by Greg Cox
“I concur,” the Vision intoned. “According to my computations, there is a 98.76 percent probability that this incident is related to Wanda’s disappearance.”
The trio of Avengers had taken a position upon the Robert Moss Parkway, overlooking the American Falls. Their Avengers Quinjet, designed by Tony Stark, was parked at Niagara Falls airport, a few miles away. A brigade of U.S. soldiers, led by their commanding officer, Colonel Arturo Lopez, shared the parkway with the newly-arrived heroes. The colonel himself looked more than a little relieved that Captain America had shown up to take charge of the crisis.
“Confound it,” he shouted into a handheld walkie-talkie, close enough for Cap and the other Avengers to hear. “Somebody get those news choppers out of there. Threaten to revoke their FCC licenses if you have to, but clear that airspace!”
Shaking his head angrily, he handed Cap a pair of field binoculars that Cap used to scope out the situation. The Hulk’s bestial visage came sharply into focus, looking more savage than ever. At least two of the X-Men were down on the ground, looking like they’d experienced the Hulk’s infamously bad temper firsthand. Cyclops recovered first, and hurried to check on Storm, who appeared somewhat worse off, perhaps in a state of shock. He was quickly joined by the Beast, who dropped from the treetops onto the rocky soil. Cap wished he could hear whatever the Hulk and the X-Men might be saying to each other. That way he might feel a little less in the dark.
“I don’t know,” he said cautiously, lowering the binoculars. His unbreakable shield was strapped to his back, just as ready as Iron Man and the Vision, who stood nearby, awaiting his instructions. As immobile as a statue, the synthezoid kept his unblinking eyes fixed on the Hulk while Iron Man listened to Cap confer with the colonel. “Let’s not rush into anything before we get our facts straight.” It was practically a tradition for costumed heroes to bump heads whenever their paths crossed, with the X-Men and the Avengers being no exception, but Cap saw no reason to let this stand-off devolve into an out-and-out free-for-all if there was any way to prevent it. He handed the binoculars back to Lopez. “Tell your soldiers not to fire except in self-defense.”
“I understand,” the colonel said. His lean, prematurely furrowed face was grave. “I have my orders, though. Not only has General Ross ordered me by telephone to engage the Hulk, but the X-Men are also wanted for an attack upon a high-security government installation. I cannot allow them to escape without making some effort to take them into custody.”
“Perhaps I can persuade them to turn themselves in for questioning,” Cap suggested. Despite the Sentinel connection, and the X-Men’s surprising appearance alongside the Hulk, he was not convinced of the mutants’ guilt where the assault on S.H.I.E.L.D. was concerned. There was something fishy about everything that had happened since the Scarlet Witch was abducted from the museum.
Maybe if we all work together, he thought, we can get to the bottom of this. If nothing else, he knew he could count on the Beast to cooperate—if that really was Hank McCoy on the island.
“I can hold off for a while longer,” Lopez admitted. He peered through his binoculars at the drama unfolding at the once-wooded tip of the isle, where the Hulk still faced off against Cyclops and his team. “I’m in no hurry to throw my troops up against those freaks and their powers.” He shook his head, scowling. “Give me a good natural disaster or bomb scare any day.”
“Thank you. Colonel,” Cap said sincerely. With luck, the Canadian troops across the river would show the same restraint. He turned to Iron Man and saw his own face reflected in the sheen of the golden Avenger’s helmet. “Iron Man, can you amplify my voice so that the Hulk can hear me over there? I want to try to reason with him.”
“Are we thinking of the same Hulk?” Iron Man said dubiously. Cap knew what he meant; the Hulk was hardly the most reasonable of individuals.
“Worth a try,” Captain America said. Before resorting to force, he always made sure that all peaceful avenues had been explored; that was the American way.
“We are losing valuable time,” the Vision announced brusquely. The soles of his canary-yellow boots began to lift off the pavement as he made his artificial body lighter than air and assumed a more aerodynamic posture, arms stretched out in front of him as though he was merely diving upward into the sky. His cape rustled softly in the wind as he wafted away from the parkway, toward the Falls. “I will confront the Hulk,” he stated.
