Phase One: Marvel's The Avengers Read online

  And best of all, they would begin their conquest using Tony Stark’s Arc Reactor in his magnificent new tower. Selvig looked out over the city of New York from the top of Stark Tower. By the end of the day, he thought, the world would be utterly transformed.

  CHAPTER 25

  If they were going after Loki, Steve knew they would need all hands on deck. He got dressed and headed down to the holding cell where Barton was recovering. At least Steve hoped he was recovering. He knew Natasha was there, and when he stuck his head in the door, he didn’t bother with small talk. “Time to go,” he said.

  “Go where?” Natasha asked.

  “Tell you on the way,” Steve said. “Can you fly one of those jets?” Then he remembered that she’d been at the controls in Stuttgart. At the same time, he noticed that Barton wasn’t in his bed. But before he had a chance to react, Barton walked into the room.

  “I can,” Barton said.

  Steve glanced at Natasha, who gave him a subtle nod. Okay then, he thought. Barton’s back with us. He had some questions, but this wasn’t the time to ask them. It could all be sorted out later. If there was a later.

  “Okay. Got a suit?” Steve asked.

  Barton nodded.

  “Then suit up.”

  An hour later, they were ready. Captain America, Hawkeye, and the Black Widow strode into a Quinjet, startling the S.H.I.E.L.D. tech doing maintenance. “I’m sorry, you guys aren’t supposed to—”

  “Son,” Captain America said, “just don’t.”

  Five minutes later, they were in the air.

  Maria Hill needed to get something off her chest. She knew Fury had his own way of doing things, and usually that worked. But she didn’t like being kept in the dark about operational planning. “Sir,” she said, approaching him at his command station on the Helicarrier bridge.

  “Agent Hill.”

  She stood next to him, and both of them looked out through the bridge windows. “Those cards. They were in Coulson’s locker, not his pocket.”

  Fury nodded. “They needed the push.”

  “We have an unauthorized departure from base,” a voice said over the intercom. At the same time, they saw a Quinjet launch, curving away to the north.

  Toward New York City.

  “They found it,” Fury commented. “Get our communications back up, whatever you have to do. I want eyes on everything.”

  Maria Hill nodded. Fury had given her all the explanation she was going to get. “Yes, sir.”

  Tony Stark streaked over New York City, moving as fast as he could given the damage the Iron Man suit had suffered in the turbines. He sure wasn’t at a 100 percent… but whatever he had would have to be good enough. “Sir, I’ve turned off the Arc Reactor, but the device is already self-sustaining,” Jarvis said as Tony got close to Stark Tower. His home. His monument.

  Now on the top floor stood a machine, perhaps eight feet tall. It was a rough cylinder with a focusing lens on the top, and below that, a chamber for containing the energies of the Tesseract. Dr. Erik Selvig stood watching it and also tracking data on a computer screen.

  “Shut it down, Dr. Selvig,” Tony said. He hovered near the machine, hoping Selvig wouldn’t notice the way his thrusters were hiccupping. He was having trouble maintaining consistent thrust.

  “It’s too late!” Selvig cried. “She can’t be stopped now! She wants to show us something! A new universe.”

  “Okay,” Tony said. Clearly Selvig was beyond reason.

  Tony blasted the machine with his repulsors, but it was surrounded by a force field of some kind. The reflected energy knocked him back and also sent Selvig and his computer flying across the rooftop.

  “The barrier is pure energy,” Jarvis said. “It’s unbreakable.”

  “Yeah, I got that,” Tony said. “Plan B.” He saw Loki on the walkway that led from the landing pad into the penthouse.

  “Sir, the Mark Seven is not ready for deployment,” Jarvis said.

  “Then skip the bells and whistles,” Tony said. “We’re on the clock.” He sure couldn’t take on Loki and the Chitauri, whatever they were, in the suit he was wearing. It was barely hanging together.

  He landed and walked down the curving pathway toward Loki as the automated disassembly machinery took off his suit. Loki turned and went inside to meet him. Tony entered on the balcony level of the penthouse. From below, just inside the patio door, Loki greeted him. “Please tell me you’re going to appeal to my humanity.”

