#PART 2:
-I'M A WAR MACHINE-
Life. It can be a fragile thing. It can mean different things to different beings. For some, it is a transient event in a rapid cycle of reproduction and death. For others an endless horizon, before which existed nothing, after which will come nothing. To some it is the window of time for them to stamp their name in the annals of history, remembered for the ages as the greatest, or find themselves condemned by generations unborn.
For many, life without freedom is not life at all.
For Gigan, life, is to serve, and to serve the Will, that is all life is.
"Do cyborgs dream of electric sheep?" Agent Quartermain said aloud, his face awash in the crimson light that saturated the control room. On the opposite side of the window, the glowing visor of the space monster staring back at him. Unlike all the months when he had known it was just a burnt-out bulb, dim and empty. Now he felt the unblinking eye upon him, a terrifying, alien intelligence contemplating things he could not imagine.
In the climax of all his efforts, Otto Octavius was speechless. He stood stupefied, like a deer in headlights. The words he had planned to say quivered on his lips, the motor skills to articulate them temporarily overcome by a sense of awe. Shadows casting off his body stretched across the wall behind, a silhouette surrounded by the writhing tentacles in a sea of red.
Perhaps it was the years of living such a jaded, detached life. Perhaps the hundreds of identities she had assumed had numbed her ability to be surprised by much. But as the monster's light bore into her, it filled Mystique with a sensation of scrutiny that seemed to bypass the mask of Claire Marion and expose her naked self to its cold, dispassionate inspection. The corners of her eyes twitched in revulsion as her teeth chattered against each other.
Despite the composition and appearance of the single optic, Gigan could see and sense far more than what his tiny observers could. Multiple spectrums, infrared, ultraviolet, electromagnetic, x-ray, and several more bands, three of which currently unknown to mankind, all processed simultaneously, compositing data on the beings before him. Proximity sensors as well compiled in his mind a total image of his surroundings, creating an omnidirectional field of vision. But there was something lacking…
What is the Will? Where… where is the Will?
It was the minute movements of Pulpo on the skin of his neck that finally stirred Otto from his state. He shook his head to dispel the haze, blinking a few times to deal with the glare.
"The Chitauri, Gigan, destroy the Chitauri!"
Images flashed in Gigan's mind, recordings and schematics of the different Chitauri vehicles, weapons and vulnerabilities, every bit of information the Earth had was instantaneously recalled. More importantly, he knew what he should do.
Serve the Will.
Gigan's beak and pincers opened wide to allow an inorganic shriek of acknowledgement, inciting the humans to take a step or two back. If the creature's own capabilities weren't enough, his connection to the Insight network gave it access to real time satellite data, television and internet traffic, and in the span of a few seconds, the cyborg was aware of every known Chitauri location on the planet.
Serve the Will.
The framework of Gigan's wings flexed back and forth, making small adjustments. Then without any notable effort, Gigan rose straight up in the hanger, ascending into the sky above.
Marion and Quartermain stepped beside Octavius as they craned their necks to follow the monster's exit, mouths agape.
"You know Otto…" Claire muttered. "If this thing goes bad, we could be unleashing something just as bad as the Chitauri."
"An appreciable fear, Agent Marion, but one I have accounted for." Touching his hand to the window pane, Octavius tapped his fingers on the glass, each touch being met by an illumination. Doubling as a computer screen, a series of control menus appeared across the window, one of which showed a diagram of Gigan's head.
"Should the worst happen, I can bring him down."
Crossbones stared through his scope, taken off guard by the swift exit of the monster. He was not often surprised, but as the gigantic form flew out he quickly transition into a kneeling position in order to keep the thing in his sights. Shifting the barrel while keeping his cheek to the stock, the tracking was intercepted by the long legs of the Chitauran stalkers striding across the desert plane. Confident that his position had not been compromised, Rumlow knew it would be a dicey thing to stay put for what was about to happen.
Gigan gracefully lowered himself into the sand of the dry lakebed, deliberately drawing the attention of the Chitauri forces converging on the facility. Though his eye could not itself see the opponents arrayed against him, he was perfectly aware of where they were, in all directions. Posturing to pan his optic from left to right, the enemy numbering fourteen in all. The stalkers where half his height, the leviathans a little longer, the carrier ships big enough to span his chest. Gigan offered a sharp squawk, and that's when the destruction began.
A group of three stalkers fired their frontal beam weapons, bluish streams of plasma that tore through the ground as they converged on their single target. The cyborg was off his feet just as the beams reached him, lunging forward at his opponents. The stalkers could not adjust their trajectory in time before Gigan was on top of them.