“Stand down. Vision,” Cap ordered firmly before the synthezoid could put too much distance between them. The Vision’s impatience and impulsiveness surprised Cap; it wasn’t like him to jump the gun like this. Maybe he’s more worried about Wanda than he lets on, he surmised. The Vision paused in midair, his saffron cloak billowing around him, then reluctantly returned to the side of his fellow Avengers, but not without a lingering glance over his shoulder at the Hulk’s island refuge. His waxen expression never changed.
“Here, Cap.” Iron Man removed a capsule-shaped component from the neckpiece of his armor. His voice suddenly acquired a more human, less amplified tone. “Just speak into this.”
The miniature mike fit easily into Cap’s palm. Raising the mechanism to his lips, he addressed the distant green giant. “Hulk, this is Captain America. I know we’ve had our differences in the past, but there’s no need to make things any worse. From one Avenger to another, I promise you that we just want to talk to you and the X-Men. Give me a chance to straighten things out.”
Hoping for the best, he lowered the mike and waited expectantly. “You really think you can get through to him?” Iron Man asked skeptically. “I doubt that old Avengers ties carry much weight where the Hulk is concerned.”
Confirming Iron Man’s worst expectations, the Hulk responded by digging his hands into the soil of Goat Island and tearing out a large, gray boulder the size of a washing machine. Raising the colossal rock above his head, he hurled the boulder at the shore, sending it soaring over the entire width of the American Falls, nearly clipping the propellers of one of the buzzing TV choppers.
“Watch out!” Captain America warned Lopez and his soldiers. “Incoming!”
The rock came whistling at them, descending in an arc from the sky above. Snatching his shield off his back, Cap raised it above him and braced himself for the impact. Iron Man had another idea. Bright orange repulsor beams issued from his metal gauntlets, twin streams of accelerated neutrons pulverizing the boulder only instants before it crashed down upon Cap and the others. Bits of stony debris rained down on Cap instead, deflected by his upraised shield.
So much for peaceful negotiations, Iron Man thought. The Hulk was clearly in no mood to talk.
The unprovoked attack was the spark that set off a wildfire of retaliation, and drove the intrusive helicopters away from the Falls. Artillery fired on both sides of the river, all targeted at the berserk, green-skinned monster on the island. The unleashed firepower was deafening; romantic Niagara, the honeymoon capital of the U.S.A., suddenly sounded like Omaha Beach on D-Day. The smell of gunpowder filled the air, along with the rat-ta-tat-tat of machine guns. Neither the Canadian nor the Americans, it was obvious, intended to give the Hulk a chance to launch another projectile assault. Cap couldn’t much blame them.
Unfortunately, their efforts generated more sound and fury than results. Missiles and automatic weapons fire exploded all around the Hulk, raising clouds of dust and smoke, but leaving him entirely unscathed. Rockets detonated against his chest, and the indestructible behemoth merely bared his teeth and shook his fists at the armed forces doing their best to destroy him. He broke off another chunk of island and catapulted it into the air, this time at the Canadian forces assembled on the other side of the Horseshoe Falls. With no Iron Man to defend them, the flying boulder smashed into the armored chassis of a tank, smashing the gun turret to a pulp while nearby soldiers ran for cover.
Hopefully, nobody in the tank got hurt, Cap thought. But it was only a matter of time before someone was seriously injur
ed or worse.
The X-Men were also under siege from both armies. Cyclops’s ocular energy beams swept in a wide swath, shielding his comrades from the deadly fusillade while the Beast helped the stricken Storm limp toward the partial safety of the beckoning woods. Was he trying to defend the Hulk as well? Captain America couldn’t tell. The crimson beams, similar in effect to Iron Man’s repulsor rays, blocked whatever firepower came their way.
Almost. As the Beast pulled away from his visored leader, one hairy blue arm supporting Storm, an errant shell detonated less than a yard away from him. The Beast took the brunt of the blast, sparing Storm, but the shock wave slammed the one-time Avenger into the base of an old maple so hard that the tree crashed down on top of him, pinning the agile mutant to the ground.
