May 4, 2012
The Manhattan hotel room the Carters had paid for was a reasonably spacious double queen, but with 15 people plus equipment inside, it was uncomfortably tight to say the least.
Wedged in the far corner between Karma and Maggie, Clint could no longer see through the window to Stark Tower across the street, thanks to the press of family members gathering around his brother-in-law Quyen, who was unboxing the electronic weapons he'd developed for this occasion and distributing them to each combatant with a serious expression on his face and sweat visibly beading on his brow.
Clint couldn't blame him for being stressed out. This was definitely a change from the communication and entertainment devices Quyen typically designed for his engineering firm Hoang Ky Su. This time people's lives would be riding on his invention. After long consultations with Grandpa more than a year ago, Clint's dad and Steven had decided that conventional guns would be inadequate for their needs today, and Quyen had stepped up to the plate to help.
"Who's missing?" Quyen called out, holding up the last zapper with a worried expression on his face, and abruptly Clint realized he was the only combatant left in the room who wasn't holding one.
"Me!" he said, holding up his hand and trying not to look sheepish. Quyen passed it to him over the hotel bed and Clint cradled in awkwardly in both hands, looking down and mentally cataloging each part of it as a way to reassure himself that he actually remembered his training on how to use it. There was a trigger like a regular gun, of course, but this weapon wouldn't be firing bullets, but rather small, spiked balls charged with electricity. Something like a taser, but without the attached wires and the distance limitations inherent to them. The trouble with bullets, Grandpa had explained to them, was that even if you managed to shoot a Chitauri foot soldier through a gap in its armor, you might not kill it outright, thanks to its thick skin and dense flesh. Combine that with the creatures' total lack of self-preservation that drove them to battle on fiercely even while injured, and suddenly bullets didn't seem as useful as you might think. Not unless you got dangerously close to your target first.
Electrical charges, on the other hand, would short out the cybernetic devices implanted in their bodies and disable them entirely. If you managed to hit flesh and not armor, that is.
A big "if."
Beside Clint, Karma had already slung her zapper over her shoulder and was now loading her own personal handgun with quick, practiced movements. Clint couldn't help but let out a self-deprecating laugh, seeing it. Karma glanced up at him.
"What?" she asked.
"You," Clint said. "You have more combat experience than I do."
Karma raised her eyebrows. "If by combat experience, you mean I bought myself a gun a few years back and then put a few holes in a few targets a couple times a month... then, sure. I have combat experience."
"It's more than I've got."
Karma shook her head slightly. "And here I thought I was getting it so no one would mug me, or-" She broke off before finishing the sentence, but she didn't need to; Clint knew what it was she feared the most from her fellow man, and it wasn't getting her money stolen.
"Never thought I'd have to fight aliens with it," she added wryly.
"Hopefully you don't." It was Clint's intention that Karma wouldn't even need to expend all the charges in her zapper, much less use the handgun she'd brought as backup. Steven had assigned them both to the same team, and Clint had already decided that no Chitauri would get past him far enough to get so much as a glimpse of Karma.
"Anyway, didn't you come here with your family to help on 9/11?" Karma asked curiously.
Clint shrugged one shoulder. "Yeah. But we were just rescuing people. We didn't fight anyone."
"If it makes you feel any better," Maggie put in, unexpectedly joining their conversation from Clint's other side, "I haven't done much fighting either."
That was true, Clint realized after a beat. All three of his siblings had spent countless hours training for combat from childhood on, and most of Maggie's siblings had too, especially Steven and Amanda. But not Maggie herself. She tended to be the one to volunteer to watch over everyone's children while others were training. That's what she enjoyed and she was good at it; Clint had to admit she was the only babysitter besides his own parents who could take charge of little T.O. without triggering a stormy tantrum the moment Clint and Karma moved toward the exit. A real-life Supernanny. He'd even called her that to her face once, and Maggie had merely smiled sweetly and taken it as a compliment, ignoring the hint of sarcasm that had inadvertently slipped out into his tone.
