The Ultimates: Against All Enemies (4 page)

. Location of team member .

. Location of former team member , believed to be engaged in research directly related to our endeavors.

, for political consultation and guidance. Also seat of government of the nation with financial and infrastructure support.

. Frequent location of team member known as . Notes regarding symbolic significance of this identity to one iteration of human mythology attached. Deployment orders pursuant to intensification of surveillance efforts in these locations attached. Assimilation and infiltration activities in other areas of the planet are to remain unchanged. We consider the a primary threat, and we redirect our resources to reflect this conclusion. Previous efforts to eliminate the focused on direct attacks on members of the group as well as the headquarters. At this time that strategy is no longer considered viable. Current strategy prioritizes more indirect methods. Results indicate that this approach is successful at this time, and it will be pursued. The timetable for execution of this phase of the human ordering project accelerates due to security questions noted in appendix. Time before missing humans provoke police investigation not known, but estimated to be less than .01916 solar year.

Appendix: Field Report

Priority human asset assimilated in . Mission security compromised by presence of human asset's mate and offspring, contrary to advance reports. Human asset's mate and offspring eliminated.

Priority nonhuman asset assimilated in . Priority human asset assimilated in

Priority human asset assimilated in .

6

Another day, another fruitless hour spent trying to reason with people whose minds were deadened and senses numbed by the onslaughts of multimedia consumer capitalism. Today Thor was in Nick Fury's office trying to convince Nick to throw SHIELD'S weight behind an effort to release the Stark screener technology. Normally this wouldn't be the kind of action he could endorse—what the world needed was less surveillance, not more—but Thor knew what was coming. He hoped to be able to impress the importance of this on Fury, but he wasn't optimistic. For all of Nick Fury's virtues, he was still a man of his times.

And this, Thor thought, is the difference. I am neither a man nor of any time. In this way it becomes impossible for us to understand each other.

Perhaps I understand Steve Rogers a little better than most, because he is lost in time as well. But he is also a creature of duty and obedience, and I understand only the first of those. In obedience I have not the slightest interest.

"So, Loki said something to me the other day," he began, just to get Fury in the right frame of mind.

"Oh, did he?" Fury said, not bothering to hide his skepticism. He was at his desk comparing two sets of figures.

"He said that of all the Ultimates, Steve Rogers was his favorite. I think your conversation the other night really made him a fan."

Fury put down his pen and squeezed the bridge of his nose. "Okay," he said with his eyes closed. "I get it. If I have to raise my right hand and swear that I believe you're the Norse god of thunder just to get you to leave, I'll do it." He raised his right hand, looking down at his desk. Ten seconds or so later, he looked up. "You're not gone."

"You're not very convincing," Thor said.

"Neither are you, Mister Son of Odin, or Wotan, or whatever we're supposed to call him. I don't believe in gods—any of them—and until you bring Jesus Christ himself in to walk across the Upper Bay from Battery Park to here, that isn't going to change. Far as I'm concerned, you're a garden-variety anti-globalization wacko who got hold of some tech that nobody can reverse-engineer. Doesn't make you anything special."

Thor had started smiling at "Wotan," and couldn't stop. "Quite a speech, General Fury."

"You provoke me," Fury said.

"Well. Let me provoke you to pay attention."

"Right now I'm paying attention to a question. Where's the belt and hammer?"

"Safe," Thor said.

"If you had to get them right now, could you?"

"Do I have to?"

Fury shook his head and laughed. "Here I go, getting sucked into a conversation about possibilities with a crazy man. Okay, never mind, crazy man. What did you come in here and screw up my day for?"

'You need to get Tony Stark's new technology into the—as much as I hate to say it—marketplace, General," Thor said. "Believe me or don't, but it's more important than anything else you can do right now."

"Okay," Fury said. "Let's say I believe you. How do you suggest I explain to the congressional inquiry that I knew I had to do it because of the word of the Norse thunder god?" Thor put away his smile. "Is that the worst problem you can think of?" Fury was about to answer when his office door opened at the same time as a knock came from the hall.