The tail claw stabbed into the body of the center stalker, piercing the vehicle's armor like a knife through an orange. Clutching the pod in its spiked grip, the stalker was tossed aside and carved a gully into the dirt until it exploded. Pivoting in the air, Gigan cut the legs out from under another with a single stroke of his scythe, following through with another slice that cleaved a great portion of the body.
The third stalker was still turning to face its foe when a metal foot spike was punted into its underbelly, sinking in with a grotesque sound of evisceration. Gigan kicked his leg to shake off the incapacitated machine.
Eleven remain. Serve the Will.
From one of the manta-like carrier ships, came a sphere of green energy generated by the two prongs in the front. Gigan put up an arm to deflect the shot, but it exploded against his metal, and the force was more than his data had indicated. Thrown off balance for a moment, another shot struck him in the back, forcing him to stumble forward, directly into the path of the five oncoming fighters moving in formation. They fired their own light blue ballista in coordination, raining down around the cyborg with tremendous destructive power.
A storm of dust and sand consumed Gigan amidst the detonations, shrouding him even as his piercing wail cut through it.
"He's getting overwhelmed." Agent Quartermain said, shaking his head as he watched they watched the battle play out on the window, courtesy of the real-time satellite feed.
Octavius raised an eyebrow to glance at the creature's vitals, and seeing no change in the readings, clasped his hands behind his back.
"Merely recalibrating."
The two Chirauri carriers prepared to fire again, energy spheres manifesting and growing between their frontal prongs. But as the dust began to clear, Gigan was gone.
Reappearing directly behind the carriers in the blink of an eye, Gigan's precision red beam sliced through one of them just as quickly. The second was skewered with a scythe stabbing down into it. With the other arm, Gigan launched the grapple hooks, capturing two of the fighters before they could circle back around. He retracted the lines to reel them in with a hard yank, and pitched the carrier into the center of their formation. When the disabled craft had reached the remaining fighters, the primary optic beam was fired, dispersing into a cluster-bomb that engulfed the Chitauri in a storm of explosions.
The hooked fighters came in fast. Gigan swung his arm around, slinging them in a wide arc, and concluding in a thunderous slam that left the ships in a crater. The grapples finished recoiling into their launch mechanisms with a metallic clink.
A new cry of feral hatred filled the air, the four Leviathans who had held back to let the war crafts take the brunt of the assault, now advanced with savage intent. Without turning in their direction, Gigan was already calculating their trajectory of attack, along with his counter-strike. Two compartments where his pectoral muscles would be opened, unleashing a pair of razor disks into the sky.
As ferocious as they might have been, against the engineered lethality of the flying buzzsaws, the Chitauri armor was no protection. Before they could reach their foe, the alien serpents fell to the ground in a shower of carnage, blood and viscera raining down on the desert sand. Then the bodies, cleaved at odd angles, snarling faces twisted in their final expressions of terror, hit the earth.
Surrounded by the harvest of his butchery, Gigan loosed a shrill chirp as he turned to receive the disks back into his chest.
"You were saying, Agent Quartermain?" A smug Octavius commented. "As I suspected, the Chitauri are no match for what the Gigan is capable of. They have come to earth in search of a conquest, only to find an adversary ready to cut them down like wheat in the field!"
Clay and Claire exchanged an uneasy set of glances. "Glad to uh, be proven wrong." He said.
"His next target should be the mothership." Marion interjected, refocusing on the mission. "We have to shut down their source of reinforcements."
"I agree." Lifting a pair fingers to the microphone to keep it close to his mouth, Otto could hardly contain his joy. "Gigan, destroy the Chitauri mothership."
Craning his head towards the sky, Gigan calculated the most direct route to where the battle cruiser was hovering in geosynchronous orbit. His sails unfurled to their full extent and spread apart at 90 degree angles, configuring to allow for maximum speed. Without any outward sign of propulsion, the cyborg was streaking through the air, steadily accelerating, a sonic cone forming around his head and becoming narrower.
On the window display in the control room, they watched a model of their soldier's flight path spawn and zoom out to encompass the curvature of the Earth and the Chitauri ship. In between them was a line of dashes, a red dot moving along it at a fairly rapid pace.
"Jesus, how fast is that thing?" Marion asked.
This question at last seemed to break Otto's self-satisfied exterior. Flinching at the sound of it being uttered, his tentacles closed in around him protectively.
