by Alex Irvine
They all turned their attention back to the ship’s clear dome. And if seeing Xavier walk had surprised them, what they saw outside left them stunned.
The stars were blinking out. They dimmed to indistinct smears against the blackness of space, and then they were gone—one after another, in groups and clusters across the 180-degree field of vision afforded by the dome. The heroes watched, astonished, their quarrel with Magneto forgotten for the moment.
Only Scott was not transfixed. He looked away from the incredible sight to Xavier, who stood alongside the rest of them. The sight unnerved Scott for reasons he couldn’t quite identify, and a question flitted through his mind: Is Xavier controlling the stars?
It wasn’t possible, and he knew that—but the coincidence, piled on top of the bizarre situation, had his mind working overtime to find patterns and connections the group could understand.
THREE
OWEN REECE, known to friend and enemy alike as Molecule Man, watched as an entire galaxy—millions of stars!—was slowly annihilated by a rolling wave of utter blackness, leaving only a single point of light outside the ship’s domed hangar and dozens of small celestial bodies—chunks, maybe, of broken planets.
Amazing, he thought. That kind of power…! couldn’t do that. I have power over the atomic structure of matter, down to every last proton and electron, but to wield it on that scale…
But he could imagine what it might be like.
The ship accelerated suddenly, but without any sense of motion. Owen knew they were moving only because the single distant point of light grew quickly. The other ship near them kept pace, streaking across the empty space at what must have been faster-than-light speeds. In a matter of seconds, the point of light was close enough that he could see it was a single star, the only survivor of the destroyed galaxy. Around it, the planetoids tumbled—but not in stable orbits. They drew close to one another, their motion random and violent— too fast and direct to be the product of gravity.
Some unseen force was building them together into a patchwork planet, composed of dozens of continent-sized wedges of crust and mantle. “Looks like a puzzle,” the Wrecker said. The rest of the thuggish Wrecking Crew—Thunderball, Piledriver, and Bulldozer— grunted in agreement. “But who’s putting the pieces together?”
“The power…” Doctor Doom said. “Incalculable…inconceivable.”
Owen nodded. If Victor von Doom, one of the world’s most brilliant minds, thought an event was inconceivable, then they were watching something truly extraordinary.
They were also, he thought, completely at the mercy of whoever— or whatever—was creating this new planet.
Their ship, along with the other nearby vessel, slowed into a stable orbit around this new planet, bathed in the familiar yellow light of the sole remaining sun. They clustered together to view this stellar survivor—and to see whether they could learn anything of the other ship and its occupants. The Asgardian, Enchantress, had told them she sensed Thor was there with a few others known as heroes, but she didn’t seem interested in listing all its passengers.
“Watch what you’re doing, Creel,” Owen heard Doctor Octopus say. He glanced over in time to see Absorbing Man brandish his wrecking ball at the irritated Doc Ock.
“How about I stuff you and your tentacles out an airlock, so then you won’t be in the way anymore?” Crusher Creel said. “Whaddaya think about that?”
Owen stepped back. He didn’t have any interest in a fight over bruised egos. Not when he had just seen an entire galaxy disappear and a new world constructed out of rubble. Drawn together across light-years! What kind of power did that take?
Stop thinking about it, he told himself. He’d given up being a villain. He didn’t even know why he was here, trapped on a spaceship with Earth’s most dangerous outlaws. Why are any of us here?
Creel and Octavius didn’t appear to be considering the problem. They were working themselves up to a fight when an energy beam blasted into the floor between them. Both staggered back, and Owen turned to see—Ultron! Owen knew of the robot and its nearly indestructible Adamantium shell. But he—it—had been destroyed, Owen was sure of it. Ultron glared at the group through red, mechanical eyes and announced:
“I am Ultron. I do not comprehend the events transpiring or how I came to be functional once more. Still less how I came to be present among you. But this is insignificant! My purpose is to destroy organic life. All present qualify.” He raised his metallic hands, glowing with deadly energy.
