Captain Marvel

by Tess Sharpe

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Novels of the Marvel Universe by Titan Books

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  Acknowledgements

  About the Authors

  Also available from Titan Books

  NOVELS OF THE MARVEL UNIVERSE BY TITAN BOOKS

  Ant-Man: Natural Enemy by Jason Starr

  Avengers: Everybody Wants to Rule the World by Dan Abnett

  Civil War by Stuart Moore

  Deadpool: Paws by Stefan Petrucha

  Black Panther: Who is the Black Panther? by Jesse J. Holland

  Venom: Lethal Protector by James R. Tuck

  Spider-Man: Hostile Takeover by David Liss

  Captain Marvel: Liberation Run by Tess Sharpe

  The Marvel Vault by Matthew K. Manning,

  Peter Sanderson, and Roy Thomas

  Obsessed with Marvel by Peter Sanderson and Mark Sumerak

  CAPTAIN MARVEL: LIBERATION RUN

  Print edition ISBN: 9781789091656

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781789091663

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  www.titanbooks.com

  First edition: February 2019

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  FOR MARVEL PUBLISHING

  Jeff Youngquist, VP Production Special Projects

  Caitlin O’Connell, Assistant Editor, Special Projects

  Sven Larsen, Director, Licensed Publishing

  David Gabriel, SVP Sales & Marketing, Publishing

  C.B. Cebulski, Editor in Chief

  Joe Quesada, Chief Creative Officer

  Dan Buckley, President, Marvel Entertainment

  Alan Fine, Executive Producer

  Front cover art by Phil Jimenez and Marte Gracia

  Back cover art by Jamie McKelvie

  Special thanks to Ronald Byrd, Kevin Garcia, Daron Jensen, Chris McCarver, Mike O’Sullivan, Roger Ott and Stuart Vandal

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  For Elizabeth May,

  A brilliant writer, a wonderful friend, and a misogynist’s worst nightmare.

  Thank you for always seeing me through.

  1

  EVERY NIGHT in the Maiden House, they would tell the story of the woman who fell from the stars.

  Hundreds of years ago, the suns went dark and a woman spilled from space itself. Though she was strange and her powers were alien, unlike anything found on Damaria, she was welcomed by the Flame Keepers as an honored guest and ally.

  But she was not content to walk among them for long. She felt it was unfair that only men bore the flame of power, and her gifts were beyond even those of the Keepers that the suns had blessed with power. And so she left them behind, choosing to travel far and wide across the planet, bestowing her gifts on the chosen women of Damaria.

  But all was not well.

  This is the part of the story where the teller would lean forward and the girls would shrink back.

  It changed each night, the painful ways the star woman’s gifted powers destroyed the daughters of Damaria. The storytellers never seemed to run out of new horrors, hammering it into the girls’ heads, trying to break them. Instead, it made them form even stronger armor.

  The woman who burned up from the inside, her power turning her to ash. The woman who plucked her eyes out because every time she closed them, she saw flashes of the future. The woman who drove a spike into her head to stop hearing others’ thoughts. The woman who wasted away to a husk, too entranced with her new gift to even eat or drink.

  They were too weak to bear it—and so are you. This is why you are kept here, away from everyone. This is why, when you come of age, you will be given to a Keeper to safeguard you from your powers. For the betterment of all.

  Every night for ten years, they told the story to her and to the girls who would become her sisters in suffering.

  They thought it was the right kind of threat. Keep the girls scared, keep them hurting, keep them thinking they’re weak, and you’ll keep the women they’ll grow up to be in the palm of your hand—right?

  Wrong.

  The girls born to this may not know the sweet taste of freedom, but she and her sisters remembered.

  She saw their story for what it was. A tale born from fear: of power, of difference, of women.

  What they thought was a warning she took as a rallying cry. A seed to nourish her into someone strong.

  Once upon a time, the Keepers had feared a woman with power.

  Rhi would find a way to make them fear one again.

  2

  POWER.

  Some people are born with it. Others stumble into it. Even more will do anything to get it.

  She’d hungered for other things—mostly the sky and the stars—but in the end, power was the hand she was dealt… the mantle that was thrust on her, but one she came to value. To love. To wrap herself in until there was no difference between Carol and Captain.

  But even when you’re an actual super hero, sometimes a woman finds herself in a situation she just can’t punch or fly her way through.

  “Come on,” Jess nudged Carol. “Do it!”

  “No,” Carol replied, even with her stomach growling as she peered over the heads of the milling crowd at Nebula, the busy restaurant where Jess had dragged her.The designers had escalated the space theme to a level of elegance that impressed even Carol, who tooled around space on the regular. But there were no space junk or abandoned alien ships found at Nebula. Above them, holograms of galaxies swirled on the ceiling, moving so slowly that unless you stared for a long time, the swath of stars and planets seemed only to glitter against the deep-blue and purple background.

