by Dan Abnett
Dormammu’s maw, defined by flame, opened wide, and a sound came out. It took Thor a moment to recognize it as laughter.
MADRIPOOR
23.26PM LOCAL, JUNE 12TH
DOC? Doctor Banner?”
Banner could hear the voice of Dale McHale the Third. He opened his eyes.
“McHale? Where are you?”
“Right here. You okay?”
Banner thought about it. He took a breath.
“My head hurts. So does my chest. I feel like I’ve got a hangover. A terrible hangover.”
“That’s probably the sedatives,” said McHale.
“Uh-huh. I guess, McHale, the real answer to your question depends on where we are.”
Banner sat up.
He was in a cage.
The cage was crude, corroded and filthy, like an animal pen in a disused zoo. Looking around, Banner saw that they were in what appeared to be an abandoned factory, some kind of manufacturing plant that had been condemned and closed down. It was gloomy and dilapidated, and he could smell waste and decay. The cage was one of several dozen lined up on the rusted belt of an old mechanical conveyer system. McHale was propped against the bars of the cage next to Banner’s. Other human figures—ragged and dirty, asleep or dead—were curled up in the cages beside them. A few bare bulbs hung from the ceiling on frayed cables, and one or two of them actually worked.
“No, McHale. I’m not okay,” said Banner.
He got to his feet. His clothes were intact, and the plastic cuff was still in place on his arm. He hadn’t changed. Unconsciousness had canceled out the rage and quelled the awful transformation.
“How long have we been here?” he asked.
McHale shook his head.
“About an hour, I figure. Not sure. My watch is dead. And I was out, too.”
Banner looked at him. “Yes, sorry,” he said. “Are you okay?”
McHale touched his chest. He looked unwell.
“Think I may have internal injuries,” he said. “Got some pain.” He glanced up at Banner and attempted to look cheerful. “I’m fine.”
“Let me take a look at you,” said Banner.
“I’m fine.”
“I’m a doctor.”
“Yeah, and we’re in cages. What are you going to do? Examine me through the bars?”
Banner sighed.
“Seriously, we’re okay,” said McHale. “I think we’re still in the city. S.H.I.E.L.D. was tracking us, so I’m betting we’ll get an extraction any time now. They won’t leave us high and dry.”
“If they can find us.”
“They’ll find us,” said McHale.
Banner looked doubtful.
“So….” said McHale. “Psychic dog-men. That’s new. What do you think?”
“I think it’s time you told me what S.H.I.E.L.D. is investigating here.”
McHale tried to laugh, but the laugh turned into a wince.
“It’s need-to-know, Doc,” he said.
“I need to know, McHale. I should have known days ago, but I was patient and I was polite. Now I need to know.”
McHale looked uncomfortable.
“Okay,” said Banner, annoyed. “It’s gamma radiation, for a start. That is my particular field, after all.”
“Doc—”
Banner held up his left hand. He was wearing a small signet ring.
“Gemstone ring,” he said. “White topaz. Cheap. I have a drawerful, and I always like to wear one. The thing about white topaz? You can use gamma radiation to change its color. This was white the last time I looked at it.”
The gemstone on his signet ring was a pale blue.
“That dog-man thing,” Banner continued. “I think it was the product of high-scale, if thoroughly misguided, genetic engineering. In fact, I’ve seen this sort of thing before. New Men. Which means a certain individual named Herbert Edgar Wyndham. How am I doing so far?”
“Boy, you’re smart, Doc,” said McHale.
“Probably why I’m here,” replied Banner, with less warmth than the previous time he had said it. He realized he had snapped at McHale. He was agitated, and the incident in the alley had probably bled most of the sedative reserve out of his cuff.
He had to watch himself. He had to stay in control.
“You are indeed very smart, Doctor Banner.”
The distorted voice had issued from a tinny speaker mounted on a metal post beside the conveyer belt.
“Wyndham?” Banner asked.
“Doctor Banner. You know full well I don’t go by that name anymore. It is vestigial and antiquated.”
