Marvel Classic Novels--X-Men and the Avengers

by Greg Cox

  * * *

  THE Leader awoke in time to see the Super-Skrull transfixed in the glow of the transformation process. That musclebound fool! he cursed the alien, realizing instantly that all their schemes were being undone. How in creation had K’lrt managed to let their adversaries maneuver him into such a vulnerable position?

  It was all those blasted mutants’ fault, he recalled, climbing slowly to his feet. He tottered unsteadily as a dizzy moment made the chamber seem to spin around him. First Wolverine, then Rogue; both X-Men had turned on him, setting in motion a catastrophic chain reaction that had apparently led to the overthrow of the so-called Ultimate Skrull. Bitter resentment drove the last vestiges of grogginess from his mind. After all my painstaking preparations and planning … what a waste!

  His infallible brain assessed the situation faster than the most advanced super-computer, informing him to a statistical certainty that the day was lost. Nearly a dozen pig-headed super heroes were running rampant through his dangerously fragile moonbase, whose existence had no doubt been exposed to S.H.I.E.L.D., the Fantastic Four, and lord knows whom else. Worst of all, his blundering partner was almost surely being stripped of the near-omnipotence that the Leader had labored so hard to bestow upon him. It’s enough to drive a lesser mind insane, he brooded darkly. Once again his visionary undertakings had been trampled beneath the thoughtless heels of inferior beings, an historical atrocity on the same order as the burning of the Great Library of Alexandria or Galileo’s infamous inquisition. He shook his capacious head sadly. Would the light of his genius ever prevail over the unthinking violence of the Hulk and his costumed kin?

  Still, he had learned two valuable lessons from this maddening exercise in futility: 1) Never marry your ambitions to another’s agenda, even if your potential ally comes from a more advanced civilization beyond the stars, and 2) never underestimate the notorious X-Men. He’d already known how destructive to his plans the Hulk and the Avengers could be; now Charles Xavier’s infamous band of mutant renegades had earned a place of distinction upon the long list of the Leader’s arch-foes. Next time he would be sure to include the X-Men’s annihilation in his plans, along with the demise of the Hulk and those other super-powered vandals. “And there will be a next time,” he whispered venomously. “Of that, there can be no question.”

  “LEADER!”

  The booming epithet came from the Hulk, who had finally noted his old enemy’s recovery. Letting go of the glowing Super-Skrull, and turning his meter-wide back on the transformation platform, the Hulk stomped toward the Leader, undiluted malice in his emerald eyes. “You’re not getting away this time, Sterns!” he bellowed. Years of nonstop antagonism stoked the fury in his reverberating voice. “It’s payback time!”

  “I fear we’ll have to settle our accounts later, my misbegotten nemesis, but I’ll leave you something to remember me by.” The Leader calmly pressed a button on his wristband, and a series of explosions, coming from the very foundations of the secluded moonbase, rocked the chamber. Excellent, he thought; once initiated, the base’s self-destruct sequence could not be aborted by any save himself. A sardonic smile upon his face, he tapped new instructions into his wrist controls. “Adieu, Hulk, though I suspect we’ll meet again.”

  “NO! NOT AGAIN!” The Hulk lunged at his perennial foe, but the calculating genius, ever prepared for any eventuality, departed in a flash of viridescent light a heartbeat before the Hulk’s huge arms closed around him.

  Only the Leader knew where he had disappeared to.

  * * *

  ON the platform, another luminous green halo faded, taking with it the Ultimate Skrull’s precious new powers. Aghast and infuriated by this noxious turn of events, K’lrt attempted desperately to summon a storm, fire force beams from his eyes, transform his flames to ice, cast a hex … anything! But his utter failure at any of these feats only confirmed what he already knew and lamented. His augmented abilities were gone.

  He was merely a Super-Skrull once again.

  “Meddling animals!” he accused his persecutors. An invisible force shield freed him from Iron Man’s tractor beam. He spitefully kicked the last remaining chunks of ice away from his legs. “How dare you rob me of what was rightfully mine? By the Lost Treasures of Tamax IV, I vow eternal vengeance upon you all!”

  “Big talk,” Iron Man said, his smug human visage blessedly concealed behind his primitive battlesuit. “From where I’m standing, Skrull, you’re in no position to talk.”

  “You tell him, Iron Man!” Iceman blurted. The callow X-Man sprouted icy spikes along his shoulders and upper arms. He flaunted a frozen club clenched in his crystalline fist. How appropriately aboriginal, K’lrt thought in scorn.

