny that I just saved the lives of his friend and the shriveled old version of the woman he loved. Eventually that dog would have taken his true form and invited some friends over for a little Bucky and Gail buffet (although in Bucky's case, being eaten by a Chitauri would probably be an easier way to go than slowly being consumed by cancer). Now, because of Hank, they were safe, and Captain America would have to look him in the eye and say thanks.

He sent the recall command to the ants. On the minicameras he had rigged to a few of them, he could tell that they were wasting their stings on a dead alien, and he could also tell that no one had been killed. They owe me, Hank thought. I screwed up, but they owe me, and they had no right to cut me off like that.

The fact that Janet wouldn't speak to him was less of a bother. She'd gone through those times before, and she'd probably go through them again. She always came back sooner or later. They were meant for each other.

Any minute now, Fury would show up, Hank was thinking. One more cleanup, one more Chitauri in ajar somewhere in the Triskelion. It was getting repetitious, almost to the point where Hank had entertained the notion that the Chitauri were leading them along. Maybe they were sacrificing one of their number every so often to see how SHIELD reacted, or to cement the impression that they were using particular tactics... while planning something else? Something completely different? If so, what? Full-scale assault hadn't worked out for them last time.

There was a sharp tap on his car window. Hank pulled off the headset and looked. It was a cop. He rolled down the window.

"What the hell is that on your head?" the cop asked.

"It's... well, it's kind of hard to explain."

"Ah," the cop said. "Would you be able to explain better if you stepped out of the car?"

"I don't think that's necessary, officer," Hank said. "It's not against the law to sit in your car."

"No, Dr. Pym, it isn't," the cop said. "But under the circumstances, it isn't smart, either." Taking a step back from the car, the cop drew his gun. Hank heard a shout from across the street—someone calling his name?— and then the world lit up in flashes from the muzzle of the gun.

There was someone buzzing around his ear, a tiny man who kept saying Hank, Hank, get down, get down. And another little man, a fly with a man's voice, saying, Doctor Pym, we need you to return to your normal size.

Return to your normal size.

This is my normal size, he wanted to say. I'm bigger than you, bigger than your judgments, my work is bigger than yours. My other size is like Janet when she's small, giant ambitions and giant personality and giant problems crushed and squeezed down into a size that disguises their true size. This is me, this is me. I have discovered my true size.

He tried to get up, and heard the groan and squeal of deforming metal. Something stabbed him under the armpit, and he was having trouble getting a breath.

Return to your normal size.

No, you fool, he thought. Then I will be small and the wounds will be huge. Then my body will be small and my pain will be huge. Then I will no longer be bigger than Janet, who is tiny tiny tiny and so full of anger that maybe I deserve.

These tiny people, with their bullets and their judgments, no bigger than ants. The ants stung, and it hurt like bullets. Janet, he said. Janet. I drove all night to prove this. I knew it. I knew it. And they knew I knew it, and their bullets sting like ants.

Doctor Pym. This is Nick Fury. If you can hear me, blink twice.

So this is what it takes to get Nick to talk to me again, Hank thought. He blinked. But after the second time, he couldn't open his eyes again.

Get down, get down...

Snafu after snafu after snafu, thought Nick Fury. I got a dog who was a Chitauri, and four civilians who saw it lose coherence. I got a cop who was a Chitauri, and a whole goddamn precinct and department bureaucracy who didn't see it lose coherence but who aren't very goddamn happy about SHIELD stepping in and making the body disappear. Granted, two of those four civilians knew about Steve, so they weren't too surprised to find out that there are other boogeymen under the bed. And Bucky wasn't long for the world anyway, so no security problem there. But Grant and Sharon, they were already demanding to know everything about everything, to the point that Nick was beginning to consider sending them on a little vacation until they could reach some kind of understanding about the wisdom of filing lawsuits against the government because their dog was absorbed by an alien infiltrator. I got one team member in a state of emotional flux because his best and oldest friend suffered some kind of cardiac event when the Chitauri started to lose coherence.

I got one ex-team member in intensive care with four holes in him, who is probably only alive because when he grew, his body put itself back together on the way from Lilliputian to Brobdingnagian. I got a commanding officer who is in the situation of having an ex-team member in intensive care because that team member knowingly put himself in danger to prove his worth to the members of his former team. In other words, Doctor Henry Pym is stuck full of tubes because I kicked him out of the Ultimates, Nick thought. And between Bucky and whatever he's doing that involves SKR and someone in Washington he won't tell me about, Steve is about at the end of his rope. And there are Chitauri everywhere, apparently, and Pym's ants look like they're doing a lot better finding them than this fancy tech that somehow was leaked by someone within SHIELD who might or might not occasionally wear a suit with an American-flag theme.

The only thing that had gone right was the fact that Pym had gotten the dog before the Chitauri cop had gotten him. Also Nick was thanking his lucky stars that at least they'd gotten Pym to shrink back to normal size before civilian response teams arrived. The Monte Carlo that Pym had apparently stolen in Skokie, Illinois, now looked like it had been carrying a car bomb, but thanks to the street-sweeping schedule there were no other damaged cars... although there were going to be some fence and stoop repairs billed to SHIELD through one of Tony's shell contracting companies. One problem at a time, Nick told himself

"Captain Rogers," he said when he saw Steve hang up his phone. "What's the word on Bucky?" Steve's face was grim. "They say he's still in some trouble, General. He's weak enough from the cancer that they can't treat the heart condition as aggressively as they'd like to, or that's what I understand from the medicalese I keep hearing."

"He's getting the best care he can get," Nick said, which was true. Cardiac care in New York City was about as good as it could be, and Nick had pulled SHIELD strings to get a couple of top-flight military cardiac specialists on Bucky's case.

"General Fury," Steve said. "I waited at least five minutes to call an ambulance because I was taking care of the Chitauri that shot Doctor Pym. If that lag made a difference, I won't be able to live with myself"

"You were saving Pym's life," Nick said, and could hear the answer even before Steve's mouth formed the words.

"That's not a good trade."

"Captain Rogers," Nick said. "I can't order you to stop being so damn self-righteous, or so damn stubborn. But I can suggest it. And I can order you, for the second time today, to take your Chitauri-chewed self to a doctor and get stitched up and checked out. You can't do Bucky any good, and you can't do Pym any good, but you can do the team and this country some good by staying in fighting trim. Now. Go to the doctor. Do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars." Nick lit a cigar. Steve gazed at Bucky's house.

"Captain Rogers," Nick said. "Go."

Steve went, climbing into a waiting SHIELD limo. The recovery team inside Bucky's house had just finished removing the alien and sterilizing the dining room. Their van pulled away after taking down the SHIELD scene perimeter... which left Nick alone to deal with the NYPD investigator, Glenn Owens, who had displayed what even Nick had to credit as superhuman patience while the SHIELD processing had taken place.

"General," Owens said when the white van had pulled around the corner. "I don't know why I'm the only guy here. You want to clue me in to the game?"

Nick gnawed on his cigar and grinned. '"Fraid I can't tell you a thing about why your bosses do what they do," he said. "I have a hard enough time with mine."

"See, the thing is, there should be brass, media relations, union suits, the works," Owens said. "If I didn't know better, I'd think you had something to do with the situation, is all I'm saying."

"Detective, I had a conversation with a man in a similar position to yours out in Illinois a few days ago." Fury's cigar was already going out. He puffed it back to life. "He thought I could do this, and I could do that. The truth is, I go through every day hoping for cooperation from people just like you. I don't get it, my job is that much harder; but there's no good reason for you to give it to me, since I can't give you a good reason."

Owens shrugged. "Have it your way. So tell me again where the body of Patrolman Victor Elizondo is?"

"Patrolman Elizondo's remains are under examination at a federal laboratory for security reasons," Nick said.

"Is that what you're going to say at a press conference?"

"Nope," Nick said. "Because if this gets to the press conference stage, I will already know that I can't hope for any cooperation from you. At a press conference, all you get from Nick Fury is no comment. I can no-comment for an hour straight."

"Understand my position here, General. I catch a case of a cop down, I show up, and there's no team in place, there's no media, there's no nothing. Tomorrow morning I'm going to have to brief the patrolmen's union. What do I tell them? Elizondo had four kids and a wife. What do I tell them?" Suddenly Nick was tired of the game. "You want to know the truth, Owens?" Owens didn't say anything.

"Do you?" Nick asked again. "If you want the plain truth, I will tell you. Do you want it?" After a pause, Owens said, "Yeah, I do."

"Okay. At some point, probably in the last month or so, Victor Elizondo was killed by a race of aliens who can assume the shapes of humans. After they killed him, one of them ate him and took his form. That alien probably went and did regular cop work, came home to his kids, went to bed with his wife, until he got an order from his higher-ups. That order was to track and take out a member of my team." Nick left out the question of Pym's status with respect to the Ultimates; no point in muddying the waters. "Then tonight, he shot my guy four times, and then Captain America killed him. That's the plain truth, as plain as I can make it. I don't care if you believe it or not. And I don't care if you're recording it, because everywhere I go I am shadowed by people whose job it is to make sure that nothing I say or do is recorded by people who should not record it. Now, Detective Owens. Are you glad you have the truth?" Owens stood for a long time looking up and down the street, taking in the exploded car, the crumpled wrought-iron fences, the broken concrete and masonry on various stoops and stairs. He looked at Bucky's house, dark and empty. He looked at the spot where Patrolman Victor EHzondo had died at the hands of Captain America. "General Fury," he said. "I would like it very much if you could keep me updated as this case progresses. Patrolman Elizondo's family and colleagues deserve a full accounting of the events surrounding his murder."

"Can do, Detective Owens," Nick said, and toasted the detective with his cigar as Owens went back to his car and drove away.

24

She knew she shouldn't do it, but she couldn't not do it, so Janet found herself standing outside the door of Hank's hospital room at Mount Sinai. And she was 110 percent sure she shouldn't have done it when the first person she saw coming up the hallway toward her was Steve. When he caught sight of her, he stiffened a little, but his voice stayed level. "Have you heard how he's doing?"

"I haven't been in, and there's no doctors around that I can see," she said. "But this isn't intensive care, so I guess that's good."

"Yeah," he said, looking around. "I was downstairs looking in on Bucky, and thought I'd... you know."

"Softie," she said. Something changed in his face, and she was sorry she'd done it. "Come on, Steve," she said. "You know I'm just kidding."

"It's not a kidding kind of situation," he said.

"I think that's really up to me, isn't it?" she said. "I mean, since I'm still married to him and all." He took that in for a beat and then said, "Okay. I guess we should talk later." Janet let him get halfway to the bank of elevators before she said, "Steve. Wait a minute." Steve didn't turn around, but he stopped walking. When she caught up to him, she said, "Maybe we could both use a drink or something away from all of this. How does that sound?"

In the elevator, he was quiet until just before they reached the ground floor. Then he said, "There is no away from all this. You know that. What did you really mean?"

"I meant not here," Janet said. The doors opened and they walked through the maze of hallways and out the emergency room doors. It was a warm night, and they crossed Fifth Avenue to walk on the park side. Steve suggested a walk through the park, but Janet, envisioning him taking off to collar a couple of muggers, wanted to stay on the street. So they ran the gauntlet of hot-dog stands and T-shirt hawkers, cheesy portrait cartoonists and tourists dazed from Museum Mile. Janet wished any of the museums were open, but it was after midnight. Instead she decided on ice cream. Steve didn't want any, so she walked into the first place she saw, got a huge cup of pralines and cream, and savored it while they kept south. When they passed the great granite pile of the Met, it occurred to her that if she was going to go home, she'd need to turn right pretty soon unless she wanted to walk all the way around the park or take a cab.

"Hey, Captain America," she said, not caring if he got the wrong impression, "walk me past Belvedere Castle on my way home."

"Yes, ma'am," Steve said, which entitled her to get furious at him for calling her ma'am, and for a little while things were light and easy and okay again.

Then, about the time they were actually passing Belvedere Castle, she screwed it all up again. "I wonder if he's really changed," she said, after a silence had passed between her and Steve.

"You're kidding," Steve said.

"I'm not," she said. "People do change."

"Janet, I'm an old-fashioned guy. I come from a time when nobody would have cared if Pym changed because everyone would have accepted what he did. And even I know he's not going to change. He attacked you with a horde of ants, for Pete's sake."

"And how many lives did he save by finding out about that dog, Steve?"

"What does that have to do with what he did to you?" Steve was trying not to shout, but the way he rounded on her—plus the fact that he stood a foot taller than she did and outweighed her by at least a hundred pounds—made people stop and look.

"It has to do," she said icily, "with the fact that as much as you want to reduce him to a cartoon, he's an actual human being. He does good things and bad things, and I made a choice a long time ago to acknowledge that if I wanted him around, I'd have to take both. Now, the other thing is that I never said I was going back to him. I never said I was not going to divorce him. I never even said I wanted him back on the team. I just wondered if he had really changed."

Janet started walking again. After a beat, she saw out of the corner of her eye that Steve was coming along. "Well, do you?" he asked.

"Do I what?"

"Want him back on the team."

"No, I don't," she said. "But I think it's a little smug of everyone else to have made that decision without even considering what I wanted. What if I thought that Hank would be useful to the team even if every time I looked at him I wanted him to die? Hey, he does great things in the lab. You big men got so caught up in protecting the little woman that you decided to shoot a really promising research initiative in the foot. And you know what? I've had it with being protected."

She stomped off again, and again she watched Steve come after her. This time he came up next to her and put a hand on her shoulder. Instantaneously Janet swore to herself that if he tried to pull on her or spin her around, she was going to sting him until he couldn't see straight, but all he did was pace her with a hand resting lightly on her shoulder. "Take your hand off me," she said anyway. Steve did, and because he did, Janet stopped. "In the end, it doesn't matter what I feel for him or don't feel for him," she said. "What matters is the Chitauri, and it drives me frankly batshit that some ridiculous leftover chivalry has you and Nick cutting someone out of the team who could make a difference. They want to kill us, Steve, and if they can't kill us, they want to reduce us to zombies. Do you really want to moralize about spousal abuse when the stakes are that high?"

They were across the park, waiting for the light to change at 81st Street and Central Park West because Steve would never jaywalk. The Museum of Natural History—another great granite pile—loomed just to the south. Janet wanted to go in there, too, but now it was one o'clock in the morning and she was close to home, and it was time just to have a glass of wine and go to bed before she got up and had to bathe in Bruce Banner's self-pity for another day while looking for a way to create the latest generation of augmented soldiers like Steve Rogers.

What a job, she thought. Imagine the ad: Challenging work environment, chance to make a real difference.

While she was woolgathering, Steve had been looking up at the buildings surrounding the park. "Please don't start telling me about how different it is now," Janet said.

"I wasn't going to," he said. "Although there sure wasn't anything like that one." He pointed at the new Time Warner building on Columbus Circle.

Janet sighed. "What were you going to say, then?"

The light changed. Steve was quiet as they crossed, but as soon as they got to the sidewalk, he started talking. "When we beat the Chitauri, it's not going to be because some manic-depressive wife-beater with a Buck Rogers helmet on sics ants on them," he said. "It's going to be because human beings—American human beings—prove one more time that they're smarter and tougher and more willing to fight for what's right than interstellar shape-shifting geckos."

"He really gets to you, doesn't he?" Janet asked.

Steve stopped in mid-soliloquy. "Who? Pym?"

She laughed. "You can't even say his first name. Yes, I mean Hank. The fact that he exists drives you crazy."

"No. Hank is just loony tunes. A guy like that isn't worth going crazy over, since he's already there. What drives me crazy is that you, who aren't and should know better, are playing right into his games."

