by Alex Irvine
Without a word, Loki walked slowly back to the control panel. Coulson watched him go. He couldn’t get up. Thor could see he was badly wounded.
Loki tapped the touch screen, and the floor disappeared. Air roared up into the Helicarrier from the opening. Then Loki touched another control, and Thor dropped through the Helicarrier’s lower levels and out into empty air, falling thousands of feet toward the ground.
CHAPTER 21
Natasha found Barton near Loki’s cell. She almost got the drop on him but something—she would never know what—clued him in to her presence and he spun at the last moment, letting fly an arrow that came so close she felt the whisper of its passage. Then she closed in on him and they fought hand to hand. Barton was very good, but Natasha was among the best who had ever lived. Barton had the upper hand at first because he was skilled at using his bow as a weapon. Natasha caught hold of it and got it away from him, thinking now she had the advantage, but he pulled a knife and once again she was fighting for her life. She couldn’t believe it. She was closer to him than anyone, but he was coming after her like she was just another target.
She concentrated on keeping the knife away from her, but they were fighting on a narrow catwalk. Once Barton got close, his superior strength came into play. She locked both her hands around his right wrist, holding the knife away from her, but it got closer and closer.…
Desperate, Natasha bit him on the arm. Barton shouted out in surprise, and she used the momentary distraction to swing him around and smash his head into one of the steel posts supporting the catwalk.
He went down and stayed down for a few moments. Then he looked up at her and said, “Natasha?”
But she wasn’t ready to believe he had freed himself from Loki’s spell. Not just yet. Natasha stepped in and knocked Barton unconscious with one final punch.
Loki watched on a monitor screen as the prison cell fell… and fell… and smashed into the earth near the ocean far below, shattering into thousands of pieces. It was too far away to see details but surely not even an Asgardian could survive that.
He turned away from the control panel. It was time to see how Dr. Selvig was doing with the portal stability device.
He got a little surprise then, in the form of quiet words from Agent Coulson. “You’re going to lose.”
“Am I?” Loki was intrigued. He paused to see what this dying mortal would have to say.
“It’s in your nature.”
Loki tried to understand what Coulson could possibly mean. “Your heroes are scattered, your floating fortress falls from the sky… where is my disadvantage?” he asked.
“You lack conviction,” Coulson said. He did not move from where he sat against the wall. Blood trickled at the corner of his mouth, and the enormous gun lay uselessly across his lap.
Of all the things Coulson might have said, this was perhaps the one Loki expected least. I have moved worlds out of conviction, he thought. Made bargains with beings who snuff out planets as an afterthought. “I don’t think I…”
The enormous gun discharged a bolt of dazzling blue energy, striking Loki squarely in the chest and blasting him through the nearest wall. For a moment, there was silence. Coulson watched, but Loki did not reappear.
Then he looked down at the gun. “So that’s what it does,” he said.
The Helicarrier wasn’t quite in free fall, but it was close. It was losing altitude at a rate of hundreds of feet per minute, and unless Tony got the turbine going again, Steve knew they were all done for. The turbine was spinning faster, which was good, but the bad guys had just thrown a grenade at Steve and knocked him off the broken edge of the platform. He was hanging by a cable over a whole lot of air.
“Cap, hit the lever,” Tony said.
“I need a minute here!” Steve shouted.
The turbine roared, reaching its full power. “Lever. Now!” Tony said, sounding more anxious. Then a sound came out of the turbine like the sound a garbage disposal makes when you drop a spoon into it.
Steve hauled his way back up the cable and dodged fire from Loki’s men. He scrambled across the platform and pulled the lever.
Below the spinning turbine blades, vents opened. They were designed to keep the blades from overheating, but they also let Iron Man fall out. He tumbled a hundred feet or so before he got his boot thrusters under him. Then, accelerating, he arced back toward the Helicarrier. Steve watched him approach. What was he doing?