But for today's mission, Dad had asked that all those with genetic enhancements consider volunteering for the four combat teams, leaving the support roles to the in-laws, and everyone had fallen into line. So it was Uncle Dave, and Maggie's husband Henry, and Joe's wife Holly who were back in Winchester watching over several dozen kids today, and it was Quyen and Christina and Mom who were going to stay put in this hotel room to reload and repair weapons and provide portal service to the combat teams as needed. "POGs, but not in a bad way" was how Steven had dubbed them with a teasing grin on his face. Clint still didn't know what that meant. Some military thing, probably.
"We'll be okay," Maggie went on. "Grandpa said the Chitauri weren't all that clever of fighters."
Clint suppressed his annoyance at her glibness. Where did she get off trying to reassure him, when she was even wetter behind the ears than he was? He had at least come out the victor in a bar scuffle or five over the years. It wasn't hard to guess that Maggie had never faced even that much. She'd probably never taken a single pop to the jaw in her life. And what had Steven been thinking, assigning them both to the same combat team? He knew their personalities didn't mesh. Steven had patiently endured any number of rants from Clint over the years on that very topic.
Clint had been hoping to be on Steven's team, if nothing else because he'd worry less about Karma that way. But only Beatrisa would be going with Steven. The two of them had been training together intensively to combine her portal-making with his one-man-army style of fighting, and Dad had said with open pride that the combination was becoming downright explosive. Anyone else added to their team would just get in their way, Clint supposed.
Fighting alongside one of his siblings would have been a relatively palatable alternative. But Harrison and Sammy were both assigned to special ops for this mission, and Natty was leading a different combat team, because of course she was.
Which left Clint stuck with Maggie.
"Chitauri tactics may not be sophisticated, but they're strong and they're pretty resilient, thanks to all those cybernetics," Natty put in, expression sober. She had her dark hair pulled back into a tight dancer's bun, and like the rest of them she was dressed in civilian clothes so as to not draw attention. "Not to mention their superior numbers. We shouldn't go in over-confident."
Amanda looked unconcerned. "They might be effective at terrorizing civilians who are about to be caught completely unaware... but that isn't us."
"Natty's right," Steven said, and as if by signal the chatter in the room suddenly quieted down as everyone else turned to listen to him. "We shouldn't let our guard down out there." He paused for a moment. "But Amanda's right too: we have an advantage. They won't be expecting the kind of resistance we're about to put up. Much less the kind of fight the Avengers are about to give them."
Just then there was a burst of static, and Dad's voice crackled over the radio. "Steven, come in. We're in position here. What's your status?"
Steven answered readily. "Mike. We're good to go here. Do you have eyes on the Tesseract?"
"Affirmative," Dad said. Clint couldn't help but crane his neck to look out the hotel room window, even though he knew Dad's helicopter wouldn't be visible from this angle: it was currently parked on the landing pad atop the skyscraper to the west of Stark Tower. Amanda's husband Rob and Sammy's husband Saul were with him to round out his airborne team, both of them familiar with firearms thanks to their experience as a cop and a former soldier, respectively.
"Dr. Selvig's team just finished setting up the device and went back inside," Dad continued over the radio. "It's powering up now. Selvig stayed behind alone to keep an eye on it."
"And Loki?" Steven asked levelly.
"He's on the walkway below, just outside Stark's penthouse lounge. Just pacing back and forth. Waiting." Dad paused ever so slightly. "He has the scepter."
Clint could feel his heartbeat picking up speed. So close. Two Infinity Stones, practically within spitting distance. And both in the hands of the worst possible person. Well, they weren't in the hands of Thanos exactly, but they might as well be. He'd preyed on Loki's resentment and lust for power and maneuvered him into this situation. And innocent people were about to suffer for it.
And to think this was only the opening salvo. Two were bad enough, but once he got all the Stones...