"Don't you dare," Janet said.

Steve looked at her like she'd slapped him. "Dare what?"

"Don't you tell me what I'm doing. You and all the rest of the manly men down at the Triskelion look at me like I'm a little girl who needs help learning to ride a two-wheeler. You think you know everything about me, and you walk around congratulating yourselves about how you protected me by getting rid of Hank.

Well, guess what? Maybe you need Hank. Maybe the world needs Hank. I sure as hell don't, but even I can see that anyone who's figured out a way to track the Chitauri belongs in the Triskelion instead of out in the suburbs of for-god's-sake Chicago."

"Ah," Steve said. "We need Hank for his ant gizmo."

"Yes, we do."

"Because he can track the Chitauri," Steve said.

"Yes."

"Come on," Steve said. "I want to show you something." Ten minutes later they were standing at the dead end of the breezeway between Janet's building and the neighboring building to the south. Steve had a key-chain flashlight, and he was using it to show Janet certain things on the ground near the wall. "Recognize this?" he said, holding the light over a series of discolorations on the concrete. No, they were marks.

She was looking at a series of faded evidence notations of the kind made by SHIELD post-operation investigation and recovery teams. One string of letters, repeated over and over, stuck out: CTT. Chitauri tissue.

"One of them was here," Janet said softly. She looked up, to the third floor, where her small bathroom window looked out over the breezeway.

"Yeah. One of them was here. Two, actually An armed-services black-ops team took one of them out, and the guy who runs it brought me back here to show me how it happened. He was also showing me a handheld version of Tony's screener. It sniffs around and detects shed cells carrying Chitauri DNA." Steve pointed at the window grates, one after another. "The sniffer lit up there, and there." Then he pointed at the wall. "And there."

"Oh my God," Janet said.

"I caught it on the fire escape just below the third floor, and I killed it by the wall at the back of the courtyard." Steve's face was hard in the wash from the flashlight. " Hank wasn't here for any of that. I just thought you should know."

He started walking back toward the street. "I'll stand here and make sure you get inside safe."

"Steve," Janet said.

"I don't want to talk anymore," he said.

Janet looked at the notations for a long time. Then she found her keys and went around to the front door.

"Steve," she said.

"Good night, Janet," Steve said.

She opened and closed the door. When she was inside, in her lobby in her new building unshadowed by memories or the presence of Hank, she leaned against the bank of mailboxes and said, in a voice barely above a whisper, "Steve. You don't get it at all. You're missing the point." 25

Status Report

Unplanned loss of assets has occurred in <New York City>. Further complications include the apparent reintegration of <Henry Pym> into the operational structure if not member circle of the <Ultimates>. Assessment of the <Pym> situation continues.

Assimilated nonhuman asset tasked with surveillance and infiltration of friends and associates of <Steve Rogers> lost .000456 solar year ago. Assimilated asset in <New York City Police Department lost

.000451 solar year ago after undertaking mission to track and eliminate <Henry Pym>. Events appear to have combined unfortunate timing and unanticipated improvisation on the part of human/augmented human opponents. Revisions to operational planning continue to incorporate this new information. Suggestions that <Henry Pym> deliberately put himself at risk to provoke response from <Steve Rogers> and other <Ulti-mates> seem to overestimate human capacity for risk assessment, as well as

<Henry Pym>'s capacity for behavior in the mode of altruism. It is considered more likely that the operation of chance was decisive in this case.

Operations within media conglomerates proceed at a pace short of projections, and will be discontinued. Available broadcast technologies fail to meet necessary standards for proposed component of human ordering project. Abandoned initiatives involving application of psychoactive substances to municipal water supplies are undergoing renewed study, but prospects for implementation remain uncertain. More promising are assets and initiatives existing and developing in <Washington, D.C>. Assets within <Stark lndustries> report technological advance bearing strong implications for success of human ordering project. Few details are currently available; investigation ongoing. Planning for countermeasures will continue on an expedited schedule, as necessary and possible given new information and changing circumstances in the field.

All assets are instructed to be watchful for the presence of invertebrate order <Hymenoptera>. If assimilated circumstances permit, assets should avoid locations commonly inhabited by <Hymenoptera>. If such avoidance is impossible, curtail the number and duration of visits to such locations. This directive is issued with full cognizance of <Hymenoptera>'s wide distribution and near ubiquity. Efforts to degrade human capacity to control <Hymenoptera> are ongoing. Prospects of success impossible to determine at this time. Expenditure of assets is deemed highly probable in the event of a direct operation to degrade or eliminate <Pym-Hymenoptera> technology. In anticipation of this necessity, until extent of development of <Pym-Hyrnenoptera> technology is more fully understood, asset conservation will be prioritized.

Intelligence regarding imminent human/augmented attack, location <Saxtons River, Vermont>, should be considered unsubstantiated at this time. However, considering events of the previous .000456 solar year, assets in the area, or with operational connection to <Noofie Acres>, will proceed on maximal alert status.

26

On this fine summer Thursday, Thor had been planning to attend a retreat organized by a new anti-globalization collective called CAREFIST. Instead he found himself in the bowels of the military-industrial beast called Triskelion, listening to Nick Fury expound on the latest developments in the Chitauri saga. We know how this is going to end, Thor thought. We'll run them to ground somewhere, and kill them; and then, sometime later, we'll find out that we didn't kill all of them, and we'll have to do it again.

Or, one of those times, fate will swing the other way, and the Chitauri will win. The conference room—the same place where Tony had originally demonstrated his screener—was full. All of the Ultimates were present, including poor Banner via monitor. In addition, several tech-support staffers milled around in the back of the room tinkering with some kind of gadget that, Thor assumed, would be the centerpiece of a glamorous demonstration whenever Nick finished his speech. At least Thor had the good fortune to be sitting next to Clint, who was the only other member of the team, in Thor's opinion, with the right (which was to say, cynical) attitude toward the Ultimates and SHIELD as a whole. Perhaps it was because Clint had come out of the dirtiest of dirty worlds, deep-cover black ops. We have both seen the worst behavior of human beings, Thor thought. He has been a slave of the globalist hegemony, and has killed for it; I have always fought against it. But we have both seen its worst excesses... and I have a little history that he does not.

Nick stood near a display screen at the head of the conference table. "It looks like everything is about to come to a head, Chitauri-wise," he was saying. "We have new technologies for identifying and tracking them, and they know it. As a result, they're becoming more aggressive. The actions of Doctor Hank Pym have both helped and complicated the situation, since he has been able to direct ants to attack Chitauri, but he has also revealed this ability to them, which may cause them to rethink their tactics." Thor saw Steve and Janet exchange a sharp glance.

He wondered what was happening there; he'd heard about the Chitauri caught near Janet's apartment, but didn't know why the two of them looked angry. Lovers' quarrel, he decided. Not worth pursuing.

"Most recently, a Chitauri was found in the form of a Newfoundland dog belonging to the nephew of an old friend of Steve's. Obviously this Chitauri was there to observe what Steve was up to, and be in a place where it could act immediately if it needed to. We must assume that other such disguised agents exist."

"Sic ants on all of us," Tony said with a smirk.

"It may yet come to that," Nick said. "We found out where that dog was bred and ran a little operation out that way, in southern Vermont. Town called Saxtons River, and the breeder was called Noofie Acres. Bagged forty-six Chitauri, the biggest single concentration since before Arizona. Plus now we've got about sixty Newfoundland puppies that are verifiably not Chitauri. Anyone here who wants to go into the dog-breeding business after we rid the world of our latest alien menace, let me know." A ripple of laughter. Sixty Newfoundland dogs, Thor thought. You'd need an island of your own. A nice northern island, granite and tall pines and deep azure fjords...

"According to tax and license records, Noofie Acres has been there since 1981, and hasn't changed owners. So the Chitauri are getting a little bit cleverer about where and how they settle in. What with this, the attack on the Triskelion, and the various lone wolves we've smoked out—some thanks to Dr. Pym's work with ants—a picture is emerging of an enemy that's learned it can't defeat us in a direct fight, so it's adapting its tactics to the resource differential. Settling in and keeping a low profile at a place like Noofie Acres indicates that they're planning long-term; but something like the suicide attack on the Triskelion means that they've got short-term plans as well, most likely meant to provoke a specific response." Fury looked directly at Steve Rogers. "And unfortunately, I believe we have in certain cases done exactly what they wanted."

Hmm, Thor thought. He glanced over at Clint, who returned the glance. They'd both seen it. "Times like this," Thor said softly, "make me glad I stayed on the outside of all the power struggles."

"Yup," Clint said.

At that moment, Thor saw Loki on the other side of the room. Ah, he thought. So the complications have not yet finished complicating. Loki stood in the guise of a slightly built female technician helping to put together the display for Tony's presentation that was to come after Nick brought them all up to speed. Brother, Loki said.

Thor nodded.

This is a delight to observe, brother, Loki said. It's so rare that I get to merely watch chaos instead of having to create it myself.

You've had nothing to do with this? Any of it? Thor won-dered. Solely as spectator, Loki said. But aren't we in a quantum world? Do we not know that the observer alters what he observes merely by observing? Ha ha ha!

You're not going to get me to come after you in the middle of this meeting. Thor shook his head. They don't need another reason to think I'm crazy.

Oh, Loki said. Worried about what they think now? Worried about the perception of you among the humans? How very Ultimates. How very image-consultant and focus-group. Our father would gouge out his good eye if he heard you say that.

We'll settle this another time, Thor said.

And your little comment to Hawkeye there, about power struggles? Oh! Loki laughed. Yes, you've never taken part in power struggles. No, no. The Aesir are so innocent of turf battles and petty feuds. We could give lessons. Ha ha ha!and petty feuds. We could give lessons. Ha ha ha!

"What are you looking at?" Clint whispered.

At that moment, Thor didn't care what anyone thought. "Loki is here watching."

"No kidding. Where?"

Thor waited until Fury was looking the other way, then pointed. "Looks like a tech to me," Clint said.

"That's what he does," Thor said.

"Well, shit," Clint said. "Bad sign?"

"Bad enough."

"Can we do anything about it?"

"Probably not right now."

"Ah. Well, hell with him, then." With that, Clint went back to listening to Fury. What a skill, Thor thought. To be able to track and untrack your mind in that way. To be able to just stop thinking about something...

A sharp shriek cut through the room, ending as quickly as it began. Everyone around the conference table leapt to their feet; various weapons were unlimbered and fighting stances assumed. All of them focused on the source of the sound: Loki, in his Stark Industries coverall. He had a hand on the side of his face, and Thor watched him quickly adjust it to rub at the side of his nose. Something gleamed in his left ear.

"Sorry, everyone! I know that didn't sound like a sneeze, but it was one. Sorry. I've always had a weird sneeze. Got kicked out of class for it in high school. Dust gets me every time." Loki smiled, and Thor wondered what had really happened.

Clint winked at him. "Can't stand a sneak," he whispered. "Especially a sneaky Norse god. I mean, if you're a Norse god, show yourself"

"What did you do?"

Clint held up a paper clip, bent straight except for a single curl at one end. He made a flicking motion with the fingers of his right hand. "Sent him a little greeting card, is all."

"Careful," Thor said, even though he couldn't help but smile. "Loki has a long memory, and he carries grudges."

"So do I," Clint said.

"General," Steve said, and Thor turned his attention back to the front of the room. "How exactly have members of this team acted in ways that the Chitauri would have wanted us to?" Steve's directness surprised Thor. It wasn't like Soldier Boy to bark back at his superiors. Nick looked a bit surprised, too, but he didn't let it show for long. "The Chitauri mean to cause chaos and division," he said. "If that's what they want, then one responsibility of this team is to show a united front. We all need to be pulling in the same direction."

"Classic guerrilla tactics," Steve said. "We all understand that, General. And isn't one of the classic problems faced by conventional forces in a guerrilla war an inability to adapt to the guerrillas' way of fighting because that conventional force is overconfident by virtue of numerical superiority?"

"Captain," Nick said. "This isn't the war college. You can write your dissertation after we've taken care of the Chitauri. Unless you're trying to make a specific point about SHIELD operations?" How interesting, Loki said. I believe we're witnessing a proxy battle here. On the one hand, the intrepid Steven Rogers; on the other, the indomitable Nicholas Fury. Both of them too stupidly proud to focus on what's really happening. I love this. .

"Can you put one of those paper clips in his eye?" Thor whispered.

"Sure," Clint said. "But he wouldn't be able to pretend he was sneezing." Too bad, Thor thought.

"I don't think any more needs to be said about this." Nick held out a hand toward Tony Stark. "And now Tony's going to show us the latest Stark Industries toy. Before he does, I'll just say that we are all indebted to the work done by Henry Pym. Pym will not be returning to the team, but his independent research has proved very useful, so credit where credit is due."

Thor looked around the room, and saw that Loki was still sitting, still watching. As if he felt Thor's gaze, Loki looked over and gave his half brother a little wink. His new paper clip earring showed through the dark fall of his hair.

This isn't over, Thor thought.

27

"Okay," Tony said, standing up and looking around the room. "I'm going to try this one more time. And Nick, this time I promise I won't use you as a guinea pig." He caught the eye of his lead tech. "Carlo. We ready to go here?"

At the thumbs-up from Carlo, Tony said, "This is another case of me getting a little far afield from the initial purpose of a contract. At one point in the not-too-distant past, Stark Industries was asked by parties who shall remain nameless to investigate the possibilities of using wireless-enabled consumer products as a kind of distributed surveillance or information-gathering network. I worked on that for a while, but I'll tell you the truth. The Chitauri problem makes it difficult to focus on basic research, and it also makes it difficult to stay within the parameters of a research contract when I see a possibility that might have application elsewhere." He grinned and shrugged. "Call me scatterbrained, I guess. Carlo, start the movie."

The lights in the conference room dimmed as a projector started up. A map of the United States appeared. "After Arizona," Tony said, "we all decided to believe the Chitauri were gone. But in the last couple of weeks, we've had confirmed sightings in Illinois and New Ybrk."

"And Washington, D.C.," Steve said.

There was a moment of silence.

"Is that so?" Tony said. "Hmm. Seems our intelligence sharing isn't what it could be. Okay, and Washington, D.C. Carlo, next time we show this, bring a Sharpie in case anyone else has a Chitauri sighting to add."

Nobody laughed. Oh well, Tony thought. There are occasions when even I can't lighten up a situation with a joke. Keeps me humble.

"In any case, confirmed sightings, and in situations that indicated they weren't just hanging around. They were tracking us. They infiltrated Hank Pym's lab, they carried out a suicide bombing on the Triskelion after figuring out exactly how our freight intake was handled, they tried to get into Janet's apartment, and they even assimilated a dog to keep an eye on Steve. Last time around, they went for big clusters and grandiose gestures. This time, it looks like they're taking a much more subtle approach... focused on us." As Tony listed each Chitauri action, the projector showed a related image: Hank's wrecked lab, the aftermath of the Triskelion bombing, the recovery team in the breezeway next to Janet's building, the destroyed Monte Carlo where Hank had been shot. That final image remained as Tony went on. "And especially focused on Hank, even though he's not on the team anymore," Tony said. "Why?

Because—and this is hard for me to admit—Hank found the silver bullet." The screen image flickered and became an ant.

"Bullet ant, I should say. Chitauri under great physical stress begin to lose their shape-shifting ability. This ant packs possibly the most painful sting in the insect kingdom, and a little cluster of them can ruin a Chitauri's disguise in no time flat. How do we know this? Because Hank Pym figured out how to tell ants to search for and attack Chitauri."