“Wyndham, what do you want from us?’
The speaker crackled. Banner was sure he heard music playing in the background, some popular song from a century earlier.
“I must confess,” the speaker sputtered, “I experienced annoyance when I was informed that you had come to Madripoor. You represent the sort of trouble I seek to avoid. But on reflection, I recognized an opportunity had been presented to me.”
“Wyndham?”
“Time is short, Doctor. We must seize the day. Seize it while there is still a day to seize.”
A shutter door rattled open at the far end of the factory space, and light flooded in. Banner saw figures approaching against the glare.
“Stay calm, Doc,” said McHale, struggling to get up. In the cages around them, the other inmates stirred. Some moaned or called out weakly in the local dialect.
A roof hatch swung open above the rows of cages. Daylight shafted down.
A human/cat-hybrid dropped down through the hatch and landed on top of one of the cages. The man inside squealed in fear, and his anxious wails were taken up by others nearby. The cat-thing hissed at them, then began to leap from cage to cage, traveling down the row. It bounded across the top of McHale’s cage and landed on Banner’s.
Banner looked up. Big yellow eyes stared down at him. The thing hissed again.
“Back the hell off!” cried McHale.
“Don’t provoke it, McHale,” Banner urged, holding out a pacifying hand in McHale’s direction. He kept his eyes fixed on the cat-thing staring down at him.
The figures that had entered via the shutter approached. One was the dog-thing from the alley. Behind it trotted a smaller rodent-hybrid, and something squat and shambling that had been spliced with simian DNA. All three wore ragged clothes.
The prisoners fell silent. Banner could smell the fear.
The dog-hybrid uttered a snarl, and the rodent-thing hurried to fetch a control box from a hook on a nearby support pillar. It ran back, clutching the box to its chest with the extension cable trailing behind.
The dog-hybrid took the box and threw a switch. With a clunk, an electric motor engaged, and a greasy, antique hoist system began to slide along an overhead track, its chains swinging.
It took an age to arrive. The dog-thing waited until the unit was alongside Banner’s cage, and then stopped the motor. The cat-hybrid perching above Banner leaned out, grabbed the dangling chains, and attached them to a fat metal loop on the top of the cage.
“Doc—” McHale began. There was serious concern in his voice. He clutched at the bars of his cage, peering across at Banner.
“It’s okay, McHale,” said Banner, fighting to stay calm. “It’s fine. Please, stay calm so that I can stay calm.”
“Maybe,” McHale said, “maybe you shouldn’t stay calm.”
Banner flinched. He felt a rush of heat up his spine and sensed a green darkness in his peripheral view. He fought it off.
“No, McHale,” he said very carefully, pacing his breathing. “Don’t say that. Don’t wish it. Not ever. We don’t need that. No one ever needs that.”
“But, Doc—”
“Please, McHale.”
The dog-hybrid turned a dial on the control box. The hoist’s winch started to whine, and the rotating drum took up the chain tension. Banner steadied himself as the cage began to move. It tilted sideways at first, and then swung c
lear of the conveyer belt with a jolt. The dog-hybrid and the thick-set ape-thing moved in to steady it. They adjusted its swing until the cage was hanging directly beneath the hoist. The dog-thing let the drum take up a few more lengths of clattering chain, and then shut down the motor.
Banner was suspended in a gently swinging cage fifteen feet above the factory floor. The cat-hybrid was still riding the bars above him.
The dog-hybrid threw another switch, and the hoist began to travel back along its sooty track. The motion made the cage sway back and forth, and Banner had to cling to the bars.
“Doc!” McHale called after him. “Doc!”
“It’s okay, McHale,” Banner called back.
The prisoners in the other cages became agitated again. Some sobbed. Most of them wailed and pleaded, hands reaching through the bars.
The dog-hybrid, walking along behind the moving cage with its companions, uttered a fierce snarl. The prisoners quickly shut up.