Clint felt every hair on the back of his neck stand up. T.O. was half a world away from Manhattan, safe with the other Carter children in Winchester, but somehow that didn't seem nearly far enough. Thanos' army would be here in minutes. There was no stopping it now.
The thought was sickening, and he could tell by the faces around him that he wasn't the only one who felt that way. So he did the only thing he could do, the one thing that he knew would shake him free from the paralyzing grip of fear. The only thing that had ever worked for him.
"Boy, if only we had an army of super soldiers right about now," he said blandly into the silence.
He hadn't thought it was a very good joke, yet the responding laughter was explosive. As if everyone was just waiting for a chance to vent their emotions, and this was the first chance they'd gotten. Natty was face-palming with a huge grin on her face, Maggie was wiping a tear of mirth from one eye, and even Steven was shaking his head ruefully but with a definite hint of amusement.
"There he is! Iron Man!" Joe said suddenly, pointing out the window. They all turned in time to see a bright streak of light flash across the sky and then pull up to hover over the pinnacle of Stark Tower. Even from here, they could see that his jet flares were stuttering; his suit was running out of power.
"He's talking to Selvig," Dad said over the radio. They waited in tense silence, but in less than a minute they saw a flash of white light at the peak of the tower, followed by an responding blue burst of energy that sent Iron Man tumbling back through the air.
"He didn't even leave a mark on the device," Dad said quietly. "But Selvig's down for the count." There was a short pause. "Stark's taking off the suit and going inside. Loki's following him."
"Okay, Prevengers," Steven said in a business-like tone, turning to face them all with an air of calm and confidence. "That's our cue. All right, everybody. Prepare to ship out. And remember-"
"-that we may be outnumbered, outgunned and outsmarted by the other team," Clint interrupted smoothly, "but by Odin's beard we have heart, and we're gonna go out there and give 110 percent, and we're gonna sports just as hard as the other team and maybe even harder, because it's do or die, folks! This is our time!"
Karma's appreciative snicker behind him spurred him on, so he kicked his volume up a notch and pumped his fist in the air. "We're gonna take it to the next level now, because it is what it is, guys, it is what it is!" He was shouting now. "We're gonna overcome a ton of adversity and we won't be denied! Let's send a message and bring our A game! We are gonna be one big happy family and kick the crap out of a bunch of aliens!" He clapped his hands with authoritative rhythm. "Let's go let's go let's go!"
In the uproar of laughter and cheers that followed, Joe could be heard shouting indignantly over the cacophony: "Oh come on! I wanted to hear Steven's pep talk!"
"You know what?" Steven said, lifting his hands up with good-natured resignation. "I can't top that. You heard the man!" He clapped his hands loudly. "Let's go let's go let's go!"
Sling ring at the ready, Amanda turned and opened a portal into the wall, and she and Joe and Sarah disappeared into it. Aliyah was ushering Bram and Natty through another. Beatrisa and Steven stepped through a third, and then Mom opened the last one for Clint's team. Maggie went through first, followed by Karma. Clint happened to catch his mother's eye as he went through her portal last of all.
He was fully expecting her to look afraid for him, but to his surprise she had an entirely different expression on her face as they briefly locked eyes: a fiercely incandescent pride that lifted her chin and glowed in her eyes. He saw it only for a split second, and then the portal snapped shut between them.
Jarvis was wounded.
It was pretty bad. Not disaster-level bad, but bad enough. Harrison's eyes flicked back and forth between watching Loki pace on the walkway outside through Stark Tower's tinted-glass windows, then back to the readouts on the monitors here in Tony Stark's workshop. An awful lot of them were flashing error messages in big red letters. Never a good sign.
They'd completely dismantled Jarvis' security protocols for Stark Tower as soon as they arrived: Loki and all his brainwashed minions that Clint Barton had helped him assemble while his own mind was overthrown. It was no surprise Loki had used the Mind Stone embedded in his staff to scramble Jarvis' mind, too. By then the tower had been completely evacuated, thanks to a hasty order called in by Tony himself just before he left the helicarrier to head for Manhattan. In the chaos of frightened fleeing Stark Industries employees, it hadn't been difficult for Harrison to slip into a hiding place unnoticed, emerging only after Loki had arrived and done his mischief.