Tony paused for just long enough to let that sink in, and then he said, "Kind of makes me wish I'd never wasted my time on those screeners. They'll do some good, but if the Chitauri don't want to be spotted that way, they'll just avoid airports and the other places where screeners like that get installed." On the screen, a reproduced newspaper headline, clearly from a small-town weekly: Local Woman Attacked by Fire Ants. More headlines followed, all variations on the same theme.

"Apparently Hank couldn't always get bullet ants, so he practiced with whatever species he had around. But his results, ladies and gentlemen, are impeccable. Hank Pym has designed broadcast commands for twenty-odd different species of ant, all of which can now be made to hunt and attack Chitauri on command. How are we doing so far? Questions?"

"What about—" Steve started to say.

Fury shot out of his seat. "Captain Rogers. You will not waste Tony's time. Is that understood?" Steve looked straight ahead at nothing and folded his hands on the tabletop. "Yes, sir," he said.

"Good. Tony, please continue."

My goodness, Tony thought. A more obvious bitch-slap has probably never occurred in this room, or at least not between members of the team. Wonder what that's all about. "Okay, well, the great thing about what Hank did is that ants live nearly everywhere in the world that people do. So we could see a solution: put the world's ants on high alert for Chitauri presence, and have rapid-response teams in place to act whenever the ants turned one up. The problem, as you have all doubtless already figured out, is that Hank Pym doesn't work for SHIELD anymore, and anyway, how is one guy going to run around the world with his ant-controlling helmet on all the time?"

The image changed back to the map of the United States. After five seconds, splotches of color began to cover it. "These are maps of cell-phone coverage," Tony said. "All the major companies, including mine." Most of the map was covered, but there were large empty spots, mostly in the Rocky Mountain West.

"This is pretty good, right? But not good enough. So we kept looking, and I even tried to buy a couple of AM radio stations to fill in some of the holes, but the FCC doesn't move that fast for any man. I tried to pick up an XM satellite frequency, but it turns out that none of the ones that are available would work for the ants. Then I had an idea. What if we could piggyback on consumer electronic devices? GPS

handsets, cell phones, PDAs, everything. They all send out signals to their networks, just to keep in touch, and if we can add just a little packet of data to those signals, we can suddenly have literally trillions of sentinels on the lookout for Chitauri everywhere. All the time."

"I'm going to step in real quick and ask a question, Tony," Nick said. "Which is: but how does this work?

I mean, you can't wave a sample in front of the ants and tell them to go look for something, right?"

"No, but you don't have to. One of the smart things Hank did was figure out how to turn one chemical signature of Chitauri tissue into a set of electrical impulses. It's like talking on a phone. Sound becomes electricity becomes sound. In this case, an odor becomes a kind of algorithm, which when broadcast into the ant's brain becomes the sense of an odor together with the pheromonal signal to attack. Put another way, Hank figured out how to actually broadcast thoughts into ants' heads. I've got to tip my hat to Hank on that one. It's good stuff. Stark Industries is stealing it without shame. And the best thing about the whole project is that it works like SETI@Home, or any one of those other geek-nirvana projects," Tony said. "It'll broadcast on any wireless router, and pretty much any other Bluetooth device. If you're driving across the Mojave and there's not an Internet cafe within a hundred miles... as long as you've got cell service, you'll be helping us out. Or if your car has GPS, or whatever. Carlo, we ready?"

"We sure are," Carlo said.

"Okay, everyone," Tony said. "Turn around so you can see where Carlo is, and let's watch." Amid the shuffle and scrape of chair legs, Tony thought he'd talked too much. Always better to let people come in once in a while, and use their responses to drive things forward in a way that made them feel like they'd contributed. Nick had kind of put everyone on alert with his takedown of Steve, though; no wonder the room had been so quiet afterward. What the hell was going on with those two, he wondered? Was this still about the leak? Did Nick think—or know—that Steve was the culprit? Was that why he was keeping Steve on a short leash?

Spare me the intrigue, Tony thought. I've got brain cancer, and there are aliens among us. Let's get this done.

Carlo uncovered a large Lucite terrarium, approximately one-third filled with earth. The rest of it was filled with a standard assortment of leaf litter, pieces of fallen trees, and so forth. Your typical pocket ecosystem ant farm. "In there are about twelve thousand average harvester ants," Tony said, "and a single half-gram sample of Chitauri tissue. And this," he went on as he held up a small black rectangle about the size of a remote-entry car key, "is a little voice that will speak to the ants. Everybody turn your cell phones off"

When everyone had done so, Tony set the black rectangle on the table in front of him. He switched it on and said, "Now look at the ants."

The ants weren't doing anything unusual. "Here's the good part," Tony said. "Someone—ah, how about you, Janet?—turn your cell phone on."

Janet looked annoyed, but she got her phone out of her coat pocket again and turned it on. "The phone is going to start looking for its network," Tony said. "When it does that... hey, look at those ants." Everyone turned, and it was perfect. The ants came churning up out of the earth and converged on a spot near the end of a length of decomposing birch. Almost instantly, the birch disappeared under the swarming ants. "Anyone care to guess where I put the sample?" Tony asked.

"And this would have worked no matter which of us turned on a phone?" Janet asked.

"It would have worked no matter who turned on a phone, or any other personal accessory that broadcasts its presence to a network," Tony said. "There's one other thing, too. Stark Industries owns a number of communications satellites, and I believe I'm going to be able to slip this message into their signals. If that works, then we'll have coverage of the entire world, just like that. But if it doesn't, I still have this."

The projector showed a roughly cylindrical metal machine sitting on a tripod, with antennas fanning out around its midsection. It looked like a satellite, but the framing of the image made clear that it was small enough to sit on a table. "I thought you said you hadn't gotten the satellites up yet," Janet said.

"Janet, my darling, getting things up is never my problem. I said I hadn't worked out the signal yet, and this isn't a satellite. This is an amplifier, which if attached to an aircraft at a sufficient height should be able to bounce a signal to the ants all over a line-of-sight area. Say, a time zone at a time. If I can get a dozen old U-2s, or even a secondhand fleet of Airbus 320s, these amplifiers will give what we call blanket coverage."

"Meaning," Nick said, "that there's nowhere in the world—-or at least the parts of the world inhabited by ants—that a Chitauri will be able to hide."

"And without them, we'll have to rely on one phone, one BlackBerry, one GPS at a time. The amplifiers are the trump card."

"So what, we get the amplifiers deployed and the Chitauri just pull up stakes and head for the North Pole or the Himalayas or somewhere?" Clint asked.

"Well, this is where Homeland Security's data-mining operations are going to be very useful," Nick said.

"Some of you have made no secret of your distaste for how closely SHIELD has to work with Washington, but in this case that cooperation is going to come in handy. We'll have access to everything they know about sudden movements of population, and we've already got surveillance satellites on the lookout for new populations in areas unoccupied by ants."

"Already?" Clint repeated.

Nick looked a little less confident when he answered. "In the event that the Chitauri have already figured out what Hank has been up to. If their agent in Hank's Illinois lab was able to report back, then the Chitauri might already have gone to a worst-case scenario and figured that they should head for the hills. I don't think that's the case, but we've got to include it as a possibility."

"And if they have, then what?" Thor boomed suddenly. "Another little incursion into a sovereign nation?

Will we be nationalizing any oil assets along the way?"

"Keep your pinko politics out of this room, mister," Steve growled. "You're not even American. We're under attack. They want to kill us. If you don't want to fight back, then there's the door."

"Captain Rogers," Nick said. "Team unity is very important here. When the enemy is not obviously identifiable, it's natural to start suspecting everyone's motives. But we don't need that. What we need is everyone on-board. You can fight about multinational corporate hegemony some other time."

"As much as we'd all love to talk about it now," said Tony with a roll of his eyes. "Being a hegemonic corporate presence myself, I can't wait to have that conversation."

"Are we going to be clearing this project with people in Washington? The ant part of it, I mean." Steve glanced over at Nick, but for once Nick let him run. Curiouser and curiouser, Tony thought. "Is Homeland Security just mining data and taking pictures for us, or are we supposed to be working together? They killed the screening tech, remember."

In the silence that followed, Tony looked around the room, just sort of to take everyone's temperature. A serious confrontation was brewing between Steve and Nick, that was clear. As far as Tony was concerned, the two of them deserved each other, but everything needed to be kept on less than a full boil until this little problem with the alien invasion was taken care of.

"They did kill the screening tech," Nick said. "But it didn't stay dead, now, did it? Which is a good thing. I'm not a tremendous fan of leaks and other security breaches, but that one seems to have done the job. My point is that Washington is Washington. Sometimes they do the right thing, sometimes they don't. So when they don't, we need to be flexible enough and smart enough to figure out a way to do our jobs even when the people who are supposed to be helping just get in the way."

"So we are taking this to Washington," Steve said.

"No, we are certainly not," Nick said. "Officially, SHIELD doesn't know a goddamn thing about any ant project. Plank Pym is not a member of this team, and Stark Industries operates under all kinds of defense contracting protocols, very few of which have anything to do with me or with SHIELD." Nick cracked his big action-hero grin. "That, ladies and gentlemen, is what is known as plausible deniability." 28

Steve went straight from the unveiling of Tony's amplifier tech to a scheduled meeting with Garza, which was the last thing in the world he wanted to do right then. Didn't it just figure that General Fury would throw a monkey wrench into the whole works by doing the right thing? How was a guy supposed to move ahead when nobody around him would stay consistent?

Face it, he told himself Your real problem is that you thought you had everyone pegged, and now that they're not fitting into the holes you made for them, you're second-guessing yourself No time for that. The Chitauri aren't second-guessing themselves, you can bet on it.

So the thing to do was stick with what he knew. There was a threat; there was a way to deal with the threat. That was all anyone needed to know about the situation. The complicating factors—idiots in Washington and the bureaucratic self-preservation instinct that infected people who had to work with idiots in Washington—were part of the equation, but they weren't the primary factors. Stay focused, Steve thought, and got into the now-familiar black limousine waiting in Battery Park City. Before he could say anything, Admiral Garza said, 'We've got a problem, Steve." Tell me about it, Steve thought. But we've got a solution, too, if people would just stay out of the way.

"What is it, sir?"

"We've had to shut down production at SKR. In the past forty-eight hours we've discovered nine employees who were Chitauri." As he said it, Admiral Garza looked angry and embarrassed. "I don't have to tell you that this is a black eye for me. We have to assume the Chitauri know the location of every screener, and will plan to avoid them. There's a minimal benefit to knowing that they won't be going through security at La Guardia, but it's not nearly what it would have been if we could have had them believing they were free to move about. Goddammit," Admiral Garza said. "I'm furious at myself" What Admiral Garza hadn't mentioned was that Chitauri discovery of the screener tech was exactly the reason Ozzie Bright had given for not wanting the screeners publicized and privately manufactured in the first place. "I guess Ozzie Bright had the right idea," Steve said.

"Ozzie Bright can go to hell," Admiral Garza said. "You know the old saying. Even a blind hog finds an acorn once in a while."

"What do we do?" Steve asked. "You still have the handheld screeners. Do the Chitauri know about those?"

Admiral Garza shook his head. "We're building those in-house. Right now we're hammering out the interagency cooperation protocols to equip all Transportation Security Administration personnel with them, and also begin handing them out to federal law enforcement. You know these Beltway types, though. Anything that really needs doing takes forever, and is usually screwed up from the beginning." Looking at his watch. Admiral Garza opened Steve's door. "Listen, we're going to need to touch base again tomorrow. I've got an urgent meeting to get to, and I need you to do a little listening around SHIELD headquarters. Don't spy for me, Steve. You're not cut Out for it, and it's low work for a man of your beliefs and integrity. If anyone asks you anything, tell them. Don't keep secrets for me anymore, either But do tell me what people are asking you. I'm in a tight spot right now between Washington dumbasses and Triskelion paranoids. It's not an easy place to be. We know the aliens are out there, and we know how they

work. So what we need is enough resources and enough time to put that knowledge to use. I'll put together the resources. You help me gain the time to use them."

"Yes, sir," Steve said, although the truth was, he'd followed very little of what Admiral Garza had said. Everyone, it seemed, was having trouble being coherent and consistent today. His phone rang. "Go ahead and take that," Admiral Garza said. "I'll be in touch. And you can tell Nick about the SKR problem. I'd do it, but he and I haven't been getting along lately. Maybe you can soften the blow."

'Yes, sir," Steve said again, and got out of the car. He flipped open the phone and found Tony Stark on the other end.

"Listen, my friend," Tony said. "I was just downstairs in the lab with Janet and she said you told her something about a handheld alien detector. Is that right?"

"I'm not at liberty to tell you about that," Steve said.

"Okay, so you did say it. Don't pussyfoot around with security and chain-of-command crap, Steve. Where were you when you saw it, and who was using it?"

"I'm not at liberty to tell you—"

Tony exploded. "Goddammit, Steve! It was Janet's building, in the breezeway around the side, and you were with some of the goddamn spooks you spend all your time with! You're a terrible liar, Steve. Even when you're not trying to tell a lie, you might as well be walking around wearing a sign that says I Have Secrets. You can't bullshit a bullshitter, and you're talking to the best. Now are we going to have a conversation here, or do I have to go and tell Nick about all the time you're spending with Esteban Garza?"

"We had a word for people like you," Steve said.

"You had a lot of words for people like me," Tony shot back. " Fink, stool pigeon, snitch. I don't care. Drunk? Lush? Whatever. Call me whatever you want. Just tell me about this supposed miniature screener."

"If you know I talk to Garza, General Fury does, too," Steve said.

"Could be. You want to find out for sure?"

I can't risk it, Steve thought. If Janet told him, Tony's got no reason to think she's lying, and he's right. I've got a lousy poker face.

"I saw one of the people I was there with use it," Steve said.

"Ah. Honesty. How refreshing. Well, let me tell you something. I optimized that design, size-wise. It doesn't work any smaller because you need too many sniffer points for the processor to come up with a faultless result. If the screener doesn't have enough different sources for its samplers, the computer doesn't get enough data fast enough to figure out where the source of a particular odor or chemical signature is. So they're spaced out along the frame."

"Tony," Steve said. "I saw this thing work."

"Steve, if a handheld version of this thing was possible, I'd have invented it already and I would also have made sure that it was in every cereal box in the country by this week. I know you're not going to believe this, but you're being suckered. Plain and simple."

"You think you know everything? Maybe someone just figured out something that you couldn't."

"About this? Yes, I do know just about everything. One of the things that I know is that miniaturization has serious limits when you're talking about screening tech that has to pick out and process something as small as DNA within an operationally meaningful time frame. It's not possible. It's like someone was telling you that they invented a perpetual-motion machine."

"I'm telling you, I saw it work."

"Steve, don't take this the wrong way, but you're not a scientist. You saw what, exactly? You saw someone wave something around and then you saw a little light go on. That's how Janet described it. Pretty accurate?"

'You're leaving out the part about bow there really was a Chitauri in the backyard about to climb into Janet's window. The thing worked, Tony."

"My God, are you gullible," Tony said. "They sent suicide bombers to the Triskelion, and you don't think they'd throw one soldier under the bus if it meant they could keep you barking up the wrong tree pretty much forever?"

Steve hung up the phone. He had a country to defend, and he didn't need Tony Stark's alcoholic ramblings to distract him. Three minutes later, someone called back from Tony's number, but Steve didn't pick up. Three minutes after that, he got—of all things—a text message. "Oh, for Pete's sake," he said, hating text messages and the whole of youth culture. But he opened it. GET TO A TV WATCH CNN, it said. It was from Tony.