Doom grabbed Owen and leaned in close, growling through the riveted steel of his mask. His mouth was barely visible, and his pupils glittered behind the mask’s rectangular eye-slits. “You. Owen Reece. You have called yourself Molecule Man in the past. You did not escape the notice of Doom. You have the power to counter Ultron.”
“No!” Owen said. “I gave up being Molecule Man. I’m just Owen. I don’t even know what’s happening. I don’t know how anyone could destroy an entire galaxy like that! But I…”
He stopped, because he’d been about to say “I think I could learn.” But could he? Would he want to? No! He wasn’t that kind of monster.
“I have need of your power,” Doom said. “Of those present on this ship, only you and Galactus can depower Ultron. Galactus likely will not take notice, it seems, so you must.”
“No,” Owen said again. “My therapist—”
“Is in another galaxy,” Doom finished for him. He leaned even closer, his dark green hood falling over his mask. “And I am here.”
“Okay, okay. I get it,” Owen said.
Owen didn’t want to do it, but he gave Ultron a push. It was simple, as easy as clearing his throat. The molecules obeyed him. Adamantium was one of his favorite alloys to move. He liked the arrangement of its particles and the patterns into which they bonded. He flipped Ultron into the front of Galactus’ boot.
“Idiots!” Ultron crowed. As he bounced off Galactus’ leg, Ultron blasted an energy discharge that scattered the Wrecking Crew to the other side of the central chamber. “Although it is redundant to even use the word idiot when speaking of organic beings—what is this?”
Ultron’s voice changed as Galactus levitated him with a thought. He rose through the air until he found himself before Galactus’ face. The giant’s placid expression never changed, but he lifted a purple-gloved hand. “You, organism!” Ultron said. “You will die last, and most slowly. Do not think your size will—RAARRKK!”
A flash lit up the whole interior of the ship, and Owen turned away, shutting his eyes against the blast. Ultron’s shriek rang in his ears, and his eyes stung from the brightness. He opened them as Ultron hit the floor with a ringing clash and lay still. Owen stared in disbelief.
“Holy—!” Piledriver goggled at the fallen Ultron while the rest of the Wrecking Crew gathered nearby. Doctor Octopus approached from the other side of Ultron, his quartet of metallic tentacles reaching out to tap the inert robot and turn it over.
“Did you see that?” Piledriver asked. “He sucked the energy right out of Ultron. How’s that even possible, man?”
“Ultron contains the latent energy of a hydrogen bomb,” Octavius said. “At least. I might be off by an order of magnitude.”
“Speak English,” the Wrecker demanded.
“Of course,” Octavius said. “It might be ten hydrogen bombs.”
The Wrecking Crew stepped back, and one by one they looked up at the towering form of Galactus. “He’s just staring off into space like it never happened,” Piledriver said.
Thunderball hefted his wrecking ball and looked around like he thought Ultron might get up again. “He barely noticed Ultron smacking into him.”
“He noticed enough,” Bulldozer said, looking back down at the fallen Ultron.
“I hope he keeps on not noticing us,” Owen said.
Doom leaned in close to him. “You see what you have done,” he said to Owen. “Your powers have been quite useful already. Imagine what you coul
d do if you permitted yourself to exploit them fully.”
Owen shied away from Doom. “No,” he said.
“Weakness will not serve you well here,” Doctor Doom said.
“You don’t tell me what to do,” Owen said. He tried to sound confident, but his voice quivered. He saw Kang watching them carefully from across the room. Everyone was looking at Owen and Doom. Owen thought briefly of taking all of Victor von Doom’s molecules and repelling them away from each other all at once, but then he pushed that thought aside. He spoke firmly this time. “Nobody tells me what to do.”
“That is what Ultron thought,” Doom said, but he took a step back—and that was when the crack in space appeared.