"Excuse me, General, but I just need—"

The uniformed man in the doorway was dark-haired, lithe, mischievous. Loki.
Perfect
, Thor thought as he looked back at Fury and saw on the general's face only the beleaguered annoyance of the desk officer who in his mind is never far from the field. "Please," he said. "Come in."

"We were just discussing how to circumvent a political roadblock to the production of an extremely important technology developed under a black-budget contract by Stark Industries," Thor said. "I believe General Fury has political concerns, with which I sympathize, but I can't agree with his decision." Loki winked at him. "General Fury, all I need is just this one signature," he said, approaching Fury's desk with a manila folder opened to expose a document.

"I don't think I have to tell either of you how important it is to be able to recognize Chitauri infiltration wherever it may occur," Thor said. "And Tony's innovation—"

"Goddammit," Fury said. "You keep talking, and I'm going to have to kill one of my only competent secretaries. Have you ever heard of a goddamn security clearance?"

Thor put the smile back on. "Oh, but General. He already knows." In a double take that would have done Jim Carrey proud, Fury's head snapped back and forth between Thor and Loki. Then he caught himself and said, slowly and angrily, "Are you telling me you think this man is Loki?"

"I don't have to think it, General. Should I make introductions?" Fury stood behind his desk and pointed at his secretary. "You. Get the hell out and forget whatever you heard here."

"Yes, sir," Loki said, and closed the door behind him.

"And you," Fury went on, now pointing at Thor, "are one crazy son of a bitch." Thor spread his hands. "General. After all we've seen in this past year, you still think it's crazy to believe in shapeshifters?"

Fury glared daggers at him.

"However you want to rationalize it to yourself is fine."

"Oh," Fury said. "You're going to lecture me about rationalizing? Let me get out my tape recorder."

"General Fury," Thor said. "That was Loki. Last night he was telling me that after your conversation with Steve Rogers, Steve was angry about the suppression of Tony's tech. Is that true?" Fury didn't answer.

"Is it also true that you talked about baseball, and that Steve drank only ginger ale?" Still only silence from Fury.

"If you need to think I'm crazy because that's the way your world makes sense to you, be my guest," Thor said. "But this happened. And what needs to happen now is you need to get control of the Stark Industries technology before someone else does it for you." Thor stood. "That's what I came to tell you. I'll leave now, but remember: if you don't act, someone else is going to. I know that, too. You can figure out how."

On his way to the helipad, Loki fell in alongside him. "Not everyone finds your righteousness charming," Loki said.

"It isn't meant to charm," Thor said. "It's meant to be right."

"You know it's not going to work," Loki said.

Thor looked down at him. "What's the name of Fury's secretary?"

"Who cares?" Loki shrugged. "He's downstairs filling out a report on something ridiculous like equipment depreciation."

"I don't care," Thor said. "What's his name?"

Loki sighed. "Arthur Kostelanetz. Why?"

"So I can know who I'm going to be accused of assaulting," Thor said, and leveled his half brother with a roundhouse right.

When he got outside and into the helicopter, Thor opened his cell phone and called Steve Rogers. The phone rang only once before Steve's recorded message clicked on. Thor shut the phone, opened it again, and re-dialed. Again the message. One more try, Thor thought. He called Nick Fury.

"I've had enough of you today," Fury said when he answered the phone.

"Do you know where Steve Rogers is, General?" Thor asked.

"No. And if I did, I wouldn't tell you. I'll see you next time we convene as a team, and I hope not before." Fury hung up on him.

Mortals
, Thor thought. It's too much for them. Everything is too much for them. He called Fury again.

"Did you not hear me?" Fury said.

"No, I did. But I wanted to find out if your secretary Kostelanetz is all right."

"Is that—" Thor could almost hear Fury doing another double take over the phone. "You son of a bitch," Fury growled, and hung up again.

Thor laughed. What could you do?

He leaned forward and tapped the pilot on the shoulder. The pilot leaned his head back, still keeping his eyes front. "Where can you put me down in Brooklyn?" Thor shouted into his ear. The pilot leaned forward to consult some gauge or other, then leaned back again. "What part of Brooklyn?"

