X-Men and the Avengers: Lost and Found, Page 9

  That being said, he also knew there was only one man on Earth who was the undisputed authority on the effects of gamma radiation in particular: Dr. Robert Bruce Banner.

  The man who was also known as the unstoppable mountain of muscle that a terrified world had named ... the Hulk.

  Cruising majestically 25,000 feet above sea level, the S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier was the largest moving object capable of soaring over the Earth. A huge mobile command base for the world's premiere intelligence organization, the Helicarrier looked big enough to house a couple of Boeing 747s and still have room left over for a decent-sized shopping mall. Smaller aircraft buzzed and hovered around the immense vessel like jet fighters around a Navy aircraft carrier, landing and departing constantly while the Helicarrier remained aloft twenty-four hours a day, keeping watch over the world it was built to protect. Many noted meteorologists maintained that the Helicarrier was so colossal, and its energy output so vast, that it had a direct effect on the weather conditions in whatever airspace it was currently occupying. This was probably true; certainly, it was casting a massive shadow on portions of eastern Montana at this very moment.

  Aboard the Helicarrier, in the office of the Executive Director, Nicholas Fury was not having a good day.

  “Blast it, Val!” he swore, pounding his fist on his desk. “How hard is it to find a UFO? It’s been hours since we first tracked that thing.” He gulped down a steaming cup of black coffee—his fifth that day—then took a long drag on the stump of a cigar clenched between his teeth. Technically, smoking was forbidden anywhere on the Helicarrier, but the only person who had ever had the nerve to point that out to Nick Fury quickly lived to regret it. Last anyone had heard, he was still serving extended duty in Antarctica.

  If I can survive World War II and a coupla hundred Hydra assassins, Fury thought, as the smoke warmed his lungs, a little caffeine and tobacco ain’t about to kill me.

  ‘ ‘The Air Force, NASA, and our own units are searching for the mystery ship at this very moment,” a tall, dark-haired woman reminded him, her voice holding a distinct European accent. Like Fury, the Countess Valentina Allegro de Fontaine wore the standard blue jumpsuit worn by any S.H.I.E.L.D. field agent, complete with shoulder holster, handgun, plasma beam projector, and other lethal accessories. Even though they were currently occupying the nerve center of the world’s most formidable flying fortress, years of experience had taught both Fury and his second-in-command to be ready for anything, anytime, and anywhere. “Even the cosmonauts on Mir are keeping an eye out for this elusive UFO.”

  “Right!” Fury barked. The empty socket behind his trademark black eyepatch itched something terrible, like it always did when trouble was brewing, but he refused to scratch out of sheer cussedness. “Like I’d trust the Russkies to share classified intel out of the goodness of their hearts.”

  “The Cold War is over, Nick,” Val said, sounding faintly amused by her boss’s intransigent attitude. Only a white streak rising up through the lofty pile of jet-black hair above her unwrinkled brow indicated that the Countess had been in the spy game almost as long as Fury.

  “Yeah, that’s what they want us to think,” Fury replied, exhaling an acrid cloud of smoke into the pressurized atmosphere of the immense airship. A half-day’s growth of stubble carpeted his jaw. “You and I both know better.”

  Deep down, though, he knew Val had a point. This 105

  didn't feel like a Russian operation. Red or otherwise, which was one reason he had brought Cap and the Avengers into the loop. Ordinarily, Fury preferred to handle matters of international security without relying on the Avengers, the Fantastic Four, or any other super-powered civilians, thank you very much, but if these UFO sightings were the first glimmerings of another extraterrestrial offensive, then the Avengers might be the only people equipped to handle the threat. Good as S.H.I.E.L.D.’s hardware was—the best on Earth, probably—he knew dam well that it didn't stack up against the futuristic super-science of Galactus or the Celestials.