  “Our armored associate speaks for us all,” the Beast asserted, looking only slightly more bestial than his irksome fellow primates. Hairy blue knuckles brushed the floor as he moved with a revoltingly simian gait to join Iceman and the others. “Those who trade in forcible abductions and shameless super-power poaching can hardly claim to be the wronged party in this particular contretemps.”

  All this barking, mammalian chatter offended K’lrt’s highly-sensitive ears. To perdition with his lost invincibility, he was ready to fight on. Even with nothing more than the powers of the Fantastic Four and his proud Skrull heart, these impudent humans would learn that the Super-Skrull was no cowardly Kree to be cowed by their laughable prowess and authority. “Do your worst, humans,” he challenged. “The Super-Skrull fears you not!”

  His flaming fists thickened dramatically, the unstable molecules of his black gloves allowing his hands to mimic those of Benjamin Grimm. A roiling fireball sparked within his grip, but before he could hurl it at the insolent Beast, the buried chamber quaked violently. The powerful tremors nearly toppled K’lrt from the pedestal, and he swung his arms wildly to retain his balance. At first he thought an unexpected moonquake had struck, then he recalled that Earth’s lifeless satellite was geologically dead as well. More explosions sounded overhead, from the upper levels of the lunar base, and the Skrull realized what was transpiring. “Computer!” he shouted loudly to the voice-activated machinery in the habitat’s walls. “Terminate self-destruct sequence!”

  “Negative,” a robotic voice reported from the loudspeakers in the ceiling, even as fiery blue sparks gushed from the elevated command bulb to fall like suicidal fireflies on the heads of the Skrull and his adversaries. The Leader’s sophisticated apparatus immolated itself in a spectacular eruption of electric pyrotechnics, leading K’lrt to hope that Rogue had been consumed in the conflagration as well. “Abort command denied due to supreme executive override.”

  Supreme? K’lrt knew of only one sentient being who possessed the sheer effrontery to place himself above the Skrull in the computer’s hierarchy of command. “Leader!” he roared, searching the shaking rotunda for his faithless partner. “You craven worm, what treachery is this?”

  His irate gaze fell upon the Leader only an instant before that base and perfidious villain teleported himself to safety, leaving the lumbering Hulk empty-handed. The depths of K’lrt’s contempt for his departed ally plummeted to absolute zero; he knew desertion when he saw it. Someday, Leader, he swore a solemn oath, you will rue your dishonorable retreat!

  To complete his unhappiness, he saw Rogue soar free of the imploding command bulb, unscathed by the fiery holocaust devouring the Leader’s equipment. “Shoot!” she exclaimed, zipping over the Super-Skrull’s head. “Who started the fireworks?”

  The shuddering moonbase began to tear itself apart. Jutting blocks of steel and concrete thrust up through the convex floor, creating irregular crevices and jagged monoliths across the base of the rotunda. K’lrt abandoned the unsteady pedestal, using his torchfire to lift him above the convulsing floor. Those Terrans who could fly—Iron Man, Storm, and the Vision—joined Rogue in the air, while the other humans scrambled as best they could to cope with the chaos beneath their feet. Iceman tried to rise above the explosion-wracked
floor on a rising pillar of ice, but another turbulent perturbation shattered the foundations of his frozen column, sending him falling toward a gaping chasm from which volcanic gouts of flame emerged. “Yikes!” he yelped as he plunged toward what K’lrt hoped would be a scalding death.

  Iron Man dived to rescue Iceman, but the arctic X-Man demonstrated that he required no assistance; taking advantage of the weakened gravity to slow his fall, he extruded an ice-slide ahead of him that carried the endangered mutant safely over the perilous fissure. “Watch out below!” he whooped as he slid to a soft landing in a surviving snowdrift. A second later, his translucent head rose from the piled snow and looked around at the crumbling chamber, taking in the incendiary paroxysms laying waste to the moonbase. “Correct me if I’m wrong, gang,” he called out to his teammates, “but I think it may be time to get out of here!”

  Cracks opened up in the ceiling and a solid steel beam crashed downward, dropping between K’lrt and Storm as they flew toward each other. The beam nearly hit Cyclops, but Captain America threw himself at the X-Men’s dour co-leader, carrying them both out of the path of the falling girder. “Thanks for the save, Captain!” Cyclops said after catching his breath. The heavy beam slammed into the floor only a few feet away, raising a cloud of pulverized cement and tile. “That could have flattened me!”

