by Alex Irvine
CHAPTER 15
He found his way to the Valkyrie’s flight deck. There was a single pilot’s chair surrounded by a half circle of instrument consoles. In the middle of the consoles was a two-handed steering yoke. Through the windows, Steve saw only open sky. Behind the pilot’s chair stood a machine. Steve took a moment to look at it.
It was about four feet tall, with heavy cables coming out from it down into the floor. There was some kind of tank or chamber at the front of it, with a locking lid. Blue light blazed inside it. Behind that was a sloping case, filled with cables and hoses. The blue glow was bright there, too, as if some kind of energy was pumping out from this machine into the rest of the plane. Maybe it powered the whole thing. Steve thought about wrecking it. That would crash the plane and save how many lives?
But he still didn’t know where the Red Skull was, and Steve wanted to face him first.
Just as he thought that, he heard a sound from the back of the flight deck, where he had come in. He spun and brought his shield up just in time to absorb the blast of a Hydra energy rifle. There was the Red Skull!
Steve charged him, feeling two more energy blasts hit his shield. A third missed him and shattered one of the cockpit windows. Wind began to howl through the flight deck.
He hit the Red Skull with everything he had, using the shield like a battering ram. Schmidt reeled backward and tried to raise the rifle again. Steve smashed it with his shield. A blast of blue energy flashed out from it, blinding him. It set off sparks from other electrical equipment in the cockpit.
The Red Skull dropped the rifle and caught the shield as Steve swung it at him. He tore it from Steve’s hands and smashed Steve across the face with it. Steve stumbled. He blocked Schmidt’s next punch and they fought over the shield. Steve got control of it and threw Schmidt away from him. He banged into the instrument console and knocked the steering yoke hard to one side.
Both Steve and Schmidt flew into the air as the Valkyrie dove suddenly almost straight down. It was like there was no gravity. Steve was flung toward the back of the flight deck again, bouncing along the ceiling. The Red Skull fought the g-force of the plane’s dive and reached out for a button on the instrument console. Steve couldn’t get there in time to stop him. He hit the button.
The Valkyrie pulled out of its dive and leveled off, throwing both of them hard to the floor.
The Red Skull got to his feet first. He pulled a pistol from a holster at his belt. It looked just like a German Army Luger, but Steve could see the telltale glow of blue in its barrel. It was a Hydra energy pistol. He got the shield up and rolled away just in time as Schmidt fired several shots. They punched holes straight through the steel floor of the flight deck. “You don’t give up, do you?” the Red Skull called out.
Steve faced him, crouching and ready for the Luger to fire again. “Nope,” he said.
“You could have the power of the gods! Yet you wear a flag on your chest and think you fight a battle of nations!” Again Steve dodged as the Red Skull fired at him. “I have seen the future, Captain! There are no flags.”
Steve had ducked behind a bulkhead at the back of the flight deck, near the door. Now he stepped out, shield ready. “Not my future,” he said, and threw the shield as hard as he could.
The Red Skull tried to block the shield, but Steve had thrown it too hard. It knocked the Red Skull flat and then deflected off the wall and into the glowing blue machine behind the pilot’s chair. There was an explosion that knocked them both over. Steve scrambled to pick up the shield as blue energy crackled and spat from the wreckage of the machine.
Now he could see what was inside it. There was a cylinder holding a glowing blue cube. That was the energy source. Exposed to the open air, it was firing off strange waves of light. The air felt strange, like everything was being bent or stretched somehow. Steve looked up and couldn’t believe what he saw. The roof of the Valkyrie wasn’t there anymore. He was looking at deep space. He saw clusters of stars, brightly colored nebulas, even entire galaxies! How could that be? It was broad daylight outside.
“What have you done?” screamed the Red Skull. He pulled himself to his feet next to the broken cylinder and touched the cube. Sparks and lines of energy ran up and down his fingers. He picked the cube up and held it in the palm of his hand.
That’s when things started to get really crazy.
The Red Skull stared at the cube in his hand. Steve was about to go after him again, but his eyes widened and he stayed where he was when he saw what was happening.
“No!” Schmidt howled. The light from the cube washed through his hand, and he started to disintegrate, bit by bit. He turned into streaks of light that beamed away, up into the endless space where the Valkyrie’s ceiling had been. Steve was amazed. It didn’t look like Schmidt was in pain. He was just astonished, watching himself turn into a multicolored spray of energy. Then he was gone.
The portal closed and the view into deep space disappeared. The cube fell to the metal grating on the floor around the broken machine. It melted through the grating with a soft crackle. Then it melted through the floor below that and tumbled away out of sight.
Steve was alone in the plane, somewhere over the far north Atlantic. Maybe even over the Arctic by now. The Valkyrie was a very fast aircraft. He had to get control of it somehow if he could. And if he couldn’t…
No matter what else happened, he had to make sure those flying bombs in the Valkyrie’s belly did not reach their targets.
