by Barry Lyga
“TRAVELERS: Be aware that the Titan system is currently under voluntary quarantine. You travel there at your own risk.”
Hovering just above the gate, Thanos looked over at Cha, who had joined him in Sanctuary’s cockpit. “Your last chance to abandon the Mad Titan’s quest,” Thanos told him.
“They need us,” Cha said simply.
Thanos engaged the forward thrusters and guided them into the gate and to his home.
CHAPTER XXVIII
FOR THE FIRST TIME IN YEARS, THANOS BEHELD THE orange-swaddled orb that was Titan. From a distance of thousands of kilometers, the planet looked exactly the same as it had when he’d left, with no indication as to the havoc that lurked beneath the haze.
Warning buoys drifted in descending orbits around the globe, sounding their alarms as he guided Sanctuary closer and closer.
“WARNING! You are nearing a quarantined planet! Proceed at your own risk!”
Which was precisely what he planned to do.
At sub-lightspeed, it seemed to take forever to find a reasonable parking orbit. He’d expected to pick up signals from survivors by this point, but the local comms channel was silent and dead.
He established an orbit as close to the planet’s atmosphere as possible. He wanted minimal distance for the shuttlecraft to travel.
Sanctuary was a cargo ship. She had not been designed to land on planets, to suffer the stresses of gravity. For that, they had the shuttlecraft, which were built to ferry pallets of cargo from ship to surface and back but had been modified by Thanos to serve as a combination of ambulance and clinic. Thanks to the automated piloting systems, he estimated they could rescue four thousand Titans at a time from the surface of the planet to Sanctuary.
They waited. Thanos assumed that survivors would have clustered in the Eternal City, but he didn’t want to send his shuttlecraft there without being certain. There was a chance—however small—that people had fled the clotted and disease-wracked city streets for the open foothills of the cryovolcanoes.
“There’s a signal,” Cha said suddenly, pointing to a holographic readout. “It’s weak, but it’s not background noise. It’s definitely a signal. From here.”
Thanos’s eyes widened. “The center of the Eternal City,” he rumbled. “The MentorPlex.”
“The what?”
It was forever ago that he and Sintaa had stared up at the floating androids as they assembled the MentorPlex, casting A’Lars’s will into reality.
“Never mind,” Thanos said. “It makes perfect sense that survivors would gather there.” He stood abruptly from his command chair, barking orders over his shoulder as he left the cockpit. “Send the shuttlecraft to that location. I’ll take the command module down myself.”
“You’re going down?” Cha leaped up and followed him. “Thanos, you don’t know what it’s like down there! The surface… the disease…”
“I’ll be in an environment suit.”
They marched through the corridor of the ship, toward the command module drop point. “That might not be enough,” Cha argued. “You don’t know exactly what sort of pathogen you’re dealing with. You can’t risk yourself like that.”
Thanos paused at the door to the command module. “They’ve been terrified and lost for years,” he told Cha. “If we just send down a fleet of shuttles and a message to get on board, they won’t listen. They need someone down there to tell them it’s safe.”
“You could die,” Cha warned him.
The concern was touching, if misplaced. Thanos offered a tight, humorless grin. “I haven’t yet.”
He thumbed open the door. Beyond lay a large chamber, in the center of which was a small, sleek vessel. The command module. From here the captain of Sanctuary could run all the ship’s functions while outside the ship itself. Cargo vessels frequently turned off life support to conserve energy during the laborious process of loading and unloading, so the command module was where the captain would supervise that procedure while the ship was crewed by robots and artificial intelligences.
He rummaged in a nearby locker for his environment suit. The standard suits that came with Sanctuary had been too small for him, so he’d taken two apart and welded them back together. He tugged experimentally at the seams; they held.
“At least take this,” Cha said with exasperation.
Thanos turned to his friend. From another locker, Cha had unearthed a medium-length pole with a flaring, curved spike at the end.
“Where did you get that?” Thanos asked.
“I liberated it and some other gear before we sold the Leviathan. Take it.”
Thanos stared doubtfully at the Chitauri battle-staff that Cha held out to him. “I don’t need a weapon. These are my people.”
“They’ve been ravaged by disease and disaster,” Cha protested. “They’re not the people you left behind. And may I remind you that they were never quite fond of you to begin with?”
Thanos bristled at the comment—not from its harshness but rather from its truth. Time had a way of whitewashing memory. The acrimony of Titan had faded in his mind, become a background to the greater need of his people. In his thoughts, his own love for them had become turned around and twisted into reciprocal love for him. He thought rarely of his father or of the looks of shock and disgust that had been the backdrop to his childhood. Instead, subconsciously, he permitted himself mostly memories of Sintaa, of Gwinth, even of the synths who had cared for his mother.
His mother. He thought of her, and not of her madness.
“Titans are proud but not stupid,” he told Cha. “They know now I was right. They’ll welcome me with open arms.”
“I’m worried about exactly what kind of arms those might be,” Cha replied. “Live up to your people’s reputation: Don’t be stupid. Take the damned staff, Thanos. Just in case.”
