Phase One: Marvel's The Avengers Read online

  “Sound a general call,” Fury said. “I want every living soul not working rescue looking for that briefcase.”

  “Roger that,” she said.

  “Coulson, get back to base. This is a Level Seven,” Fury said. He’d never had to say that before, but there was no sense shying away from the truth. Level 7 was S.H.I.E.L.D.’s highest alert status. “As of right now, we are at war.”

  “What do we do?” Coulson asked after a pause.

  Fury knew there was only one answer.

  CHAPTER 3

  In an abandoned factory next to a rail line in Moscow, Natasha Romanoff sat handcuffed to a chair. In front of her stood the general she’d been assigned to spy on, along with two of his goons. The general stepped up to her and slapped her in the face.

  “This is not how I wanted this evening to go,” the general said.

  Black Widow said nothing. She wasn’t afraid. Even if no one on earth knew she was here, even if there was a thirty-foot drop to a concrete floor right behind her, she trusted herself to be able to handle it.

  “I know how you wanted this evening to go,” she answered in Russian. “Believe me, this is better.”

  “Who are you working for?” He reeled off some names of his rivals. “Lermontov? Does he think we need to go through him to move goods?”

  One of the goons leaned her chair back over the drop. She gasped. “I… I thought General Solohob was in charge of the export business,” she said.

  The general laughed. “Solohob? A bagman, a front. Your outdated information betrays you. The famous Black Widow, and she turns out to be simply another pretty face.”

  Natasha pouted at him. “You really think I’m pretty?”

  The general smirked and took a few steps away from her, to a table covered with tools. Natasha knew what those were for. She had no intention of letting the general get anywhere near her with them, but she needed him to keep talking. “Tell Lermontov we don’t need him to move the tanks. Tell him he is out. Well…” He picked up a torture instrument from the table. Switching to English, he said, “You may have to write it down.”

  A phone rang.

  One of the goons answered in Russian: “Da?”

  Looking puzzled, he handed the phone to the general. “It’s for you.”

  “You listen carefully,” the general growled into the phone—but he was cut off.

  Even from her distance, Natasha could hear Agent Coulson’s voice. She had extraordinary hearing, part of her… unusual training. “You’re at 1-14 Silensky Plaza, third floor,” Coulson said, getting right down to business. “We have an F-22 exactly eight miles out. Put the woman on the phone or I will blow up the block before you can make the lobby.”

  The general’s expression changed. Before he had been confident, cocky; now he was surprised that someone had found him… and scared at the thought of a fighter jet with a missile aimed at him.

  He put the phone on Natasha’s shoulder. Still handcuffed, she pinned it to the side of her head. “We need you to come in,” Coulson said.

  “Are you kidding? I’m working.”

  “This takes precedence.”

  “I’m in the middle of an interrogation. This moron is giving me everything.”

  The general looked puzzled. “I not… giving everything,” he said, looking to his goons. They shrugged.

  “Look, you can’t pull me out of this right now.”

  “Natasha, Barton’s been compromised.”

  The words sent a chill down Natasha’s spine. Not Clint…

  She kept her face calm. “Let me put you on hold,” she said.

  The general reached to take the phone. As he got within range, she jabbed a heel into his knee. With a grunt of pain, he buckled forward, and she head-butted him, making sure he stayed down. Still with the chair on her back and with her hands cuffed behind her, she took out the goons with a quick series of spinning kicks. She even got to use the chair as a weapon, using its legs to smash the second goon’s foot and then jumping up in the air to land backward on him, smashing the chair to pieces and knocking him out. The first goon was just getting up after she’d laid him out, and she made sure he stayed down before strolling over to the general. He looked stunned and groggy, but things were about to get worse for him. She wrapped a length of chain around his legs and shoved him off the edge of the drop to the main factory floor. He fell and hung there fifteen feet above the ground. His rivals would find him sooner or later, Natasha thought.