  Blasted aliens, he fumed. It’s not like there weren’t enough cockamamie menaces on Earth already. Faxes blanketed the top of his stainless steel desk, containing updates and status reports from field agents and regional directors all over the world, bringing him up to speed on any number of brewing situations that might soon require immediate intervention by S.H.I.E.L.D. He quickly sorted through the documents, scanning them for the pertinent details. An underground A.I.M. laboratory somewhere south of Seattle, rumored to be the site of unsanctioned time travel experiments. A reported alliance between two Hydra splinter groups, in Berlin and Stockholm, respectively. Rumors of industrial espionage at Stark-Fujikawa, including advanced computer technology diverted to the Zodiac crime cartel. Ceasefire violations along the Wak-andan border. Civil unrest in Genosha. New leads pointing toward the possible hidden lairs of Baron Zemo, Modok, Viper, Fenris, the Red Skull, the Yellow Claw, and other regular fixtures on S.H.I.E.L.D.’s Ten Most Wanted List. The usual, in other words.

  All in a day’s work, he thought sourly.

  And now, on top of everything else, an Unknown Flying Object that persisted in staying Unknown despite the best efforts of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s considerable resources, and up to who knew what. Fury ground out the remains of his stogie in the adamantium ashtray on his desk, rubbing the ashes into a scorched photo of Baron Wolfgang Von Strucker, and wished he could dispose of the nagging problem of the mystery ship as easily.

  “Keep watchin’ the blasted skies,” he muttered under his breath. “Why can’t these everlovin’ ET types stick to their own backyards?”

  It didn’t help his mood any that the Helicarrier was carrying him farther and farther away from the vicinity of the UFO sightings. While security considerations clearly dictated that S.H.I.E.L.D.’s command center be moved away from any potentially hostile aircraft, running away always rubbed Fury the wrong way. There was a reason his office was surprisingly compact, barely large enough for a small meeting; he didn’t want to get too comfortable sitting behind a desk.

  If there’s a nasty brawl ahead, I want to be where the action is, not sitting tight hundreds of miles away.

  As if in answer to his unspoken request, a warning siren suddenly caught both Fury and the Countess by surprise.

  “What the—?” he exclaimed, shooting an inquisitive glance at Val, who didn’t know any more than he did. He slammed down his palm on the intercom switch on his desk, heedless of the faxes that went sliding off the edge of the desk to flutter unnoticed to the floor. “This is Fury,” he snapped, spitting out the words like bullets from an automatic rifle. “What the devil is going on?” “Intruders on Deck Four,” an automated voice reported. “All security forces report to site of breach. Instituting stage-three containment procedures. ...”

  Fury was already away from his desk and out the door, with Val right on his tail, pausing only long enough to stuff a couple of particularly sensitive documents into the shredder. A Colt automatic in his hand, Fury joined a stampede of armed agents rushing to defend the Helicar-rier from the still-unidentified invaders.

  What’s the matter with our security perimeter? he wondered. In theory, the smaller aircraft surrounding the Helicarrier should have intercepted any hostiles before they ever got close enough to board the vast airship itself. Why wasn’t there any warning?

  The shrill alarm blared in his ears. Unwilling to take a chance on the mag-rail elevators during an emergency situation, Fury shoved the Colt back into his shoulder holster and clambered hand-over-hand down a sturdy maintenance ladder, counting off the decks as he descended rapidly toward who knew what.

  Deck Four, he considered as he climbed. That was mostly R&D: state-of-the-art laboratories where S.H.I.E.L.D.’s crack team of scientists and technicians developed everything from new particle-beam weapons to the latest generation of Life Model Decoys. Pretty darn convenient, Fury thought, that the invaders chose that region to stage their incursion. He’d bet his government pension, which he never exp
ected to collect anyway, that they knew exactly what they were looking for.

  Valentina’s steel-toed boots rang against the metal rungs right above Fury’s head. “Nick,” she suggested hesitantly, “maybe you should hang back until we find out what exactly we’re dealing with here.” From the tone of her voice, she knew this idea wasn’t going to fly with

  Fury, but felt obliged to bring it up, anyway. “We can’t afford to lose you.”

  “Not a chance,” he barked gruffly. The day he had to hide behind a battalion of bodyguards, like some president or senator, was the day he’d hang up his eyepatch for good. “Nobody breaks into my HQ without an invite, not without gettin’ a .45-caliber welcome from me.”