With a resigned sigh, he accepted the weapon and collapsed it to its carry-form. “I’m only doing this because the irony of a pacifist insisting I be armed amuses me,” Thanos told him.
“I didn’t give it to you as a pacifist,” Cha replied. “I did it as your friend.”
Thanos piloted the command module through the thick soup of Titan’s atmosphere, trying not to think of his last voyage of this kind. He’d been going in the opposite direction in the vessel known—temporarily—as Exile I. He’d been certain that his people were doomed, and now he had proof that he was right.
When he broke through the cloud cover, he beheld devastation.
Even kilometers above the Eternal City, he could make out the outline of the City perimeter. Just barely. It had been encroached upon by a massive flow of cryomagma from the ridge of cryovolcanoes. Orange dust swam everywhere—consolidated organonitrates from the cryo-eruptions. The cryomagma would have exploded to the surface, swamped the City, and then almost immediately frozen solid. Those struck by its initial blast would have been flash frozen in an instant.
The sudden drop in temperature would have caused the City’s weather-modulation systems to overcompensate. The cryomagma would have melted and then refrozen…. The City would have gone into a panic.
Worse yet, he noticed new foothills on the west side of the City. Plate tectonics in action. With the cryomagma moving from under the crust to the surface, the delicate subterranean balance had been disrupted. The geologic plates beneath the City had shifted, with the western plate rising up to create a whole new topography… and probably wiping out half the City in one fell swoop.
Thanos gritted his teeth and kept an eye on the hologram that was locked onto the signal Cha had received in orbit. It was stronger now, under the cloud cover, and it was definitely emanating from the MentorPlex.
I’m truly going home.
He found a clearing ten kilometers from the MentorPlex, in what had been a shopping bazaar. The stalls and kiosks were abandoned, many of them folded away, leaving him enough room to set down the command module.
His environment sensors told him that the air outside wa
s breathable but contained high levels of carcinogens and at least four unknown pathogens. He slipped into his environment suit and tested it for leaks. It was sound.
When the entry portal to the module opened, a dull wind picked up as the air pressure between the module and the outside obeyed the laws of physics and balanced. Orange dust swirled into the command module and lay in thin sheets on the control board. He stood in the doorway and hesitated, gazing out at the utterly empty bazaar. In his experience, no part of the City had ever been so barren. It almost didn’t seem like Titan at all.
After a moment, he turned back and tucked the collapsed Chitauri staff into a holster at his side, then stepped down onto the surface of the planet Titan for the first time in years.
All around him, eddies in the air spun cyclones of dust. The air was cold, almost as cold as on the Chitauri homeworld, despite the brighter, warmer sun.
He looked around, half expecting to see someone approach him, half expecting bodies stacked ten deep. But there was nothing. The bazaar had been abandoned.
“Cha,” he said into his comms, “I’ve arrived on the surface.”
Static responded to him. Too much pollution in the atmosphere. He couldn’t broadcast with the low-powered personal comms unit. He would be cut off from Cha for the duration.
Consulting his handheld scanner, he confirmed that the signal was coming from the MentorPlex. It towered over the rest of the City, its upper stories swathed in dust and clouds. The tower was bent slightly, leaning off-kilter, no longer perpendicular to the ground. The same groundquakes that had razed the western side of the City had wreaked havoc on A’Lars’s grand accomplishment as well.
Thanos double-checked the oxygen-nitrogen mix in his air tanks, then began walking home.
It was slow going in the confining environment suit, and as he got closer, the streets and walkways became clogged with debris, trash, and then bodies.
The first body he saw was a young girl, no older than eight or ten. She lay in perfect repose, as though she’d become tired and decided to take a nap here on the walkway. Thanos knelt by her. She seemed so peaceful that he could not believe she was actually dead, but when he touched her, she did not move, and her flesh had the yielding, slippery feel of a corpse. She had died here, and the cold and the aridity had preserved her thus. It was worse than finding her rotting or skeletal. She was a parody of life and of death at the same time.
“Sleep well, child,” he murmured, and continued on his way.
He thought of Gwinth, the Gwinth of his dreams. She was rotting away. Not at all like these eerily preserved cadavers. The dream did not match reality. Maybe that meant she still lived….
He chided himself for superstition. For giving into mysticism and magical thinking. Dreams were nothing more than dreams. She was alive or she was not, and the difference had nothing to do with the random neurons firing in his brain at night.
By the time he arrived at the MentorPlex, he had become inured to the sight of bodies. He’d stopped counting at a hundred, finding it pointless. He had proposed killing half of Titan, and now so many more were dead. He’d been right beyond his wildest imaginings.
How many had survived? A few thousand in the MentorPlex, he surmised, and twice that number in shelters along the edge of the City…. Perhaps as much as ten percent of the population of Titan in the best-case scenario.
He could have saved half of them. If only they had listened.
