by Barry Lyga
Cha spoke after a moment, confirming Thanos’s math. “Nearly a year.”
“Three worlds in a year. At this pace…” He shook his head. “Too slow. We need to find a way to identify these worlds and speak to them en masse. And we need to be more persuasive.”
“Yes. The endless slaughter is… enervating.”
“Enervating?” Thanos asked.
“Such killing…” Cha shrugged. “No matter how necessary it may be, such killing weighs heavily on your soul, no doubt. It does on mine.”
Thanos laughed a hearty, honest laugh. “Weighs heavily on my soul? No, Cha. Once, perhaps, I saw killing as a necessity, the better of two options. It was pragmatic and expedient.” He paused, considering. “It still is those things, of course. But, Cha, I’ve come to the conclusion that”—he leaned forward, both hands flat against the window—“killing is an absolute, universal good. Killing clears the chaff from the wheat. Killing subtracts that which would multiply into danger. Killing obviates crisis. Focusing on the killing is the wrong perspective, in any event. We’re not looking to kill half of them; we’re trying to save half of them.”
“If killing is a universal good,” Cha said, speaking slowly, anticipating an interruption. When none came, he went on. “All things serve their own purpose. There is a purpose to all this death. We have merely yet to see it.” He put a hand on Thanos’s shoulder. Patted him there. “We are guided by the universe itself, by its ineffable quest for harmony. We will continue on the proper path.”
Thanos was amazed. “After all this time, after everything you’ve done and witnessed… You actually still believe there is a path to universal peace. Unreal.”
“Deep down, Thanos… so do you. Why else do you keep me around, if not to remind you of what you believe?”
Thanos grunted, curled his upper lip. Then, without a word, he stalked away from the bridge.
CHAPTER XXXIII
THANOS KNEW THAT HIS CAUSE WAS JUST AND HIS PATH righteous, but he also understood that most intellects were neither refined nor enlightened enough to comprehend it. He resigned himself to a life of misapprehension, of unnecessary conflict in the face of brute and savage denial of plain, obvious facts.
And so it was a pleasant surprise to him that—as his infamy spread—there were those who not only agreed with him, but also sought him out as he sacked their worlds. A pittance among the billions dead, yes, but the idea that even one person out of a planet’s entire population might heed his warning was a greater number than experience had taught him to expect.
He took them on, of course, and with the genetic largesse of his experiments on the Chitauri, he modified and empowered them, making them his vanguard into the universe.
In turn, they adored him like a father. They gave themselves new names, rechristening themselves in his honor. They were Ebony Maw and Corvus Glaive, Proxima Midnight and Cull Obsidian, names dredged from the grimmest pits of fever dreams and black omens. He set them loose upon the universe in his name, preaching his dire warnings, seeking out new worlds and new places to conquer.
They called themselves his children. But they were not. They were his tools, his weapons. Sent out into the void in pairs or as a group, they heralded his eventual coming, guided his forces on the ground, ruthlessly enforced his will.
They also inspired him.
“We have been too thorough,” Thanos told Cha one day as they sped between systems. His underlings were already ahead of them, on a world called Zehoberei, one ripe for Thanos’s brand of global modification. “If there is even one person on a planet who believes in our cause, that life is worth saving and exploiting.”
“So… no more wholesale slaughter?” Cha asked a little too eagerly.
“We have enough plunder from our conquests to fuel our cause for another century. Perhaps we should try balance on a worldly scale.”
Cha raised an eyebrow. “Mercy? From Thanos?”
“A different mercy,” Thanos chided him. “Imbalance still exists. The mercy of the grave has sufficed until now, but going forward we will be more thoughtful in our purges. It has been safer to eliminate entire populations so no one would remain to seek us out in the name of revenge. But now… Now we will try something different. We will enact the Titan protocol, eliminating half of each world. And as those worlds recover, they will stand as examples to others that our way works.”