  “My pleasure, X-Man,” the Avenger answered. He brushed clinging snow and powdered concrete from his garish costume. “Good soldiers watch out for each other—even on the moon!”

  K’lrt found the humans’ self-congratulatory banter nauseating. He sought to break up their mutual admiration session with a stream of searing fire, but a surprising gust of wind blew the flaming spray away from his targets, so that the bright orange flames merely scorched the fallen girder instead. “Dorrek’s Ghost!” the foiled Skrull swore. Having only recently wielded the very same control over the currents of the air, K’lrt had no difficulty naming the source of the untimely wind. “Storm!”

  “Well, Skrull?” she said, swooping between K’lrt and her gravity-bound cohorts. Elemental energy suffused her eyes, making them shine with an electric luminosity. “Your secret hiding place is destroying itself before your eyes. Will you save yourself from the mounting cataclysm—or waste your life in fruitless conflict?”

  As much as he loathed admitting it, there was wisdom in what the mutant female said. K’lrt could not deny that their battlefield was rapidly becoming a tomb; despite his intense craving for vengeance, he knew that only a dolt or a martyr waged war atop a sinking ship—and the Super-Skrull was neither.

  “The choice is yours, Skrull,” Storm stated with galling strength and composure. Her snow-white tresses billowed from the wind raising her up through the air. “Shall we battle to our shared destruction—or live to fight another day?”

  “Curse you, witch!” he snarled at her, unable to refute the relentless logic of her argument. The clangor of crashing walls somewhere above them only added to the maddening inevitability of his decision. Gnashing his sharpened canines, K’lrt shook a blazing fist at Storm and her abhorrent fellows. “Beware the future, Terran filth!” he proclaimed defiantly. “Humanity will yet learn to dread the wrath of the Super-Skrull!”

  “Ah, go ahead and scram already!” Wolverine shouted back at him, impertinent to the last.

  Another day, mutant, K’lrt vowed, then rose like a solar flare through the roof of the devastated chamber, leaving a trail of hellfire in his wake.

  * * *

  LOOKING uncannily like Johnny Storm at his most torrid, the Super-Skrull fled at great speed, the extreme heat of his bombastic exit melting through the decaying ceiling and creating a vertical escape route from the doomed rotunda. And none too soon, Ororo thought, grateful that the malevolent alien warrior had not insisted on a battle unto death. With both their foes having chosen retreat over further confrontation, the X-Men and their noble allies could concentrate on the more vital task of escaping the disastrous demise of the Leader’s lunar habitat. “Iron Man!” she called to the armored hero she had come to trust completely over the course of their joint crusade. “This chamber will not long endure. I suggest we take advantage of the exit provided by the Super-Skrull.”

  “Sounds good to me,” the Avenger agreed, jetting closer to Storm, who saw her own countenance reflected in his polished faceplate. Iron Man pointed upward at the hole in the ceiling. “I’ve got a fix on the quinjet’s homing beacon. It’s two levels up and about forty-three degrees to the northwest.”

  “Then lead the way, my friend,” Storm told him. “I shall ensure that none of our comrades are left behind.” Gliding down over the agitated floor of the rotunda, where Cyclops and the others scrambled to avoid thrusting mounds of concrete rubble, she got everyone’s attention by means of an emphatic thunderclap. “Listen to me!” she cried out, certain that all eyes were upon her. “Iron Man has discerned the shortest route back to our spacecraft. All who are able, follow after him as swiftly as possible. I will summon a wind mighty enough to carry the rest of you to safety.”

  Bright Lady, she prayed, let us all depart this place in haste. It was all too evident from the fitful trembling of the chamber’s walls that the Leader’s once-sturdy sanctuary was no longer a safe haven from the deadly vacuum outside. I fear that every moment lost may cost us dearly.

  The newly-melted exit was at least thirty meters above the floor, but that posed no difficulty for the Vision, who wafted weightlessly upward, and Rogue, whose tremendous strength enabled her to carry the Beast and Cyclops as well. Likewise, the brawny legs of the resolutely self-reliant Hulk propelled him up and out of sight within seconds. That left only Iceman, Captain America, and the Scarlet Witch stranded upon the unstable floor of the rotunda. “Can your winds support the four of us?” Captain America asked, clearly concerned for Storm’s own safety.