Within half a kilometer of the MentorPlex, the roads were so clotted with bodies and refuse that he drew his staff and locked it into its full fighting length to use as a walking stick as he maneuvered over and around piles. He no longer paused to mourn the dead. There were too many. The smell overwhelmed the air recirculators in his environment suit and soon the stench of dead and desiccated bodies filled his helmet. He increased the antibiotic and antiviral mix of chemicals in his breathing air to compensate.
The MentorPlex’s lean was more egregious the closer he got. He began to wonder how the building managed to keep from toppling over, so steep was its angle. A’Lars’s architectural and material-sciences genius was evident in the mere standing of the tower.
The main entrance was jammed shut by fallen steel and rubble. It took Thanos an hour to navigate the treacherous, cumbered circumference of the tower to the emergency portal along the eastern side. The door’s controls worked, but a short circuit somewhere had disconnected them from the door itself. Every time he pushed the button, he was greeted with a success trill and a flash of green light, but the door would slide open only an inch before shutting again.
So he wedged the Chitauri staff in the inch-wide gap when it appeared, and leaned into it with all his weight. Chitauri metal and his raw strength won out, and the door ground open even farther, then stuck there. Just enough room for Thanos to squeeze in.
He was in the lobby of the MentorPlex, where tenants and visitors would pass through on their way to the lifts. The lights were out. An emergency protocol, no doubt. Power had to be conserved for life support in the necessary areas of the MentorPlex. Splashy, abstract photonic art had decorated the walls, but without power the place was just a small, dark chamber with a floor covered in a scrim of orange dust. According to his portable scanner, the signal was coming from below the surface. In addition to five hundred stories above the ground, the MentorPlex also extended fifty stories below. A perfect place to wait out the environmental disasters and keep quarantined from the plague.
His environment suit had a built-in headlamp, which he now activated. The orange dust swirled around him in eddies conjured by his footsteps. There were no bodies here.
He’d passed through this lobby more times than he could readily recall. It had been a place of life, cramped with comers and goers. Now it was empty and hollow.
The antigravity lifts were offline, of course, since there was no power. He broke down the door to one with the help of the Chitauri staff and gazed into the black abyss of the empty lift shaft. The scanner confirmed that the signal emanated from down there.
A fifty-story climb. Or drop, if he slipped.
Back outside, he rummaged through the wreckage and scrap piled around the building, until he found several lengths of stout cable, which he fused with blasts from the battle-staff. Dragging it inside, he tied the new single cable around an outcropping of bent steel. He tested it with all his strength.
Before he could change his mind, he tossed the free end of the cable down the shaft and began his descent.
After ten stories, his arms and shoulder complained. After thirty, they burned with the effort of hauling his own considerable body weight. The only way he could mark his progress was by twisting to aim his headlamp down occasionally to make sure there was nothing impeding his progress. As best he could tell, it was one endless black well all the way down.
He reached the bottom with inches of cable left to spare, his shoulders afire, his fingers numb and sweat-slick in his gloves. The scanner told him that the air was free of pathogens and safe to breathe, so he removed the helmet of his suit and wiped perspiration from his face with the back of his hand.
He was in the ink-black bottom of an elevator shaft that stretched from his position to nearly a kilometer in the sky. Wind whispered above him. Echoes and creaks sounded all around. The entire MentorPlex seemed as though it could collapse in on him at any moment.
All the more reason not to dally. The door to the lift was to his right—he bashed and slammed his way through it, aware that the sound of his approach was probably sending thrills of fear into the survivors. Still, there was no way to be gentle.
When he entered the corridor, a series of lights flickered to life, dimly illuminating an old maintenance access hallway. Power had been conserved for the last meters leading to the survivors.
He walked down the corridor, lights coming to life ahead of him and fading behind. It was a short trip to a large, stout door. Too thick and sturdy for him to blast or bash through. With a sli
ghtly trembling hand, he reached out to touch its surface. It was cold and clammy.
Beyond this door lay the remains of his people. They could have been trapped within for years. He hoped their better natures had won out, but he prepared himself for a tableau of blood and horror. Being cooped up for so long, with the weight of the calamity upon them, could do horrible things to the psyches of even the kindest and best-adjusted people.
He rapped at the door, the sound blunt and muted. Just when he thought nothing would happen, a small hatch opened in the ceiling. A globe drifted down and bathed him in a green light. A body scanner.
The door slid open as though it had been installed and freshly oiled the day before. Thanos steeled himself and stepped inside.
The door slid shut behind him, simultaneous with overhead lights sparking and flaring to life.
He’d expected a hovel, an overcrowded room gone to filth from the presence of scores of Titans crammed into the only safe location and forced to subsist there.
Instead, the room was bright and clean. Obsessively clean, really—he spied not even a mote of dust. It measured perhaps ten meters to a side, the walls polished and gleaming steel, the floor and ceiling cast in a burnished alloy that reflected and held the light. It was a box, and it was empty except for a long oblong crate at the far end.
Thanos double-checked his scanner. The signal was strongest here. It was coming from right here. But there was no one—
The oblong crate hissed and the lid opened. A figure within sat up, then stood. Thanos fumbled with his scanner, lost the battle, and dropped it with a resounding clatter and clang.
It was his father.