  Then she went back to the phone. “Where’s Barton now?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “But he’s alive,” she said, trying to make it a statement instead of a question.

  “We think so. I’ll brief you on everything when you get back. But first you need to talk to the big guy.”

  “Coulson, you know that Stark trusts me about as far as he can throw me,” she said.

  “Oh, I’ve got Stark,” Coulson said. “You’ve got the big guy.”

  Oh, Natasha thought. That big guy. She said something in Russian. It wasn’t polite.

  CHAPTER 4

  Bruce Banner had gotten pretty good at running away and hiding. Once he’d tried it in Brazil and stayed gone for years. Then he’d been forced to come back, when General Ross tried to make him into a weapon. Bruce carried gamma radiation in his blood, and it gave him the power and the curse of changing into the unstoppable green Hulk whenever he lost control of his emotions. The farther he stayed away from the army, and from S.H.I.E.L.D., the more likely he could live a normal life.

  Now he was working with the poorest of the poor in a shantytown on the outskirts of Calcutta. The need here was endless, and doctors were few and far between. Bruce did what he could to combat the spread of disease—and also to atone for the damage he’d done when he changed into the Hulk. He had come a long way since then, but he knew the monster always lurked within him, and he had to do whatever was necessary to keep it from taking control. That’s what drove him, a desire to be a force for good in the world, despite the Hulk always trying to get out.

  Late one night, he was ministering to a sick family, attempting to keep their fevers down without access to advanced medicine, when he heard a commotion at the door. “There is sickness here! Go!” the family’s mother said.

  Bruce looked and saw a small girl at the door. “You’re a doctor?” She spoke English, but repeated the question in Hindi. “My father’s sick, and he’s not waking up! He has a fever, and he’s moaning! But his eyes won’t open!”

  “Slow down,” Bruce said in Hindi. He’d gotten pretty good at picking up languages in his travels.

  “My father,” she said, begging.

  “Like them?” he asked, pointing at the sick children on the bed. They coughed and stirred in their fever.

  The little girl just held out one hand with money in it, doubtless everything her family could raise. “Please,” she said.

  Bruce went with her, ducking away when a jeep full of soldiers passed. She led him into another house, then climbed through a window inside it and disappeared. He stopped on the porch, looking in through the open windows. The house was empty.

  A prank? A trap of some kind? Bruce looked around, thinking out loud. “Should have gotten paid up front, Banner,” he said.

  Then he heard a voice from the shadows where he had just looked. “You know, for a man who’s supposed to be avoiding stress, you picked quite a place to settle.”

  Bruce turned and saw a young woman coming out of the house. She didn’t look dressed for a fight. She wore a black dress with a shawl over it and carried no visible weapons.

  Bruce didn’t know what she wanted, but he figured it wasn’t good. She wouldn’t have decoyed him all the way out here to the edge of town just to say hello. Anyway, he figured he might as well continue the conversation while he found out. “Avoiding stress isn’t the secret,” he said.

  “Then what is it? Yoga?”

  He didn’t bother to answer that. “You
brought me to the edge of the city,” he said. “Smart. I assume the whole place is surrounded?”

  “Just you and me.”

  “And your actress buddy? Is she a spy, too? They start that young?”

  She looked him dead in the eye and said, “I did.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Natasha Romanoff.”

  “Are you here to kill me, Miss Romanoff? Because that’s not going to work out for everyone.”

  “No, of course not. I’m here on behalf of S.H.I.E.L.D.”

  “S.H.I.E.L.D.” Bruce sighed. Some things you just couldn’t outrun, he thought. “How did they find me?”

  “We never lost you, Doctor. We just kept our distance. Even helped keep some other interested parties off your scent.”

  “Why?”

  “Nick Fury seems to trust you. But now we need you to come in.”

  “What if I say no?”

  “I’ll persuade you.”

  “And what if the other guy says no?’

  “You’ve been more than a year without an incident,” she said. “I don’t think you want to break that streak.”

