Marvel Novel Series 10 - The Avengers - The Man Who Stole Tomorrow

by David Michelinie

  That effort was made somewhat easier as the Messerschmitts opened fire, raking the street and building fronts with a rain of screaming lead, digging lines of jagged holes and sending scraps of multicolored plastic scattering in all directions. Captain America grabbed the Beast and pulled him into the recessed doorway of one of the ground-floor shops as the jet fighters shot by overhead, banking for a return strafing run.

  “Sheesh!” sputtered the Beast, smoothing out his ruffled fur. “Why couldn’t Kang have stuck to big lizards? At least I can outrun them!”

  “We’re sitting ducks, Beast.” Cap was peering out from under the doorway’s overhang. “And if we stay on the ground, we’re going to be nailed for sure.”

  “Terrific. So how do we get off the ground? You got a spare 747 in your hip pocket?”

  Cap turned back around, a dangerous grin on his face. “Not exactly. But I do have a plan.”

  Less than a minute later, the jets had completed their approach run and were swooping low over the street, looking for their targets. But this time the two heroes didn’t hide—they stepped out directly in front of the speeding airplanes. As the Messerschmitts angled toward them, guns spitting fire, the Beast squatted down behind Captain America and grabbed hold of his ankles. Then, with a last farewell—“Cap, you’re crazy—but ya got guts!”—he lifted and flung the Star-Spangled Avenger high into the air.

  As he flew, Captain America tilted himself forward and then pulled his knees up to his chest, rolling himself into a spinning sphere that carried him in a high curve over the approaching planes. When he reached the apex of that curve, he straightened his body, falling feet first to land in a crouch on the nose of the lead jet.

  Inside the cockpit of that jet, the pilot stared. He had never even heard of the supersoldier serum, or of Steve Rogers. He only knew that he was cruising at a speed exceeding 500 mph and that a man in a red-white-and-blue uniform was crouching on the fuselage of his aircraft.

  “Heilig düngen!” he said, and considered that a comparatively mild expression of his feelings in the matter.

  Even with his superstrength, Captain America was having trouble keeping his balance on the speeding Messerschmitt. He had to get this over with quickly, he thought, and so brought his alloy shield around in a backhanded arc, ripping out the glass front of the cockpit canopy. He then reached in with his right hand, grabbed the pilot by the lapels of his flight jacket, and pulled him out through the opening, snapping safety straps and communications cables like bits of string.

  For a frozen instant, Captain America held the terrified pilot before him, trying to quell ancient angers. The flyer was a Nazi; moreover, he had just tried to kill him and the Beast. But he was also a man. And so Cap pulled the pilot’s rip cord before tossing him, screaming, over the side and squirming into the cockpit himself.

  The whole incident took only seconds, and so the speeding 262 had not yet deviated from its flight pattern. Captain America sat behind the controls, confidently. There wasn’t a plane, Allied or Axis, that he couldn’t fly as easily as riding a bicycle. He jammed the throttle forward to maximum thrust, pulling away from the two jets that followed, hoping that they hadn’t been close enough to see him “requisition” their leader’s craft. Apparently they hadn’t, for as he banked sharply to the right, bringing his plane swiftly around onto a direct collision course with the others, his radio came alive.

  “Heinz! Was ist verkehrt?” the auxiliary console speaker crackled.

  “Why, nothing’s wrong, Fritz . . .” Cap answered, flipping up the safety guard over the button on his control stick, “ . . . now!” He thumbed the button, and the four 30mm cannons in the nose of his Messerschmitt chattered to life. In front of him, he saw tracers sketch a line to one of the oncoming planes, and then turn that plane into an exploding ball of shrapnel and flame. As he flew by, watching the fiery fuselage fall to the street below, he hoped that it wouldn’t strike a populated area. Too many casualties in any war were anything but warriors.

  Executing a smooth, lateral curve as he rounded Kang’s plaza, Cap pointed his 262 back toward the aerial battleground, looking for the remaining enemy jet. Unfortunately, it found him, as cannonfire cut through the side of his plane, splitting fuel lines and just missing his neck and legs. The Hun was on his tail!