Cha considered this. “We’ll also want to be sure to eliminate any and all military capacity,” he pointed out. “Otherwise, we’ll have to watch our backs more so than usual.”
Thanos grinned with sheer pleasure. “Pragmatism from the idealist. I’ll convert you yet, Cha.”
From this angle, the small planet Zehoberei hung in space, a brilliant green-blue jewel on the black velvet backdrop of a starless nebula. They had entered the Silicon Star System, with its twelve planets, only one of which was habitable.
Zehoberei. Home to three billion sentient souls. All of whom were guaranteed to die in a few short generations, unless Thanos was obeyed.
He was not.
And so he attacked.
He watched the assault from the bridge of his ship, as he’d done so many times before. From up here, it was merely a light show—occasional bursts of yellow and orange from the surface of the planet. Nuclear fire rippled along coastlines, spilling like lava from the shore.
He skimmed his battle plans and saw that nothing needed to be adjusted. The Zehoberei had made no moves or countermoves that he had not already anticipated. The conclusion was foregone. He realized, to his surprise, that in the midst of war, he was… bored.
“When did genocide become rote?” he asked Cha.
Beside him, Cha looked up from the small holoplate that streamed data direct from the Chitauri Leviathans. “Are you having misgivings, Thanos?”
“And if I were?”
Cha clucked his tongue and waggled the tips of his pointed ears, something he only did when deep in thought. “Wholesale slaughter is an egregious evil,” he said at last. “But not when in service to a greater good. Still, there are many paths to victory. You can always choose another one.”
Thanos snorted. “Victory itself is meaningless to me. I only want to help.”
Cha’s lips quirked into a concerned mien. “I know where this is headed. You know I don’t like it when you join the Chitauri in battle. It’s dangerous.”
“More dangerous is allowing a distance between myself and our battles. It may grow and mutate into distance between myself and my cause. I need these experiences, Cha. I need to see the devastation for myself. As I did on Titan. To rededicate myself. To remind myself what we’re fighting for.”
Consulting the holoplate, Cha nodded to himself. “Well, there’s an area on the western continent that’s been swept clean. You could—”
“No. As always, I need to see the suffering.” He knew that witnessing only the antiseptic aftermath of the Chitauri’s cleansing of the world meant nothing. It was like observing the end result of a surgery. You learn nothing from the stitches and the scar. Only by watching the surgeon’s hands in the blood and the viscera could you come to comprehend the mechanics of medicine.
“It means nothing if I do not live it,” he told Cha. He thought back to the days before the massacre aboard the Blood Edda. How he had used his own hands to torture and kill Vathlauss. The feel of the Asgardian’s blood, tacky and slick at the same time, between his culpable fingers.
“Not a chance,” Cha said resolutely. “You’ve done it before, and every time it was too big a chance to take. We just can’t risk it.”
Thanos turned to his friend and curled his lip in a parody of amusement. “I was not asking permission, Cha.”
“It’s too risky,” Cha insisted, swallowing hard, but standing his ground. “We can’t take the chance of something happening to you.”
“We,” Thanos said in his deepest and most intimidating tone, “do not make the decisions on this ship.”
Defiant, Cha pulled back his shoulders and thrust out his chest. He and Thanos glared at each other for long moments.
Cha swallowed hard. “Thanos, please! Think about what you’re proposing! What you’re risking!”
“I am prepared. I’ve trained with the Chitauri for a long time. I have my battle armor, which they forged for me to my exacting specifications. No harm will come to me, my friend.”
In the end, Cha surrendered. As Thanos had known he would from the beginning. That was, in fact, why he valued Cha so much as a friend—Cha pushed back. But never too much.
On the surface of Zehoberei, Thanos strode through the remains of a village on what had been one of the northern continents. It was summer in this particular spherical cap of Zehoberei and the heat bore down on him, mitigated by only the passing shadows cast by great plumes of smoke from nearby, where his Chitauri warriors had set off a plethora of bombs.