  “I made the reservation under my name, but the hostess will give us a table if you pull the Captain Marvel card.”

  She and Jess had been waiting for at least twenty minutes, and she was starting to daydream about the hot-dog stand down the street she’d passed on the way. “I’m not gonna whip out my imaginary super hero badge to get us crab cakes faster, Jess,” Carol said as her friend rolled her eyes.

  “Crab cakes,” Jess sighed. “I hear they’re so good.”

  “As you’ve been telling me for a week since you booked this.”

  “I am an attentio
n-starved single mother,” Jess declared. “I need adult time. Time that does not involve swinging off tall buildings saving the world and does involve crab cakes.”

  “We can wait a few more minutes.”

  “Girl Scout,” Jess replied, with absolutely no heat and all sparkle in her eyes.

  “I’ve still got my badges,” Carol smirked.

  “Do you want a seltzer while we wait?”

  Carol looked over at the bar, which had hand-blown glass planets suspended above it. “I’m good.”

  Despite the crowd, she did like this place’s aesthetic. There were days she woke up during her leave on Earth and missed looking out her window at Alpha Flight Station into the vastness of open space. There was a loneliness to that view she missed, but the endless possibility of discovery and the imminent danger also grabbed her. It wasn’t just a mere pull now; you could break that kind of tether. But the stars, they’d sunk into her very soul, and they wouldn’t leave. She’d soared through them—one of the handful of people from her world to do so—no gear, no fear, no need. She was home. She was lucky.

  She was restless.

  “Did you get a load of this guy?” Jess muttered, not so subtly tilting her head to the side so that Carol’s glance shifted to that direction. At the bar, sitting under the glass Jupiter, was a young blonde woman, her entire body stiff and tilted away from the man in a suit who wasn’t just not taking the hint, he was full-on blasting past blinking red sirens screaming LEAVE ME ALONE!

  “Just one drink,” Carol heard him say. “C’mon.”

  “No, thank you,” the girl said, her voice strained.

  “Third time she’s said that,” Jess noted, throwing a disgusted look across the room.

  “I’m meeting friends,” she went on, “I really don’t want—”

  “But your friends aren’t here yet,” he interrupted, signaling for the bartender. The girl shifted in her seat as his hand settled between her shoulders. Carol could see it in her face, the quick mental calculation going through her mind: What’s he going to do if I move his hand? Will he get angry? Is it worth risking that?

  Carol’s mouth flattened.

  “You’re not gonna get mad at me for people-watching now, are you?” Jess asked, misreading the look on her face. Then, in the next second, as Carol started moving toward the bar, suddenly singleminded, Jess hissed, “Carol! Wait a second!”

  But that’s the thing about power: It comes with privileges. It comes with responsibilities.

  And one of those privileges and responsibilities is teaching certain people that no means no.

  Jess’s hand closed over her wrist, tugging. “Hey, after the last time, you promised me you’d never get us kicked out of a restaurant again.”

  “You won’t let me forget that, will you?” Carol asked, keeping one eye on Mr. Pushy. “And technically, we didn’t get kicked out.”

  His hand was still between the girl’s shoulders, which were clenched so tight they were up near her ears, as if she was trying to turtle inside her body.

  “After it nearly burned down, we were strongly encouraged never to return to Chez Maurice,” Jess pointed out.

  “In my defense, there were aliens.”

  “When aren’t there aliens?” Jess asked, which should have been more of a joke, but if you got down to it, it was kind of Carol’s life.

  “I promise, I won’t get us kicked out. You’ll get your crab cakes,” Carol said.

  “No punching?”

  “No punching. Cross my Hala Star.”

  Jess grinned. “Good enough for me. Go get ’em.”

  Not that she needed permission. Carol was already making her way down the steps to the bar area. Her heart wasn’t thumping, her palms weren’t sweating, her stomach wasn’t knotted—she’d faced far worse foes than this with a smile—but still, she knew those feelings. They were hard to forget.

  She remembered being fifteen, walking down the street in Boston… and the quickening of her steps when some dirtbag whistled and shouted. That hot, humiliated flush that spread up her neck and cheeks, the hooking sensation of fear in her stomach. She remembered being nineteen, out with her friends, only to get followed home by a man. Those moments of fearful calculation and quick checks behind her when the footsteps became impossible to deny were just seconds away, but they stretched into eternity. Her only saving grace that time had been the fact that she’d lived on base and he couldn’t follow her beyond the checkpoint. It had kept her tossing and turning for weeks: What if I didn’t live on base?

  Her fingers clenched as she zeroed in on Mr. Pushy. His other hand had moved to the seat of the girl’s stool, effectively boxing her in. She was leaning so far back, trying to prevent his fingers from grazing her thigh, that she was in danger of toppling off.