  Shoving the control stick forward, Captain America sent his jet into a steep dive. As he’d hoped, the pursuing bogie followed. Then, when he was sure that the Nazi was closing for the kill, he yanked back on the stick, shooting up and over in a screaming backward loop that threatened to tear the wings off his plane. But when he leveled off, the enemy 262 was in his sights. He thumbed the trigger, his bird raked the Nazi jet with lead talons, and another ball of fire fell spiraling to earth.

  Cap sat back, allowing himself a small smile of satisfaction. The old skills die hard, he thought. Unfortunately, the engines of his Messerschmitt chose that moment to putter and die instead. Startled, the Avenger looked at his fuel gauge. The needle sat dead still on empty. As he struggled to keep his four-ton neo-glider in the air, Cap thought ironically that the Nazi pilot’s skills weren’t all that bad, either. And then he had another, even less pleasant thought: he had no parachute!

  On the ground, the Beast saw what was happening, and felt about as useful as a fourth leg on a tripod. But he had to do something! He looked around, desperate, and then realized that the shop in whose doorway he had been standing was apparently a showroom for fortieth-century recreational vehicles. Maronie’s Skidders and Flitters, the sign on the door said, Everything for the Flying Hominid. Through the window he could see several dozen vehicles, ranging from hover-bikes like Mauler’s to what appeared to be multi-engined family vacation houses.

  He tried the doorknob; it didn’t turn. He tried smashing his foot against the door; it opened.

  Inside, a thin man with a mustache toop stood behind the counter, waving a frightened hand. “We’re closed! Kang’s doing it again! Go away!”

  “Hi,” the Beast said, taking a seat on what looked disquietingly similar to a golf cart with an outboard jet on the back and rotary blades where its wheels should be. The vehicle had a steering wheel and pushbutton controls for up/down, forward/backward, and speed. The Beast pressed “up,” “forward,” and “fast” simultaneously.

  “ ’Bye,” he said as he went crashing out of the shop’s display window.

  Once outside, the Beast found that his chosen rotary steed was more gainly than it appeared to be, handling not totally unlike the Avengers’ jet hoppers he’d flown many times back in the twentieth century. And so he was able to quickly, if not with incredible grace, maneuver the flitter to a position slightly below the crippled Messerschmitt. Looking up and saluting, he called out, “Hey, soldier, need a lift?”

  In the wind-battered cockpit of the jet, Captain America smiled with relief. Then, thinking to possibly turn defeat into renewed offense, he motioned for the Beast to follow and angled the stubborn control stick down and to the right. When the pointed nose of the ’Schmitt was aimed directly at the front edifice of Kang’s towering citadel, he locked the ailerons, jettisoned the canopy, and jumped from the cockpit. Holding his shield over his head with both hands, he was able to control his speed and angle well enough so that he landed on the back of the Beast’s flying golf cart with less than bone-breaking impact.

  The Beast was about to make a “welcome aboard” statement when the flitter was rocked by an explosion. When he had steadied the vehicle, both he and Captain America watched as the crumpled, blackened remains of the last Me 262 skidded down the face of Kang’s obelisk and into the waiting chasm of the cosmic moat. The obelisk itself was unscratched.

  “Blast!” said Captain America.

  “Damn!” said Kang, switching off a second monitor. “Good help is so hard to find these days. Or any other days, apparently . . .”

  “There they be, as we were told! Purify the witch first! Then we’ll cleanse her silver-haired familiar!”


  The blurring in the air had occurred half a block away on a connecting side street, and so had completely escaped the attention of the softly stepping Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch. They had seen neither the blurring nor the dozen or so strangely costumed men who had walked from it. Hadn’t seen, that is, until they had rounded a corner and found those selfsame men blocking the path between them and the rear of Kang’s citadel.

  The men wore black long coats with wide collars and cuffs, black pants, and black ankle boots with large gold buckles. Around their waists were equipment belts from which dangled various weapons and tools, and on their heads they wore black-plastic helmets with visors. Some of them carried riflelike devices with nozzle-tipped barrels. In short, they looked like a perverted hybrid of Plymouth Rock Pilgrims and the New York Highway Patrol.

