My appreciation to all the readers who've put this story on their favorites and alerts list. I'd also like to thank the readers who posted reviews, including Jelsemium, Pati G W Black, Guest, Qweb, Penny Tortoiseshell, Justsuzaku, Adamantium Rose, Katya Jade, Arrows the Wolf, and blown-transistor.

I'd especially like to thank those of you who correct errors (Qweb caught a doozy!), enlighten me about aspects of canon I might not be aware of, or just tell me what they'd like to see included in this story to make it better. Stories were never meant to be static things, but interactive, living creatures told around a campfire in a cave or sung in a great hall before a king, altered at every telling just a little to meet the needs of your audience. What use does a story serve but to entertain its readers?

Thanks for reading!

X

Chapter 34

"This is better than watching one of them action flicks on Imax," the old Caretaker said, his odd combination of cold-war era night vision goggles and teeny tiny birdwatcher binoculars pressed against the glass of Liberty's crown.

"It certainly is," Bernice said, lacking his enthusiasm for the battle unfolding across the harbor. Or perhaps that was because she knew Steve was as vulnerable and capable of getting killed, despite his enhanced physical capabilities, as any other human. The only thing 'super' about a superhero, she was finding out, was other people's perceptions of them.

She counted. One-one-thousand. Two-one-thousand. Three-one. The odd delay Steve had spoken of when she'd asked him about his encounters during the alien invasion. Her binoculars afforded her a much better view than that of the Caretaker, but it was still anything but perfect. Between the distortion created by the eerie green light of the night vision goggles and the limitations of the binoculars themselves, she could just barely make out enough features to recognize who she was looking at.

Nick Fury shot another shoulder-held rocket at the mini-Leviathan, doing little harm. The creature reacted the moment the rocket exploded against its hull, as though it were in pain. It seemed to recognize, of its own volition, an immediate threat, but it ignored smaller ones. And threats that were unfamiliar. The way even the bravest human might recoil from stepping on a snake, but walk fearlessly past an old rusty canon perched in a war memorial. The bigger Leviathans had been part machine, part technology, so she assumed the little one was as well. Did it have independent survival skills beyond whatever program the Chitauri were using to make it behave as though it were a ship? Like a war horse, trained to ignore enemy fire and carry its rider into battle, but which might occasionally rear up and do something other than the will of its rider if it was directly threatened? Bernice incorporated this idea into her counting, trying to note when the baby spaceship acted like a machine, and when it acted like a frightened animal.

She noted another delay when Natasha jumped up on top of the Excursion and swung onto an alien glider, aiming it to knock a second glider out of the sky before leaping back to the ground milliseconds before it crashed. Sometimes the gliders would stay in formation no matter what, even if it meant a Chitauri soldier's death. But other times, a creature would veer off at the last second, recognizing a threat that could have been avoided earlier, but reacting a half-second or so before it normally would have reacted if the two-and-a-half second delay Steve had noted was set in stone.

Mindless chatter her video game developing friends had prattled on about over far too much beer and pizza, geek talk that had made her brain hurt about handicaps, vitalities, reaction times and skills as they had begged her to bring their video game heroes to life for them visually suddenly clicked into place. One computer program, multiple live players, and game-pieces with independent survival skills like well-trained animals. Was this whole thing a game? A great big game for some sick alien god? The answer to the problem was too absurd to contemplate, but wasn't that why she'd been brought on board in the first place? To look at the obvious and piece it all together, no matter how preposterous it might sound to someone who had been trained to know better?

She noted another delay when Iron Man zigzagged in front of the alien ship, alternating between taunting it and shooting his pulse weapon at it. It appeared as though the creature was indecisive, warring with itself over which program to follow. Pursue? Or chase another target? The mini-Leviathan had released six more gliders moments after lifting itself out of the ocean, bringing the total now swarming the Avengers like flies up to nine. Unfortunately, no matter what they did, the presence of the Leviathan with its heavier weaponry meant they were seriously outgunned.

Steve. Where was Steve? Why hadn't he emerged from the Triskelion, wearing his armor to join his comrades in battle? Was he… No! She shoved the unwanted thought right out of her mind. He was alive! He had to be! She had seen no body in the place where he had dove into the open doorway. He hadn't emerged to help his friends for some other reason.