Battery Park City was crammed with chain restaurants, all of which had TVs on in their bar areas. Steve walked into the first one he saw and glanced around for news. What he found was mostly baseball games, but there was one TV in the back of the bar tuned to National Geographic, and nobody seemed to be watching it. "Mind putting on CNN?" Steve asked a passing waiter. It took the waiter a couple of minutes to find the remote and get the channel changed, and then a seeming eternity of dumb celebrity news that Hedda Hopper would have been ashamed to print... and then Steve figured out what Tony had meant.

A news anchor was saying, "Early indications are that Undersecretary of Defense Ozzie Bright went into anaphylactic shock upon being stung by fire ants while walking across the Mall to get a hot dog." The image cut to a full screen of the Washington Mall, full of people taking in the summer sun, the white obelisk of the Washington Monument in the middle distance. "Hospital staff are being very closemouthed about details of Bright's condition, but witnesses report seeing him being stung by a large number of the ants."

Steve watched in shock. Ozzie Bright, he thought. A Chitauri. How does it all fit? Variations ran through his mind. Bright a Chitauri, so Altobelli and Garza weren't; or all of them were, and the outbursts General Fury had told him about had been an elaborate charade; or Bright and Altobelli were, but not Garza ... but then Tony's parting shot rang in Steve's mind: You don't think they'd throw one soldier under the bus if it meant they could keep you harking up the wrong tree? ?

A teenager wearing a Baltimore Orioles cap filled the screen. "I saw him, man. He had them ants all over, and he was screaming... " The kid shook his head. "Almost didn't sound like a man." It wasn't a man, Steve thought. And I fell for it hook, line, and sinker.

"And then did an ambulance come?" came the question from an offscreen reporter.

"No, it wasn't no ambulance. About six men come piling out of a big black Escalade, drove right out onto the grass, and they grabbed the man and took him away."

Back to the anchor, who said, "Mall staff sprayed the area immediately after the attack, and spokesmen say they'll keep that part of the Mall cordoned off while they investigate. We turn now to Doctor Leslie Armentrout of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Doctor Armentrout tracks incidents involving venomous insects, and is here to give us a little background on this phenomenon. Doctor, it seems like all we've been reading about in the papers lately are ants stinging people. Is it really happening more often, or is this a case of the media latching onto a previously unreported story and making it news?"

"Well, Bob, there's no question that there's been an uptick in the number of serious ant-sting incidents. Could be it's climate change, could be just that the ants are tired of waiting for crumbs to fall from the picnic tables and now they're just going to take the whole picnic, you know what I mean?" Steve didn't stay to hear any more. He charged back out onto the street, calling Tony back. Tony's phone cut immediately to voice mail. "Tony, it's Steve," he said, and hung up. Next he tried General Fury, but there was no answer at all there. Then he got an alert: another text message, from a number he recognized as the automated Red Alert line used for SHIELD emergency messages. ATTACK UNDER WAY STARK INDUSTRIES, it said, and nothing more.

29

Status Report

Circumstances, and prospects for success of the human ordering project, have undergone a radical change from -.005476 solar year to present. Under consideration once more is the surgical option. Unfortunately current assets do not include the same caliber of ordnance brought to the last open confrontation with human defenders. It remains possible, however, that assimilated assets in place could cause profound damage to human centers of population. Whether the amount of damage inflicted would, in the end, precipitate ecological upheaval on the scale necessary to bring about the ordering of Homo sapiens via its elimination rather than its alteration remains uncertain. Choices will have to be made whether the remote possibility of such ecological transformation is enough of a potential reward to offset the certain loss of all existing assets in the effort to catalyze it. Another possibility is a degradation of human civilization to its state of approximately -1000.00 solar years. This degradation could possibly be accomplished through a small number of carefully targeted actions to destabilize food production, clean water availability, and similar resource arenas. Simultaneously, ethnic, national, and religious tensions could be inflamed in flashpoints such as <South Asia>. Simulations and projections related to the possibility of success in these and like ventures have thus far yielded unclear results. Further analysis is ongoing. The ordnance challenge after the events of <Arizona> is formidable, and the possibility exists that a large-scale operation designed for pervasive and long-term degradation of human civilization is beyond the scope of current assets.

If so, current asset and command structure will refocus around mission of eliminating augmented human assets such as the <Ultimates>, with a view to future reinforcements and redevelopment of the human ordering project. Timeline of the project should perhaps be viewed as more flexible than was previously considered desirable.

While this ultimate decision is analyzed and taken, all available assimilated assets are to review their orders. Mission to reduce or eliminate Stark Industries amplifier technology commences .000273 solar year from broadcast of this report. Primary focus of mission will be capacity of Stark Industries to disseminate software via existing public networks. Secondary objectives are contained in individual unit orders.

Appendix

Unless otherwise noted, asset losses delineated below are the result of action of arthropods, order

<Hy-menoptera>, presumably directed by <Henry Pym>.

Assimilated human asset lost in <Fort Bragg, North Carolinax

Assimilated human asset lost in <New York, New York>.

Assimilated human asset lost in <Miami Lakes, Florida>.

Assimilated human asset lost in <Dania, Florida>.

Assimilated human asset lost in <Fort Hood, Texas>.

Assimilated human asset lost in <Atlanta, Georgiax>

Assimilated human asset lost in <Antelope Valley, California>

Assimilated human asset lost in <San Diego, California>

Assimilated human asset lost in <lmperial, California>

30

Even a guy with the uncanny accuracy of Clint Barton needed quality equipment. And for his equipment he had once gone to a seriously top-secret NSA lab in West Virginia. But then he came in out of the cold, so to speak, and ended up with the Super Hero Ultimates gig, and now he went shopping for his gear at Stark Industries, which occupied a fine-looking skyscraper near Bryant Park. Nothing big or flashy by Manhattan standards: fifty, maybe sixty floors, glass and steel construction. It was underground that the place got exciting, because Tony had figured out some way to engineer a whole lot of subbasements that avoided subway tracks, utility conduits, and other existing basements. The whole setup was a marvel of engineering vision and ruthless graft. Clint often wondered what a three-dimensional schematic of the subterranean parts of Stark Industries would look like. Swiss cheese, maybe. Or, to use a comparison more apropos to current events, an ant farm. Clint had come to the ant farm to test out some new arrowheads and miscellaneous other doodads that the tech underlings at Stark were constantly working on whenever Tony freed them from their government projects. It seemed to Clint that the underlings had quite a bit more enthusiasm for Ultimates-related gimcrackery than for their standard cluster bombs and cruise missile gyroscopes. Today he was there to look at a prototype arrowhead that would, if it worked as advertised, deliver serious armor-piercing value even at the relatively low velocities an arrow could reach. This was apparently achieved by an extraordinary rotational velocity that caused initial penetration even into hardened steel, after which a high-explosive charge did the rest. It was the kind of battlefield performance fairly easily reached by a rocket-propelled grenade or high-caliber depleted uranium bullets, but you didn't always want to make your mark with those munitions. What if say, you wanted to punch a hole through the door of a hardened limo, but you didn't have any way to set up with an RPG or .50-cal?

And what if you just plain loved the feeling of the bowstring tautening as you held it back, and then back a little more... and then let fly?

Hell, I can shoot guns, Clint thought. I've spent more of my life looking through crosshairs than most people have spent eating cheeseburgers. But the bow. The handheld projectile. That was where his body found its true union with the weapon.

"So show me the new toy," he was saying to Arjun, the lead weapons tech in Stark's Low-Velocity Research Facility.

"You got it," Arjun said, and started a complicated sequence with a keypad to get them through a door, and that's when the first bomb went off upstairs.

Glint and Arjun looked at each other in shock. "Arjun," Clint said, "I don't care if they work to specs or not. Give me some goodies."

Another explosion shook dust from the ceiling. Arjun finished the keypad sequence and stood back as the door opened. "Locker's the first door to the right," he said. "Take what you need. I'm getting the hell out of here."

Which is as it should be, Clint was thinking as he headed back up toward ground level, bow in his left hand and forty-eight arrows in three quivers slapping against both hips and his left shoulder blade. Get the civilians out of the way. If there's fighting to be done, leave it to the soldiers. He wished he had some regular old arrows. If he was going to be shooting Chitauri with these armor-piercing shafts, they'd likely be sticking out the other side before the explosives got around to detonating. Gunfire to his left. Clint turned and shot before his conscious mind had identified a target. The arrow drilled through the head of the guy with the gun, right behind the hinge of the jaw, and then the charge went off and the guy's upper body turned into a big bloody loogie on the wall. 'Yikes," Clint said. He was loaded for bear here, and maybe only hunting squirrel. For a would-be perfectionist like him, being overequipped was almost as bad as being underequipped.

He took a second to raise Nick on the cell. "Nick," he said. "I just shot somebody in Tony's basement."

"Keep it up," came the reply. "We're on the way, but you and Tony are the only ones there right now, and he's not sure he can get to the suit."

Suit, Clint thought dismissivcly as he clicked off Anyone can be a hero inside a robot skin. And anyone can be a hero if he can grow to be sixty feet tall, but Hank Pym is still a loser. Me, all I have is the hand and the eye and the tool. And that's all I need.

He found a fire stairwell and got on the cell again, looking for Tony this time. "I'm a little busy," Tony said when he picked up.

"I'm in your basement," Clint said. "What should I be looking for?"

"Outstanding," Tony said. "Can you get to 2-B?"

Clint looked up the stairs. "I'm at 4-B," he said.

"Then go up two flights and kill anyone who might be an alien," Tony said. "I'll be there as soon as I can." Clint walked through his daily life with a part of his brain constantly assessing the manner in which he could kill anyone who passed through his field of vision. It wasn't a character trait he took any pride in, but it had kept him alive and made him invaluable to a certain type of unscrupulous or ideological bureaucrats until he'd woken up one morning, realized he'd killed nine people the day before without ever knowing what they'd done to deserve it, and felt nothing. He was out of black ops the next day, and what kept him alive was that all of the people in his former areas of employment were too scared of him to try to take him out. This was the only compliment any of them were ever likely to pay him. He got the all-hands-on-deck text message when he was waiting outside the door to 2-B. "Hmm," he said to the stairwell. "Wonder how long it'll take the gang to get here. All I got is forty-seven arrows left." The door was locked, and Clint cursed Tony loudly and without reservation until he decided just to blow the goddamn thing off its hinges. Which he did, the AP-HE arrowhead working admirably when it had a little more than human bone and tissue to work with. The doorknob and about eighteen inches of the jamb disappeared in a poof of smoke and a singing haze of shrapnel, and then Clint was into Tony's private lab, where Tony worked on the Iron Man suits. Clint had forty-six arrows and no idea who he was supposed to be killing. People were running in every direction, there was a hell of a lot of shooting, and smoke from a hole in the wall made it hard to see and breathe. During the hit on the skyscraper last year, they'd known everyone in the building was Chitauri. This was different. Who were the bad guys?

Chaos, man.

The hole made one aspect of target selection easier; anyone who came in through it got an arrow. Then anyone who reacted to that got an arrow. The explosions were outright deafening in the closed space of the lab, and something about the constant impacts on his eardrums slowed Clint's thinking just a touch. It took him much longer than it should have to figure out that the infiltrating Chitauri weren't going after Tony's suits. The ones already in the room were laying down suppressing fire to get the others through the lab and into the stairwell.

They want the amplifier, Clint thought. Shit. Here I am trying to save Tony's suits, and they aren't the objective. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

He'd been firing from behind a lab table near the stairwell door where he'd come in, and now he ducked under the table and sprinted through the smoke and chaos to a bank of monitors and testing equipment, from which he had a better angle on the other stairwell door.

From somewhere overhead, a big explosion shook the building. Clint saw the shock wave propagate through the hanging smoke in the lab. What were they after? He fired until his arrows were gone, and then he swept two AK-47s up from dead Chitauri and switched them to single shot. God, the world was slow. It was a hundred feet or so from the hole in the wall across the lab floor to the stairwell door. A fast Chitauri in human guise could cover that distance in less than five seconds. Clint could draw a bead on a running target, squeeze off, and go to the next in a hundredth of that time. By the time the clips in the AKs were empty, the room was quiet except for the ringing in his ears and the panicked yelling of the techs who had survived the initial assault.

Clint snapped open his cell and called Tony. No answer. "Shit," he said. Next he tried Nick, and got him on the first ring.

"The lab is clear," Clint said. "But they weren't after the suits."

"We know," Nick said. "You still on 2-B?"

'Yeah."

"Load up and head for the ground floor. Fastest is through the subway tunnel."

"Subway tunnel?"

"The hole in the wall that goes to the subway. Follow it to your left until you see a hole in the ceiling. Come up that way and you'll know what to do from there. Haul ass, Clint." Fury hung up, and Clint headed for the hole, scavenging clips where he could find them. They didn't fit very well in the quivers he was wearing, but sometimes a man had to improvise. He poked his head into the tunnel just as an outbound Long Island Rail Road train was roaring by, not nearly close enough to hit him but not nearly far enough away that he could avoid an instinctive flinch back into the lab. As the train's clack and thunder echoed away east, Clint wondered why the Chitauri hadn't blown the subway tracks, or one of the trains, if what they were really after was widespread chaos. Goddamn aliens, even when you understood what they wanted you still couldn't figure out how they'd go about getting it. "The world," Clint said, "was a better place when we were the only ones screwing it up."

Out in the tunnel again, he raced down a long-abandoned catwalk, finding a hole in the ceiling about seventy-five yards west. Hoisting himself through it, Clint came up into a supply closet with a nice clean hole blown through its west wall into what must have been level 1-B in Tony's building. He was in a long, white hall, lit only by emergency bulbs near the floor. A large number of dirty footprints, tracking in subway grime, led off to his left. It was suspiciously quiet, and when his cell phone pinged with an incoming message Clint had a moment of intolerable paranoia, imagining every rifle muzzle in the world picking out this one sound in the dim and silent hall.

He opened his phone and saw the message from Nick: STAY THERE. DON'T LET ANYONE OUT. Part of Clint was furious. He wanted in on whatever was happening. His blood was up, he'd logged maybe sixty kills already and wanted more. Why were they leaving him here? If the Chitauri got what they came for, they could leave any way they wanted. Goddammit.

Then the other part of Clint's mind, the one that lived only for targets and the choreography of eye and hand and tool, soothed him. Nick must know something, said the predator part of Clint's mind. He needs someone to seal off the exit, and there's nobody in the world better.

Nobody.

Clint settled himself just inside the hole blown into the hallway. He made himself still, keeping a firing position, timing his breath to the flicker of the emergency lights. Whatever came down the hall would never live to see the tunnel.

31

Steve got to Stark Industries the fastest way he could on a weekday afternoon. He ran. The four miles between Battery Park City and Tony's headquarters melted away, and the only reason Steve didn't run right on in the front door—through the cordon that had already formed outside on 34th Street—was that General Fury called his cell. "Steve, find the closest subway grate. Go through it and call me back." Fires burned in several of the building's lower floors, and Steve could hear small-arms fire through broken windows. As he watched, another window spider-webbed and then disintegrated under the impact of bullets. Fire crews were starting to respond, and there were so many sirens going off that it sounded like the last time Steve had been in an air raid over Germany.

"It's kind of loud out here, sir. Did you say to go through a subway grate?"

"That's what I said." Fury hung up.

Steve had gotten some odd orders in his time, but this one was right up there. "Yes, sir," he said, even though he was talking to himself, and he flipped up the first grate he saw. Dropping into it, he landed in a thick sediment of cigarette butts, falafel wrappers, tourist flyers, and the miscellaneous muck and scum that washed through the grates every time it rained. It smelled like the floor of a Coney Island bathroom, if that bathroom had recently been on fire. He called General Fury back.