  No punching. Right. Carol had promised. Why had she done that again?

  “Andrea!” Just four steps away from the bar, she boomed out the name. The sound startled Mr. Pushy enough that he dropped his hands, no longer boxing the girl in. Excellent.

  “There you are!” Smiling at the girl like she was her best friend, Carol fit herself in the space between her and Mr. Pushy. Her mother always said that her broad shoulders would be good for something someday. And right now, they were blocking his view perfectly.

  She met the blonde’s eyes steadily. I’ve got you. There was a flash of confusion in the girl’s face, then realization followed by profound relief as Carol continued, “I must have walked right past you when the rest of us came in. My bad. We’re all in the back at a big table already. Let’s go!”

  “I should’ve checked, so silly of me,” the girl replied, hopping off the bar stool, clutching her purse in a death grip, anxiety in every line of her body as Carol took her arm.

  “Hey,” the man said, even as they were turning away. “We were talking.”

  The girl stiffened, but Carol’s stride didn’t break. “Just keep walking,” she said under her breath.

  “Thank you,” the girl whispered as Carol led her away, toward Jess and the hostess who was holding the menus. Perfect timing.

  “No problem,” Carol said. “Why don’t you come sit with us until your friends show up?”

  “Are you sure?” The girl looked over her shoulder, then back at Carol, relief in her eyes. “I would really appreciate it. They texted me they were held up in traffic, but they’ll be here in ten minutes or so.”

  “We’d love to have you,” Carol said, turning to the hostess with a smile. “It’s going to be an extra person, just until her group arrives.” The hostess’s eyes widened as she recognized her.

  “Of course, Ms. Danvers. I mean, Captain. I mean…”

  “Carol’s fine.”

  “Of course. This way… Carol.”

  The hostess led them to their table at the back of the restaurant, where Jess had already set up a third chair.

  “Are you… you’re Captain Marvel?” asked the girl in a hushed whisper, her eyes widening.

  “Guilty,” Carol smiled. “This is my friend, Jess.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Jess said. “Sorry you had to deal with that jerk.”

  “I’m Kensie,” the girl said. “And… wow. I seriously can’t thank you enough. When I came back from the bathroom, I overheard the guy trying to bribe the bartender into double-pouring my drink without telling me.”

  Carol’s eyes narrowed, and Jess’s head whipped toward the bar.

  “The bartender wouldn’t do it,” Kensie added hastily. “He had my back.”

  “Small mercies,” Jess muttered.

  “What do you do, Kensie?” Carol asked after the waiter walked up and took their drink orders—wine for Jess and Kensie, sparkling water for Carol.

  “I’m studying biology. I actually just applied for an internship at Alpha Flight for next summer. I’m very interested in the field of alien biology—the top-secret stuff. There’s so much to learn from other worlds.”

  “Just don’t ask me to be a specim
en,” Carol said, and Kensie’s cheeks turned red.

  “Oh, I didn’t mean—”

  “She’s joking. Don’t worry, you get used to it after a while,” Jess said, flipping open her menu.

  Carol grinned. “I’m an acquired taste, I’m told.”

  Kensie’s phone buzzed, and she looked down. “Oh! My friends are here.” She cast a glance back to the waiting area, waving at a group of young women who waved back.

  “What’s your last name?” Carol asked as she stood up to go.

  “Hoffman… why?”

  “So I know which Kensie to put in a good word for.”

  Kensie practically squeaked at the thought. “Thank you so much! And thank you again for saving me. I just… I didn’t want to make a big deal out of it. I just wanted to be left alone.”

  Carol could feel a twinge of familiarity at her last words. So simple, right? Yet anything but, in this world. “We understand,” Carol said.

  “Bye!”

  “Sweet kid,” Jess commented, as Kensie went to join her friends, who were peering interestedly at their table. “I would’ve made a big deal out of it.”

  “We’re not all so sure of ourselves. And all sorts of people freeze up.”

  “It’s good that you stepped in,” Jess went on. “A true act of heroism.”

  “And nothing caught on fire this time.”

  “We might just get through this dinner unscathed,” Jess said, suppressing a smile. “Now, do you think we should split an order of crab cakes, or get one for each of us?”

  “You’ve talked them up so much, I want my own plate,” Carol said. “And the biggest steak on the menu.”

  The two women relaxed, the incident at the bar starting to fade with their familiar banter.

  “So tell me what’s new with you,” Jess said.

  “Not much.”

  “Still lone-wolfing it?”

  “I’m not,” Carol protested, and then she was saved by the waiter coming to take their order. But Jess was like a dog with a bone, waiting impatiently for her to elaborate. “Technically I’m on leave.”

  Jess snorted. “Like leave’s a thing you’ve ever taken seriously. I read online that you fixed the dam break in Northern California. Did you just happen to be in the neighborhood?”