"Here come reinforcements, I think," the Caretaker whooped, his voice warbling with excitement. "Who's that fellow on the motorcycle coming in there on the other side?"

Bernice swung her binoculars from where Iron Man played chicken with the Leviathan to a motorcycle racing down the road that ran all the way around the island on top of the sea wall. Steve's bike? No. This bike was much smaller. One of those Japanese racing numbers Steve made fun of, still having not gotten used to the idea that Japan was now an ally. Whoever drove was heedless of the gliders that broke ranks from the embattled Avengers to address the new threat racing into battle, however small. The rider did not flinch. The bike came at them. The gliders fired at the rider the exact second Bernice anticipated they would fire, as though they were conducting a well-orchestrated training drill. The bike slid sideways along the ground, dragging the rider with it as sparks flew off the pavement.

"Ohmygod!" Bernice shrieked as his helmet smashed off of his head and she got a good look at his face. "Doctor Banner!"

"Damn!" the Caretaker said. "Thought for sure they'd send in more reinforcements than that. He's only one guy. I can't see too good, you know. Tell me what's happening."

"I think he's okay," Bernice said, heaving a sigh of relief. "He's getting up." She watched as Doctor Banner lurched to his feet, crouched over in pain. His gait was odd. She blinked, tapping the side of her night vision goggles to see if they were working properly as the mild-mannered doctor appeared to grow larger, his countenance becoming outright menacing as he threw himself to the ground and lifted his head like a wounded tiger, shrieking at the gilders circling around for another shot. The glider fired, hitting him with a near-direct shot, but when the hellfire cleared, it was no longer Doctor Banner standing next to the mangled motorcycle, but…."

"Where did he come from?" the Caretaker shouted, shaking with excitement. "Those alien flyboys are toast now that the Hulk is here!"

Bernice glanced over to the Caretaker and realized how ridiculous they both looked in their musty night vision goggles. An odd laughter bubbled to her throat, sounding like some hysterical old woman, talking to people who didn't exist and laughing at them like a madwoman. She remembered the look on Doctor Banner's face when she'd asked him about the last time she'd noticed him at the scene of a Hulk sighting. She looked to the Caretaker and gave him the only answer she legally could.

"That's classified…"

The mini-Leviathan grew tired of its game of cat and mouse with Iron Man. As the Hulk smashed glider after glider, the bigger ship abandoned what had appeared to be a carefully orchestrated group of maneuverability protocols to get the job done and suddenly began to behave in a totally unpredictable fashion. Bernice could almost picture some teenage alien seizing control of a video game joystick and start maneuvering the game piece to gobble up vitalities so he could win the prize. There was still a delay compared to a nimble asset such as Iron Man, but the delay in reaction time was now less than one second. Three-quarters of a second, perhaps? Still a delay, but very small.

"They're coming! They're coming!" the Caretaker shouted. "The governor finally sent in the National Guard!"

Bernice swung her binoculars around, not sure which piece of action to watch. The Leviathan, she thought. Those were the ships whose movements had been too ponderous to notice a delay caused by something other than the sheer size of the biomechanical … whatever the hell they were … in the bigger versions of those ships. This smaller one was much more nimble, the way a preschooler could run circles around its parents. It moved around enough that she was able to see patterns that might be missed in its slower moving Leviathan parents.

"The children…" Bernice said, suddenly realizing why the Chitauri might have been experimenting on human children. What had Steve told her? Hadn't the Nazi's set up some kind of breeding camps during World War II? She filed the thought aside for future reference.

"No! No! No!" the Caretaker shouted. "Stop! Stop!"

Bernice stared, horrified, as the Leviathan jerked unexpectedly to one side, as though someone had shoved the joystick too far, and slammed into one of the brick buildings that lined the road around the island, knocking it right into the path of the oncoming military convoy. Jeeps skidded sideways, two of them shooting right of the sea wall into the harbor, a third one getting buried in falling bricks. The Leviathan flapped its tail like a salmon trying to leap up to the next tier of a salmon ladder and knocked a second building over, blocking the rear of the convoy. They were trapped.

"Get out of there!" the Caretaker shouted. "It's an ambush!"