  “Well, I don’t get what I want every time,” Bruce said, trying not to sound bitter.

  Agent Romanoff got more businesslike and direct. “Doctor, we’re facing a potential global catastrophe,” she said.

  “Well, those I actively try to avoid.”

  She pulled up an image on her phone and put it down on a low table. “This is the Tesseract. It has the potential energy to wipe out the planet.”

  He came to look at the image. “What does Fury want me to do—swallow it?”

  “He wants you to find it. It’s been taken. It emits a gamma signature that’s too weak for us to trace. There’s no one that knows gamma radiation like you do.”

  Bruce almost thought she must be joking with him. Gamma radiation had destroyed his life, taken away everything he’d ever had… and now they wanted to exploit how much he knew about it?

  “If there was, that’s where I’d be,” Romanoff added.

  “So Fury isn’t after the monster,” Bruce said. He wanted to be sure what he was getting into.

  “Not that he’s told me.”

  “And he tells you everything?”

  “Talk to Fury. He needs you on this.”

  “He’s going to put me in a cage?”

  “No one’s going to put you in a—”

  “Stop lying to me!” he roared, slamming his hands on the table. In an eyeblink, she was up and across the room, a gun leveled at Bruce’s head.

  He felt a little bad when he saw how much he’d terrified her. S.H.I.E.L.D. agents didn’t scare easily, but if she’d read Bruce’s file, she would have known what he could do. No wonder she was scared. Bruce backed off and gave her a smile. “I’m sorry. That was mean. I just wanted to see what you’d do.” What he really wanted was to cut through the song and dance, find out what Nick Fury really wanted and decide whether or not he would go along with it. “Why don’t we do this the easy way, where you don’t use that and the other guy doesn’t make a mess,” he said. “Okay? Natasha?”

  She lowered the gun. “Stand down,” she said, apparently to no one. “We’re good here.”

  Outside, Bruce heard the sound of guns being lowered and hammers uncocked. “Just you and me,” he said, quoting Natasha’s words back at her to show he knew she was lying. He knew she wouldn’t have come alone. Bruce Banner was many things, but stupid wasn’t one of them.

  CHAPTER 5

  Nick Fury had called an emergency meeting of the World Security Council. They needed to know what had happened with the Tesseract, and they needed to know what he planned to do about it. He brought up holographic images of all the WSC members, with their faces and locations hidden. He did not know who they were, but S.H.I.E.L.D. reported to them. He stood in a small room near the Helicarrier’s bridge and briefed them on the appearance of Loki and the destruction of the S.H.I.E.L.D. base in New Mexico.

  When he was done, they weren’t happy. “You’re out of line here, Director,” one of them said. “You’re dealing with forces you can’t control.”

  “You ever been in a war, Councilor? In a firefight? Did you feel an overabundance of control?”

  “You’re saying that this Asgard has declared war on our planet?”

  “Not Asgard,” Fury corrected him. “Loki.”

  Another councilor stepped in. “He can’t be working alone. What about the other one? His brother.”

  “Our intelligence says Thor’s not a hostile. But he’s worlds away. We can’t depend on him to help, either. It’s up to us.”

  “Which is why you should be focusing on Phase Two,” said the councilor who had spoken first. “It was designed for exactly this.”

  “Phase Two isn’t ready. Our enemy is. We need a response team.”

  “The Avengers Initiative was shut down.”

  “This isn’t about the Avengers.” That wasn’t strictly true, but Nick Fury was no idiot. He wasn’t going to show all his cards to the World Security Council when he didn’t even know who they were.

  “We’ve seen the list,” said a third councilor. “You’re running the world’s greatest covert security network, and you’re going to leave the fate of the human race to a handful of freaks.”

  “I’m not leaving anything to anyone. We need a response team. These people may be isolated, unbalanced even, but I believe with the right push they can be exactly what we need.”

  “You believe?” echoed the third councilor.

  The first added, “War isn’t won by sentiment, Director.”

