They glanced at him.
“Get the hell back now!” he yelled.
They started to fall back. Stark stepped out into the open and faced his twin.
It was his discarded armor.
It had been crudely rebuilt. It was complete again—functional, animated—but it was not pretty. The dents and tears had been fused with crude, organo-alloy patches. Nanofacture waste composite covered it like scabs. It looked diseased.
Only intense nanofabrication could have refitted it so rapidly.
The faceplate had been transformed. Still twisted and buckled from the fight at Pine Fields, it now displayed a fierce, downturned snarl and malevolent eyes.
Ultron hadn’t fled into the electronic oceans of the data-net. It had concealed itself inside the apparently dormant nanobot residue coating Stark’s damaged armor. S.H.I.E.L.D. and the security services had been scouring the globe for it, but it had been right with Stark all along. It had been hiding inside Iron Man.
“Hello, Anthony,” Ultron said.
Stark powered up his repulsors. Full charge.
“No one touches my stuff,” he said.
“The armor is technically crude,” said Ultron, “but it forms an adequate exo-form host. We may resume our conversation.”
“No conversation,” Stark replied. “You attack the world and attempt Singularity, I respond as an Avenger. You steal my technology, you make it personal.”
“How very human,” said Ultron. “Ha ha ha.”
Stark looked at the body that Ultron was dragging. Despite the blood and the terrible injuries, Stark could see that it was Seavers.
“Screw the hardware,” Stark whispered. “I’m going to kill you.”
“Calculating success probability,” said Ultron. It paused.
“Zero,” it concluded.
TWENTY
SIBERIA
LOCAL TIME UNRECORDED, NO RELEVANT DATE
TIME is spent,” murmured Dormammu. The magelord was gazing up at the cold void. The last two stars were almost perfectly aligned.
He looked over at Thor, and gestured disdainfully at the burning hexagram that protected the Thunder God.
“My circle will soon be complete,” Dormammu said, “while yours is about to die.”
The fires were almost out. The wood had burned away. The six clumps of stakes were little more than heaps of embers, and the flames of the central trunk were pale and faint.
“The symmetry of rituals,” said Dormammu. “One circle forms, another fades.”
“When our flames die,” said Thor “you’ll still have to kill me. I will not fall to you without resistance. We have established how hard it is to kill a god, especially when you need all the power you can muster.”
“Oh, Odinson.” Dormammu laughed. “That was then.”
He gestured up at the constellation of red suns.
“My strength is now beyond anything you can imagine. I have energy to spare. Energy to slay you with a blink. Were you not listening? The circle magnifies the power of the caster. It amplifies it. When the stars align, I will reshape universes.”
He laughed. The beasts at his feet yapped and snickered in answer.
Thor thought of several responses, but none of them was worth uttering. Just insults—beneath his dignity.
He looked up at the ring of stars and then down at his own dying circle of fires.
Had their fellow Avengers heard Wanda’s call? Would they respond? Could they?
And if they did respond, what could they do—even standing shoulder-to-shoulder—against the Dread One at full strength? They—
He paused.
Without a backward glance at Dormammu, he turned and walked across the dead, black earth to Wanda.
“Where are you going, Odinson?” Dormammu called after him. “There’s nothing you can do. I will make it quick, I promise.”
Thor ignored him. He crouched down beside the Scarlet Witch.
“Any ideas?” he whispered to her.
She shook her head.
“I was hoping you might have devised something ingenious,” he said. “Something magical of which I had not thought.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“So am I,” he smiled, “because it means I have to tell you my idea. And it is not ingenious. It is foolish, and you’ll tell me a thousand ways in which it is wrong.”
“Just say it,” she said. “We haven’t got anything else.”
“Circles,” he said.
“Circles?” she echoed, frowning.
“Circles of magic,” said Thor. “His above, made of six stars. Yours below, made of six fires.”