Men in combat fatigues leaped out of the jeeps, pulse-reactor equipped M-17's in hand as they fired uselessly at the mini-Leviathan. One of them pulled a rocket launcher and fired, but it did little damage, only angering the creature as it swam through the next building as though it were water, raining bricks down upon the men. Bernice tried to discern a pattern, but now its pattern was now truly unpredictable, as though there really was somebody home instead of some mindless machine spewing out probabilities and running random computer codes.

The ship circled around, ignoring the harassing shots of Iron Man, who was inflicting little damage, and aimed right for the tallest building which towered over the embattled men. It slammed into it like a battering ram, tipping the entire brick structure right off its foundation. It careened forward in slow motion, oddly intact as though it were constructed of Legos. Bernice stood, horrified, unable to do anything but watch.

The building never hit the ground.

The Hulk stood underneath the front wall, holding it up while men swarmed like ants, abandoning their vehicles and climbing over the shattered brick building knocked down earlier. As soon as they cleared the danger zone, they lining up in battle formation in front of the next building, guns aimed in unison to take down the Chitauri gliders. The aliens had formidable technology, but humanity had learned from the last invasion where to hit the poorly shielded Chitauri drones. The pulse reactor enhanced M-17's they used now were packing a hell of a lot more punch than the M-16's they used in the last engagement. One by one, the tide began to turn as glider after glider couldn't overcome the limitations of whatever program some malignant entity was using and was shot out of the sky.

"Doctor Banner!" Bernice shrieked as the precariously tilted building finally fell. She could discern no movement in the dust cloud that arose as the building cracked into several pieces. She didn't know the doctor well, but she had worked with him enough times that she would mourn his loss.

A glider passed over, having been knocked out of formation by a well-placed shot by Iron Man only moments before. A big green hand reached up through the bricks and grabbed it, spinning the glider around as though it were a merry-go-round and flinging it straight into a shattered wall. Bernice's heart leaped for joy as a the rest of the Hulk's large, green body crawled out of the rubble, a victorious grin on its face as it surveyed its handwork. Bernice had seen that grin once … on Doctor Banner's face when an engineer had made a technological breakthrough on the contraption that had been drilled into the Melanesian Island children's brains. Whoever this Hulk was he transformed into, Doctor Banner was still in there somewhere, too.

"Look out!" the Caretaker shouted.

Whatever limitation was imposed on the lower-ranking aliens, it was no longer an issue with the mini-Leviathan. The thing behaved like an enraged bull, angered by one taunt too many from a toreador. It was wounded just enough to want to hurt somebody, but not badly enough to slow it down. It charged the Avengers storming the Triskelion, who now fought two separate fronts as gliders shot at them from one side while men dressed in black S.H.I.E.L.D. uniforms shot at them from the deck of the ship. A man she thought might be Hawkeye emerged from a hatch behind the imposters on the deck of the ship, firing at the imposters to distract them from the Avengers coming at them from the front.

Agent Romanov moved in like a wraith, her cat-like movements deadly as she took down one imposter and moved onto the next one without so much as a backwards glance. Bernice shivered. The woman moved like a cobra striking prey. No delay in those reaction times, that was sure! She rushed up to Hawkeye, speaking briefly to him, and then disappeared into the ship.

Bernice's rush of hope that, at last, the tide was turning in favor of the Avengers, was dashed when the Leviathan turned and charged right for them, weapons blasting everything into oblivion that dared get in its way. Iron Man fired at the ship and was swatted out of the way like a fly.

"Mr. Stark!" Bernice shrieked as Iron Man crashed into the ground.

Lightning cleaved the sky, illuminating the scene in white light as one bolt raced out of the clouds like the roots of a tree and sparked electricity down the length of the living ship. Out of nowhere, a man dropped out of a thundercloud, right onto the ship's back. He buried an enormous hammer into the beasts brain. The beast faltered, writhing in a death-spin, trying to shake the man off his back. Thor. God of Thunder. Steve had told her the ancient legends were true, but the man she had met at the dance had seemed more like some good natured jock in high school than a hero out of Norse legend. Now … she believed. Thor held on, raising the hammer Bernice knew was named Mjolnir and pounded the creature senseless. Finally, it dropped out of the sky and lay shuddering on the ground. The living ship heaved one last breath and lay still. The God of Thunder leaped off and strode over to where Iron Man lay, unmoving, and reached down to help him up.