The cage reached the end of the track, and the dog-thing lowered it onto a wheeled pallet truck. The cat-hybrid disengaged the chains, and then jumped down. Together, the four New Men wrangled the truck and its payload up a scabby metal ramp into a battered freight elevator.
The dog-thing rattled shut the elevator’s accordion gate and glared in at Banner.
“What happens now?” asked Banner.
The dog-thing reached in through the gate and tossed him a key. It bounced off the bars and fell on the deck of the elevator car outside.
“What?” Banner asked.
The rodent-hybrid reached up and pushed a button on the wall. There was a distant thump, and the elevator began to rise.
Banner stared at the four New Men watching him through the gate until they slid out of view and he was looking at nothing but the dark, slimy, moving wall of the shaft.
Banner kept his breathing timed. He wiped his mouth with his palm, and then fidgeted with his hair.
Calm down, calm down…
The elevator stopped with a clunk. Something that seemed like sunlight streamed into the car through the accordion gate. It was midnight, wasn’t it? Midnight and gone. Banner’s disorientation rose.
Calm!
Banner squatted down and leaned out of the cage, groping for the fallen key. It was almost out of reach. He got his fingers around it, brought it back inside, and undid the lock.
He got out of the cage, dragged open the accordion gate, and stepped through.
The room beyond was filled with a soft, golden radiance. Music was playing, another old song from the days before the World Wars. The tone was soft and scratchy: an old gramophone player.
The room had once been grand, but now it was faded and worn. The paneled walls were hung with old photographs: stern men in blazers, elegant ladies with parasols, rowing teams, polo matches, a society formal. Side tables and shelves were stacked with books and tatty files, bottles and flasks, insect specimens in glass cases, skulls and antlers, antique scientific instruments, yellowed newspapers, card files, a typewriter, and X-ray film in card sleeves.
There was a Chesterfield sofa, several arm chairs, and an old player piano. The gramophone with its horn speaker sat on a table in the corner, old disks piled up beside it.
The drapes were shut. Banner walked to the nearest window and pulled aside the cloth. He was looking down on the jumbled streets of Lowtown Madripoor. It was night, a maze of streets described by neon signs and brightly lit windows.
Banner turned back and hunted for the source of the soft light. Inside a glass dome on a side table, a miniature sun glowed. He thought it was a trick at first, some kind of oversized filament bulb, but he felt its warmth as he approached it. It was the size of a grapefruit. He could see its coronal flare and the tiny bruises of sunspots growing and fading on its burning surface.
Tiny specks revolved around it: planets. It was an orrery, a model of a solar system, but there were no visible signs of support for the planetary bodies. How was it done? How was it possible?
“Don’t stare at it for too long.”
He jerked around.
Wyndham was watching him from the doorway of the adjoining room.
Banner blinked. His eyes were sore. He could see sun dots on his eyelids.
“A model,” he said.
“In a way,” said Wyndham. “I made it. The orbital scales are contracted for convenience, but the thermonuclear-fusion process is real enough.”
“In a glass bottle?”
“A force field, actually. Otherwise there would be secondary issues of gravity, magnetics, and so on. One cannot have a solar wind blowing through one’s parlor, can one?”
“It’s a toy, then?” asked Banner.
“No,” said Wyndham. “It’s a reminder.”
Herbert Edgar Wyndham had not been entirely human for a long time. Tall, powerful, imperious, he was locked in a form-fitting suit of flexible metal. The ribbed under-suit was silver. The outer armor, boots, gloves, and helmet were a polished magenta. The design reminded Banner of the Art Deco robot in Fritz Lang’s silent movie Metropolis. That was what the future had looked like when Wyndham had been growing up in the early years of the twentieth century. For a man of such advanced ideas, Wyndham was stylistically trapped in his own past.
“You said something about an opportunity, Wyndham,” said Banner.
Wyndham shook his hand dismissively.
“Please, Doctor,” he replied. “Not that name. It represents another me, a past iteration. You know full well how I like to be addressed.”