"The exact mechanism that allows the Gigan to hover and fly still eludes me as of yet. I have ascertained that it is a process that takes place within the wings, but it is a technology that surpasses even my ability to grasp."
As he begrudgingly spoke the last few words, the ends of the metallic arms coiled tightly.
"But, judging by his speed here, I would say that he can reach mach 3 within Earth's atmosphere, and presumably far more in the weightlessness of space."
The assertion of information that he felt confident in seemed to restore some pride to the man. Marion thought it interesting that an egomaniac like Otto was forced to admit something was beyond his intellect. It amused her to watch him squirm under the shadow of those mysterious superior minds.
Soaring through the layers of the atmosphere faster than a rocket-assisted space shuttle, the far more stream-lined Gigan encountered no resistance as he approached the Chitauri mothership. The invaders apparently not anticipating the possibility of any weapon the Earthlings could bring to bear being able to reach them.
From the top of the ship's four extension arms energy cannons swiveled in place, locking onto the target. Each of them fired at once, the blue spears of light coming one after another in mechanical succession. Gigan dodged each of them in turn, gliding around their path of travel as smoothly as running water. A second volley was launched, this one coordinated to converge on a single anticipatory point. The blasts and the cyborg were on a collision course, and just as the points met, Gigan disappeared in a collapsing star of matter, allowing the explosion to occur in the spot he might have occupied. He reappeared further along his original trajectory, still striving onward.
Within the dark confines of the alien ship, the long-faced Chitauri soldiers watched on their own monitors the rapidly advancing cyborg. In their inhuman tongues they argued about that to do, not understanding what kind of threat the monster posed. Hampered by confusion and ignorance, they decided to receive their guest with the customary belligerence of their race. One of the bays opened, and spewed out a small squadron of carrier ships and fighters. They moved in force, preparing to assail the enemy with wave after wave of attack.
Gigan saw them coming, calculating their speed and trajectory relative to his own, data lines appearing between them to represent spacial calculations. The direct path of travel to the open bay of the Chitauri ship was now crowded with several hostiles, which suited him perfectly.
He extended his arms out to his side, each blade facing either up or down. Then the chest saw began whirring, reaching a blur of motion within seconds. Slowly at first, for a few moments Gigan began to rotate as he glided forward, gaining momentum the closer he got to the Chitauri. The acceleration from there was effortless, his whole body becoming a single tornado of spinning blades. It was an unorthodox countermeasure, but Gigan was an unorthodox weapon.
The Chitauri ships fired their beam ahead of them, the rays deflecting off the armor moving too fast for the shots to penetrate. Gigan cut through the attack, sending sparks and slivers of light in every direction, like a comet soaring across the sky in a brilliant show.
It was like feeding tomatoes into a blender when Gigan finally broke through the attacks and collided with the Chitauri forces. A carrier crashed head-on with the cyborg, its subsequent evisceration taking only seconds as Gigan's cranial spike ripped it to shreds. Other ships suffered much less gruesome fates as the scythes carved into them, slicing through their hulls with great savage gashes.
Passing through the wave of ships with all the grace of a butcher, Gigan straightened out, extending his arms forward as he ceased rotating. Like this he dived into the open bay of the Chitauri mothership with a piercing cry, disappearing inside amidst a flash of sparks and fire.
In the control bridge, the Chitauri recoiled in horror at the sight of the monster breaching the ship's integrity. Scrambling to coordinate internal defenses, they were thrown off balance by a series of explosions that rocked the innards of the station.
The constraining green orb of light surrounding the Peak dissipated, freeing the instillation from the binding effects. Overhead lights in the control bridge slowly powered back to life, prompting the crew members to blink in the sudden illumination, glancing about at each other with confusion and caution. Several of the staffers reporting that the various communication systems were operational again.
Her own vision protected by the impenetrable shading of her glasses, SWORD Director Abigail Brand stood still in the center of the room, staring out of the newly unobstructed windows. Through them she saw the mammoth Chitauri craft in the same spot it had been in before everything was blacked out. Now however, she saw a series of explosions erupting from the ship's hull, fire and debris rising in what one would swear was a deliberate path.
"Get on the horn to SHIELD!" She called out, her voice simultaneously hushing the workstation of murmurs and restoring order. "Tell them the mothership is going up in flames!"
Another explosion preceded a thick red beam lancing out into space from somewhere inside the main body of the Chitauri ship. Gigan emerged from the rift in the hull, his chest saw still running, the surrounding area splattered by dark oils. He cried out as he sent another crimson beam raking across the exterior, creating a streak of destruction that spread in all directions.