He got into the pilot’s chair and set his shield down. The steering yoke was jammed. He couldn’t move the plane off its autopilot-installed bearing. There were a couple of map displays on the instrument console. One showed his current location, somewhere in the Arctic, barreling over pack ice toward North America. The other display showed a map of the area around New York City with the German caption ZIEL.
That was German for “target.”
He turned on the Valkyrie’s radio and found the SSR frequency. “Come in,” he said. “Come in, this is Captain Rogers. Can you hear me?”
When they heard Captain America’s voice over the SSR control room speakers, everyone froze. Morita was the first to respond. He toggled the radio microphone and answered, “Captain Rogers, what is your position?”
Before Captain America could answer, Peggy leaned in and took the microphone away from him. “Steve, is that you? Are you all right?”
“Great,” he said. “Schmidt’s dead.” There was a crackle of static as he spoke. Even so, everyone in the control room heard him. There were a few cheers, but not a big racket. They weren’t out of the woods yet.
Peggy leaned in to find out more. “What about the plane?”
“That’s a little bit tougher to explain,” Captain America said after a moment.
“Give me your coordinates,” Peggy said. “We’ll find you a safe landing site.” She looked over at the big map on the wall. The standard flight path from the Hydra base in the Alps to New York would have taken it over Great Britain and Ireland. Schmidt had probably gone farther north to avoid the potential for aerial combat. So if the plane had gone farther north, say, crossing over Iceland and Greenland, then coming back south over the remote Canadian Arctic…
There were bases. Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Maine in the United States. There was a way to handle the problem.
On the Valkyrie, Steve thought about this. He wrestled with the controls and started to understand that the plane was too damaged to trust. The steering yoke barely moved to the right and left… but it did seem to go up and down. He leaned into the mike to make sure Peggy could hear him over the howl of the wind through the broken cockpit window. “This thing’s moving too fast and it’s headed for New York,” he said. “I gotta put it in the water.”
Peggy’s voice crackled back at him immediately. “Please! Don’t do this. We have time.…”
Steve looked at the map display on the instrument console. He saw lots of ice and water. Glaciers, fjords. No c
ities, no towns. He figured Peggy was looking at a map, too, but she didn’t know how badly the Valkyrie was damaged and he didn’t have time to explain it to her. At his current airspeed, he was going to be within range of big cities in just a couple of minutes. “Right now I’m in the middle of nowhere. If I wait any longer, a lot of people are gonna die,” he said. “Peggy, it’s my choice.”
It was the only choice. He opened up his compass and put it on the altimeter readout so he could look at the picture of her. Then he braced both hands on the steering yoke and pushed it forward as far as it would go.
The Valkyrie dove, gathering speed. The altimeter needle spun backward, faster and faster. The Valkyrie was dropping thousands of feet every second. Out the windows, Steve saw ice and water, still far away but getting closer fast. “Peggy,” he said.
In the SSR control room, there was dead silence. Peggy swallowed and said, “I’m here.”
“I’m gonna need a rain check on that dance.”
She smiled a little. “All right,” she said. “A week, next Saturday, at the Stork Club. Eight o’clock on the dot.” She paused to gather herself and added, “Don’t you dare be late. Understood?”
There was a crackle over the speakers, then Captain America’s voice again. “You know I still don’t know how to dance.”
“I’ll show you how,” Peggy said. “Just be there.”
“We’ll have the band play something slow,” Captain America said. “I’d hate to step on your—”
Static.
Steve woke up to the sound of the Dodgers on the radio. He sat up and looked around. He was in a room, maybe a hospital room? It was sunny, with a spring breeze coming in through an open window. He was wearing an SSR T-shirt, khakis, and boots. Why boots? He didn’t remember putting them on. The last thing he remembered was putting the Valkyrie into a steep dive. He’d heard Peggy’s voice over the radio and kept his eyes on her picture.
Then, nothing.
On the radio, Red Barber’s voice got more excited as Pete Reiser cracked a line drive all the way to the wall. Rizzo will score, Reiser heads to third. Durocher is going to wave him in. They look to relay, but they hold steady. Pete Reiser with an inside-the-park home run!
But something wasn’t right. He was groggy, but he could tell. Where was his shield? Where was his uniform?
A woman came into the room. Steve swung his legs over the side of the bed, still doing a mental check on himself. He seemed to be all right. He seemed to be great, in fact. It was pretty surprising. Erskine’s Super-Soldier stuff was even better than Steve had thought. It had let him survive the crash of the Valkyrie.
“Good morning,” the woman said. “Or should I say afternoon?”
Steve didn’t know how to answer that. “Where am I?”
“You’re in a recovery room in New York City,” she said. On the radio, Red gave the score: Dodgers take the lead. It’s eight to four!