  As he neared his destination, Fury could hear the unmistakable sound of battle raging, like a small war had erupted on Deck Four. Gunfire crackled and voices shouted, along with a series of hisses, zaps, and buzzes of a less recognizable nature. Fury smelt both gunpowder and ozone in the air and felt the ladder tremble in his grip. A series of violent shocks shook the Helicarrier, which was swiftly losing altitude, perhaps to cope with the loss of air pressure on the research deck. Judging from the lack of explosive decompression, not to mention the fact that he could still breathe, Fury guessed that the titanic airship’s automatic self-maintenance systems had already sealed whatever gap the enemy boarding party had tom in the hull. He just hoped whoever was flying the Helicarrier right now knew what they were doing. Chances were, Fury’d be too busy fighting off the bad guys to approve any flight plans for a while.

  But what kind of customers was he gunning for? Who in heck had the nerve and the gall to stage a raid on S.H.I.E.L.D. HQ? Dropping from the ladder onto the quaking floor of Deck Four, Fury quickly ran through all the possibilities. Hydra? The Serpent Society? The Mutant Liberation Front? Nothing in any of his daily briefings and status reports had even hinted at an enemy operation of this magnitude.

  Just that blasted UFO, he thought, all his instincts pinning the blame on the mystery ship. In his gut, he knew there had to be a connection. Guess there’s no time like the present to find out who’s come knockin’, he thought, drawing his handgun. The customized blue-steel firearm fit perfectly into his hand.

  “Heads up, everybody!” he hollered to Val and the other agents coming down the ladder behind him. He recognized Lee, Coning, Plummer, and Schwartz—all solid agents. They dropped onto the shaking deck without a single misstep. “Let’s show these trespassers what we think of surprise visits!”

  Rounding a comer into a spacious testing area, over a city block in size, he was prepared to confront anybody from foreign terrorists to alien space monsters. The last people he expected to see fighting a team of hard-pressed S.H.I.E.L.D. operatives were . . . the X-Men?

  Unlike like many of his peers in the CIA and the NSA. Fury had never regarded the notorious mutant team as more dangerous to public safety than any of the other high-profile super-groups proliferating out there in this brave new world of costumed cut-ups with paranormal powers. To tell the truth, he’d always figured the X-Men served a useful strategic function in keeping tabs on the real bad apples in the mutant community, like Magneto and his fanatical Acolytes. Let the super-weirdoes police themselves, while the rest of us take care of our own problems, that was his philosophy, at least until one or more of the costumed clan got seriously out of line. To date, the X-Men had never risen to the top of Fury’s “to-do” list. He had his hands full with real hard cases.

  But if that was the case, then what were they doing here, wreaking havoc on the Helicarrier with their freakish talents for destruction? Before his one remaining eye, brightly-garbed figures whom Fury identified as past and present X-Men took on his own people, each in their own bizarre fashion. A jagged gap in the ceiling, nearly two yards across, testified to the mutants’ initial angle of attack, but their goal appeared to be a sealed airlock at the opposite end of the staging area, which the first wave of courageous S.H.I.E.L.D operatives were doing their best to defend, despite the uncanny forces arrayed against them.

  Clad in an eye-catching crimson costume, his face concealed behind a stylized mask that made him resemble some exotic Asian demon, Sunfire directed intense blasts of heat and flame at hard-pressed S.H.I.E.L.D. agents, who were forced to fall back before the thermal onslaught, despite the fire-resistant Beta Cloth (type C) in their uniforms. The Japanese mutant kept up the offensive, discharging his fusillade from both hands.

  I don’t get it, Fury thought. He could feel the heat from Sunfire’s blasts even from a distance. Yoshida usually sticks pretty close to his homeland. What’s he doing here?

  Standing beside Sunfire, mouth wide open beneath a mop of unruly orange hair, the Irish mutant codenamed Banshee added his own powerful sonic screams to their joint assault. Although less visible than his compatriot’s flashy fireworks, Banshee’s wails were no less effective; stricken security officers threw their hands over their ears, letting go of their automatic rifles and high-tech ray guns even as the weapons vibrated to pieces within their grips. So tightly focused was the sonic bombardment that Fury and his reinforcements, approaching the fray at a right angle, barely heard more than a faint, high-pitched whine. Banshee’s green-and-yellow costume contrasted dramatically with Sunfire’s own crimson garb, making the regulation blue of the besieged S.H.I.E.L.D. agents even more uniform and interchangeable by comparison. Crinkly wrinkles around the Irishman’s merry green eyes hinted at the fortyish mutant’s age. Striped black-and-yellow wings hanging beneath Banshee’s arms reminded Fury that, like Sunfire, the shrieking Irishman was fully capable of taking flight if necessary.