Oh. He blazed straight at the last of Loki’s men and put him out of commission with a bone-crunching collision.
They were safe for the moment. The Helicarrier started to gain altitude again, and it leveled out. But a Quinjet was taking off, and Steve had a feeling Loki was on it. So they hadn’t crashed, but they hadn’t really won, either.
The final battle was yet to come.
CHAPTER 22
The Helicarrier was stabilized once Tony got the turbine going, but with Thor and the Hulk gone and Romanoff tied up with Barton, there was no way for the S.H.I.E.L.D. crew to stop Loki from escaping in the stolen Quinjet. All they could do was triage the wounded and do a head count to see how many they had lost. Nick Fury himself headed for the detention area, knowing that was where Coulson had been going.
He found Coulson sitting on the floor leaning against the wall. He was pale, his eyes heavy-lidded and his breath shallow. He looked up as Fury approached and knelt in front of him. Fury took the gun off his lap and set it on the floor.
“I’m sorry, boss. The god rabbited,” Coulson said.
“Just stay awake. Eyes on me.”
“No. I’m clocking out here.” Even on the edge of death, Coulson kept his cool. Clocking out, Fury thought. How many soldiers could make a little joke in the last moments of their lives? Coulson was one of a kind.
“Not an option,” Fury said. He couldn’t afford to lose this man. Not after everything else they’d lost today.
“It’s okay, boss,” Coulson breathed. “This was never going to work… if they didn’t have something… to…”
He never finished what he was going to say. With a last slow sigh, Agent Phil Coulson died. Nick Fury bowed his head. He’d lost plenty of men during his military career and plenty more with S.H.I.E.L.D.… but this one hurt the most.
“Agent Coulson is down,” he said over the intercom.
“A medical team is on its way to your location,” said a dispatcher in return. But it was too late. Fury knew it was too late, and when the medical team arrived, they knew it, too.
If they didn’t have something to…
That’s right, Fury thought. Coulson was right. They needed something to pull them together, to make them see beyond themselves.
Now Fury was going to make sure they saw that. This battle had hurt them badly, but the war was not over. Not by a long shot.
A few hours later, after the casualties had been counted up and the first critical repairs were under way, Fury gathered the surviving members of the team in a conference room. Usually this was where he spoke remotely to the World Security Council, and he was looking forward to this conversation about as much as his meetings with them. Steve Rogers, Tony Stark, Natasha Romanoff, Maria Hill, and him. That was all that remained of the team. Loki had struck them a crippling blow.
But Fury wasn’t ready to give up. He stood by the table near Steve Rogers and said, “These were in Phil Coulson’s jacket. I guess he never did get you to sign them.” He tossed bloodstained Captain America trading cards on the table. Rogers picked one of them up and looked at it. It was a picture of him from World War II, before he’d started going after Hydra in the mountains of northern Europe.
“We’re dead in the air up here. Our communications, the location of the cube, Banner, Thor… I got nothing for you.” He paused, trying not to get emotional. “I lost my one good eye,” he added, meaning Coulson. “Maybe I had that coming.”
No one else said anything. That was fine with Fury. He needed them to listen more than he needed a
discussion.
“Yes,” he said. “We were going to build an arsenal with the Tesseract.” There was no longer any reason to keep Phase Two a secret. Fury didn’t regret hiding it from the team. It wouldn’t have done them any good to know. “I never put all my chips on that number, though, because I was playing something even riskier,” he went on. “There was an idea, Stark knows this, called the Avengers Initiative. The idea was to bring together a group of remarkable people to see if they could become something more. To see if they could work together when we needed them to, to fight the battles that we never could.”
Tony was looking at him now, and Fury’s next words were for Tony Stark and Tony Stark alone. “Phil Coulson died still believing in that idea,” he said. “In heroes.”
Tony suddenly got up. Fury thought for a moment that he was about to say something, but after a moment, he just left the bridge.
“Well,” Fury said. “It’s a good old-fashioned notion.”