“Mine is designed to keep him at bay for a short time,” said Wanda. “His is made to reforge reality. They’re rather different.”
“But the principle is the same, yes?” asked Thor. “The circle, six points, amplifies the sorcerer’s power? Six fires, be they bonfires or stars? They work the same way. This is what he told me.”
She nodded.
“Where does that get us?” she asked.
“I am not sure.” Thor smiled. “I am no magician. But if he breaks our circle, we die.”
“Yes.”
“And if we break his?”
She raised her eyebrows.
“Well, his power would be diminished.”
“And he would no longer be able to transform worlds?”
“I suppose not.”
“He would be thwarted in his plans to capture and control the Earth?”
She sat up.
“Yes, but we—” she began.
“Wanda, I fear there is no saving us now,” said Thor. “He has us, and we will be destroyed one way or the other. All that matters is that we stop him.”
“Agreed,” she said. “But you misunderstood. I wasn’t worried about us. I was just going to ask how we could possibly break his circle.”
“We put out a fire,” said Thor.
“It’s flattering you think I have that kind of range,” she said. “Thor, I can’t extinguish a sun.”
“But the circle and the magician are one, are they not?” asked Thor. “One does not work without the other?”
She stared at him.
“That’s…madness,” she said. “I see where you’re going, but it’s—”
“What have we to lose?” he asked. “Do you have ability left?”
“Some.”
“Enough for a local effect? Here, on this bleak plain? Just here, and here alone?”
She got to her feet. She flexed her fingers.
“Let’s find out.”
He gazed out into the darkness and nodded.
She raised her hand and took him by the chin, turning his face gently to look at her.
“If it works,” she said, “we’ll only have an instant. And we will be unprotected.”
“Then we’d better both be ready,” he replied.
She rubbed her hands together, trying to warm them. He took hold of Mjolnir by its leather-wrapped haft.
“What are you doing?” Dormammu called across at them. There was dark mockery in his tone. The beasts at his feet barked and growled. “One last attempt to fight me? Do you rise to greet death standing?”
“Do it,” Thor said to the Scarlet Witch.
She braced herself, feet planted apart. She bowed her head, eyes screwed shut, and balled her fists. The flames on the trunk behind her rose again, crackling with refreshed power.
She threw out her hands, fingers splayed. Thor felt the surge of power shake the night air.
The bonfires went out. The flames sputtered and died, trailing thin smoke from the points of the circle. The trunk extinguished, too, smoldering.
Dormammu convulsed and screamed. He dropped to one knee, and then struggled back to his feet.
The Dread Lord no longer burned with mystic light. He was a gaunt, blackened, skeletal giant, smoke coiling from his hands and the scorched bone of his head.
“You dare?” he gasped.
Wanda had cast a spell to banish fire from the area around them, forbidding any flame to burn within a radius of one mile. The ban would not last. Dormammu’s mystic, living flame did not burn like natural fire. It would renew again in seconds.
But the Thunder God was ready.
Mjolnir flew, hurled with all the force that Thor could muster. It sang through the air at supersonic velocity and struck Dormammu in the head.
The black skull shattered.
Dormammu fell.
Thor was already running. He caught the returning hammer in mid-stride and leapt, hefting Mjolnir over his head with both hands.
The dark lord’s shuddering, headless form was on its hands and knees. It was groping blindly. Frail tendrils of magic were spinning from its fingers, trying to reknit the smashed and scattered shards of its skull.
Thor brought down the hammer on Dormammu, crushing his spine into the ground.
Thunder boomed.
Wanda fell, her energy spent. She saw the ring of beasts leap up and charge to attack both her and Thor.
“Thor!” she yelled.
Thor rose up from Dormammu’s broken, twitching body. He swung at the first beast that came for him, smashing it aside. His fist caught a second, launching it into the air. A third closed its jaws around his forearm. He swung Mjolnir and broke its neck.
