The Ultimates: Against All Enemies (7 page)

The view dissolves into static.

From the outside camera: Sergeant Cullen and four of the contractors hired to move freight around inside the Triskelion are annihilated in a stop-motion bloom of fire threaded with black smoke. The camera washes out. When its light meters stabilize, the dock area is in ruins. Small fires burn on the boat, one slowly catching on the clothing of an unconscious or dead crew member. The hole blown in the side of the Triskelion has cross-sectioned three floors. Papers from upstairs offices flutter out over the Upper Bay, wafted by the scorching updraft from the fire burning in the intake warehouse. A woman lies dead near her desk, one of her arms dangling over the edge of the exposed floor. Major Christina Akinbiye. Steve had poured her a cup of coffee three weeks before in the Triskelion cafeteria. After that he couldn't look at it anymore. When he'd gotten downstairs, response teams were already reporting nonhuman remains.

Some of which he was still cleaning up. Steve gritted his teeth and let slip a curse that Gail would have slapped his face for.

Since nobody knewwhat the hell would happen if a seagull happened to fly by and pick up a snack of Chitauri tissue, every cell needed to be collected and accounted for. They were still, almost a year later, doing final cleanup on the Arizona site. Getting the Triskelion shipshape wouldn't be nearly as big a job, which wasn't much consolation since it sure wasn't the kind of job for which Steve was suited. But he was here and General Fury wasn't, and Banner was still locked up downstairs until they put him in front of a firing squad. So instead of hunting down the aliens, Steve was picking up pieces of them. It wasn't his job. He was wasted here.

"It's like a Willie and Joe cartoon," he said to the tech closest to him. The tech looked up from bagging a bloody piece of acoustic tile. "A what?"

"Never mind," Steve said. He should have known better. Might as well have made a joke about a political cartoon from the Civil War.

Resentment was so thick in the back ot his throat that he could practically spit it out. God, he hated them. Hated them worse than he'd ever hated the Nazis or the Japs. He would have killed them all himself, shot them in the back as they fled. If God Himself came down and gave Steve Rogers the gift of prophecy, and he knew that the Chitauri would leave tomorrow and never come back, he would still have killed them as they filed onto their ships.
And they could have done some thing about it
. From the circling cluster of choppers, one detached itself and came down to land on the sea-level helipad. The blast of prop wash blew away some of the smoke that still hung over the dock. When General Fury got out, Steve looked to the skies, searching for some resolve that would help him stop himself from saying something he shouldn't... and there was Tony Stark, showing off in his suit, blasting back and forth long after it might have done any good.

Steve knew at that moment that he couldn't hide from it any more. Admiral Garza had been right. Fury strode through the wreckage to Steve. "Tell me," he said.

"Chitauri in human form. Suicide bombers," Steve said. He bent over and picked up a stringy gobbet of flesh, now sparkling with scales. Holding it up for General Fury's inspection, he snapped, "They lose their cohesion when they're dead. Only when they're dead."

"Hold on there, soldier," General Fury said. "Aim that anger where it counts." Steve dropped the bit of flesh into a collection bag, sealed it, and put the bag in a plastic tote not unlike the one that had carried the detonator. Then he stood up, looked General Fury in the eye, and said,

"With all due respect, sir, that's the problem here. It might have counted."

"I don't follow you," General Fury said.

Pointing up into the sky, Steve said, "If Tony's tech had been installed, they would have been tagged. I could have done something." Whatever resolve he'd been looking for failed Steve, and he kept talking.

"But instead Washington wanted to be careful. Well, this is what careful gets you when you're fighting an enemy who isn't afraid to die. We've got sixteen in the morgue, and who knows how many others burned. People died, Nick. Excuse me. General."

Fury didn't answer right away. Eventually, after Steve had bagged and tagged two more pieces of Chitauri tissue, he said, "You're relieved. We can find someone else to do that."

"I'm not doing anything else," Steve said.

"I am relieving you of this duty, soldier," General Fury said, and let it hang. Not hurrying, Steve bagged one more piece of tissue and then stood. "Yes, sir," he said.