CHAPTER 23
You fell out of the sky,” a security guard said as Bruce recovered his senses.
He looked around. He was in a pile of rubble in what looked like a factory. Looking up, he saw a Hulk-size hole in the roof. “Did I hurt anybody?”
“There’s nobody around here to get hurt,” the guard said. Bruce could see his name tag. It read HARRY. “You did scare the hell out of some pigeons, though.”
“Lucky,” Bruce said. It was a funny thing to say when he was lying in a heap of broken concrete with no clothes on and no way to get back to the team, but it was true.
“Or just good aim,” the guard said. “You were awake when you fell.”
“You saw?”
“The whole thing. Right through the ceiling. Big and green and buck naked.” He reached down and picked up a pair of pants. Tossing them to Bruce, he said, “Didn’t think these would fit you until you shrunk down to a regular-size fellow.”
“Thank you,” Bruce said. He got the pants on. They were a little big, but a whole lot better than naked.
“Are you an alien?” the guard asked.
“What?”
“From outer space,” the guard said. “An alien.”
“No,” Bruce said. He wasn’t sure how to explain what he was, so he didn’t try.
“Well then, son,” the guard said, like he’d been thinking about it all night, “you’ve got a condition.”
In a cell on the Helicarrier, Natasha Romanoff sat by Clint Barton’s bed. He was restrained as a precautionary measure, because they had no way of knowing if they had really freed him of Loki’s influence. Natasha thought she had seen him come back after she’d cracked his head into the catwalk railing but could not be sure… at least until she could talk to him for a minute. Then she would have to trust her instincts.
Barton thrashed at the restraints as he started to wake up. “Clint,” Natasha said. “You’re going to be all right.”
She put a hand on his shoulder as he fought his way back to wakefulness. Barton got his eyes focused on her, and she knew he was back. She could see him in there instead of Loki… and she could see that he was scared and confused and angry.
“You know that?” he asked. “Is that what you know? I got… I gotta flush him out.”
“You’ve got to level out,” she said. “That’s gonna take time.”
He fell back on the bed. “You don’t understand,” he said. “Have you ever had someone take your brain and play? Take you out and stuff something else in? You know what it’s like to be unmade?”
“You know that I do,” she said. She’d been made and unmade more times than she could remember. She had told Loki as much when she said she was Russian… or used to be. Natasha didn’t know what she was anymore, except that she was loyal to Nick Fury, loyal to S.H.I.E.L.D., and loyal to Clint Barton.
Barton looked over at her. “Why am I back? How’d you get him out?”
“Cognitive recalibration,” she said, dead serious. Then with a small smile she explained. “I hit you really hard in the head.”
He stared at her for a moment like he was trying to decide if she was joking. Then he just said, “Thanks.”
That was what Natasha needed. She knew Barton was back. Now she could unbuckle his restraints. He sat up, rubbing his wrists. “Tasha,” he said. “How many agents did I—?”
“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t do that to yourself, Clint. This is Loki. This is monsters and magic and nothing we were ever trained for.” Better than maybe anyone on the Helicarrier, Natasha Romanoff knew you couldn’t blame yourself for things you did while you were brainwashed. All you could do was try to heal and get things right the next time.
“Loki,” Barton repeated. “He got away?”
“Yeah. Don’t suppose you know where?”
He shook his head. “Didn’t need to know. Didn’t ask. He’s gonna make his play soon, though. Today.”
“We have to stop him,” Natasha said.
“Yeah? Who’s ‘we’?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Whoever’s left.”
Barton considered this. “Well,” he said. “If I put an arrow through Loki’s eye socket, I’d sleep better, I suppose.”
She smiled. “Now you sound like you.”
“But you don’t,” Barton said. “You’re a spy, not a soldier. Now you want to wade into a war. Why? What did Loki do to you?”
“He didn’t, I just…” she trailed off, knowing she couldn’t deceive Barton. Not after what he’d been through. He knew how Loki worked, how he got into your mind before you even knew it was happening.