  “With so little gravity to contend with, easily,” she assured him. Unwilling to expend another valuable moment in discussion, Storm proved her point by harnessing the imperiled atmosphere to lift both she and her passengers higher and higher above the floor until they passed through the circular opening the Super-Skrull had left behind. “Careful,” she warned, “the edges of the aperture may still be hot.”

  “No problem, ’Roro,” Iceman said, his ebullient voice tinkling like crystal chimes. A layer of frost formed over the molten edges of the hole. “I’ve got that covered!”

  “Good teamwork,” Captain America commented approvingly. “The X-Men work well together.” Storm knew that was high praise coming from the chairman of the Avengers.

  “Yes,” the Scarlet Witch added. Her accent bore a disturbing similarity to Magneto’s, but Storm resolved not to hold that against her. “Over the last day or so, I’ve been impressed by Rogue and Wolverine’s resources and performance under pressure.”

  “Thank you,” Storm replied, accepting the praise on behalf of her teammates. Following Iron Man’s directions, she carried her complement of heroes two levels beyond the collapsing rotunda. To her dismay, she saw evidence of similar demolition elsewhere in the moonbase; all through the multi-level complex, flames and explosions undermined the structural integrity of the entire outpost. But Storm refused to give in to despair, choosing to hope for the best. “If nothing else, this terrible ordeal may ultimately strengthen the bonds between our two teams.”

  “It already has,” Wanda Maximoff insisted, and Storm wondered at the conviction in the woman’s voice.

  Reaching the appropriate level, they found both the Beast and Cyclops waiting for them. “See?” the shaggy X-Man informed his fellow alumni of Professor Xavier’s academy. “I told you they’d be along shortly. In the immortal words of FDR, we have nothing to fear but fear itself.”

  “That and explosive decompression,” Cyclops said grimly, giving voice to Storm’s own direst apprehension. “Wolverine and the others are clearing the way to the quinjet. Let’s not keep them waiting.”

  Once her fellow travelers’ bo
ots were securely lowered onto the floor of the upper level, Storm set free the obedient wind and hurried after Scott and Hank. Captain America, Iceman and the Scarlet Witch kept pace with her as they ran for their lives. How much longer, she worried, would the base’s life-support mechanisms survive the cascade of destruction the Leader set in motion?

  As they had discovered earlier, upon their initial exploration of the moonbase, this level was laid out in a series of concentric circles, with no obvious portals between each ring. I suppose you don’t require doors, she surmised, when teleportation requires only the press of a button. The ring they now traversed clearly held the Leader’s personal quarters; unlike the sterile, futuristic decor that predominated in the other sections they had visited, this donut-shaped region was comfortably, even cozily, appointed with lush orange carpeting, walnut bookshelves, and elegant sofas and chairs. Subdued lighting provided a meditative ambience completely belied by the seismic jolts shaking the very walls of the sumptuously-furnished domicile. Leatherbound volumes, whose titles and contents Storm had no time to observe, toppled from their shelves, landing on the carpet with a muffled clatter. The Leader lived well, she thought. A pity he could not leave the rest of us to also enjoy the comforts of home.

  “Let’s go, people!” Cyclops urged them on. Storm saw that Iron Man had marked the trail by leaving behind a string of luminescent white pellets, no doubt released from a hidden cache in his laudably well-equipped armor. To further ensure that they did not lose their way in the tumult and confusion, Iron Man had also laser-burned an arrow on the ceiling. “This way!” Cyclops shouted redundantly. “Hurry!”

  The Beast bounded over to Storm’s side. “Is it just me,” he asked glibly, trotting down the corridor as he spoke, “or is this headlong dash also providing you with a truly remarkable sense of déjà vu?”

  Storm knew just what he meant. Only days ago, at the very outset of the present crisis, the three of them—Cyclops, Beast, and herself— had run through a holographic Danger Room simulation that bore an uncomfortable resemblance to their current circumstances. In that exercise, the trio of X-Men had rushed madly through an imploding Shi’ar space station, striving desperately to reach a waiting space shuttle before the artificial environment gave way to the killing void of outer space. The striking, if coincidental, parallels with the real-life race against time now in progress only added to her anxiety, especially when she recalled that all three X-Men had ultimately “died” in that earlier exercise, when the collapse of the station’s wall had sucked their entire party into the chill of space. Her memories of those final frightening seconds, right before the holographic routine ended, were all too vivid. Blackness all around me, and a freezing cold…!