"Okay, get down into the tunnel," General Fury said. "Cross to the north side of the track that runs under 34th Street and head east until you see a hole in the ceiling. Go through it, but sing out first."

"Am I hearing you right?" Steve asked. "You want me to announce my presence?"

"Are you going deaf?" General Fury snapped. Static flared over the phone, and Steve heard a boom from the street above. Some of the assembled crowd of gawkers screamed. "Yes, I want you to announce yourself, unless you want seven or eight bullets in your head. Clint's down there, and he's pissed off and jumpy."

Which turned out to be a fairly exact description. Steve found his way through and past holes in a couple of train tunnels, and when he got to the one in the ceiling where General Fury had told him to look, he called softly. "Clint? Steve here."

"Left hand through the hole, pinkie and thumb extended. Now."

Steve did it.

"Huh," Clint said. "You're pretty fast. If that had been a normal reaction time, I was going to take off the thumb just to be sure."

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.

The next time Nick woke up, he was in bed, and he could hear. Two improvements over his previous attempt at consciousness. A doctor came in and informed him that he'd be able to go home the next day.

"I will be leaving here in one hour," Nick said, "and I'm only giving you that long because I know you'll never get the paperwork done sooner."

One hour later he was leaving the hospital. One hour after that he was back in his office in the Triskelion, going over mission reports. The first thing he did upon sitting down at his desk was put in a call to Tony Stark. He got voice mail, and said, "Tony. I'm expecting an explanation of your last comment, and I mean soon." Then he hung up and started poring over initial results of Homeland Security tracking to see if there had been an unexpected influx of new residents into any of the populated areas of Earth's landmass where ants didn't live. Nothing showed up in the numbers, and Nick leaned back, thinking the situation over. The Chitauri had clearly put all they had into the attack on Stark Industries, which meant they still thought they had something to fight for... which in turn meant that they didn't think the ants were going to be decisive.

Nick went back over the reasoning. An alternate possibility was that this had been an all-or-nothing attack because the Chitauri knew they were already beat, and Stark Industries had been a Hail Mary. Nick couldn't quite make himself believe that, though. They were too cautious, and too good at planning for the long haul. If that hadn't been a last-ditch effort at something, though, the waste of manpower was huge... which meant the Chitauri had lots of bodies to waste.

Each line of thought turned itself into its opposite, and Nick gave up after spending the afternoon plowing the same furrows through his mind. He checked in at the lab downstairs to see if any of the Chitauri had survived, and could be interrogated, but according to Janet there had been no survivors. "And, Nick," she added, "just how the hell am I supposed to interpret the fact that everyone on the team was called in except me?"

"I sent out an APB to all team members," Nick'said. "You're on the list. I'm not going to take responsibility for anything beyond that."

Over her shoulder he could see Banner looking out of his glassed-in cell with keen interest. Wonder if anyone's doing the kind of psych profiling on him that could tell whether his isolation is changing the way he gets interested in other people, Nick thought. Not that it mattered. Looking back at Janet, he saw that she didn't believe him. "Janet," he said. "I was damn close to calling Hank there at the end of that fight. I mean, look at me. You think I'd have just left you out?"

Wrong thing to say, Nick thought as her soon-to-be-ex-husband's name left his mouth. "Oh, you were," Janet said. "Funny. Does the SHIELD moralizing have some kind of emergency threshold? When the chips get down, we call back in the abusers that we cashiered even though we ignored all of the other things other members of the team had done? That must be one of those situational ethics things they teach you when you're in military college."

"It was a joke, Janet. An exaggeration. We were never going to call Hank," Nick said.

"Go to hell, Nick."

Janet turned and walked off and Nick saw that Banner was still looking at him. When Banner noticed Nick's attention, he shifted his gaze to Janet and followed her all the way to a specimen locker at the other end of the lab. Psych people would have no trouble figuring that out, Nick thought. He sighed, went back upstairs, and put in a work order for a tech team to figure out if there was something wrong with Janet's phone or SHIELD comm, if she'd had it available.

It was five o'clock, his head was killing him, he had stitches all over his arms and shoulders from a menagerie of shrapnel, and he still hadn't begun to deal with the biggest problem of yesterday. Some combination of Ozzie Bright, Vince Altobelli, and Esteban Garza was Chitauri. Nick's guess was all three, but he wasn't sure about Altobelli. He also wasn't sure how the Chitauri would be reacting to Bright's outing as one of them. They had to know that SHIELD would realize that Bright had been assimilated, and they had to know that Steve would put together the relationship between Bright and Garza. Bright played bad cop. Garza played good cop, and Nick Fury bought it hook, line and sinker. So had Steve, until Tony laid out for him the impossibility of a handheld screener. It was all elementary misdirection, exposed as soon as Steve started telling even a fraction of the truth to his nominal superiors. Emphasis, Nick thought, on the nominal. Time to put that to rest. He put in a call to Steve, just to run through the facts one more time, and then made one of the most difficult decisions of his service life.

"Steve," he said for the second time in a month, "how about we get us a beer together?"

"You know I don't drink, General," came Steve's response.

"I also know that you've been lying to me, that you don't trust me, and that this team is going to fly apart if you and I don't clear the air. So you will meet me at the same place as last time, and we will have a beer, and by the end of the night we will understand each other better than we do now."

"Is that an order, sir?"

"All of it's an order. Meeting, drinking, understanding. You are ordered to do all three." Fury hung up and started contemplating what a pain in the ass it was going to be to get to Brooklyn. He hated taxicabs. On the train, the ride was fairly short, but that was only because it left you with quite a ways to walk. Nick didn't know if other people felt this way, but if he was going to walk somewhere, he'd just as soon walk there; if he was going to take wheeled transportation, he wanted it to drop him off within sight—preferably within arm's reach—of his destination. Mixing the two was not his style. And thinking about it was starting to make his battered body feel worse. Here I am with a building full of engineers and geniuses, man, Nick thought, and all I really want is one of them to teleport me to a bar. What the hell good is science, anyway?

The only good thing to come out of the day so far was that SHIELD'S news-culling service was starting to spit out increasing numbers of headlines about ant attacks. Somewhere out there, Hank Pym was doing his thing, and the Chitauri were responding. This led to a new set of problems, since there was no mission coordination. Hank wasn't answering Nick's calls, which Nick could understand on a personal level, but this was no damn situation to let feelings get in the way of what needed to be done. Hank was a liability, team-wise, and he knew it; he also must know that the ant research could be done faster at Triskelion laboratories than at whatever thrown-together facility he could get together. None of that would make any difference to Hank, because he carried around an inferiority complex big enough to make anyone paranoid—even if that anyone wasn't bipolar to begin with. So Hank was at the mercy of his brain chemistry. All of them were.

I got a guerrilla ant army out there, Nick thought, but no way to control it until Tony gets his voice of God networking thingamajig set up. I sure hope he didn't blow the shit out of his own building to the extent that he can't go ahead with that little project, which might save all of us. Be just my luck if suddenly there's some kind of continent-wide spraying program that wipes out all the ants. If Steve was right about Bright and Garza, it wasn't out of the question. They had to move fast.

Life, Nick thought, would be easier if I was as stone-cold a human being as Janet appears to think I am. Since he wasn't, he was going to go have a beer.

33

Status Report

The <Pym-Hymenoptera> technology begins to cause consistent asset loss, and has resulted in difficult curtailment of standard surveillance activity and regular mobility. At this time no viable countermeasure is available. Frequency jamming fails due to the constant band-switching of <Hymenoptera> signals, and the limitless number of possible sources of such signals now that the <Stark> modification to the

<Pym-Hymenoptera> technology is operational.

Planned elimination of the <Stark> modification by means of assault on manufacturing and design facility in <New York City> proved unsuccessful. Mission timeline and analysis follow. Due to mission results, retrenchment will occur as of receipt of this transmission.

Mission Timeline

-.010954 solar year: Initial reports that <Stark Industries> has developed a device capable of tremendously enhancing human detection and counter-infiltration activities.

-.010713 solar year: Preparation of mission plans. Reconceptualization of possibilities for success of human ordering project. Selection of mission plan according to primary objective of eliminating or delaying deployment of <Stark lndustries> amplifier technology.

-.005422 solar year: Mobilization of assets. Planning for redeployment of assets to minimize impact of

<Pym> technology for control of <Hymenoptera>. Two plans constructed, one subsequent to planned

<Stark> mission success and another envisioned as retrenchment in the event of <Stark> mission failure.

-.002825 solar year: Assets within <Stark> secure laboratory where amplifier is believed to be designed and where prototypes are believed to be housed. Penetration of <Stark lndustries> headquarters by means of subterranean demolition.

-.002813 solar year: Destruction of utility and network lines in and out of <Stark lndustries> headquarters. Reserve power systems prove resilient and problematic.

-.002795 solar year: Laboratory in which <Tony Stark> designs <Iron Man> exoskeletons provisionally secured. Forces moving through to next mission objectives.

-.002793 solar year: Unexpected (and believed coincidental) arrival of <Clint Barton> in <Iron Man> lab. Consequent failure to deliver full amount of assets to next set of objectives. Unexpectedly high losses of assets.

-.002754 solaryear: Penetration of laboratory previously secured by assets within <Stark lndustries>. Thorough destruction of laboratory, penetration of attached facilities on adjacent floors.

-.002749 solaryear: Intelligence of <SHIELD> rapid-response team. Preparation for counterattack. Continued degradation of laboratory capabilities. Numerous amplifier prototypes destroyed.

-.002733 solar year: Arrival of <Steve Rogers> through ingress previously believed controlled by rearguard assets. Near-simultaneous penetration of laboratory by <SHIELD> rapid-response team, including <Thor>.

-.002723 solar year: Degradation of <SHIELD> rapid-response team, with exception of <Thor>.

-.002720 solaryear: Arrival of <Tony Stark>, in <lron Man> exoskeleton previously believed secured. Near-total destruction of amplifier laboratory and adjacent floors.

-.002711 solaryear: Loss of mission assets reaches 85 percent. Retreat executed. Egress controlled by

<Clint Barton>. Near-total loss of mission assets.

Analysis of <Stark> Mission

Mission failures included redeployment of assets away from surveillance of <SHIELD> team members. Lack of surveillance resulted in unexpected combat circumstances and unsustainable losses of assets. Retrospective analysis indicates that mission planning was reactive and too narrowly focused, as well as insufficiently respectful of alternatives and possible consequences of asset redeployment. A more decisive shortcoming was failure to credit possibility that the <Stark> amplifier was a decoy, of similar nature to the <Micronesia> operation carried out against <SHIELD> forces with notable success in the previous solar year. Available evidence indicates that <Tony Stark> alone among the <Ultimates> knew that the amplifiers were fabricated; the only possible conclusion is that <Stark> deliberately endangered his comrades and engineered the partial destruction of his headquarters in order to inflict heavy asset loss. The irrationality of this initiative needs no explication. Its success demands consideration.

The <Stark> entrapment appears to have been made possible by the human tendency toward strong personal identity, without which a single individual—in this case <Tony Stark> himself—would have been unable to conceive of and execute an operation in which his colleagues and superiors were deceived to the same degree as our assets. A heterodox possibility presents itself: perhaps, due to ecological quirks on a local scale, <Homo sapiens> is better served by individualism, traceable to primate ancestry, than other dominant species have been by the more common trait in successful civilizations of mass identification. Millennia of documented ordering projects militate against this possibility, but the human ordering project has been unusual in a number of ways. A flexible and committed project guidance hierarchy would take into consideration this strong variance from the norm when future ordering projects are being planned.

At this time, prospects for success of the human ordering project are highly uncertain. Arrival of reinforcements from other sectors would positively influence the equation; however, lack of consistent communication with other sectors would seem to indicate that events elsewhere are unfolding in a manner unlikely to yield significant asset redeployment to <Earth>.

Given results of <Stark> mission, existing redeployment plans for minimizing impact of

<Pym-Hymenoptera> technology are to be implemented as of receipt of this transmission. 34

The Boulevard was a little more lively than it had been, if by lively you meant more populated by the kind of noisy freaks that could make you second-guess your life's dedication to protecting American citizens. The hairy bartender was behind the bar again, wearing his German soccer jersey that probably hadn't been washed since the last time Steve had been there. At least this time the other guy behind the bar, a long-haired Chinese, had on a Mets cap. The Mets still didn't seem like a real baseball team to Steve, but then again, neither did the Los Angeles Dodgers or San Francisco Giants. In some ways, he thought, he'd never catch up to the fifty-seven years he'd missed. He ordered a ginger ale from the Chinese bartender, whose name—Steve discovered when the other bartender asked him where something was—turned out to be Steve.

Go figure. There sure weren't any Chinese named Steve when I was growing up around here, Steve thought.

While he waited for General Fury to get there, Steve wondered how often in the history of military operations a soldier had been ordered to sit in a bar and wait for his superior so they could have a drink. Probably it happened fairly often to spies, but Steve Rogers would sooner have worn a hammer and sickle than considered himself a spy.

Whoa there, he told himself. What have you been doing this past couple of weeks? Keeping secrets, executing plans that directly contravene your orders... if that wasn't spying, it was sure in the same territory.

Steve's father had always drilled into him the importance of being a man when you found out you'd been wrong about something. A real man admitted his errors and would move heaven and earth to make them right. Now Steve found himself in the position of having to do that. General Fury had called him out. The jukebox abruptly switched from some kind of incomprehensible noise to music that Steve recognized, even if he'd never learned to appreciate it: the Delta blues he'd never known anything about until he'd gone into the service and heard it coming from the kitchens and maintenance yards where most of the black soldiers were assigned. The only black person in the bar was wearing a leather cowboy hat and long braids. Not a blues type, that was for sure. And now here came General Fury through the door, more walking evidence that Steve was a man out of his time as surely as Rip Van Winkle. A black general. With a flush of embarrassment, Steve remembered breaking General Fury's nose, and later apologizing about it. When you made a mistake, you made it right, no matter how hard or humbling it was.

"General," Steve said, standing up as General Fury approached his booth.

"Sit down," General Fury said. "We're off duty here. You want that freshened up?"

"Thanks," Steve said. When General Fuiy had come back with another ginger ale for Steve and a beer for himself, Steve said, "Okay. I have three orders, and I've completed one. Gan I get a pass on the second if that makes it easier to fulfill the third?"

"You mean I'm not going to be able to get you drunk?" General Fury said. He did not smile, which put Steve off balance right away.

"I got drunk once in my life, when I was sixteen," Steve said. "That was enough."

"Fair enough. Consider the second order rescinded. Now let's get on with the third. I need you to lay out for me exactly what you've been doing with Esteban Garza. Has he been in touch with you since Ozzie Bright had his little accident?"

"No, sir. I haven't heard from him. I imagine that I won't be hearing from him." How did you say it, Steve wondered? When you were Captain America, how did you admit that you'd been suckered because you were so hungry for action, for the grim self-satisfied thrill of deciding what was right and then doing it, that you decided to ignore the oaths you'd sworn? He couldn't make the words leave his mouth. Pride, he thought.

"Did he ever ask you to report on SHIELD activity?" General Fuiy asked. Steve remembered Admiral Garza saying something along the lines of I'm not asking you to spy for me, but I am asking you to listen. "Not directly," he said. "He did ask me to pay attention to how you were dealing with Washington."

"And did you?"

"I—" Steve caught himself He was only going to get one chance to say this, and he had to both tell the truth and make sure that it sounded right. But he spoke quietly, both because there were civilians around to hear and because he was going to be saying words he never thought he would have to say. "I never told him anything that compromised any mission or SHIELD security, sir."

"Okay. What did you tell him?"