“Natasha,” he said, trying to get her to talk.
“I’ve been compromised,” she said. Even though she’d known it, and used it to get information out of Loki, she still could feel the way he’d used her. “I got red in my ledger,” she said, knowing Barton would understand. “I’d like to wipe it out.”
CHAPTER 24
After Tony left the group, he found his way to the detention area where Loki had been held… and where Phil Coulson had died. He stood there thinking for a while, and then he noticed Steve Rogers had found his way there, too. Tony hoped Cap wasn’t interested in picking up their argument where they’d left it off. He didn’t have much stomach for a fight right then, at least not with Cap.
But Cap wasn’t looking for a fight, either. He stood for a minute, reflecting on what had happened in that room. Then he asked, “Was he married?”
“No,” Tony said. “There was a, uh… cellist. I think.” That was all he knew about Coulson’s personal life, and he only knew that because of what he’d overheard when Pepper talked to Coulson. To Tony, Coulson had always been just an irritation, and now he was regretting that.
“I’m sorry. He seemed like a good man,” Cap said.
“He was an idiot,” Tony said.
“Why? For believing?”
“For taking on Loki alone,” Tony said.
“He was doing his job,” Cap insisted.
Cap’s stubbornness made Tony angry. “He was out of his league,” he said. “He should have waited. He should have…”
“Sometimes there isn’t a way out, Tony,” Cap said.
And there they were again, arguing over heroism. “Right,” Tony said. “I’ve heard that before.”
Cap walked toward him, not quite aggressive but definitely pressing his point. “Is this the first time you’ve lost a soldier?”
“We are not soldiers!” Tony said, barely keeping his voice below a shout. He was Tony Stark, billionaire genius! He was Iron Man! He was nobody’s cannon fodder. “I am not marching to Fury’s fife!”
“Neither am I! He’s got the same blood on his hands that Loki does. But right now we’ve got to put that behind us and get this done. Loki needs a power source.…” He stopped as he saw Tony’s attitude change.
Tony had been struck by an idea. “He made it personal,” he said.
“That’s not the point,” Cap said.
“Tha
t is the point,” Tony insisted. “That’s Loki’s point! He hit us all right where we live. Why?”
Like he was talking to a child, Cap said, “To tear us apart.”
“Yeah, divide and conquer is great, but he knows he has to take us out to win, right?” Now Tony was rolling. He had Loki figured out. “That’s what he wants. He wants to beat us; he wants to be seen doing it. He wants an audience.”
“Right. I caught his act at Stuttgart,” Cap said.
“That was just previews,” Tony said. “This is opening night. And Loki, he’s a full-tilt diva, right? He wants flowers, he wants parades. He wants a monument built to the skies with his name plastered.…”
That was it. Tony looked at Cap, and saw that he had figured it out, too. “Sonofagun,” Tony said.
They both knew where Loki would strike next.
Erik Selvig had nearly completed the greatest scientific work of his life. The machine holding the Tesseract was complete, and ready for activation. It resembled the containment structure he had built in S.H.I.E.L.D.’s New Mexico facility, but he had made some improvements. This new machine was designed not to measure the Tesseract’s power but to amplify and channel it. The Tesseract itself was the core of the machine. Around it was a plasma chamber and a conical array of mirrors and lenses. When the portal generator powered up, it would superheat the plasma in the chamber. Then the lenses would focus that energy into a beam that would tear open a hole in the universe and let the Chitauri through. Once that portal was open, Loki’s triumph would be assured. No force on Earth would be able to oppose him.
He opened up his laptop—the same one he had used when he was working with Jane Foster, before they had ever seen Thor, or the Destroyer, or Loki. He ran through a series of software checks. Everything was in order. Soon, very soon, they would do something no human had ever dreamed of being able to do. Not even the Red Skull had understood the latent potential of the Tesseract.