  “No,” Fury agreed. “It’s won by soldiers.”

  Then he waited to see what they would say. More accurately, he waited for them to say what he had known they would say all along. They did not forbid him from going forward, but Fury knew he couldn’t count on them for support, either. He was on his own.

  That was all right. Usually he preferred it that way. As long as the Council didn’t start going behind his back, he would be fine.

  CHAPTER 6

  Steve Rogers pounded and pounded on the punching bag that hung from the gym’s ceiling. He came here when all else failed—when he was out of options for how to deal with all the information he’d been having difficulty processing. When he had been Captain America, fighting Hydra in Europe during World War II, he’d had a sense of purpose. Now, after seventy years on ice, he was completely adrift. S.H.I.E.L.D. kept him on a short leash, helping him to get used to his sudden appearance in the year 2012. But it didn’t always work, and sometimes the only way Steve could stop himself from going crazy was to get into the gym and hit the bag.

  He thought of his fellow soldiers and hit the bag. He thought of Peggy Carter and slammed it again. He thought of Howard Stark, of progress, advancement, of the seventy years of history he’d not been a part of, and he punched and punched: harder and harder, faster and more furious.

  He remembered the battle aboard the Red Skull’s plane. Like it was yesterday, he saw the energies of the cube open a hole in space and suck the Red Skull through. He remembered the moment when he knew he wouldn’t be able to stop the Hydra superweapons from destroying New York City… and he knew he’d have to crash the plane. He knew he would have to sacrifice himself to save millions. He remembered saying good-bye to Peggy.…

  Then he remembered waking up, in this strange future New York where he was a man out of time. He didn’t belong here, in present day. Everyone he knew was gone or too old to remember him. Peggy, Bucky… everyone. But he was still here, and all he could do was try to sort things out because Steve Rogers was Captain America. People were counting on him.

  His punches built to a rage, and a final haymaker tore the heavy bag loose from its moorings and knocked it across the gym. It lay there spilling sand on the floor.

  Steve was barely breathing hard. He wasn’t done. He went and picked up another bag. He had a row of them ready for when he got in t
hese moods, and all he wanted to do was hit something.

  As he hung the new bag from the chain, he heard Director Fury’s voice. “Trouble sleeping?”

  “I slept for seventy years, sir,” Steve said. He started a new series of punches, trying to find a nice easy rhythm. “I think I’ve had my fill.”

  “Then you should be out celebrating. Seeing the world,” Fury said.

  Steve stopped. He could tell Fury wanted to talk to him about something, so he started stripping the workout tape from his fists. “When I went under, the world was at war,” he said. “I wake up, they say we won. They didn’t say what we lost.”

  Fury nodded. He and Steve had talked about this before. He knew Steve was having trouble getting used to his new environment. “We’ve made some mistakes along the way. Some very recently.”

  Steve cut to the chase. “Are you here with a mission, sir?”

  “I am.”

  “Trying to get me back in the world?”

  “Trying to save it,” Fury said. He handed Steve a dossier. Steve opened it and on the first page saw a picture of the Red Skull’s cube under the heading TESSERACT. “Hydra’s secret weapon,” he said.

  “Howard Stark fished that out of the ocean when he was looking for you,” Fury explained. “He thought what we think. The Tesseract could be the key to unlimited sustainable energy. That’s something the world sorely needs.”

  “Who took it from you?” Steve asked, handing the dossier back. There was nothing in it he needed if he was going to get a briefing from Fury.

  Fury hesitated. “He’s called Loki. He’s… not from around here. There’s a lot we’ll have to bring you up to speed on if you’re in. The world has gotten even stranger than you already know.”

  “At this point, I doubt anything would surprise me.”

  “Ten bucks says you’re wrong. There’s a debriefing packet waiting for you back at your apartment.”

  Steve picked up a heavy bag to take home, but Fury wasn’t quite ready to let him go just yet. “Is there anything you can tell us about the Tesseract that we ought to know now?” he asked.