"Mostly that I was angry and dissatisfied with the way SHIELD was approaching the Chitauri threat."

"Was this after Garza used you to leak the screener to SKR?"

"Yes, sir."

"You know that SKR was shut down."

"Yes, sir. Admiral Garza told me."

"He make a big show about how embarrassed he was?"

Steve nodded.

"You realize," General Fury said, "that he flew you like a flag. I sent out a test crew with Chitauri samples, and they walked right through every single SKR screener they tried. You got up on TV to tell everyone about terrorism and how SKR was going to make them safer, and what happened was that they made goddamn placebo screeners, and now the Chitauri know exactly where they can go, unless we're going to fill every airport and federal building in the country with ants. Let me put this as clearly as I can: if you weren't who you are, you'd be in jail. In some situations, you'd be in a grave. I never thought I'd say this, but Hank Pym's been a damn sight more useful to us the past few weeks than you have." Steve could feel his face burning. Still he did not speak, because he could not defend himself. What he could do was sit and take his medicine, and wait for his chance to make it right.

"Now," General Fury said. "Am I wrong?"

"No, sir," Steve said. "You're not wrong."

"I'm glad we agree. Now would you like to get started on fixing this mess?"

"I very much would, sir."

General Fury killed off his beer. "I thought you might. Find Garza. When you find him, call me so we can bring him in. Under no circumstances are you to take him down yourself. Are all parts of those orders understood?"

"Yes, sir," Steve said. "May I ask a question?"

"You sure may."

"Will I have SHIELD resources available to me while I'm looking?" For the first time since he'd walked into the bar, General Fury cracked a smile. "Oh, now he wants to work with the team. Yes, Captain. They're waiting for you at the satellite tracking lab right now." It took less than six hours. Garza had been smart enough to ditch his cell phone—which pinged from a Dumpster on Great Jones Street—and nobody at the Pentagon would allow SHIELD to piggyback on the homing beacon they had in all high-level staff cars. Initially that was a problem. Then Steve realized that the Chitauri might not know that SHIELD had pegged exactly the way in which SKR had faked the screeners, and he commandeered security footage from Washington and New York airports. Presto. Either Garza hadn't had time to consume and assimilate a new identity, or he hadn't thought he needed to. Whichever was the case, a lab tech caught him via facial-recognition software coming out of long-term parking at JFK. With that hit, they tracked him into his terminal, through a gate with a brand-new SKR

screener, and to the gate where he boarded a flight... for Buenos Aires.

Back to the Pentagon, where after some wrangling Steve was able to get a look at tapes from Ezeiza Airport in Buenos Aires. Again the techs went to work, and they pegged Garza getting on a chartered flight. Using the gate number, they cracked Ezeiza's records... and found that there was no record of any flights taking off from or landing at that gate on the day in question.

"Hmm," Steve said. "Looks like our lizard friends have gotten into the airport before us."

"You want my guess?" said one of the techs. "Heading through Argentina, plus no ants, equals Antarctica."

Steve watched the map, wondering how he might test that hypothesis. "Could be you're right," he said.

"Let's nail that down."

Ninety minutes later, armed with satellite tracks of a private jet leaving Buenos Aires at the right time and then landing in the Antarctic interior, Steve was on his way by helicopter to McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey. An hour after that, he was thundering south in an F-16. He left a message for General Fury: GONE ICE FISHING.

35

It all comes to a head, Nick thought. One last meeting, one last set of orders, and one more time we set out to take care of business. Normally he was starting to get jazzed up about a mission by the time it came to this point—knowing combat was on the way was the second-most powerful buzz in the world, combat itself being the first—but for some reason he was coming into this final briefing annoyed and out of sorts because they should have put the goddamn Chitauri away the last time. Which is what he told the team right off the bat. "What we're doing here," he said, "is cleaning up a mess that we never should have made. We had the Chitauri on the ropes in Arizona, and we got distracted by other things, and look where that got us. Today or tomorrow, we finish the job once and for all." He looked around the room, from Janet to Clint to Thor to Tony. Banner hadn't been invited today. They would also be using several squads of next-gens, but Nick planned to brief them separately later.

"Okay," Nick said. "Steve is en route to Antarctica right now. It looks like the Chitauri have decided that the ants are their biggest problem, so they've cleared out to where ants don't live. Unless Hank comes up with a way to control penguins, we're working with a whole new set of circumstances on the ground."

"Sounds a little like Micronesia all over again," Tony said. "I'd sure hate to have to do that again. It was hell on my batteries."

"Keep on joking, Tony. Twenty thousand people died that day. It's not a mistake we're likely to repeat." Tony stood. "Nick, can the sanctimony. Yeah, I was joking, but I'm also right. The last time we decided to go in and take on the Chitauri face-to-face without Bruce, we ended up with a wrecked fleet and a hundred square miles where the fish are going to grow three heads for the next thousand years. What I'm saying, in my own inimitable fashion, is let's make sure we don't fall for the same trap again."

"The difference is, they're on the run this time," Nick said.

"And armies on the run lay traps behind them, do they not?" Thor said. "I'm afraid Tony might be right here. How do we know what we're in for? Have we even seen this place where they're going? Do we know it exists?"

Nick pulled up a large image of Antarctica, and rescaled it to infrared. "Right there," he said, zooming in on a mountain tagged Vinson Massif, near an inlet of the Weddell Sea, "is what looks a lot like a volcanic vent. Thing is, the geologists say there's no volcanic activity anywhere near there. After Steve and the lab tracked down these invisible flights from Buenos Aires, we found others as well, from Johannesburg, Christ-church, and Melbourne. We've backtracked the manifests of those flights, and an awful lot of them had a passenger or passengers who originated in the United States but has no return flight booked. So, lady and gentlemen, I believe we have found our Chitauri stronghold. It's cold, it's isolated, and there's no telling how long they've had to prepare it or how many of them are there to hold it. We leave in twelve hours. Any questions?"

Tony, who had taken his seat, now stood again. "Just one, Nick, and I'm serious. How do we know this isn't another Micronesia?"

"Because, like I said, they're on the run," Nick said. "From what we know about their fertility rates and so forth, there can't be that many of them unless they've been cloning like crazy or they've been reinforced from off-planet." He turned his attention from Tony specifically to the group as a whole.

"Neither one of those is likely, because their tactics to this point haven't squared with the idea that they're operating from what they feel is a position of strength right now. Suicide attacks, infiltrations, attempted assassinations... these are the tools of the outmanned force. I'm guessing they're low on manpower, but maybe not low on weapons, and they were going to be content with laying low until they found out about Hank's breakthrough with the ants. So they tried to take that out... ah. Maybe now is a good time for Tony to explain to us exactly what the story is with the amplifier."

"What's to explain?" Clint asked. "We got it all before."

"All except for the part about the amplifier being fake," Thor said. Clint looked from Thor to Tony to Nick, and then back to Thor. "What?"

"Sure. Ask him. There is no amplifier. He showed it to us, then put out a distress call to get us to come save it. Only it was... what's the best way to put it, Tony? Would you call it instilling brand loyalty?"

"Oh, for Christ's sake," Tony said. "You and your hippie canards. It worked, didn't it? And aren't you the one who called down lightning in the middle of my headquarters, with my employees all over the place?

You can shove your sanctimony, too."

"Let me get this straight," Clint said. "You showed off a fake amplifier in the lab, and then built your whole presentation at the Triskelion around the same fake amplifier? And then got the whole team to show up because the Chitauri were blowing up your building to get an amplifier that didn't exist?"

"More or less," Tony said. "Except you haven't talked about the reasons."

"Screw the reasons," Clint said. "You put our lives on the line for a joke."

"Clint, aren't you about the last one in the room who should be moralizing about the value of a life?" Tony asked.

"Stay on track here, people," Nick warned.

"We are on track, Nick," Tony said. "The track is to figure out what's at stake, where the enemy is, and how to fight it. That's what I did. We've got Chitauri in the Cabinet of the United States. How do I know there aren't any in SHIELD? You can be pissed about it if you want to, but from my point of view it looks like I just sacrificed my company headquarters as a decoy to round up a whole lot of Chitauri. They put all their eggs in this basket, Nick. Now it's either go back underground or rally for some big doomsday like the bomb they had before. The one that Thor teleported off to wherever."

"Niflheim," Thor said.

Tony tipped an imaginary cap. "Thanks, big man. Niflheim. And the dragon's name was, what, Bimblog or something?"

"Nidhogg."

"Okay. So Thor teleported their last bomb to Niflheim, as a result of which Nidhogg bears a serious grudge against all of us. Unintended consequences. That's fine. But we need to consider whether they might not have something similar planned right now. They know we're coming."

"If they'd had another doomsday kind of bomb, wouldn't they have set it off after Arizona?" Janet said.

"If they were thinking like human beings, maybe, sure," Nick said. "That doesn't appear to be the case, however. Now can we get back to the briefing?"

"I'd say it's part of the briefing to know what our odds are of being suckered in and incinerated, Nick. Wouldn't you?" Janet said dryly. Everyone in the room at least cracked a smile, and Tony laughed out loud.

"Our odds of being suckered in and incinerated are unknowable," Nick said. "We know they're there this time, because we've tracked them there. That's one thing that's different from Micronesia. Also, there's no place they could have gone. We've been watching that area in Antarctica since we found those first flights, and there's been a steady trickle of people—by which I mean Chitauri—coming in, but nobody's coming out. Does that make you feel better?" Nick paused to give Janet room to answer if she was going to. When she didn't, he said, "Fine. Now maybe we can get on to the actual mechanics of our operation."

"Why," Thor said, "when all of this sniping is so entertaining?" Ignoring him, Nick said, "Estimates of the number of Chitauri in this installation vary depending on whether you think we've tracked down all of the invisible flights. If we have, there are several dozen. If we haven't, there might be a lot more. And we must assume that they have been taking care to fortify the installation and anticipate our most likely actions. Tony, your satellites did most of the thermal imaging, so why don't you tell us what this set of images means?"

On the projector screen, they saw the same heat vent, only in infrared, with the ghost of a rectangular outline visible framing it. "It looks like there's at least one level," Tony said. "The level we're looking at is a couple hundred thousand square feet, and it's definitely got warm bodies in it. Now look at the sonar imaging."

The image flipped, and the outline became more precise. "You'll see here," Tony said, indicating a sharp line of cliffs just to the west of the heat vent, "that it appears they've built a big driveway up to the surface. There aren't a ton of tracks there, but the Antarctic winds make it hard for tracks to survive more than a couple of days. Katabatic winds at the base of those cliffs are probably sixty or seventy miles per hour on average. They're at least as strong near the vent, and around the other entrance that I was able to find. See here?" Tony pointed at a crack in the ice, visible only after he had enlarged the image. "That, lady and gentlemen, is the front entrance to the Chitauri South Pole Resort and Shape-Shifting Club. Admission, I'm sure I don't have to remind you, is very selective."

"So who goes in the front and who goes in the back?" Clint said. "Let's get this figured out and do it."

"My sentiments exactly," Nick said. "We'll be using approximately six hundred next-gens, and they'll be deployed to all three apparent entrances. We're going in hard, and fast, and without much care for whether they know we're coming or not. We'd prefer not to go in at all, but"—-he glanced at Tony—"the lesson of Micronesia is that you have to go look to make sure the enemy is present. Then you can worry about whether everything is booby-trapped. So we go. We hit all three entrances. Tony, I think the only one of us who can go through the heat vent is you, so that'll be you. Heat tolerances of Chitauri vary enough that some of them can probably come out that way, so a perimeter of next-gens will be set up around the heat vent. Other next-gens will act as support and infantry for a full-on frontal assault on the other two entrances. Thor and Janet lead one, me and Clint will lead the other."

"And whenever Steve gets there," Clint said with weary sarcasm, "he'll go ahead and do whatever he wants."

"Do you want to go through this again, Clint?" Nick asked. The tension in the room, Nick thought, was enough to give even him a heart attack.

"No, Nick, I don't. But I do want to know that we can count on Steve, because if we can't, I'd just as soon he wasn't there."

That hung in the air, and Nick could feel the room taking sides. The truth was, Nick figured he could count on Steve because of Steve's shame, which was one of the most powerful motivators a man could know. The problem with that truth was that Nick could only share so much of it with the team before the disclosures tore the group dynamic into even smaller shreds than currently flapped against each other. He was about to make a decision, and even he wasn't sure what it would be, when a Triskelion warning siren went off. Quickly others joined in, including one that Nick recognized as the new alarm system built on the dock where the bombing had occurred.

"All hands on deck, people," he said, and there was a huge impact against the side of the Triskelion. Everyone in the briefing room headed for the door, and a second impact threw them off balance. "What the hell?" Janet said. "Is Bruce out again?"

Nick's phone chirped and he answered it. After a pause, he said, "Thank you. Tell him we'll be right down."

He returned the phone to his pocket and said, "Ultimates, we have a visitor. His name is Hank Pym, and I believe he's come to plead his case. We will now go downstairs and listen to what he has to say." 36

Hank had his speech all prepared before he jumped off the back of the Statue of Liberty ferry. He'd wanted to grow while underwater, but figured that the sudden expansion of his lungs without corresponding increase in the amount of air in them would create a vacuum, and the last thing in the world he needed was for his lungs to collapse while he was underwater. He'd never get Nick to listen to him that way. So he jumped, listened to the screams of his fellow passengers, and then popped his head up out of the water to shout, "I'm okay! Everything's fine! Enjoy the statue!" Then he grew, bam, to a full sixty feet. The sounds of the transformation echoed in his newly expanded inner ears, where suddenly his anvils were the size of real anvils and the grind of his bones growing sounded like a rock slide—especially underwater, where sound was transmitted so much more intensely. He'd never grown underwater before, and for a moment he could feel the water resisting him, before the force of the Pym particles overcame the water's density. His increase in width and girth caused a Shockwave that propagated outward with a receding thrum, and his tenfold increase in height momentarily stood him on a pillar of pressurized water. Shrouded in an explosion of foam, most of Hank's body burst upward above the surface, as a huge bulge in the meniscus of the Upper Bay crested and rolled away to roil the ferry's wake and slap against its stern. Then Hank sank down again, rolling over like a whale to flash his ass at the gawkers on the ferry, loving the feeling of the cold water on his skin even though he knew that he might as well be swimming through the containment lagoon at a chemical plant. That, though, was part of the point. He did it because he could. Hell, what was the point of being a Super Hero if you didn't get to do stuff like this once in a while?

One thing, Plank thought as he started swimming toward the Triskelion. He would never forget the looks on the faces of the people who had gathered around the ferry's back railing. Open mouths, wide eyes, pure slack-jawed amazement. Hank wanted everyone to look at him like that. Awe. Hank wanted awe. And he got it, at least when he boomed out of the water at the edge of the Triskelion and climbed up onto its main pier. "Hey, Nick!" he shouted, his voice strong enough to send ripples through the American flag hanging above the front door. "Come on out!" Hank banged his elbow into the wall near the front door, SHIELD security people looked at him but made no move to stop him.

"Shoot if you want," he told them with a gigantic grin. "Really. Fire when ready. I won't even hit you." They didn't, and Hank shot another elbow into the wall. One of the windows, designed to withstand explosive impact, cracked. "Hey, Nick!" he shouted again. "I've got an idea for you!" Looking back down at the door guards, Hank said, "One of you mind going to get him? He's not answering the door."