  Tony came down the stairs and paused. “Uh, actually I’m planning to threaten you.”

  “You should have left your armor on for that,” Loki said.

  “Yeah, it’s seen a bit of mileage, and you’ve got the Glow Stick of Destiny,” Tony said with a shrug. He opened a decanter and held it up. “Would you like a drink?”

  “Stalling me won’t change anything,” Loki said.

  “No, no, no threatening!” Tony said. “No drink? You sure? I’m having one.”

  He poured himself a glass and swirled it before taking a small sip. Loki watched, cautious and intrigued, trying to see what Tony was planning.

  “The Chitauri are coming,” he said. “Nothing will change that. What have I to fear?”

  “The Avengers,” Tony said. He kept his tone chatty, casual, like they were talking about baseball scores or the weather. “That’s what we call ourselves; we’re sort of like a team. ‘Earth’s Mightiest Heroes’ type of thing.”

  While he stoppered the decanter, he also slipped a bracelet over his wrist. Loki was looking the other way. The bracelet was a remote activator for the Mark 7 armor Jarvis was so worried about. Tony hoped he’d have a chance to use it… but with Loki, you never knew when things were going to go wrong.

  “The Avengers,” Loki said. “Yes, I’ve met them.” His tone of voice left no doubt that he was unimpressed.

  “Yeah, takes us a while to get any traction, I’ll give you that one,” Tony said. “But let’s do a head count here. Your brother the demigod, a Super-Soldier, a living legend who kind of lives up to the legend, a man with breathtaking anger-management issues, a couple of master assassins… and you, big fella, you’ve managed to piss off every single one of them.”

  “That was the plan,” Loki said with a grin.

  “Not a great plan,” Tony said. “When they come, and they will—”

  Loki interrupted him. “I have an army.”

  “We have a Hulk,” Tony said.

  “I thought the beast had wandered off,” Loki said, mocking him. And it was true that Tony had no idea where Bruce was. He was going on a wing and a prayer here, trusting that Bruce would show up again when they needed him.

  “You’re missing the point!” he said, and his tone got sharper. “There’s no throne, there is no version of this where you come out on top. Maybe your army comes and maybe it’s too much for us… but it’s all on you. Because if we can’t protect the Earth, you can be sure we’ll avenge it.”

  He had stepped up to Loki, and now Loki closed the distance between them a little more. He had listened to Tony with a smile on his face, humoring him. Now he said, “How will your friends have time for me, when they’re so busy fighting you?”

  With those last words, he tapped Tony on the chest with his scepter, just has he had Hawkeye and Dr. Selvig. Nothing happened. The Arc Reactor in Tony’s chest countered the scepter’s effect.

  Loki tried it again. “This usually works.…”

  “Well,” Tony said, “best-laid plans. You know the saying.”

  Suddenly angry, Loki flung Tony to the floor. “Jarvis,” Tony said. “Anytime now.”

  Loki wrapped a hand around Tony’s throat and lifted him to his feet. “You will all fall before me,” he hissed.

  “Deploy,” Tony said. “Deploy!”

  Lifting Tony into the air, Loki threw him through the window and over the balcony railing. Tony fell, watching the street rush up at him with incredible speed. If Jarvis was right and the Mark 7 wasn�
��t ready, his part in the fight would be over really soon.

  But you could never count Tony Stark out. The bracelet on his wrist chirped, and the Mark 7 armor burst out of a closet, rocketing down after Tony. Keyed to the bracelet’s homing signal, it reached him in midair. The armor opened up and built itself around his body while Tony fell. He engaged its thrusters less than fifty feet above the ground, and with a big grin on his face, Tony rocketed back up to have a little word with Loki.

  Nobody threw him off his own roof.

  He got to the balcony and saw a very surprised Loki. “There’s one other person I forgot to mention,” Tony said. “His name is Phil.”

  And he blew Loki across the room with a repulsor blast.