He looked at her. She looked a little like Peggy. Steve remembered he had a date. Stork Club, eight o’clock sharp. What day was it? He hoped it wasn’t Saturday yet. While he was thinking about that, something about the radio broadcast clicked. An inside-the-park grand slam? Steve remembered sitting in the grandstand at Ebbets Field as Pete Reiser headed around third for home.…
Alarm bells started to go off in Steve’s mind. This room was not what it seemed.
“Where am I really?” Steve asked.
“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” she said.
“The game,” Steve said. He nodded toward the radio. “It’s from May 1941. I know because I was there.” He stood up and faced her. Something was wrong here and he needed to know what it was. “Now I’m going to ask you again.”
“Captain Rogers—”
Steve noticed she was holding something in her hand and pressing a button on it. “Who are you?” Steve demanded. She kept pressing the button as Steve started looking for a way out.
The doors behind her burst open and soldiers came in. They weren’t wearing any uniform Steve recognized. They might not be Nazis, but they sure weren’t US Army, either.
He charged them and knocked them straight through the wall. It came apart more easily than it should have. Steve charged through after them. The room was a fake. It was built in the middle of a big, dark space like a warehouse. The light was strange, cold and blue. Steve looked right and left. He spotted a sign over one of the doors: EXIT.
He ran toward it and collided with another guard. Steve threw him out of the way. The guard hit the wall and went down. Steve ran on. A loudspeaker sounded an alarm. “All agents, Code Thirteen, Code Thirteen!” Steve shoved two more guards aside. He could see another large open room ahead. There was daylight there.
When he ran into that room, he saw a row of glass doors. There were security guards charging toward him. Should he stay and fight or get outside? Instinct told him to go. He didn’t have his shield and he didn’t know where he was. The sooner he got away from the people chasing him, the sooner he could figure out what was going on.
Steve sprinted for the door and got outside. He knew right away he was in a city: lots of cars, tall buildings, honking horns. A split second later, he knew he was in New York when he saw street signs at the nearest corner. He was on 45th Street near Broadway. Okay, he thought. He would head for the antiques store in Brooklyn where Dr. Erskine’s lab was hidden. Peggy and Colonel Phillips would be there.
Steve ran to the corner and turned down Broadway. He was so focused on getting away from the fake room and finding Peggy that at first he didn’t notice how different everything was. Bit by bit it dawned on him, though. After a few seconds, it overwhelmed him. He stopped in the middle of Times Square, stunned. This was not the Times Square he remembered. There had always been billboards, throngs of tourists, people selling things from sidewalk tables… but not like this. The buildings were taller, and made of shining glass. The billboards were… they were like giant view screens, the kind of advanced gear only Hydra or the SSR had. The kind of thing Howard Stark would dream up. Pictures and words crawled across them, giant ads ten stories tall.
He spun around as something else hit him. The cars. These weren’t the sleek sedans and coupes Steve remembered. They were all different shapes and sizes, all different colors. Their engines sounded different. They looked like spaceships from a movie, almost. Some of them reminded Steve of the concept flying car Howard Stark had shown at the expo. That seemed like a long time ago. Crashing a giant airplane into the Arctic and then waking up in New York did strange things to your head, Steve thought. How long had he been out?
Big black cars, like paddy wagons, squealed to a halt all around him, blocking traffic. Soldiers got out, wearing black uniforms Steve didn’t recognize. They had eagles on their patches. From the nearest car, a bald black man with an eye patch approached Steve. He wasn’t dressed like an officer, but he carried himself like one.
“At ease, soldier,” he said. Steve just looked at him. There was no way to know where he was in the chain of command. Did Steve have to salute him? Was he real? What did he know about all this? “Look, I’m sorry about that little show back there,” he said. “But we thought it best to break it to you slowly.”
“Break what?” Steve asked.
“You’ve been asleep, Cap,” the officer said. Steve saw sympathy on his face. “For almost seventy years.”
Seventy years? He remembered the fight with Schmidt on the Valkyrie like it had happened just a few hours ago. The date of that operation was May 4, 1945. So now, if it was almost seventy years later, this was…
He looked again at the screens on the buildings surrounding Times Square. The date and time scrolled across the bottom of one, below some kind of news report. It was April 17, 2012.
Two thousand and twelve. Peggy would be an old, old woman now, if she was still alive. Steve sure hadn’t made it to the Stork Club on time.
I crashed Hydra’s superweapon and saved New York, Steve thought. Then I woke
up in the future.
“You going to be okay?” the officer asked.
Steve thought he didn’t have much choice. He had to be okay. Here he was. He was a soldier.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m just… I had a date.”
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Contents
COVER
TITLE PAGE
WELCOME
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
COPYRIGHT
Copyright
© 2014 MARVEL
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