To his credit, Jarvis had put up a fight. Even wounded, he'd managed to shut down the arc reactor less than a minute after Loki had pressed it into service kick-starting the Tesseract, now suspended in a device placed at the pinnacle of the tower. But by then it was too late: the energy surge was self-sustaining and it was only a matter of time before a stable portal between Earth and the Chitauri armada opened up.
But Loki hadn't bothered to destroy Jarvis completely. Maybe he'd underestimated how powerful Tony's AI was, Harrison thought, just as he'd underestimated the Avengers themselves. Focused on the needs of the moment, he was fixated on getting inside, getting the arc reactor going, and getting the portal open. Maybe he thought that once the armada arrived, his work would be done.
Loki hadn't been blind to the danger posed by the Iron Man tech, though. Once the Tesseract was set up outside, only Dr. Selvig had remained behind to operate it. The rest of the mercenaries recruited by Barton had shown up here in the workshop with explosive charges in hand, intent on wanton destruction.
They'd been pretty shocked to find a lone security guard standing between them and Stark's array of Iron Man suits.
Harrison had given them each a pretty good thump on the head before any of them had managed to set off any charges or even sound an alarm. With any luck they'd be free of the influence of the Mind Stone now, but nevertheless he'd dragged them into Tony's office and barricaded the door. They were already enemies of S.H.I.E.L.D. before Loki got to them, and Nick Fury would be glad to see them behind bars after everything was over, even if he'd never know who did him the favor.
Suddenly, machinery all around the workshop powered up, and robotic arms under the floor kicked into motion, easily visible through the glass panels embedded there. Harrison glanced out the window again and saw that Tony Stark had just alighted on the landing pad outside and was now being divested of his Mark VI suit. Pieces of damaged armor were passing under Harrison's feet and getting funneled into the scrap bin. Simultaneously, the glass case protecting Mark VII was sliding open, and other robotic arms were pulling it out piece by piece and subjecting it to rapid adjustments from various automated tools, sparks flying out and the smell of ozone filling the air.
Through the tinted window Harrison watched as Tony strolled into his penthouse lounge, paced by Loki entering through a different door with equally feigned casualness.
Harrison turned his back to the wall and squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, fighting every instinct he had to burst into the lounge and defend his charge, now facing off against a Frost Giant wielding an Infinity Stone with nothing but a Black Sabbath T-shirt and a metric ton of snark to protect him.
"Please tell me you're planning to appeal to my humanity," he heard Loki's voice faintly through the wall, followed by Tony's laconic answer: "Uh, actually, I'm planning to threaten you."
"The staff won't work on him," Harrison reminded himself firmly under his breath. Thank goodness for Tony's "tin heart." All he had to do was talk. His greatest talent. Just talk long enough for Jarvis to limp through the completion of Mark VII's construction.
And limping he was. Error messages continued to flash, and Jarvis seemed to be trying to make some adjustment to Mark VII's chest plate, but one robotic arm was simply not responding to repeated command codes scrolling by on a nearby monitor.
Finally, Dum-E - Tony's old, buggy robot built back in his college days - came wheeling out from its storage cubby to assist... and promptly got stuck trying to move past a wheeled tool cart that had been knocked askew during Harrison's tussle with the mercenaries.
"The Chitauri are coming," he heard Loki say from the other room. "Nothing can change that."
Dum-E backed up with determination, moved forward and banged into the tool cart, then backed up, then banged into the tool cart again. Wincing at the noise, Harrison darted forward and picked up the cart as quietly as possible, moving it aside. Dum-E trundled past him with a palpable attitude of gratitude and finally managed to reach the Mark VII chest plate. Moving clumsily but with purpose, its robotic arm took a tool from the grasp of the immobile robot and sparks began to spray as it resumed the job.