FOUR
THEY were close enough that Reed could make out some of the individual figures on the villains’ ship. He had seen the brilliant flash in front of Galactus but could not tell what it meant. The ship appeared undamaged when the afterimages faded from Reed’s vision, but one silver figure lie prone amid the rest of the assembled villains.
So, he thought. They have started what we were able to avoid. That was a good omen. Those able to keep their heads in difficult situations were more likely to survive.
“Look!” Spectrum said. She stood in her black-and-white winged costume at the edge of the dome, trying to watch the other ship and see what the new planet looked like now that its pieces had been jammed together by whatever cosmic force had extinguished the nearby galaxy.
Reed did not permit himself to think about whether they were in the Milky Way—because then he started thinking about Earth, and New York…and his son, Franklin, and Susan. She alone of the Fantastic Four was not with them. Why?
At Spectrum’s exclamation, he looked beyond the other ship to a tiny bright light set against the vastness of space. Its distance from their ships was impossible to tell against the backdrop of perfect emptiness—in fact, Reed had the sense that “far” didn’t have any context here. The perception of distance between objects required two objects for scale. Reed’s eye was an object, to be sure, but the light—what was it?
It appeared to be a tiny squiggle of pure brightness, impossible to look at directly even through the dome’s evidently polarized material. It seemed to move, but that might have been an artifact of vision, the eye struggling to make sense of what it was seeing.
Reed watched, thinking. That little squiggle had to be a small tear in the fabric of space-time, above—from their perspective—both the new planet and the preserved sun. That was the only possibility. And from the tear’s existence, Reed was able to deduce quite a bit. Obviously, the annihilation of the galaxy had not been a natural act—but Reed understood, too, that destruction had not been the main purpose. Whatever had destroyed that galaxy had deliberately preserved exactly those planetary fragments and adapted them to a new purpose.
Then a voice spoke, though not audibly. Reed was no stranger to telepathic contact, but this was something more. The mind that reached out to him was so unlike his own that he could not even be certain it was a mind. There was a sense of incredible vastness, of age and power that only Galactus among them might come close to matching.
I am from beyond…
Immediately, Reed’s mind raced with questions. So a single being had done this? Erased an entire galaxy save for a few fragments to be recombined into a planetary mass, and a single star to anchor the planet in an orbit? Beyond: Beyond what? And did this being say “from” because it understood spatial relationships the way human minds did, or was it translating—dumbing down—a different incomprehensible reality for their benefit?
This kind of minute analysis was natural to Reed. The process relaxed him, and he felt uneasy when there was not a difficult problem to exercise his mind. This situation had his brain firing on all cylinders, as the saying went. Understanding the nature of the being sending them this message could be the first step to getting home. He was certain of it.
Then the voice went on, and Reed’s questions took a different turn.
Slay your enemies and all you desire shall be yours…
Everyone on the ship looked around. Reed noticed that several members of the group immediately turned their attention to Magneto, who appeared to be listening hard and considering the situation much like Reed was. Slay your enemies: Seemingly clear, but in fact not so—because what was meant by enemies? Those perceived to be enemies, or one’s true enemies, no matter whether they were known as such? This was critical. Gnomic utterances such as the one they were hearing now depended on inscrutability for much of their impact. The group that understood the message’s true meaning would stand a much greater chance of coming out of this in one piece—and avoiding unnecessary bloodshed. All you desire: This was where, for Reed, the whole question got tricky on multiple fronts. Why did this being from beyond (Beyond?) need them to kill one another—or want them to? How could it grant them all they desired if none of them had ever been in contact with it before? How would it know what they wanted? This was a claim of amazing breadth. The fact that it was being communicated directly into their heads—in the aftermath of selective galactic annihilation—suggested immense power. On the other hand, Reed had heard this kind of claim before. It was the most ancient of beguilements: Do as I wish, and you will be rewarded.
The next words spoken—although “spoken” was not the correct word—made Reed feel as if the being had heard his thoughts and was addressing them.