  CHAPTER 26

  Above Tony Stark and Loki, on the rooftop, the Tesseract activated. A beam of blue energy pierced the sky—literally. It opened a hole fifty thousand feet above New York. On the other side of that hole was space… and the waiting Chitauri. They began to pour through, riding small machines like flying motorcycles. There were dozens of them at first, then hundreds, racing down toward the city that lay defenseless below.

  Or at least, Tony thought, the Chitauri thought it was defenseless. He flew up to meet them. Somewhere—he hoped not too far away—the rest of the team was coming. It sure was going to be a long day if he had to take on the entire Chitauri invading force by himself, in a suit that had never even been tested in the field.

  As fast as he could, Tony blasted the Chitauri out of the air with repulsors and shoulder-mounted minimissiles. There were too many of them! They got past him and flew low over the streets of New York, shooting wildly and destroying anything in their path.

  The Battle of New York had begun.

  Newly transformed into his Asgardian armor and helmet, Loki watched. At last, his conquest was beginning.

  Then, for the second time in a few minutes, he was unpleasantly surprised by the appearance of someone he had thought dead.

  Thor dropped out of the sky to land on Tony’s balcony. “Loki!” he roared. “Turn off the Tesseract or I’ll destroy it!”

  “You can’t!” Loki cried out, riding a wave of exhilaration at seeing his army finally in action. “There is no stopping it. There is only… the war!”

  “So be it,” Thor growled.

  Loki jumped down from the rooftop and slashed at Thor with the scepter. Thor blocked it and struck back with Mjolnir. They battled with the fury that only brothers at war can feel, their combat tearing pieces away from the top of Stark Tower to fall onto the roofs of shorter buildings nearby.

  Around them, the Chitauri army marauded through the streets. New York was rapidly falling into chaos.

  The Quinjet was coming in hot with Barton at the controls and Natasha monitoring the situation… which didn’t look so good. She saw Iron Man zigzagging through the city and broke radio silence to let him know they were close. “Stark, we’re on your three, headed northeast,” Natasha said.

  “What, did you stop for drive-through? Swing up Park Avenue, I’m going to lay them out for you.” A large group of Chitauri were right on Tony’s tail. He angled north and then banked back around. The Chitauri followed, and the Quinjet caught them from the side, shooting many of them down with its belly-mounted cannon.

  “Sir, we have more incoming,” Jarvis said.

  “Fine. Let’s keep ’em occupied,” Tony said.

  The Quinjet swung by Stark Tower, still firing as the Chitauri air bikes came within range. Hawkeye saw Thor and Loki fighting. He gestured to the Black Widow. “Nat?”

  “I see them.”

  Hawkeye brought the Quinjet around and slowed it to a near hover so she could target Loki—but before the Quinjet’s gun locked in, Loki got off a bolt of energy from his scepter. It exploded in the Quinjet’s left wing engine, sending the jet into a violent downward spiral. Only Hawkeye’s superb piloting skills kept them from crashing straight down and taking most of a building with them. As it was, they landed hard in a street-side plaza a few blocks from Stark Tower. Quickly, they unbuckled and got out of the Quinjet, with Captain America in the lead. “We need to get back up there,” he said.

  They ran toward Stark Tower as the Chitauri flashed overhead, strafing the streets. Tony was shooting them down as fast as he could, but there were still plenty left. And then a groaning noise came from the hole in the sky, and they looked up to see a giant creature coming through from Chitauri space.

  It was hundreds of feet long, with a gaping mouth and a tail that undulated up and down as it seemed to swim through the air. It had no wings. It had fins, and bony spikes sticking up from its back. It was like a giant skeletal fish that could fly, and it bore down on New York. As it dove between the skyscrapers of Midtown, portals in its sides opened, and Chitauri foot soldiers leaped out, hanging onto the sides of buildings and breaking in through the windows.

  “Stark, are you seeing this?” Cap radioed.

  “Seeing. Still working on believing,” Tony answered. He was hot on the Leviathan’s tail, but he had no idea how to fight something that big. A flick of its armored body destroyed whole floors of buildings. “Where’s Banner? Has he shown up yet?”