"That's more like it," Fury said.

He was about to say something else when Tony came in for a landing on the ruined dock. "Perimeter's clear out to a mile," Tony said. "Can someone give me a hand with the helmet here?"

"I'll do it," Steve said. He worked the helmet's seals and clamps loose and lifted the faceplate away, releasing a flood of greenish gel.

"Hell of an upgrade," Tony said. "Although I guess we can talk about that later." Steve leaned in close to him. "One thing," he said quietly, not wanting Fury to hear. "Your screener would have stopped this." .

Caught up short, Tony looked at him, a puzzled expression on his face. He wiped some of the gel away from his eyes. "You're not blaming me for this?"

"Not a bit," Steve said, still keeping his voice down. "I don't blame you. But I wanted you to face what happened here because I might need your help."

"My help?"

But Steve had already turned away. "General," he said. "I was here. I'll take media point on this. What we have is two Chitauri suicide bombers. I don't have to tell you that this is a new tactic for them, and it tells us quite a bit about where they think they are strength-wise."

"Well, that's not going to help the reporters," General Fury said.

"No?"

"No. Because we're not going to tell them that," General Fury said. "People do not need to hear that alien suicide bombers got into the Triskelion. They are more than willing to laugh at what incompetent idiots we are, accidentally blowing ourselves up, but they'll forget all about that the next time we save their asses. They will not forget the idea of infiltration, and that is what needs to be managed here."

"Managed," Steve said disbelievingly. "You're worried about how to manage this."

"Would you rather see our funding gutted because we come across as a bunch of amateurs? Would you rather go back to working out of whatever space the Army can spare at Fort Drum? Remember what we talked about the other night, Cap."

Steve looked around and spread his hands. "Isn't this part of what we talked about the other night?"

"What did you two talk about the other night?" Tony wanted to know.

"Nothing," Steve and General Fury said in unison.

A silence fell, broken by the thud of circling helicopters and the scrape and shuffle of the tissue-recovery detail. "Fine," Steve said. "Okay. My offer to take media point stands. You let me know how we're going to handle it."

"Well," Tony said. "That's a little disappointing from our straight arrow." Steve spun and jabbed a finger in Tony's direction. "You get that one free," he said quietly. "But don't ever say anything like that again. Is that clear?"

He could tell Tony was trying not to smile, but right then Steve didn't care. Tony Stark could have his bravado. That, and money, was all he had.

"Clear,
mon capitaine
," Tony said.

"French," Steve said with disgust. "On top of it, he speaks French." He stripped off his gloves and threw them on the dock. "General. Permission to stand down until a briefing whenever you decide to schedule it."

"Okay," General Fury said. "Where are you headed?"

"I have a date. If Washington can screw around while we get infiltrated by aliens... " Steve let the thought trail off. "You always know where to find me."

"A date," Tony said as Steve walked away. "He's learning." And later that night, after steaks at Peter Luger's— which made Janet laugh about how old-fashioned he was, but somehow she was the only one of the team who could make that joke without it making him angry or maudlin—Steve took a piece of paper out of his pocket. He was walking down Broadway in Brooklyn, under the elevated BMT tracks. No, not the BMT anymore, now everyone just called it the JMZ line. There was no more BMT, no more IRT, everything was just the MTA. Janet was on a cab back over the Williamsburg Bridge. He found a pay phone on Havemeyer and made a call. On the way back to his apartment, he dropped the paper down a storm drain.

11

Nick had maybe five minutes' notice that Tony Stark was about to appear in his office and was, in the words of the desk sergeant, "loaded for bear." Fury put away a report he'd been about to sign off on and started to straighten his desk, a pre-meeting reflex he had ingrained in himself when he'd made the transition from commando to command. It was useful in that it cleared the mind as well as the desk. Two minutes after he'd been served notice of Stark's approach, there was a knock at the door. "Come on in," Fury said, and in walked not Tony but Steve Rogers.

"Don't tell me," Fury said.

