The Ultimates: Against All Enemies (27 page)

"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?"