All of the guards disappeared, and Hank sat down to wait. It was a lovely sunny day, and he enjoyed the feeling of the sun on his back. When there was so much more of him, the warming effect seemed much larger. He knew it wasn't—in fact, it was probably smaller since his mass had increased so much more than his surface area—but it seemed that way, possibly because even when he was sixty feet tall, Hank's perceptual framework still was that of someone who stood six-one. The discontinuity there made for all kinds of strange sensory effects. However the effect happened, though, Hank liked it. He basked like a crocodile on the Triskelion's deck, between the VIP helipad and the ceremonial front door. Someone ought to draw me, he thought. It was almost a shame when Nick showed up, followed by Clint, Thor, Tony... and Janet.

"Hey, babe," he said.

The way she nodded at him made him feel kind of like they were on opposite sides of the fence at the O.K. Corral, but even that couldn't bring him down right then. "So, here I am," he said. "It's about time we let bygones be bygones, right? My hit rate's gone way down, which I'm guessing means that the ants have the Chitauri on the run. Am I right?"

Nick raised a hand as a couple of the others started to speak. "Two things, Hank. One, we're not going to discuss things like what the Chitauri are doing. Two, you're trespassing."

"I'll add a third," Tony said. "Isn't there some kind of SHIELD bylaw about showing up to a meeting naked? I mean really, Hank."

"Naked, shmaked," Hank said. "The Chitauri headed out, didn't they? Maybe I should say bugged out." He couldn't help but laugh at his own joke. "Where did they go? My money's on the Himalayas. Talk about remote. They could hide out up there forever, and by the time we tracked them down they might have figured out something to counter the ants. At least temporarily. I don't think there's any permanent way around the ants for them, especially if someone can cook up some way to broadcast the signals over a wider area. Tony, you're probably working on that, right?"

"Confidential, old boy," Tony said with a wink and a grin.

"Okay, sure. I get it," Hank said. "That's not what I came for, anyway. I'm not here to talk science. I'm here to squash lizards. Let's do it."

"We are doing it," Janet said. "But you aren't."

Hank stood up and stretched. God, the sun felt good. "Jan, come on," he said. "People work together after a divorce all the time. Let's be adults about this."

"People don't work together after one of them has tried to kill the other one," she said. "Get the hell out of here, Hank."

"Well, now, wait a minute," Tony said. "Weren't you the one who was saying a little while ago that if we needed Hank to fight the Chitauri, that was more important than personal issues?"

"She said that?" Hank asked. He couldn't believe it.

Janet spun on Tony and jabbed a finger in his face. "That was a private conversation, Tony. How the hell do you know about it, and where do you get off bringing it up right now?" Tony looked over at Hank. "Private conversation with Steve, is the part she didn't mention. And I bring it up right now, darling, because you said it and it's germane to the current conversation."

"No, it isn't," Nick said, in a tone that shut them all up. "Janet doesn't make those kinds of decisions around here. I do, and the decision was made a while ago. Hank, I'm going to tell you again. "You need to leave the Triskelion, and you need to leave it now. Whatever anybody said or didn't say before is irrelevant. Get gone. You did the work with the ants, and we'll tip our caps to you for that. In fact, we managed to squash a whole lot of media interest in the way you put away your former lab assistant, so we did you a little favor, too. And now it's time for you to move along." Hank folded his arms and looked down on the five of them. "Clint? Thor?" he said. 'You guys have nothing to add?"

"They have nothing to add to this discussion," Nick said. "It's not their call. It's mine, and I made it."

"There is one thing I'd like to say," Clint put in. "I've done a lot of things I'd rather not remember, but I never hit a woman. Killed a bunch, but never hit one who wasn't an enemy in a fair fight. You're a punk, Hank. I wouldn't piss on you if you were on fire, and if you don't get the hell out of here right now, Nick's going to have to reprimand me for undisciplined use of force."

"What are you going to do, poke my eyes out with paint chips?" Hank chuckled. "Sever my jugular with your wedding ring? Give me a break, Clint. If I was worried about you, I'd squeeze you until I felt you pop."

Hank had always known that he was prone to mood swings, and long before doctors had begun strafing him with terms like bipolar and manic-depressive, he had also known when the shift was about to happen. In retrospect,

it had always seemed to him that an external stimulus did it: a sound, an odor, a color. The shifts didn't seem to have much to do with his particular emotional responses to the particular actions of other people. He remembered once being moved nearly to ecstasy, from a depression as black as any he'd ever experienced, by the glint of sunlight off the surface of a car windshield—and he remembered falling into an emotional black hole because of the way Soknopsis invicta articulated its antennae. This time, it was the word pop. The way it felt in his mouth and echoed in his ears, it was like the first minute shift in a mile-wide cliff of snow. Invisibly it began an avalanche.

Janet hated him. The team scorned him. He was standing naked at the front of the Triskelion, with news helicopters probably circling overhead waiting to tell the viewers at home what a ridiculous buffoon Plank Pym had again proved himself to be.

"Piss on me if I was on fire, Clint?" Hank said. "If I pissed on you right now, bucko, you'd drown." He bent over and scooped Clint up in his left hand. "Or maybe I could squeeze you until you went pop. Pop!

How does that sound, Clint? You going to put my eyes out with both of your arms pinned? Who's a punk now, Clint?"

He had Clint held up in front of his face, close enough that sharp consonants out of Hank's mouth carried enough punch to make Clint involuntarily flinch.

"Put him down, Hank," Fury said. Janet said it almost simultaneously, their two contrasting voices making a strange chord of disapproval.

"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."

"Where's our Norse god of thunder?" Tony asked.

"No idea. He said he'd be here, and I took him at his word."

Again Steve was reminded of just how loopy everyone on this team was. "Did he say why he didn't come along with everyone else?"

General Fury rolled his eyes. "What do you think? Loki, he said. It had something to do with Loki." Seven-thirteen p.m. local time, the Antarctic winter winds coming down off Vinson Massif at a steady gale force with gusts over a hundred miles per hour, windchill close to the negative century mark. Hell of a time to be jumping off a helicarrier, Steve thought. He imagined trying to parachute in weather like this, and just had to laugh. You'd end up floating all the way to the Falklands, or landing on an iceberg somewhere in the Southern Ocean. Thank God for technological advances, specifically jetpacks. As a temporary concession to the weather, Steve was wearing a thermal oversuit; no sense freezing before he got to the ground. The mission plan was fairly straightforward. Individual jetpack deployments would coincide with aerial bombing of the heat source, with the idea that by the time the Ultimates and the supporting next-gens hit the ground, the Chitauri nest would be blown wide open. What they knew of Chitauri physiology inclined SHIELD scientists—including Janet and Bruce—to believe that the Chitauri couldn't survive in the Antarctic, and their adoption of human form would only mean that they could go as far as an average human. Which, given the ambient conditions, wasn't far at all. So SHIELD would hit hard, not give the Chitauri time to suit up for a coordinated flight, and go straight into the nest to mop them up. General Fury had ordered that as many Chitauri as possible were to be taken prisoner, but Steve was having a little trouble reconciling that order with the rules of engagement, which were simple. Anything that moved inside the Chitauri facility was to be considered hostile. The base of Vinson Massif was, until further notice, a free-fire zone.

Steve stood in a sheltered hangar bay facing Algol's stern. The jetpack and thermal suit made him feel slow; he couldn't wait to hit the ground and get them off His shield hung over his chest. There was no sign that the Chitauri knew they were coming, but there was also no way to know whether the Chitauri were playing possum.

We'll find out soon enough, Steve thought.

Next to him, Tony waited in the Iron Man suit. "You ever see The Thing?" Tony asked. "Movie about an Antarctic research station that finds an alien that can change shape. You can guess where it goes."

"Don't think so," Steve said. "When did it come out?"

"Oh. Right. After your time."

Like so much else, Steve thought. "Wait a minute," he said, at the faint spark of a memory. "I read a story when I was a teenager that was something like that. I think it was called 'Who Goes There?' Maybe the same thing."

"Maybe. You're going to freeze your ass off," Tony said.

"Already am," Steve said.

Behind them stood two platoons of next-gens. Algol held its position over the shallows of the Weddell Sea. Altair and Alshain were triangulating the Chitauri nest, stationing themselves at the northern and southern edges of Vinson Massif.

"Haven't heard from The Man in a little while," Tony said. "What's keeping him?" Shut up, Steve thought. Just shut up and do your job.

Below, the landscape lit up with missile impacts. Huge white flashes walked along the base of the mountain, almost immediately obscured by clouds of steam

"Way to keep the troops informed, Nick," Tony commented dryly. "What if I'd gone to the bathroom?" Huh, Steve thought. Wonder how he does that in the suit. Knowing him, he's figured out an instantaneous way to turn crap into energy, and he's keeping it to himself.

His cornm popped. "We are go on the jetpacks," said a SHIELD officer. "Repeat, jetpacks go." Steve lifted his right hand, made a fist, and cocked it forward. Behind him, he heard the shuffle and scrape of the next-gens getting themselves into position. Dropping his arm, Steve took three steps forward, powered the jetpack on, and stepped out into the void. For a moment he let himself fall, getting clear of Algol's wash before trying to steer through the ferocious wind. Tony, who could cut through a hurricane in his suit, thundered over Steve's head and arced away toward the ground, where a second round of missile strikes was gouging deeper into the Chitauri nest. "That's your air support, ladies and gentlemen," came General Fury's voice over the comm. "There will be no further air support until all ground forces are out of the target area."

"Understood," Steve said. He glanced up and saw that the next-gens were fanning out into their formation above and behind him. It was go time. Firing up the jetpack, he followed Tony's ion trail down into the roiling clouds of steam.

38

Status Report

Relocation to the <Antarctic> facility begun before the <Arizona> event is complete. All assets previously emplaced in other locations are either eliminated, en route, or already at this location. One lesson of <Arizona> was the undesirability of allowing a broad frontal confrontation with human forces; however, given the introduction of the <Pym-Hymenoptera> technology and its next-generation improvements by <Tony Stark> and <Stark lndustries>, the concentration of assets in a location uninhabited by <Hymenoptera> was an unavoidable tactical concession. The limited success of the

<Polynesia> decoy, immediately previous to the <Arizona> events, is a guidepost both with respect to its successes and its failures. <Polynesia> failed in its primary goal of eliminating one or more of the core

<SHIELD> operatives due to previous asset grouping's incomplete understanding of individual

<SHIELD> members' capabilities. Too, <Arizona> did not achieve useful strategic or tactical outcomes due to failure to anticipate or understand the capabilities of the <SHIELD> operative known as <Thor>. It is not known whether <Thor> will be present at any <SHIELD> action against the <Antarctic> facility. If so, all effort must be expended to direct him away from the <Rogers> gambit, outlined later in this directive. Desirable outcomes following this relocation include:

Reduction or elimination of <SHIELD> capacity to perform defensive and counter-infiltration function Retrenchment and increase of available asset strength

Maintenance of channels for future assimilations and asset placement

Development of technical and ordnance facilities unavailable in current dispersed asset grouping Under active consideration is the possibility that the primary goal of this asset grouping should be the weakening of human resistance to a future phase of the human ordering project. The

<Pym-Hymenoptera> technology, while surmountable, is a decisive tactical influence under current circumstances. In addition, the tactical situation is likely to worsen given the failure of current asset group to prevent <Stark> innovation in <Hymenoptera> control. In view of this, recalibration of goals of this asset group has led to the conclusion that survival beyond the next .002738 solar year is unlikely. Loss of <Bright> has hampered intelligence-coordination efforts, and discovery of <Garza>'s assimilation has compromised ability to manipulate actions of <SHIELD> and <Ultimates>. In addition, continuing losses due to the <Pym-Hymenoptera> technology further exacerbate the already prominent problem of asset paucity. It is unknown at this point when operational and asset reinforcements will be forthcoming. A possible use for asset <Garza>, involving planned loss, is under advisement. Involved is a psychological gambit aimed at utilizing existing mental state of <Steve Rogers>, which is deemed unstable following <Rogers>'s discovery of his exploitation in intelligence and logistical work of this asset grouping. Resources and planning for this gambit are operational at this time. Future iterations of the human ordering project would be well advised to take into consideration the peculiar circumstances involved in the interaction between human tribalism—and its more fully developed descendant, the nation-state and media-driven cultural grouping—and <Homo sapiens> seemingly genetically coded impetus toward individual achievement and individual action. <Kleiser> and the previous iteration of this project failed to fully anticipate the effect this dynamic would have on human resistance. The current asset groups attempted a more comprehensive approach incorporating previous learning in this area, but increased understanding yielded small gains in light of the broader goal of the success of the human ordering project.

Alert

Attack underway. All assets defend. Primary objective to repel attack. Secondary objective to degrade or eliminate <SHIELD> resources for purposes of assisting future iterations of human ordering project. Special emphasis on removal of <Steve Rogers> from active opposition to human ordering project. All assets mobilize to execute gambit referred to in previous paragraphs of this directive. 39

On a shelf of stone two thousand feet above the storm of missile impacts, Thor closed his eyes and felt the wash of steam and heat. Now this is my kind of fight, Thor thought. Give me fire and ice, stone and smoke, air that burns coldly in the lungs, sweat that vanishes into steam. He raised both hands and threw his head back as lightning forked and crackled in the skies above the mountain. Then he said to the stones and the sky, "Loki. If you are here, I will find you. If I find you, it will not go well for you, brother." He sensed Loki's presence the way a dog senses a threat just at the edge of the firelight. From the sky fell the embers of SHIELD troops in formation, led by the blue streak of Tony's Iron Man armor. Gods know the approach of endings, thought Thor. And an ending approaches. He leapt from the stone, and fell into steam. Icebergs calved into the Weddell Sea at the impact of his feet on the ice. Before him, a chasm yawned in the ice, and continued down into the stone roots of Vinson Massif. Meltwater from the missile strikes ran in streams down into the depths of the exposed Chitauri complex. So very much like an anthill kicked open by a careless boy, Thor thought. The first wave of next-gens arrowed down into the ruins, and was met by a fusillade of defensive fire. In the vanguard came Steve Rogers, and Thor also saw Clint firing arrows from a rocky outcrop exposed by the melting ice. Janet would not be far away. Tony, though...

"So there you are," Tony said.

Thor glanced to his right and saw Tony hovering a foot off the ground. "Here I am," Thor said.

"Nick was starting to wonder if you'd show up. Enjoying the view, or were you planning to join in?"

"Loki is down there," Thor said, returning his gaze to the battle below. "Do not question my courage."

"Perish the thought," Tony said, and chuckled.

Thor took a deep breath, letting the smells of the land and the battle flood through him. As he exhaled, he said, "Here amid icebergs rule I the nations."

"Oh God," Tony groaned. "Are we quoting eddas today?" Thor shot him a grin. "No, that's Longfellow. He was a big fan of mine. Gotcha." And then he raised Mjolnir and leapt down again, blood singing with the battle to come. From the bridge of Altair, Nick watched Thor join the battle. If there's one thing I hate, he thought, it's not being able to make a decision. And I just cannot decide whether Thor is the real thing or not. All of the jabbering about Loki makes me think he's a nutcase, but then he brings the lightning and teleports bombs to other dimensions. He just doesn't fit in any framework I can put together. One possibility, Nick had to admit, was that he needed a new framework, but he was not about to admit the existence of Norse gods. If you let the Norse gods in, next thing you knew you had Kali and Ogun and Quetzalcoatl and Jesus H. Christ Himself wearing costumes and fighting bad guys. No man could stay sane for long if he took that scenario seriously.

Whatever Thor was, he sure could kick ass. That was what Nick needed right then, and that was all he was going to think about until this operation was over and they could all take a breath. Simultaneous to this takedown of the nest, SHIELD had operatives all over the world cleaning assimilated Chitauri out of airports and other facilities used to grease the skids for the mass exodus to Antarctica. This time they were going to get them all, and if they didn't get them all today, they were going to stay on the case and hunt them down one by one for as long as it took. They had the ants, they had Tony's screener tech, and they had plain old human doggedness and ingenuity. Survival was one thing humans did as well as any other vertebrate on the planet.