Down on the Earth, in the Area 51 division of Project Insight, Octavius and the SHIELD agents continued to watch the window display where the display of the alien ship became surrounded by small data boxes.
"With their mothership disabled..." Otto observed. "The Chitauri's invasion force will be swiftly winnowed down until none remain."
A new video window popped-up adjacent to the depiction of the orbital conflict, this one featuring the stern visage of Natasha Romanov. Red hair plastered to her face, the sound of battle could be heard, behind her the long avenue of civilian cars along the street upturned and savaged by the fight.
"Whatever you did to the mothership, Octavius, the Chitauri in New York are falling back." Flashing across the street in the background of her feed, Iron Man sent a pair of palm blasts after a hovering chariot that carried a pair of the alien soldiers.
"A squad of the new Hammer Sentinels just arrived, and I hear Army and Marine units are holding the capitol with the help of the X-Men. Though this would all be a lot easier if we had the Hulk or Thor around."
"We must all do what we can, Agent Romanov." Otto said with a tight smile. "The Gigan is merely performing his own part of the overall strategy. I'm sure we are none the less for our lack of the Asgardian or Dr. Banner's monster."
Black Widow turned away from the feed and fired her wrist stingers at something out of sight. "Still, I feel like they should be here."
A Chitauri solder coming into view behind her noticed the Avenger, raising its weapon in her direction. Before it could fire however, an arrow struck the power core, the weapon blowing up in the soldier's face. The explosion at last drew her attention, and she spun around in time to see Hawkeye come running in to deliver a high kick to the creature's head as it staggered back.
"I shall leave you to your work." One of Otto's tentacles tapped the glass to close the feed, restoring the entire pane to Gigan's assault on the mothership.
Flying low over the hull, Gigan stabbed his right scythe into the metal, carving through it as he circumnavigated the ship like an apple peeler. The other three launch bays opened, spewing out the remaining carriers, fighter ships, and war beasts in a final desperate attempt to fight off the bladed assailant before all was lost.
Gigan landed on the surface of the craft, his feet sinking into the hull as his internal gravity generators pressed his body weight against the ship. He could see the hordes of Chitauri enemies looping back to come and overwhelm him with sheer numbers. His optic reticule filled with target designations, more than four dozen of them in all.
Satisfied that all enemy targets had been locked, Gigan unleashed his newly acquired firepower.
A storm of red beams rained upwards from the Earth, peppering the Chitauri ranks mercilessly and decimating their numbers within seconds. The wails of the Leviathans lost in the vacuum as their bodies twisted and jerked in agony from the slaughter.
The entire time Gigan had been in combat, he had been simultaneously maneuvering the Insight Helicarriers into position to provide support. Going as high into the atmosphere as their design would let them, the SHIELD craft bristled with cannons, all poised to fire their shots even higher, the monster serving as a forward observer to guide their continual barrage. Adapted from the technology of the Gigan, the man-made red beams were not quite as powerful as the original inspiration, but when loosed by the dozen it made little difference. Under the hail of fire, the Chitauri ships that managed to make it through then faced the cyborg itself.
Gigan unleashed the razor disks once more, directing them in long swooping arcs through the cloud of explosions and shrapnel. He turned his head to fire a crimson beam off to his right, a carrier ship obliterated in green hellfire. Then he found another one, destroying that too.
As explosions rumbled within the mothership beneath him, Gigan held off the Chitauri forces. The disks returned to his chest, cutting through a leviathan that was making a bloody-mouthed dive in his own death throws. The top half of the beast floated by Gigan's head, droplets of blood freezing in a trail behind it. With a casual wave of his arm, he knocked the half away to survey the field of debris and carnage. None of them remained.
Gigan drove his left scythe into the hull of the Chitauri ship, as if he were sawing through a tin of food. Exposing the inner mechanics, his single optic began to glow an intense red, accumulating energy into a single over-powered discharge. The crimson fury was unleashed at last, burning through the ship like lava through ice. After a few moments the beam erupted out of the bottom of the ship, having gone straight through to the other side.
The Chitauri mothership shuddered from a massive explosion that tore the lower quarter of the craft apart, sending one of the bays adrift.
Gigan leapt away from the scene of rapidly intensifying destruction, distancing himself from a volcanic plume of fire that sprung up where he had been standing.
"Now that the primary threat has been eliminated, I think it's time the world got a taste of what our new weapon can do." Octavius tapped on the glass of the window, bringing-up a map of the United States, with red spots signifying the locations of Chitauri forces.