Watching from the shore, Cap was distressed to see the Beast lying immobile beneath the downed tree. Was he just unconscious or…?
“Blast it!” Captain America exclaimed, his words lost in the din of the battle. “This is just what I didn’t want!”
* * *
THE Vision gave Captain America a questioning look. The Captain nodded solemnly, and, without a word, the Vision launched silently off the parkway once more, leaving Captain America and Iron Man to defend the American troops as best they could. The artificial Avenger flew over the Falls, rockets and live ammunition passing harmlessly through his intangible body.
A curious urgency compelled him. The prospect of engaging the Hulk in combat seemed vastly preferable to continued inaction, especially while the Scarlet Witch remained unaccounted for. It was only logical, of course, to desire the safe return of a valued team member, but was that the only source of such uncharacteristic haste? A rigorous self-diagnostic could not ignore the potentially significant factor that the Avenger at risk in this instance was, as a matter of biographical record, his former wife.
Wanda. His emotional responses were not what they once were, having suffered significant degradation over the course of various episodes of major repair and reconstruction, but he could not rule out the possibility that some residual subroutines, left over from an earlier generation of himself, might still linger in his software, lending additional impetus to his current priorities. Wanda is in danger. Wanda.
An intriguing hypothesis, but now was the not the time for further introspection. The Hulk loomed before him, glaring at the Vision’s spectral form with unconcealed antagonism as the synthezoid descended from the sky by minutely increasing his mass. The Vision’s plastic face was as impassive in appearance as the Hulk’s was fierce.
“Do not attempt to resist, Hulk,” he warned. “Willingly or not, you will answer our questions.”
“Questions?” the Hulk echoed. For a moment, he looked more puzzled than aggrieved, as though unable to imagine what manner of questions the Avenger might have for him, then his customary belligerence returned. A contemptuous sneer further marred the aesthetic of his primordial features. “What do I look like, an information booth?”
It was difficult to comprehend the Hulk’s words over the cacophonous tumult of the military armaments deployed against him, so the Vision adjusted the sensitivity of his auditory receptors, filtering out a statistically significant portion of the explosive background noise. His boots touched down lightly upon the soil of Goat Island, directly in front of the Hulk. The green-skinned goliath towered over the slender synthezoid by more than a head, but the Vision was undaunted; as long as he remained intangible, the Hulk’s physical strength, however formidable, could not touch him.
The Vision glanced quickly to the left, ascertaining the current status of the X-Men. Captain America would want to interrogate the mutant adventurers as well, he knew, but they did not appear to be in danger of escaping in the immediate future; Cyclops remained fully occupied by the task of fending off the barrage from the two armies while the Beast and Storm had not yet recovered from previous injuries. I will deal with them shortly, he resolved, giving the Hulk his full attention.
“I require data, Hulk, which either you or Dr. Banner may be able to provide. What do you know of the Gamma Sentinels and/or the abduction of Wanda Maximoff, also known as the Scarlet Witch?”
“Don’t talk to me about Banner!” the Hulk snarled, saliva spraying from his prognathous jaws. He tried to bat the Vision away with the back of his hand, but the slap passed through the synthezoid as if he wasn’t there. The Hulk glared at his own splayed fingers with open annoyance.
“I am waiting for your answers,” the Vision said with implacable calm. His arms were crossed below the yellow diamond symbol on his chest. His boots left no impression in the ground below. “Will you surrender them voluntarily, or will I be forced to resort to physical coercion?” The amber gem embedded in his crimson forehead started to glow forbiddingly.
“Don’t pull your spooky act on me, robot!” the Hulk growled. He walked straight through the Vision, effectively leaving them back-to-back instead of face-to-face. “Get real enough to fight, or leave me alone.” He strode arrogantly across the tiny spit of land, not giving the Vision so much as a single backwards glance.