"I believe it's called Flatbush?"

"What?"

Thor sighed. "Flatbush!" he shouted. "Flatbush Avenue!" Again the pilot consulted a display. "I can't get you down any closer than the Brooklyn Navy Yard," he yelled. "Unless you want to set down in an empty lot."

"Fine, yes," Thor shouted, nodding, "let's do that."

"You going to explain it to General Fury?"

"He'll know why. Just do it."

Ten minutes later Thor was stooping as the helicopter angled up and away to the southwest. He was in the middle of an acre or so of cracked and weedy asphalt, once a truck yard and now just one more place where the commerce of New York had come and gone. When he got to the fence, he jumped up and caught the razor wire, bracing his feet on the top of a fencepost before vaulting over. As his feet hit the ground, he saw three passing teenagers gaping at him. "Pretty good trick, isn't it?" he said with a grin, spreading his hands so they could see that he hadn't cut himself.

"Damn," one of them said. "Homey's a ninja."

They watched him walk down Flatbush Avenue back toward Rogers's apartment, which was in the as-yet-ungentrified hinterlands of Brooklyn. The block Rogers lived on looked like nobody had put a coat of paint on anything since he'd left for the war. At times like these, Thor thought, I would just as soon fly, and to hell with this pretense for mortals and their small fears. He felt the absence of Mjolnir in his hands. Then he cracked a smile again, thinking of the teenagers and their wonder and what must have seemed an impossible thing to them. Being immortal had its privileges... and its drawbacks, Thor thought, remembering the dark and shining malice on the face of his half brother.

Steve Rogers is my favorite
, Loki had said. That much Thor had told Fury. What he had not mentioned was that Loki had said something else.
Rogers I love,
Loki had said,
because he will squeeze so hard
with his fists of order that chaos will inevitably squirt out
. And laughed, Loki had, long and loud. Thor picked up his pace, spurred on by a sense he couldn't shake that something was about to happen, some trick about to be played on a man whose goodness would be the lever that evil would use against him. To be a god was to know things; the joke of fate was that too often, what even the gods knew was not quite enough.

Rogers wasn't home. Thor stood on the street, watching the mortals pass. What would he have told Rogers? That Loki had taken a special interest in him? Rogers believed in flag and country, nothing else. His was a pure belief, not ignorant of nuance but dismissive of it, deeply invested in a black-and-white view of the world. There was an innocence about it that gave Rogers much of his strength, but that innocence was also part of what made him a useful tool for those who operated by deceit. Strength of belief, Thor thought, was admirable, but it was a lever that when used against you always tipped you long before you knew it was being used.

And so, Thor thought. I have come looking for him to call him a naif and tell him that my half brother, another god he doesn't believe in, has a plan for him. Hardly an errand with good prospects of success. To know and not to be believed. This was the lot of gods. All the same, Thor was glad he wasn't a mortal. Fate would do what Fate did, to Steve Rogers and to them all.

7

One thing about coming out of a fifty-seven-year deep freeze was that it diminished the number of people you could turn to when you needed to figure something out and couldn't do it on your own. All I have left, Steve thought as he signed in at the visitor desk of Mount Sinai Hospital, is the thread that keeps Bucky fighting his cancer. When that breaks, my last link to life before the freeze will be gone. Except for Gail. But she wouldn't ever be able to get close to him. All they shared anymore was the knowledge that they'd both gone on without ever quite getting apart. When Bucky dies, Steve thought, I'll go to the funeral, and I'll see her there, and then maybe we'll talk a few more times, but she will be a widow in her seventies and I'll be a super-soldier figurehead for SHIELD, and he knew how that would go. Someone would call him when she died.

Snap out of it, he told himself. Quit wallowing.

The door to Bucky's room was open, which meant he was probably awake. Knowing he was a friend of Captain America's, the nursing staff—all of whom had kids who were Captain America fans—took outrageously good care of him. They did everything but cure his cancer.