"He's alive!"

Bernice cried with joy as her boss reached up, one gauntleted fist clasping hands with the God of Thunder, and allowed himself to be pulled to his feet. Arms clasped in fellowship, the two slapped each other on the back and jumped back into the fray, providing cover for the regular soldiers who were finishing off the last of the Chitauri gliders. Behind them, the mini-Leviathan exploded, whatever self-destruct protocol the Chitauri had in place to prevent their technology from falling into enemy hands taking over. By the way even the enlisted National Guard soldiers cleared the proximity the moment the ship went down and dove for cover, it appeared this expectation was now part of whatever training regular soldiers went through to learn to fight aliens.

The Avengers battled their way past the remaining human imposters who fought them on the deck of the ship, disappearing inside. A short time later, the National Guard finished up and secured the Triskelion, some men going inside, others taking up sentry positions on the perimeter.

"Whoopee!" the Caretaker whooped. "They won!"

Bernice breathed a sigh of relief, exhaustion making it feel as though she were ready to fall over now that the adrenaline of watching the fight was over. Ambulances arrived. Several people were wheeled out on stretchers, whisked away to local hospitals to tend to their injuries. Bernice checked her cell phone. No messages from Steve.

The Caretaker headed downstairs, making excuses about not being able to stray too far from the bathroom at his age. More soldiers came, the ground so thick with them it was hard to tell one soldier from the other. She couldn't find Steve. Where was he? She checked her phone again. No messages. She'd avoided calling him during the battle, not wishing to put his life in danger from something so stupid as having the phone ring just as he was sneaking up on an alien, but it appeared there would be no danger if she called him now. The call went to voice mail. She left a message asking if he was alright.

More stretchers were wheeled off the ship, but this time the shapes they carried were long, white bags. Body bags. How many people had died tonight? Was one of them Steve? Was that why he hadn't called her yet to tell her he was okay? Bernice began to cry.

The phone rang.

"H-hello?" Bernice sobbed.

"Miss Rosenthal," a mechanical voice said. "Mr. Stark asked me to inform you Commander Rogers survived."

"J-J-JARVIS," Bernice wept for joy. "Is he … is he alright?"

"The Commander sustained serious, but non-life-threatening injuries," JARVIS said. "He will call you as soon as they finish debriefing him."

Non-life-threatening injuries. He was going to be okay!

"Oh, GOD!" Bernice shrieked with joy. "Thank you!"

"I must say," JARVIS said, amusement coming into his otherwise mechanical voice. "Nobody has ever called me that before. Really. I'm only an AI."

Bernice sobbed uncontrollably, the tension of the last few hours overwhelming her and destroying the last shred of self-control. How could Steve do this kind of work all the time when just the act of watching him put his life on the line turned her into a basket case? She barely heard the rest of what JARVIS said.

"A launch will be arriving at the Liberty Island dock in twenty minutes," JARVIS said. "Mr. Stark asked me to arrange for you to be transported home."

Giving the elderly Caretaker a hug and thanking him for all he had done, she promised she'd bring Steve back for a picture at some point in the future and got into the boat that came to take her home. It had barely gotten clear of the last pylon on the dock when the lights came back on, Liberty's torch shining golden against the night sky once more.

It occurred to her how sturdy and strong the light appeared to shine, a beacon for all to see. Only she knew how frail it really was, having stood upon the torch and felt Liberty's arm tremble during the onslaught of the alien attack. Bernice hoped that if there really was a Goddess of Liberty, that someone like Steve was watching her back.

X

Note: I'd written myself into the odd writers corner where I have our hero inside the ship, pursing his own plot device which you'll learn about in the next chapter, but the UA plot-thread I've adopted had all this other interesting battle stuff going on outside, where Steve couldn't see it. I hate it when author's adopt this omniscient point-of-view to get over the limitations imposed by their viewpoint character. I mean … really! Where does it say Captain America has remote viewing capabilities? It made much more sense to have Bernice, who's standing across the harbor with a pair of goggles plastered to her face ANYWAYS, to describe the UA battle. With my own personal twist … of course.

Thanks for reading!