But the artificial Avenger declined to be dismissed. Turning his head, he tapped into the solar energy absorbed by the amber jewel and redirected it out through the projective lenses in his eyes. Red-hot thermoscopic beams streaked toward the Hulk, intersecting at the base of his neck. For a nanosecond, the chartreuse flesh turned red and raw, before the Hulk’s legendary invulnerability asserted itself, restoring the damaged skin to a healthy green hue. With the sun now shining brightly overhead, however, the Vision kept up the bombardment of concentrated photons, his gaze literally burning into the back of the Hulk’s neck.
It was enough to make the Hulk slap a Brobdingnagian paw over the afflicted area.
“What the—!” he exclaimed, than yanked his huge mitt away in a hurry as the Vision’s thermoscopic vision seared the back of his hand, which healed almost instantly. “Cute,” he said sourly, giving the Vision a dirty look, “but you’re goin’ to have to do better than that.”
Before the Vision could reply, a new voice called out, significantly complicating the situation.
“Hulk!” Cyclops shouted. He rose from the Beast’s side, where he had knelt only seconds before.
From Cyclops’s behavior, the Vision deduced that the X-Men’s leader had not discovered the Beast’s injuries to be life-threatening. This is well, he concluded. The Beast has been a valued comrade in the past, albeit with an unnecessarily active sense of humor. The Vision further noted that a shaky Storm stood once more upon her own feet, although with obvious effort.
“It’s not too late to make a clean getaway,” Cyclops urged, daring the fusillade to approach the Hulk at a run. “Our aircraft is nearby. Come with me. Now.”
Fascinating, the Vision observed, extinguishing his heat beams. His initial analysis of the situation had suggested that the Hulk and the X-Men were pitted against each other as adversaries, but perhaps that assessment needed to be revised. Cyclops now appeared to be siding with the Hulk, despite their earlier confrontation. Regardless, the Vision decided, he could not permit either party to depart before their role in Wanda’s abduction could be determined.
Wanda.
Without warning or conscious volition, a picture-perfect recollection of his wedding to Wanda, conducted years ago in the garden of a Vietnamese temple by none other than Immortus, the enigmatic Master of Time, surfaced in his mind, momentarily disorienting him with its vivid clarity and unexpected emotional resonance. For approximately .791 seconds, he could almost smell the overpowering fragrance of the tropical blossoms, sense once more the joyful camaraderie of their assembled friends and allies.
Happy, he recalled with a twinge of regret, the bittersweet jolt of remembered emotion threatening to disrupt the ordered procession of his computations. We had both been so happy…
Cyclops’s forcebeam swept harmlessly through the Vision, leaving the synthezoid untouched but successfully deflect
ing another hail of bullets and missiles. Ricocheting rockets detonated at a safe distance from the determined X-Man, who tugged on the Hulk’s mighty bicep. “Hurry,” he exhorted the immovable green goliath. “Let us help you get away from this chaos.”
The Hulk was no more interested in Cyclops’s assistance than he was in the Vision’s questions. “Bah!” he grunted loudly. “This island is getting too crowded.”
Shrugging off Cyclops’s grip as easily as he might a flea, the Hulk squatted upon bended legs, then leapt into the air, his tremendous strength propelling him over thirty feet above the Vision and Cyclops, who had to tilt back their respective heads to follow his ascent as he rose like a rocket into the clouds. His departure left gallon-sized footprints in the ravaged soil.
“Wait!” Cyclops yelled after him. His blazing eyebeams chased the Hulk, who quickly outdistanced them. “I need to talk to you!”
No less than I, the Vision thought, resolving that the Hulk would not elude him so easily. It seemed he could still smell the flowers in the garden of a temple many thousands of miles, and a lifetime, away…
* * *
FROM the shore, Captain America took in every detail of the Vision’s confrontation with both the Hulk and Cyclops. If nothing else, the Vision had distracted the Hulk from his attacks on the various military personnel, freeing him and Iron Man from the challenge of defending Colonel Lopez’s troops from soaring boulders and the like. He tapped on Iron Man’s crimson shoulderplate, attracting the armored Avenger’s attention. Holding the miniature microphone before his lips, to ensure that Tony could hear him over all the racket produced by the artillery and the Falls, Cap pointed toward the tiny island where the Vision had established a beachhead of sorts.