The village was in ruins, its buildings and infrastructure reduced to rubble under the unrelenting assault of the Leviathans and Chitauri weaponry. Overhead, his soldiers zipped through the sky on their war-skiffs, while on the ground, infantry surrounded him, a hilariously ineffective protective shield since Thanos towered over the Chitauri by half a meter, resplendent in his blue-and-gold battle armor.
Bodies—burned, bloodied—littered what was left of a street. A brace of Chitauri dragged the corpses out of the way as Thanos and his retinue passed. Along both sides of the road, his troops stood at attention. In the distance was a massive arch, beautiful and resplendent in its design. He was pleased it had survived the war. Beauty had its place in the universe and should always be left unsullied when possible.
The smell of blood was in the air. Along with burned flesh. And terror, which had its own peculiar odor, the stench of overactive adrenal glands.
The Zehoberei people were green-skinned, tall, and lean. Their bodies stacked as well and as easily as any others.
Behind a planked barricade, a woman huddled in fear with a child. Her daughter, he could tell. As the Chitauri encircled them, something amazing happened, something that instilled in Thanos a gratitude that he’d witnessed it:
The girl—acting on an instinct Thanos had never beheld before—moved and interposed herself between her mother and the Chitauri.
In that moment of shock and amazement, Thanos almost missed the opportunity to act. At the last possible instant, he ordered the Chitauri to stand down temporarily.
A child. Sacrificing herself for her mother. It was supposed to be the other way around. Thanos’s contempt for the mother was rivaled only by his astonishment in the girl.
There was something about her…. He could not tell. He had no words for it, and this alone almost paralyzed him. She said nothing, merely gazed up at him without fear, without reproach.
“What is your name?” he asked, holding out his hand.
“Gamora,” she said.
And—marvel of marvels—she took his hand.
He could not remember the last time he’d felt the touch of another’s flesh without violent intent. A warmth suffused him.
And he realized: Her mother was about to die. The Chitauri advanced, and Ebony Maw was chattering away in the background. (Maw, so appropriately named, as he never did learn when to shut his mouth.) The Chitauri were like a computer program—they would execute their mission without fail or thought unless deterred.
Thanos swept along Gamora and brought her to the archway, away from the violence about to be perpetrated upon her mother. Still, the girl craned her neck, twisting and turning for a glimpse of her parent.
Even though Gamora’s mother was useless and contemptible, Thanos could not let the girl suffer the sight of her death. To distract her, he reached into a compartment on his armor and withdrew a jetted doubledirk, a small, boxy handle from which sprang two short blades. Proxima Midnight had found it on some primitive world she’d been exploring and had brought it to him as a gift. It was nearly useless in any sort of real combat, but he carried it with him. As a reminder.
Not of Midnight’s generosity. But of something else.
“Look,” he told Gamora, popping out both blades. “Perfectly balanced, as all things should be.” He held it out to her on one finger, the weapon poised and stable.
She turned to watch him and the blade, her eyes widening at the sight of it. He took her small hand and balanced the doubledirk on her finger. It wobbled for a moment, but steadied.
“See?” he told her. “You have it already.”
She smiled, pleased with herself.
In the background, the Chitauri murdered her mother, but Gamora didn’t notice.
CHAPTER XXXIV
ABOARD SANCTUARY, THANOS GAZED AT A HOLOGRAM OF Gamora as she slept in a secure room not far from his own. Cha burst in without signaling, as he often did, an affront that usually annoyed Thanos at the very least. But not today. Today, he cared only for the girl, still asleep, and what would come next.
“What are you doing?” Cha demanded. “Genocide isn’t enough—you’re a… a kidnapper now?”
“You climb the rungs on the ladder of sin in an odd order, Cha Rhaigor.” Thanos did not look up from the hologram. He wanted to observe the moment she awoke.
“There is killing people as quickly and cleanly as possible, and then there is abducting them and… and—What are your plans?”