  This is crazy, Fury thought, taking aim with his .45 while filling his free hand with a palm-sized fragmentation bomb from a pouch on his belt. Sean Cassidy is an ex-Interpol agent, for pete’s sakes! What the devil is he thinking? Deciding to try the stun-bomb before resorting to deadly force, out of respect for Cassidy’s roots in law enforcement, he hurled the bomb with all his strength, aiming it straight between Sunfire and Banshee. That should knock them off their feet, he thought, counting down to the expected detonation. “Three, two, one ...”

  A wall of solid ice formed in the grenade’s path, blocking its downward arc and freezing the bomb in mid-air a heartbeat before it exploded. Fury did not have to look far to find the source of the unexpected arctic fortification—sliding forward on a swiftly-forming sheet of fric-tionless white ice, Iceman, his entire body seemingly sculpted from translucent blue ice, joined Banshee and Sunfire at the front line of the conflict. More ice spraying from his fingertips like water, the refrigerated X-Man defended his fellow invaders with a shield that rose in front of Sunfire and Banshee, and from behind which the other mutants continued to direct destructive volleys of sound and flame. Fury was impressed that Iceman could construct and maintain his miniature glaciers even in the presence of Sunfire’s volcanic combustion.

  He just keeps pouring it on, Fury noted. He could feel the very air around him growing arid and more parched as Iceman leeched all available moisture out of the atmosphere to construct his dense, frigid barricade. Fury swallowed repeatedly to keep his throat from drying up while a trickle of blood leaked from his nostrils.

  “Never did like air conditioning,” he muttered to himself as he removed a thermite grenade from his belt and threw it at the wall of ice. ‘ ‘This ought to heat things up a bit.”

  Right on target, the bomb flew toward the instantly-erected snow fort—until an invisible force seized hold of the grenade and flung it back at Fury and the rest.

  What the hey? Fury thought, jaw dropping in surprise only a second before battle-honed reflexes kicked in and sent him diving for safety. His palms and elbows skidded across the floor as he hit the ground.

  “Incoming!” he warned Val and the other agents, squeezing his eye shut to spare it from the blinding flash he knew was coming. “Duck and cover!”

  A white-hot explosion of heat and light went off less than two yards from wh
ere Fury' landed, giving one side of his face a bad case of sunburn. Nick scrambled to his feet and opened his eye. His toasted profile stung like blazes.

  That was a close one, he realized. The thermite charge had scorched the metal floor where Fury had stood only a moment before. Someone is playing for keeps.

  But who? None of the X-Men he’d identified so far were reported to have that sort of telekinetic power. Peering past the three men apparently leading the assault, he spotted a striking, red-haired woman in a gleaming green-and-gold costume. A metallic gold sash clung to her hips while a generous cloud of carmine-colored curls billowed about her head, as though held aloft by the same unseen force that had snatched the firebomb in its flight. Her blue eyes glowed with psionic energy.

  Figures, Fury thought, immediately I.D.ing the woman as Jean Grey, alias Marvel Girl or Phoenix or whatever she was calling herself these days. S.H.I.E.L.D. had a file on her two inches thick, including her various clones, doubles, and counterparts, even documenting one lady, also codenamed Phoenix, who was alleged to be her full-grown daughter from an alternate future!

  I knew there was a reason I hated getting mixed up in this mutant stuff, Fury groused silently.

  “Everyone in one piece?” he asked hastily, glancing over his shoulder to see Val and the two or three nearest agents rising to their feet. To his relief, none of them looked seriously harmed by the boomeranging grenade, although the Countess’s elegant features seemed a little redder than usual and his nose detected something that smelled suspiciously like burnt hair.