Other beasts ran toward Wanda. They bounded into the circle that no longer held them back, past the smoldering piles of ash. She cast a hex that caused one of them to stumble and sprawl, and then leapt aside to dodge the open jaws of another.
Wanda landed, rolling, and leapt up again. A beast was right on her. She jerked sideways and drove her fist into its throat. It yelped and staggered away, retching and choking.
Another grabbed her cloak in its teeth. She wrenched away, tearing the hem, and then kicked her heel sideways into its face. Cap had always taught her that in hand-to-hand, it wasn’t physical strength that counted as much as placement. Eyes, face, throat. Aim a fist or a kick well, and it was possible to deter the strongest aggressor.
Thor punched another beast aside and turned back to Dormammu. The Dread One was trying to recompose his broken form. His back was twisted and snapped. Part of his skull had fused back together: the jaw, one eye socket, and a section of the cranium. Thor could feel his rage. In seconds, Dormammu’s doused fire would reignite.
Thor swung his hammer, shattering the partly formed skull again. He drove Mjolnir down with both hands, disintegrating the Dread One’s ribs.
Dormammu fell. Thor swung again, and again.
Dormammu wouldn’t die. He could not die. Thor knew that. Demons, like gods, were hard to kill.
But if Thor inflicted as much harm as possible, it would take the Dread One time to re-corporate.
One last blow, and Thor stood back. He shoved aside a beast, then turned to find Wanda.
“Damn!” he snarled.
She was dodging, punching, and evading, but she was surrounded by snarling beasts.
He flew to her, and systematically smashed away the creatures with the full-blooded wrath of the Odinson.
“Time to leave,” he said, and caught hold of her.
Without the sorcerer at its center, Dormammu’s mystic circle was being torn asunder by its own gathered power and its lack of focus.
The six red stars flared with bitter, toxic light. Tremors shook the black earth. Lightning sizzled across the cursed sky.
Splits and sinkholes appeared in the ground, venting noxious steam. The splits widened, becoming crevasses, then canyons.
Thor prepared to spin his hammer.
Immense flares of rancid doomsday energy burst across the heavens, like some nightmarish version of the aurora borealis.
Far away from them, beyond the edge of Wanda’s now-extinguished circle, Thor saw Dormammu begin to rise again. He was half-broken, mangled, defying death. Flames began to catch and lick around his broken bones.
He screamed their names. He screamed their doom.
Thor raised Mjolnir above his head and called out to the sky.
The storm answered. It did not belong to Dormammu anymore. His control had been broken. It was no longer the Dread One’s slave.
The storm had a new master.
Thor called down the lightning.
A searing bolt, blindingly bright and blue-white hot, ripped down out of the sky. It atomized Dormammu with a boom like a giant’s hammer striking an anvil.
Thor spun Mjolnir and let its upswing carry him and Wanda into the sky.
Around them, the world came apart.
TWENTY-ONE
BERLIN
01.12 LOCAL, JUNE 13TH
YOU don’t have to do this,” said Gail Runciter.
“Yes, I do,” said Cap.
“Come on, Steve. You’ve only just regained consciousness. You were on the brink of death. The antidote got into your system at the last possible moment. As it is, only your enhanced metabolism kept you alive that long. Do you understand what I’m saying? You need to rest. They need to test you and make sure—”
“Gail,” he said. He took hold of her hand. “I’m doing this. Right now. Okay?”
She sighed and nodded. Cap looked across at G.W. Bridge. Bridge nodded, too.
The S.H.I.E.L.D. guards disarmed the cell door and stood aside. Cap entered the small, blue-lit cell. He glanced at the large mirrored wall, and knew that Gail and Bridge were watching him through it.
Strucker was shackled to a metal chair facing a small table. Cap sat down opposite him.
“Where am I?” asked Strucker.
Cap didn’t answer.
“Basic human rights,” said Strucker. “Detainee rights. You are obliged to tell me where I am.”