  “Banner?” Cap echoed.

  “Just keep me posted,” Tony said. They were going to need Bruce before this was all over. He flew in parallel with the Leviathan, wondering what to do next. “Jarvis, find me a soft spot,” he said. Jarvis got to work.

  But while he did that, Tony was going to have to distract the monster before it wrecked the city all by itself.

  He made a pass in front of the Leviathan and speckled its head with minimissiles. They didn’t hurt it, but it turned to come after him with a roar that shook bricks loose from nearby storefronts. “Well, we got its attention. What was step two?” he wondered aloud as he accelerated away.

  CHAPTER 27

  Look at this!” Thor shouted, holding Loki and forcing him to gaze out over the destruction in the city. “You think this madness will end with your rule?”

  “It’s too late,” Loki said. Thor thought he was beginning to understand what he had done. “It’s too late to stop it.”

  “No,” Thor said. “We can. Together.”

  Loki looked him in the eye… and then betrayed Thor again, stabbing him in the side with a knife hidden in his sleeve. Thor dropped to the ground, clutching the wound. “Sentiment,” Loki said mockingly.

  Enraged, Thor got to his feet and pounded Loki through the window. Then he lifted him up and slammed him to the stone balcony. He was beyond talking now, and Loki knew he was in trouble. He looked to his scepter, but it was out of reach, so he rolled to the edge of the balcony and let himself fall.

  Thor rushed to the edge and looked down. Loki fell… and landed on a passing Chitauri flying machine. Piloting it, he sped away, leaving Thor alone on top of Stark Tower.

  On a bridge, Cap huddled behind a destroyed car with the Black Widow and Hawkeye. “Lots of civilians trapped up there,” Hawkeye said, indicating the nearby buildings. A flight of Chitauri went over, and Cap noticed something different about one of them.

  “Loki,” he said. He was shooting at the civilians fleeing through the streets. “They’re fish in a barrel down there.”

  Chitauri foot soldiers dropped onto the bridge and advanced toward them. “We’re good,” Natasha said. “Go.”

  “You think you can hold them off?” Steve asked.

  Hawkeye glanced over his shoulder as he nocked an arrow. “Captain, it would be my genuine pleasure.”

  They swung into action. Cap sprinted down the street in pursuit of Loki while Hawkeye and the Black Widow started taking down the Chitauri and freeing trapped civilians. On the street level, Cap dodged explosions. “Just like Budapest all over again,” Natasha said as she shot down a pair of Chitauri trying to get behind them.

  “You and I remember Budapest very differently,” Barton said.

  Steve got to the police lines. They were firing at the Chitauri
and holding their ground, but they were clearly overwhelmed. He heard one of them say it would be an hour before the military could arrive. “Do they know what’s going on here?” a second cop said.

  The first cop looked up at the Leviathan. “Do we?”

  Steve vaulted over a line of destroyed vehicles and landed on top of a taxi. The police pointed their guns at him, but he ignored that. “You need men in these buildings. There are people inside, and they’re going to be running right into the line of fire. You take them to the basements, or through the subway. You keep them off the streets. I need a perimeter as far back as Thirty-Ninth.”

  The sergeant looked at him like he’d just escaped from the loony bin. “Why the hell should I take orders from you?”

  Steve didn’t have time to argue about it, because at that moment, the Chitauri attacked. Their flyers swooped low and dropped ground troops close to the police line. Steve blocked a blast with his shield and in the same motion batted away the closest Chitauri. He pivoted and brought the shield up to parry a spear thrust from another Chitauri, knocking it down with a single punch and then grabbing its spear. He slashed a third Chitauri down with the weapon, and without breaking stride, lunged forward to grapple with a fourth and beat it into submission before throwing it back off the roof of the taxi.

  Without another word to Steve, the police sergeant started calling orders into his radio. “I need men in those buildings,” he said, pointing so all his officers could see. “Lead the people down and away from the streets. We’re going to set up a perimeter all the way down Thirty-Ninth Street.”

  Steve didn’t stop to gloat. There was a war to win.