Rogers looked like hell, at least for him. Physically he wasn't any different, but there was a look in his eye that Fury didn't like at all. He remembered thinking, the day before yesterday after Tony had said
He's
learning
, that he didn't want Captain America to learn. He wanted Captain America to act when he was told to act.

Now it looked like Steve had both learned and acted, and hadn't done either one the way he was supposed to. "What else was I supposed to do?" Steve asked.

"I said don't tell me," Fury said, "and I meant it."

The one thing Fury had left on his desktop was a copy of the business section of that day's
New York
Times
, the front page of which featured a story about a breakthrough Chitauri screening technology. Accompanying the article was an illustration of Tony's screener, run through Photoshop just enough to avoid being identical. A single line midway through the piece noted the breakthrough had been "partially derived from a canceled defense project," which Nick read as a wink from someone in Washington who had authorized the leak. Limiting himself to people who had attended the meeting where Tony's project was discussed, Nick had done some initial handicapping of likely sources. His early favorite for the leak was Garza, although it might have been any of them. Even Alto-belli or Bright, who had made such a big deal out of the security risks. The way Washington worked, that might have been nothing but a charade to polish up their collective deniability.

Nick quashed an impulse to find out whether either Altobelli or Bright held directorships or stock in Stark Industries or in the company that had miraculously invented a tech that did exactly what Tony's would have. What bothered Nick more than identifying the source of the leak from Washington was that the leaker had used Steve Rogers to pipeline the project specs to this, who was it... SKR TechEnt. Ten minutes on Google had taught Nick that SKR was a development clearinghouse, basically four walls and a roof where control-freak venture capitalists funneled projects they wanted to keep an eye on. But Nick had been around the block long enough to figure out that more was going on there than met the eye. The whole setup screamed shell company. Who had decided an outfit like SKR could possibly be the best company for the job?

"Tony's going to be here any minute," Fury said. "Keep your mouth shut until I tell you to open it. That's an order."

Steve didn't like it, but he was a soldier. "Yes, sir, General," he said. As if on cue, Tony Stark barged in without knocking. "Nick, goddammit," he began, then caught himself up short when he saw Steve standing off to the side of Nick's desk. "Ah," he said. "This goes higher than I'd thought."

"How do you mean that?" Nick asked.

"Him," Tony said, pointing at Steve. "If you were just going to do this yourself, you wouldn't need to wave the Human Flag over there."

"Permission to speak, General," Steve said.

Fury didn't take his eyes off Tony. "Granted."

"I did it, Tony," Steve said. "General Fury didn't know."

"He—" Tony took this in for a long moment. "Well. What a coincidence. And am I to assume that when you were picking up little bits of fricasseed Chitauri, and you said to General Fury something about how
we
could have done something, it had nothing to do with today's newspaper article?"

"Saw this, did you?" Fury said. He picked up the paper. "Figured you might have. I was as surprised as you until Captain Rogers here showed up and let me in on what happened." Fury didn't look at Steve as he said this. They could get their stories straight later. Right now the important thing was keeping Tony on board, and if Tony could blame Steve for the whole thing, he might just be able to get over it and remain a member of the team. Apart from the fact that Steve
had
done it, so Nick had told the truth, mostly. Steve hadn't let him in on what happened yet, but he was damn sure going to the minute Tony left.

"I hope, at least, that some kind of insubordination or espionage charge is going to keep me from losing sleep over all the money this just cost me," Tony said. He shoved his hands in his pockets. "I wasn't that pissed about this when it was just me not making as much money as I might have. This is different. Now someone else is making money that should have been mine. And the PR, Jesus. This is killing me."

"No, the tumor's killing you," Steve said. "Also I'm hoping it's the tumor making you complain about money when we've got a new Chitauri conspiracy on our hands, because if it isn't, then you're pretty much the shallowest son of a bitch I ever laid eyes on."

Tony turned to Fury. "So my medical history is public now, Nick? This is how they tell you to build team unity?"

"What I came to say is this," Steve said. Fury held up a hand to stop him, but Steve pointedly didn't look at him. "I was going to say it to General Fury, but since you're here, Tony, I'll say it to both of you. The people need this. And I'm going to make sure they get what they need."