"...a super soldier, a living legend who kinda lives up to the legend-" Tony was saying to Loki. He was speaking slowly and deliberately, with lots of pauses between his phrases. Not at all like his usual motor-mouth, mile-a-minute, don't-stop-to-think style of communication. Harrison made a mental note to himself to be afraid, very afraid, if Tony ever spoke to him like that. It probably meant that something heinous was going on the next room over.
Jarvis was reassembling Mark VII now, robotic arms swiveling and turning and riveting with furious precision. But the jet flare on the left boot was still being put together, one robot performing a painstakingly delicate operation on the wires inside.
"There's no throne!" he heard Tony's voice snap out unexpectedly. "There is no version of this where you come out on top!"
He was losing patience with Loki. Too annoyed to be clever anymore. Harrison had heard Tony use that tone on the board of directors before, and it had always resulted in a massive headache for Pepper Potts who had to smooth ruffled feathers in the aftermath. "Here we go," he muttered to himself.
"How will your friends have time for me, when they're so busy fighting you?" he heard Loki sneer.
The left boot was finally complete. A robotic arm whipped it around and riveted it onto the suit. With a seamless transition, suddenly the armor was hovering on multiple tiny jets, and with a beautiful ballet of synchronized movement, each piece worked in concert to wrap themselves together into a neat, rectangular pod.
There was a heavy thump next door, and a muffled grunt of pain from Tony. Harrison's heart began to hammer. Things were getting physical out there, and Tony still had no protection. They were out of time.
"Jarvis... any time now..." Tony said in a low, strangled voice, this time the sound coming through the speakers in the workshop because it was a direct command to his A.I.
The armored pod that was Mark VII was complete and hovering expectantly next to the revolving door that led into the lounge... but the door wasn't opening. Red error messages were flashing everywhere. Harrison realized with a jolt that it was Jarvis' security protocols that controlled the doors in here... and Loki had fried them when he had first arrived.
Mark VII was trapped.
Leaping over a work bench, Harrison threw himself at the deployment door and pressed the manual release repeatedly. Nothing. Swearing under his breath, he pounded every button in sight. Nothing.
"You will all... fall... before me!" Loki's voice ground out in pure fury, and Tony let out a frantic but strangled "Deploy! Deploy!"
Brows coming together, Harrison grabbed the door with both hands and hauled, prying it open a crack.
Glass shattered across the lounge even as the pod's jets flared, washing heat into Harrison's face and sending the pod hurtling through the too-narrow crack he had just opened, sending debris flying as the pod zipped across the lounge and out the shattered window. Harrison caught just a glimpse of a wild-eyed Loki getting knocked off balance in the wake of the pod's passage before he quickly threw himself flat on the ground, out of Loki's line of sight.
There was a short silence. Pressed against the floor of the workshop, Harrison hardly dared breathe.
And then the sound of boot jets flared, and Tony's voice rang out once more, metallic through his helmet this time.
"And there's one other person you pissed off," he told Loki. "His name was Phil."
A repulsor whined and Loki cried out hoarsely, followed by a heavy thump on the floor.
And then there was another sound, a much different one. Harrison lifted his head up, trying to identify it. A low, deep thrumming had started up under him and over him and all around him. Like the subtle effect he had felt more than heard the day Tony had first activated the large arc reactor that now powered Stark Tower. But this thrumming was more powerful, resonating in his very bones, with a higher whine that ached in his eardrums. A thrumming born of one of the most powerful devices in the known universe.
"All teams!" Harrison's dad's voice suddenly sounded in his earpiece. "All teams, the Tesseract is active. The portal is opening. Repeat, the portal is opening! Stand by for enemy fire."
Harrison's every muscle tensed, but he knew that didn't mean him. Not yet.
Because before he could fight, first there was something he had to steal.
And now that Tony Stark was distracted by the incoming army, his chance had finally arrived.
TO BE CONTINUED