Nothing you dream of is impossible for me to accomplish!
Is that so? Reed thought. Perhaps. If the speaking intelligence could erase an entire galaxy and create a new planet as an afterthought, the claim might well be true. He and the rest of the Fantastic Four had certainly encountered their share of cosmic beings whose existence was incomprehensible and whose powers were beyond human imagining.
He was still considering this when Galactus—one of those cosmic beings—abruptly smashed out of the other ship, crashed through its protective field, and rocketed away toward the gleaming breach in space-time from whence the strange and compelling message seemed to originate.
FIVE
VICTOR VON DOOM watched as Galactus lifted his regal head to regard the distant rift in space-time. This was clearly the origin point of the message they had all heard. “That voice isn’t lying,” one of the others said. Doom paid no attention to them. He watched as Galactus left the floor of the domed chamber and flew toward the invisible barrier sealing out the vacuum of deep space.
“You! Beyonder!” Galactus cried out—and Doom knew instinctively that Galactus had correctly named the speaker of the message. The Beyonder, yes—from beyond—but what else does Galactus know?
“Hear Galactus! I sense that you are from beyond this universe— beyond the multiverse of which this universe is but a single facet! I sense the energies you wield!” Galactus blasted through the force field that contained the ship’s atmosphere, leaving a wash of prismatic energy that trailed after him as he hurtled away from the vessel into space.
Doom saw his chance. He, too, leaped away from the spaceship’s deck and followed Galactus. The Beyonder’s communication had left them all with a fading echo of one another’s thoughts. Confusion, fear, and avarice warred in the minds of the others—but in the ancient mind of Galactus was a single thought. “You can take from me my hunger,” he went on. “You can end my ceaseless craving for the living essence of worlds! Let it be done! I will not wait for this charade! Let my torment end now!”
Doom rocketed through the breach Galactus had ripped in the force field in the last moment before it resealed, preserving the ship’s atmosphere and the lives of all its remaining passengers. He was protected by his armor’s systems and the force field it projected upon command. This was his chance. Galactus was playing the perfect patsy. He dared to cut through the deadly game to its essence: capturing the Beyonder’s power and putting it to one’s own use.
But Doom was going to go one better—because where Galactus sought only an
end to his perpetual hunger, Victor von Doom had no desire to end his own. He wanted power, the ultimate and secret powers wielded by the architects of the universe itself. So as Galactus charged toward the hole in space-time, Doom followed in his wake.
Let Galactus battle the Beyonder. Doom would watch, and analyze, and learn. He would understand the secrets of the Beyonder’s power—and once he understood those secrets, nothing in the universe could stop him from using them.
As they approached the brilliant tear between one reality and another, Doom felt the energies pouring from it. The instruments in his armor exhibited readings he had never seen before and had no idea how to process—but they were all being recorded and would be of use later. Right now, the sensation of the energy nearly overwhelmed him as pressure built against his force field; even the blackness of space seemed to shift around him. Doom heard the Beyonder warning Galactus not to approach, but Galactus plunged ahead. Doom followed until the ambient energies at the edges of the space-time rift grew too intense. He could feel reality deforming around him and knew he could go no farther. His armor could not protect him against the remaking of space-time.
Doom fell back behind Galactus, hoping the Devourer of Worlds would smash through into—what? Another universe? Another dimension? Another reality? There was no word for it. Into whatever place—or non-place—the Beyonder inhabited.
If Galactus went through, then Doom would fly in his wake, penetrating the shattered barriers before they could reform. Then he would know—
A titanic discharge of energy blasted both Doom and Galactus away from the space-time rift. Stunned, Doom fell toward the strange patchwork planet, unable to control his descent or the tight spin that flicked the space-time rift over and over through his field of vision, limited by his mask. He watched the rift diminish and wink out in stop-motion. It was soon gone, and he fell in darkness.