Thanos sighed. Cha had a tendency to forget to whom he spoke. Their long friendship accorded him a measure of respect and a tolerance for overstepping his boundaries. And Thanos was genuinely grateful for the endless hours of work Cha had dedicated to the cause of saving lives. But he was tiring of Cha’s liberties. So long as he spoke so in private, that was one thing. If he dared to challenge Thanos before the Other…
Or the girl…
“She ignored every survival instinct in her body,” Thanos said, his voice reverent, his eyes still locked on her tiny, slumbering form. “The mother cowered when she should have fought, leaving her daughter to act as a living shield. And against all odds, against every possible shred of logic and reason, Gamora did exactly that. Even when faced with an army and a clearly superior opponent. You can’t invent that, Cha. You can’t manufacture that kind of… heart.”
“Will you turn and look at me, at least?” Cha asked.
“No. I’m watching my… my child.”
Cha stepped around Thanos. He didn’t dare interfere with the hologram, but he stood just to its left, hovering at the edge of Thanos’s vision. “She’s not your child, Thanos. She had parents.”
“She’s an orphan. I’m adopting her. It’s quite simple.”
“May I ask why?” Cha asked, exasperated.
Thanos sighed. He didn’t feel like explaining himself—to Cha or to anyone else.
He had an army. A disciplined, lethal, obedient army. At his word, he could lay siege to entire worlds, obliterate armies, massacre whole species into extinction.
But it was always at his order. He had to be the one in command. Of everything. At all times. The Chitauri could hardly think for themselves. They couldn’t plot or plan or strategize. And Cha, while capable, was no tactical thinker. He kept the ships running and the supply lines stocked and humming, but he couldn’t prosecute a war. He had no stomach for the necessary brutality of it and no mind for the planning of it. Even Ebony Maw and the others fell victim to their own sycophancy and awe; they could not plan on a global scale.
But this girl… This raw, untapped potential… Oh, the things he could teach her to do!
“Do you really want to be a father?” Cha asked gently.
“I cannot live forever. If I die with my great work undone—and the odds are that I will—then someone needs to carry on in my name.”
“Why her? There are the others, like Ebony Maw….”
“They came to me late in life. She is still a child. I can mold her, recast her in my image. We laid waste to Zehoberei. We took the only thing from that planet worth taking. She is the v
ery best of them, and that should be preserved. We will raise her. Teach her to lead our armies. We have the finest army in the galaxy, perhaps the universe. We will make her its head.”
“The Chitauri don’t know how to teach!” Cha protested. “They have a hive mind! They learn instantly from one another, so they’ve never had to develop any method for education.”
“Then I will teach her myself.” He grinned. “Look, Cha; she’s awake.”
They sat across from each other at a table in Thanos’s personal chambers. He’d had the table brought in and set up by two Chitauri, since he usually ate his meals on the bridge, in the commander’s chair. It felt strange to sit at a table, to have another person sitting across from him.
Her fear and uncertainty came off her in waves.
He let her eat. She was ravenous, and devoured everything put before her.
“Are you going to kill me?” she asked eventually.
“No!” He was surprised to hear the horror in his voice; until that very moment, he hadn’t realized how invested he was in her. “I saved your life. I have no intention of ending it.”
She considered this for long, silent moments, until finally saying, “You spared my life. There’s a difference.”
He grinned. Such mental dexterity in one so young… He’d chosen her wisely.
“I’m pleased that you’re so well-spoken. It betokens an orderly mind. You’re mature and intelligent beyond your years.”
“Why did you do it?” Gamora asked. “Did they really have to die?”
He nodded sadly. “I wish it were not so. I truly do. But the universe is out of balance, my dear Gamora. Were it not so, I would be happy on some backwater world in a forgettable part of the galaxy. Doing something simple and durable. Perhaps farming. But I have a greater responsibility, one I cannot shirk.”
Her eyes darted back and forth as she digested what he’d said. “What do you mean?”