  “Stay thee still, Satanspawn!” their leader continued. “Neither thy beguiling form nor thy undoubted wiles shall forestall thy expurgation!”

  Wanda Frank was leery, and a little confused. “Now wait a minute,” she said. “We don’t want any trouble. We have nothing against you. We didn’t even—”

  “—expect us?” the leader sneered. “Of course you didn’t, foolish woman. No one expects Saint Alphonso’s Conscience Police!”

  “Conscience Police!” Wanda said, more to herself than Pietro. “But those were the fanatical agents of the Purists that the Vision told us about.”

  “Yes, that’s right,” Pietro remembered. “The ones who hunted . . .”

  Brother and sister thought the same thought, turned to look at one another, and spoke that thought: “Witches!”

  Instinctively, Wanda cast a protective hex sphere around herself, and just in time. The lead fanatic and several of his followers raised their rifle weapons and liquid fire shot from the nozzles in thin, strong streams. Quickly, the Scarlet Witch cast a second protective shield to guard Pietro, but she needn’t have bothered. Quicksilver wasn’t at his best when running backward, but he had nevertheless managed to be seventeen blocks to the rear when the first drop of shooting flame landed on the spot where he had been standing a second before.

  Turning her full attention to the attackers, the witch was pleased to see that the napalmlike ammunition they were using was splattering wildly when it struck the hex sphere, some of it even splashing back at the Conscience Police, scattering them over the intersection. (She was also pleased to see that the streets and buildings were unaffected by the flames—plastics technology, it seemed, had come quite a ways in the last two thousand years.)

  Hoping to end the confrontation quickly, she brought her hands up, gestured, and cast a hex to make the internal workings of her assailants’ weapons fuse together. Without weapons, she postulated, they would be no more harmful that the soapbox revisionists in Times Square. But the Conscience Police kept shooting.

  The Scarlet Witch was puzzled; perhaps the weapons had no moving parts? Clearing her head and changing her stance within the hex sphere, she drew on her mutant abilities, alerting the probabilities of the street beneath the fanatics’ feet, thinking to trap them in the same way as she had the runaway crane in Bantu Junction. This time the spell worked and the plastic pavement liquified—only the religion police didn’t sink.

  The Scarlet Witch’s hopes did, however, when she realized what must be happening. With the aid of modern science, these future witch hunters must have created electronic deflector devices, sort of like occult body armor, to protect themselves from hexes and spells, both natural and synthetic. They couldn’t get to her, but she couldn’t get to them, either. Stalemate.

  Meanwhile, Quicksilver circled around and approached the overzealous peace officers from behind. He wasn’t running at top speed because the fanatics’ backs were to him and he was counting heavily on the element of surprise. Unfortunately, it was he who got the surprise as a third eye popped open in the back of one of the CPs’ heads and a voice called out, “Jedediah! Behind us! Use the high beam!”

  Regrettably, Quicksilver wasn’t aware that at one point in its history, mankind had perfected the science of genetic manipulation. He didn’t know that people had been bred with special characteristics and additions to carry out specific functions. He didn’t even know that all of the CPs, including the one who, with a third hand, raised a wicked-looking ray pistol from beneath the back of his long coat and shot him, were just such creations. And after the ray blast struck, he didn’t know much of anything.

  It was as if someone had crammed a half bushel of downers directly into his brain. Buildings wept, the sky melted, and the street tilted in every direction but the one in which he wanted to go. He stumbled, staggering sideways, seeing everything as if in slow motion. He saw that he was lurching toward one of the bonfirelike masses of errant napalm, tried to regain his balance, couldn’t—and then he found that he did know something, after all. He knew that he was going to die.

  That belief was confirmed when he saw the ghost stepping through the fire. The ghost grabbed him by the wrist and pulled him sideways—at least it seemed like sideways—so that he fell unburned to the pavement nearby. That was an odd action for a spirit, he thought. Perhaps this was a friendly ghost? He thought of the name “Casper,” and giggled.