“I do,” said Banner, damned sure he wasn’t going to use that title. Years before, Wyndham had styled himself the “High Evolutionary”—which, to Banner, sounded like the unholy offspring of a union between H.G. Wells and George Orwell.
Banner feared that this connotation was deliberate.
Wyndham was dangerous. For a start, he was probably the most intelligent man on the planet. He had been since birth, and numerous scientific enhancements had amplified his brainpower to a level equal to that of advanced cosmic entities. He wasn’t what S.H.I.E.L.D. would classify as a “super villain,” either. Sometimes Wyndham even seemed to operate for the good of humankind.
But he was singular, gifted, ruthless—and he had lost his ethical compass decades before. His shocking eugenics projects, all done for the “betterment” of the species, had resulted in some truly calamitous problems.
“I forget my manners,” the High Evolutionary said. “Hello, Doctor Banner.”
He nodded courteously. His voice, artificially modulated, came out of his visor’s mouth without the sculpted lips moving. His eyes were glassy, pupilless blue lenses.
“Wyndham,” said Banner.
The High Evolutionary did not react to Banner’s continued use of the name.
“Join me,” said the High Evolutionary. “You’re just in time.”
“For what?” asked Banner.
The High Evolutionary beckoned, and Banner followed him through double doors into the next room. It was the sort of laboratory in which Doctor Moreau would have felt quite at home. Workbenches, flasks, microscopes, chemical jars, scales, paperwork, and instrumentation covered every surface. As a nod to modernity, Banner saw whiteboards on the walls, covered with scribbled equations and sticky notes.
“Not quite your usual lab spec,” remarked Banner. He put on his glasses and began studying the whiteboard equations, trying to read them quickly and still make sense of them. Genetic codes…transcription factors, the operation of DNA-dependent protein kinase…
“This is just a thinking space,” said the High Evolutionary. “A private room in which to ponder and design. I have more sophisticated facilities on the floors below.”
He looked at Banner. The glassy blue eyes were eerie.
“Though not, as you say, to my usual specifications. This is a hurried enterprise, thrown together in haste. I had been planning something, Doctor: a Great Act. It was years away from fruition. My plans take time to
mature. I had barely begun to conceive it, let alone build the facilities necessary. Then a situation arose, and I was diverted to this scheme as a matter of priority.”
He gestured with both hands.
“Thus, the parlous state of my facilities,” he said, “housed in a forsaken factory building in the rat-runs of this objectionable city. I make the most of that which I can gather. Expediency, Doctor. I’m sure you can appreciate that.”
“You chose Madripoor,” said Banner.
“It has slack border controls,” replied the High Evolutionary. “People here can be paid or otherwise persuaded to look the other way.”
He looked at Banner. “And now you show up at my doorstep.”
“S.H.I.E.L.D. brought me here. You know that already.”
“Typical of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s operating mentality,” remarked the High Evolutionary, “to send physical force to disrupt my activities.”
Banner gestured to himself in a mocking “who, me?” way.
“Your other self,” said the High Evolutionary. “S.H.I.E.L.D. wants me stopped, so S.H.I.E.L.D. decides to have me smashed.”
“I was brought in as a consultant,” said Banner. “It’s my mind they wanted to use, not my…alter ego.”
“Then S.H.I.E.L.D. is truly scraping the bottom of the barrel,” said the High Evolutionary. “To attempt to thwart me on a purely intellectual level is redundant.”
He looked at Banner.
“I mean no offense. You are a gifted scientist. Some of your work has shown merit.”
“But I’m hardly your equal?” asked Banner.
“Of course not. But actually, I was going on to say that a man of your intelligence will soon wish to assist me, not thwart me.”
“This is going to be good,” said Banner.
“The world is about to die, Doctor,” said the High Evolutionary. “It has, I estimate, four to six months left. I intend to save it.”
“By, let me guess, ruling the world?” asked Banner.
“That’s very perspicacious. Exactly.”
“I was joking.”
“I was not.”