Below him, the exposed warrens of the Chitauri nest were still mostly obscured by steam and smoke. Flashes of light appeared from within the clouds, mostly the little flickers of small-arms fire but sometimes much larger bursts that could have been either some kind of heavy ordnance or collateral explosions from the initial bombardment. There was no way to tell. Nick itched to be down there finding out, but he had to coordinate the bug-zapping operations elsewhere. Dammit. There were times when command was no bowl of peaches. Ah, to be a sergeant again.

At least he could follow on the comm to get the radio-play version of what was happening on the ground. Once Thor had taken the jump, Tony had boosted himself away from the edge of the blown-open next; now his force beams picked out targets in the fog, flaring to life and disappearing just as fast. The effect was almost like watching lightning... which put Nick in mind of Thor again. Would Thor be able to just bring the heavens down and melt the whole Chitauri nest? Maybe he could. Nick wasn't at all sure if he would, though—especially if he was asked to. Nick's take on Thor was that the putative god of thunder was a lot more likely to come through for the team if nobody made him feel obligated. He was one of those guys—or gods—who wanted to be allowed to come to the right conclusion for himself

Unlike Steve Rogers, who was a little too sure about his own goals and motives. That was going to be a problem if it kept up; Nick hoped that Steve would be chastened by his gullibility with Garza. Actually, no. Right then, Nick hoped that Steve would be so focused and angry that he couldn't think about anything else but taking that anger out on the Chitauri. Reflection was for another time.

"Sweet Jesus, look at the size of this."

Clint's voice over the coram got Nick's attention. "Clint," he said. "A little more detail in the report, if you don't mind."

"I'm four, maybe five levels down," came the reply. "A lot of it's collapsed, and a lot of what's farther down is flooded, but there are plenty of targets, and I just found a whole new wing of the complex that goes out into the interior of the ice shelf I don't know, Nick. Could be they have a way out into the water. Anybody reported any submarines stolen lately?"

Just what I need, Nick thought. "Hold there, Clint," he said. "I'll be right back." He switched channels and pinged the pilot on Alshain's bridge. "General Fury here. I need coverage of the open water at the edges of the Weddell Sea, where the ice shelf peters out. It's possible the Chitauri could get out that way."

"Understood," the pilot said. "We're on our way. You're picking up our next-gens?"

"I will, or Algol will," Nick said. "Go."

He watched until Alshain had made the turn and headed northwest for open water, then flipped channels again. "Clint. Can you move forward and find out for sure whether there's a way out under there?"

"Will do."

"Is anyone with you?"

"Flying solo," Clint said.

"You feeling all right? Help is on the way."

"Took some aspirin," Clint said. "And if I need help, I don't think it's going to get here in time. But thanks for thinking of me."

"Right. Team," Nick said. "Report locations."

"At the perimeter of the blast opening," Janet said. "If I knock them down out here, they die in the cold pretty quickly. It's an ugly thing, watching a Chitauri decohere and freeze at the same time." Steve was next. "I'm dead center, on the floor of the deepest level the missiles opened up. Could be I'm on the same level with Clint. Not sure with the fog, though."

"I think you are, too, Steve," Tony said. "Nick, you can see me, right?"

"I sure can," Nick said, meaning it in two ways. He did in fact have visual contact with Tony, but each of their comms also had a homing beacon built in. So, as each of them checked in, he was also correlating their reports with a three-dimensional display in front of him on the bridge. So far it all seemed to match up, and looking at the display gave him an unsettling idea of exactly how big the Chitauri nest was. He wondered how long they'd been working on it. "Can anyone see Thor?"

"He's clearing out part of the area over under the mountain, I think," Janet said. "Was the last I saw him, anyway. And singing, my God. He's singing old Viking songs or something."

"Okay. Keep in touch with each other, and do what you can to keep the next-gens working in squads to support you."

"General," Steve said. "I'm closest to Clint, I think. Should I head toward him?"

"Good idea, Cap. Clint, hold steady until Steve gets there."

"Just like Tony's basement," Clint said. "Except maybe I get in on the real fight this time? Can I, Nick?

Please, please, can I?"

"Shut up," Nick said. "We need to make a concerted push to keep the Chitauri from getting out under the ice, if they in fact can do that. Team, if Steve or Clint reports that there are Chitauri escaping that way, your new primary objective is to stop that. Let the next-gens and the weather and us helicarriers take care of Chitauri coming up. You concentrate on taking care of them when and if they head down." Steve came back on, breathing heavily. "Oh, they're heading down, all right. Lots of them. I think a memo went around. Janet? Tony? How's it look up top?"

"Still plenty to do," Janet said. "I think we're keeping a lid on it, though. Some of the next-gens are up on the rocks picking off the ones we miss. This would be a job for Clint, really. Where did Thor go?" It occurred to Nick that the cold would be dangerous for a Wasp-sized Janet Pym. "Are you staying warm, Janet?"

"Sure am," she chirped. "Every so often I dip down for a steam bath. They can't see me at all down there. I only stay up in the cold for a minute or so at a time."

"Okay," Nick said. "Get out of there. Steve, Janet is coming your way. Wait for her, and then the two of you meet Clint."

"Yes, sir," Steve said, as Janet said, "You got it, chief"

"Boys and girls," Clint said then. "We've got a serious Jules Verne setup back here. I think Steve and Jan ought to step on it, and if anyone else can get here, send them, too." 40

"On my way, Clint," Steve barked into the comm. He spun through a barrage of machine-gun fire from behind a rockfall and had almost closed on the shooter when the actinic blast of Tony's force beams shattered the rocks into gravel. In the swirl of steam, it was next to impossible to identify targets until they were on top of you or you were on top of them. The Chitauri apparently were solving this problem by shooting at anything that moved, unconcerned about taking out their own forces. The tactic made them seem to Steve to be suicidally resigned, which made Clint's surprise discovery a little hard to figure out. Unless, Steve thought as he caught a Chitauri lining up one of the next-gens and broke its neck with a sweep of his shield, the ones left out here are just fighting some kind of holding action. He was sweating, more from the humidity than the heat since frigid air was pouring down into the cratered ruin of the Chitauri redoubt. "Jan, where are you?" he called out.

"Be right there," she said, and a few seconds later she was, three inches tall and gorgeous. On the coram General Fury was trying to wring details out of Clint, but Clint wasn't talking, which Steve took to be a bad sign. He wasn't especially worried that the Chitauri had taken Clint out, but if there were enough of them around that Clint didn't think he could kill them single-handedly, then the airstrikes hadn't done their job. It just went to prove the old military adage that you can't win a war without boots on the ground.

"Tony," Steve said. "Are you still seeing lots of bogeys from up there?"

"Not too many," Tony said. "The next-gens have them pretty well corralled, and they're organizing search-and-destroy teams to go into the parts of the nest that haven't collapsed. Man, you should see what it looks like from up here now that some of the steam is clearing out." Steve looked around. "From where I sit, it still looks like fog and broken rocks." And dead Chitauri slowly decohering in the fog... and dead next-gens, too. As he looked, the steam lifted from one side of the crater, and Steve had his first real glimpse of both the size of the Chitauri installation and the damage SHIELD had done to it. He was looking nearly straight up a sixty-foot cross-section of the nest, with at least five distinct levels. Lights sparked and flared from the darkness within, and water cascaded down, catching the light. Some of it was already freezing again, walling off parts of each ripped-open floor in gleaming, sinuous sheets of ice. How long had they been at this? There was no way they could have built such a huge hideaway in the... what, two weeks since they'd learned about Hank's work with the ants?

"They must have been working on this since Arizona," Tony said. "Listen, shouldn't you be finding Clint?"

"Yep," Steve said, and glanced at the display of his watch, which gave him a directional bearing on Clint's signal. And, he added to himself, I need to be finding Garza. As they headed deeper into the complex, entering the part untouched by SHIELD missiles, Janet touched him on the shoulder. He cocked an eyebrow at her and she said, "Listen."

He did, and heard it, echoing through the maze of passageways by some strange trick of acoustics: Thor, still singing as he tore a path through the Chitauri looking for Loki.

"Cap," General Fury said in the comm. "You and Janet en route?"

"Yes, sir," Steve said. "We just heard Thor, too, but nobody's seen him since we got here."

"I don't have a read on Thor, and I don't care about him right now," General Fury said. "You get to Clint and take care of what you find down there. Alshain is stationed out at the edge of the Weddell Sea, and if the Chitauri get out that way, we'll know about it. We've got subs on the way, too, but they're not going to get here soon. Long story short, you're on your own down there. I need to keep the next-gens back for containment topside. Find Thor if you can, but don't put too much time into it. Just go."

"Orders for me, O Potentate?" Tony asked.

"Stay put. If and when you run out of targets, we'll talk then."

"Oh, well," Tony sighed. "You two have fun down there. I'll just try to enjoy the target practice."

"General?" Steve said. "It looks like we're heading down under the ice. If we go off comm... ?"

"If you're off comm, you will recon the situation and Janet will report back to comm range to keep me informed. Do what you have to do in the meantime. Now go," General Fury said. "Everything's under control up here."

They went, and pinged Clint every so often, but there was no answer. Clint's location stayed steady—

about two miles to the northwest and two hundred yards down—and Steve started to get worried. It wasn't like Clint to stay still for so long unless he was waiting for a shot, and the situation down there didn't sound like it could be taken care of with one shot.

Don't overthink this, Steve told himself You have a mission. Execute it.

Except the mission didn't include tracking down Garza, and that was the one thing that still had Steve itching to go freelance. If they got down there and solved whatever problem they found, and Garza wasn't there...

Cross that bridge when we come to it, Steve thought. For now, just down.

They were in a sloping hallway, built at the level of the ground, which was mud and ice pressurized into water that ran out into the hall, froze, then melted again at the head from some unseen source. The bottoms of glaciers, Steve remembered, were a kind of soup; the immense weight of the ice above compressed less dense ice into more dense water, and that lubricated the glacier's movement. Then, almost before they'd noticed it, they were walking solely on ice. Steve stopped, and played a flashlight back the way they'd come. Sure enough. For the last hundred yards or so, they'd been out of the slush-and-ground-bedrock mixture.

"We're over water now," Janet said.

"We sure are," Steve agreed. He aimed the flashlight ahead. "And still going down." They had to move much more carefully now, or at least Steve did. Janet flew near him, sometimes flitting up ahead to reconnoiter. The slope was gentle enough that the soles of Steve's boots, and the softness of the surface ice due to whatever was heating the tunnel, kept him from slipping. He couldn't move too quickly, though, and ten minutes in it was all he could do to keep from cursing a blue streak. He looked at his watch, and saw that he still had a bead on Clint, which meant that the comm equipment was still working at this depth. "General," he said quietly. "We're in a tunnel through the ice. Coming up on Clint, but I'm not sure how much longer we're going to have a signal."

"We show you a hundred meters below the ice surface," General Fury replied. Steve thought he sounded farther away, or tinnier, or something. Maybe the comm wasn't working so well, and the locators had a stronger signal. "Looks like Clint's about another hundred down," the general continued. "We pulled maps of the ice shelf, and near as we can tell he's close to the bottom of the ice layer. Right where he is, there's about fifty meters of water under the ice."

In other words, plenty of room for a submarine, if the Chitauri were planning on getting out that way. Behind that knowledge hung the memory of Polynesia, and of Arizona, where the Chitauri had left little presents for pursuing forces. If they'd had the resources to put another little present together, Steve and Jan and Clint would know about it soon enough. Steve didn't say anything about it. He figured they were all riding the same train of thought.

Jan had gone ahead to scout again. This time when she came back, she landed on Steve's shoulder.

"There's another tunnel up ahead that runs into this one from the left," she said. "I could hear Thor singing again."

Steve nodded, and they approached the junction carefully. When they were even with the other tunnel, Steve paused and listened. Hearing nothing, he looked at Jan.

She shrugged. "I heard it," she said softly. "I'm going to go look."

"Jan," he said, but she was already gone. Steve stood fuming, wondering what he should do. Clint was down below, obviously in trouble. Thor would be able to help, but what if he wasn't really there? What if the sound of his voice had carried from somewhere else in the ice? Mission priority was Clint and whatever he had found. Thor was secondary.

And Steve was starting to get the feeling that Garza was down there.

That made the decision for him. "Jan," he said softly into the comm. "I'm going ahead. You catch up." She didn't answer. That was almost enough to make him head up the side tunnel looking for her, but mission discipline reasserted itself. Maybe the comm was out. Either way, he had a job to do. Down the main tunnel he went.

From above the Mare Chitauri, as Tony had taken to calling it when nobody else was listening, things were pretty quiet. Oh, sure, there was still the occasional structural collapse, and lots of steam and smoke and water flowing and dripping here and there, but the main action was over. He was standing sentry over a graveyard. "Nick," he said into the comm. "There's nothing happening here. I'm starting to feel left out."

"Hold your position," Nick said.

"Come on. "You're not still holding a grudge because of that screener gag, are you?"

"Please," Nick said.

"Nick, I'm serious. I haven't squashed a lizard in fifteen minutes. This is getting—oh. Never mind, there's one." Tony sighted in on a Chitauri coming out of a hole in the northern end of the Mare Chitauri, and let go the force beams. The Chitauri was crushed against the far wall as if it had been hit by a meteor. Hmm, Tony thought. Was that the same hole that Steve and Janet went into? "Say, Nick," he said, and then the entire wall of ice, broken stone, and eviscerated structure exploded. The blast wave was powerful enough to rock Tony's gyros even this far away; he could only imagine what would be happening down under the ice shelf. "Nick, did you see that? Jesus!" he shouted. "They blew the tunnel Steve and Jan went into! Steve! Jan! Clint! Can you hear me?"

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."

"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.

Gail fed the goats the rest of the feed they'd bought from the vending machines near the entrance to the bird enclosure, which was closed for some reason. "Steve," she said. "We've both had way too much time to think about what might have been different, and all of that time to think hasn't done either of us a lick of good. You were wrong? Fine. You were wrong. Let it be the lesson it is, but don't let it change the things about you that made Nick Fury want you out there in the first place. If there's one thing I can't stand, it's a wishy-washy man. Now take me back to the hospital."

And he did, walking her back up Fifth Avenue in the deepening twilight and thinking that maybe she was right. You couldn't be wishy-washy. If you were wrong, you were wrong, and you admitted it to the people who mattered. But when the bugle sounded and you were out there in the field defending America against all enemies foreign and domestic, what you had to go on was your gut. Acknowledgments

Thanks first of all to Millar and Hitch for giving me such a rich field to work with. Also to Jen Heddle for thinking of me, and to the ever-anonymous copyeditor for some excellent catches. And thanks to P and t and L, for superhero conversation and for being the people I can count on. About the Author

Alex Irvine is the author of the novels The Narrows; The Life of Riley; Batman: Inferno; One King, One Soldier; and A Scattering of Jades. His short fiction, published in Salon, Vestal Review, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Trampoline, and elsewhere, is collected in Unintended Consequences and Pictures from an Expedition. He has also written comic books and online narratives. He has won the Locus, Crawford, and International Horror Guild awards for his fiction, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the World Fantasy Award. His fiction has been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, Czech, Polish, Hebrew, Russian, and Chinese. In 2005, he was awarded the New England Press Association's top prize for investigativejournalism, and that same year was part of a writing team that won a Webby and the International Game Developers Association Innovation Award. He is an assistant professor of English at the University of Maine.

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