“And you’re obliged to shut the hell up,” said Cap. “Don’t you dare lecture me on human rights—”
He paused.
“Berlin,” he said. “A S.H.I.E.L.D.-station holding facility. I’m telling you that because I don’t intend to sink to your level.”
Strucker laughed. His face was badly bruised.
“And that is why the Americans will ultimately lose,” said Strucker. “And why Hydra will prevail.”
“Let’s talk about you prevailing,” said Cap. “Your pathogen has been neutralized. Berlin is safe. No one died. Not even me.”
Strucker was silent.
“Any comments?” asked Cap.
“The Hydra’s Breath will—”
“Be reverse-engineered by S.H.I.E.L.D. labs within the next three hours. We have your samples, and samples of the counteragent. It is no longer a threat.”
“Cut off one head, and another will grow in its place,” said Strucker.
Cap looked at him across the table.
“It’s done, Strucker,” he said. “Hydra’s plot has failed. And in failing, it’s done considerable harm to your organization. I’m not just talking about reputation and influence. You threw it together hastily, Strucker. In doing so, you cut corners and exposed connections, processes, organization, hierarchy. Hydra may never recover.”
He kept his eyes on Strucker.
“And if it does, if it sprouts another head or two, you certainly won’t be at liberty to see it.”
“You overestimate your—”
“We searched the devices recovered from your apartment,” said Cap. “Interesting stuff. Enough data to keep field agents busy for months. Names, contacts. You really were in a hurry, weren’t you?”
Strucker was silent.
“One thing is especially interesting,” said Cap. “The log of a message sent anonymously to S.H.I.E.L.D. A tip-off, alerting S.H.I.E.L.D. to an A.I.M. operation in Antarctica. Thanks for that. I believe it’s been actioned. You weren’t just out for power and control, were you? You were also out to get your rivals. Selling out A.I.M. to keep them from beating Hydra to the prize. That’s how frantic you were.”
“Was there a question in that?” asked Strucker archly.
“Everybody was
after it, weren’t they?” asked Cap. “There was a race—a race to rule the world. You were in competition, and you did everything you could to win.”
“It had to be done,” said Strucker. “Hydra needed to be victorious.”
“Why?”
“Because there was too much at stake.”
“And everybody else thought the same thing,” said Cap. “Every major terrorist or criminal operation in the world. A sudden, desperate race to seize power. No hesitation, no subtlety, no quarter.
There could only be one winner. The world went to hell tonight because of it.”
“Your point?”
“Why?”
Strucker sat back.
“Necessity,” he said. “We had to act now, or never act again. A single chance.”
“Because?”
“There was an ultimatum. No more delays. Take power—do what you always boasted you would do. Take control of the human race and bring it to order. Impose your rule, or it will be done for you.”
“Who issued the ultimatum?” asked Cap.
Strucker shrugged. His shackles clinked.
“Strucker, there’s a threat out there. A hidden threat—a threat so grave it’s made even Hydra act with insane and reckless desperation. I need to know what it is.”
“Yes, you do,” said Strucker.
“Tell me.”
Strucker smiled.
“The world is going to be held to account; it will most likely die,” he said. “I had a chance to prevent that. Hydra had a chance. But you stopped that, Captain America. You stopped us from saving the world.”
“Ruling the world.”
“The same thing,” said Strucker. “You stopped me. So understand this. I am not going to tell you anything. I am not going to help you find or face this threat, because it is the only satisfaction left to me.”
“You would rather watch the world die than help me?” asked Cap. “You’d rather die along with it than raise a finger to help? You’re damning the planet out of spite?”
Strucker smiled.
“Exactly,” he replied. “When all you have left is spite, dear Captain, spite will have to suffice.”
TWENTY-TWO
MADRIPOOR
06.10 LOCAL, JUNE 13TH
FLASH grenades detonated in the tight stairwells of the old Lowtown factory building. Blue smoke billowed out, filling hallways and blinding the occupants.