  The Vision, now solidified, knelt down beside the lolling Quicksilver. His scanners had already analyzed the cause of the speedster’s incoherence and so he placed one finger at a point on Pietro’s neck, another at the base of his spine, and applied measured pressure for precisely seven seconds. When he removed his fingers, Quicksilver was once more lucid—and amazed.

  “You . . . you saved my life!” he stammered. “But why? After all that’s been said? After all I—”

  The Vision rose to his feet, speaking calmly. “Wanda loves you very much. If you were to die, she would be hurt deeply. And despite your refusal to understand, my most fervent desire is to keep Wanda from pain. In that respect, Pietro, you and I—man and machine—are the same.”

  As if satisfied that the matter was closed, the Vision sank down transparently into the pavement, and in seconds was gone. Quicksilver stood, thinking for a moment, and then the crackle of flames reminded him that danger still existed, both for himself and for his sister.

  It didn’t exist for long. Sprinting at top speed, so fast that he couldn’t be seen no matter how many eyes an observer had, Quicksilver whirled through the battle-torn intersection, slamming his rock-hard fists into a dozen unprotected jaws. The last of the Conscience Police was unconscious before the first had struck the ground.

  Quicksilver stood panting, as if he had released more than anger in that brief second of violence. He looked to where he had left his sister, and saw that the hex sphere had been dissolved, that Wanda and the Vision stood close, hands touching, speaking silent reassurances with their eyes. He wanted to feel resentment, indignation, disgust—but all he felt was hollow.

  In his vast, air-cooled control room, Kang smashed a force-field fist into a third monitor screen, and glowered.

  Iron Man had been hearing the sounds of fighting for some time, and so wasn’t terribly surprised when his peripheral sensors indicated that he was being paced on either side and from above and below. The pacers had appeared instantly, and so he could only assume that Kang’s time grabber had sent them—and that his and Cap’s ploy had failed.

  He glanced to one side, and immediately christened the pacing craft “Skorpions.” They weren’t extremely large, no bigger than Russian M-21 fighters, but they looked mean as hell. They were constructed of something that resembled bright-red, segmented metal. They were roughly rocket shaped and they were apparently powered by glowing, globe-shaped pods that were attached to stubby wings on either side. The cockpit area was a semi-translucent bubble on the underside of the fuselage, and though Iron Man couldn’t tell exactly what the pilots looked like, he did detect the movement of what appeared to be tentacles (and guessed that these were participants from some alien invasion in Earth’s recent past).


  But what really set the craft off was its tail assembly. Sprouting from where a tail fin would be on a conventional airplane was a long, tapering section of metal that curved back over the craft’s body like a scorpion’s tail. And, like its arachnid counterpart, that tail was tipped with an extremely lethal-looking stinger.

  As he watched, Iron Man saw the stinger on the Skorpion to his left swivel around to face him and, before he could take evasive action, it let loose a bolt of bluish energy that caught him in the ribs just above his left storage pod. The Avenger’s armor absorbed most of the bolt’s energy, but the unexpected impact rolled him over in a three-quarter turn. As he stabilized, he snapped off a quick repulsor blast from his left palm, was gratified to see it sheer the entire tail-and-stinger assembly from the offending Skorpion, and then kicked in his jet boosters and shot forward in a blur of red and gold.

  As he spun to face the remaining Skorpions, Iron Man noted that the disabled craft was crash-landing in an area of plastic hills and streams below, and was glad that any debris from what could be a very messy battle would be falling on an empty park.

  The three alien ships had formed a wide phalanx as they dove at him, catching the Armored Avenger in scintillating energy blasts from three separate angles. But Iron Man was prepared for the charges this time and stood firm, hovering in the air and rocking only slightly when the blue bolts struck. As they drew close, the Skorpions broke formation to avoid a collision, one climbing to fly over Iron Man, the others banking off to the sides. But when the center Skorpion flew overhead, Iron Man shot upward, reaching out a gauntleted hand to grab the ship’s nose and stop it, instantly, in midflight. The ship stopped, but the pilot didn’t. Iron Man heard a pulpy, squishing sound, and saw that the underside cockpit was filled with liquid.