"You're going to send him into civilian populations?" Agent Claire Marion asked, crossing her arms. "Are you sure that's a good idea?"
"I am certain." The doc responded, completely confident of his logic. "It must be publicly demonstrated that the cyborg is under our total control. When they see him purging their cities of the Chitauri menace, they will hail him as a hero."
But Agent Quartermain wasn't so optimistic. "Sending the thing after an alien ship is one thing, but Fury hasn't signed off on any domestic deployments."
"If you feel the need to go through the proper bureaucratic channels, then by all means, Agent." Otto huffed, adjusting his glasses. "I will tell the Chitauri destroying Los Angeles and Houston to come back later when we've got our paperwork sorted out."
"It is kind of an emergency situation, Clay." Marion nudged his shoulder. "Not waiting around for some stamp of approval is exactly what Nick Fury would do."
Clay sighed, dragging a hand down across his face, thinking over the matter. "Where would you send him first?''
HOLLYWOOD
Two Chitauri stalkers reached the summit of the mountain where the iconic sign rested, facing outward to the plane below. The city itself was enthralled in chaos, buildings in various states of unscheduled demolition, people either fleeing in terror, looting what they could carry, or celebrating the end of the world. More stalkers strode through the streets, hammering the ground with their seismic attacks by sending blasts of blue energy straight downwards. Each shot created tremors that leveled whole blocks at a time, leaving waves of concrete and asphalt where flat ground had been. There being simply not enough heroes to go around, some cities, even large ones had to go without any substantial aid outside of whatever military forces could be dispensed.
As it was, a unit of California National Guardsmen were moving block to block trying to clear civilians not just from the path of the alien vehicles, but also for the forthcoming artillery strike from the battery of M777 howitzers emplaced outside the city. A Staff Sergeant heading a squad of soldiers in body armor and bearing their M4 rifles, dashed up to the corner of an otherwise crushed building, tilting his head around the corner. Seeing none of the enemy ground forces, he gestured for those behind him to come forward, a combination of his own troops shepherding several terrified residents.
With his group moved into position, the squad leader advanced, weapon at the high-ready as he rounded the corner and tried to find a way to get back to their armored personnel carrier. He was about to cross another street when the foot of a Chitauri stalker stepped in front of him, the tremor almost knocking him off his feet. The soldier behind him stumbled back, braced only by the body of a father carrying his daughter. A dozen gasps went up a second before gunfire erupted from the rest of the squad, their rounds ricocheting off the superior alien armor.
The belly of the stalker opened to expose the seismic cannon, the aperture glowing with blue power. Before it could fire, a thin red beam sliced through the body, bisecting it in a split second. The two halves fell away from one another, taking what seemed like minutes to hit the ground as the soldiers flinched from the sudden shock.
A shrill cry rung out as the shadow of the cyborg fell over Tinseltown, it was met by the wail of the Chitauri soldiers who knew to fear and hate the one-eyed monster.
The two stalkers that had been about to trample the Hollywood sign tumbled down the hillside wreathed in flames, each of them missing parts of carapace. Above the newly tarred white letters of the sign, Gigan perched, the city laid out before him. From that vantage he could spot the Chitauri forces still ravaging through the streets; several more stalkers, three carriers, a dozen fighters, and a few hundred infantry.
It took all of five minutes for the cityscape to be cleared of hostile vehicles, crippled and eviscerated alien craft littered the roads and draped over the corners and rooftops of building, laying in heaps where they had crashed in craters of rubble.
A group of Chitauran soldiers scampering along cracked asphalt were incinerated in a firestorm of red bursts. When the smoke cleared, Gigan's eye examined the spot where they had been, verifying the elimination of his targets.
The sound of the monster's inorganic screech was by now a sweet song to Otto Octavius, the sound of his monster, his instrument of will. Every time he heard it, it was another testament to his success, every Chitauri warship that fell, proof of his genius. The twitching of the spider-droid on his shoulder reminded him that the alien spider had actually done most of the work that was impossible for human technology to accomplish. But that was a small matter to Octavius, a trifle detail, the repair droids themselves only tools.
With the skies newly cleared, a fleet of drones were able to be deployed, allowing SHIELD to survey the region for damage and rescue efforts. One such UAV was over Hollywood, relaying footage of places that had produced countless disaster movies that were now disaster zones themselves. The feed was playing alongside the topographical representation of Gigan's position on the wide window display.
The Chitauri forces in the area had seemingly been destroyed, leaving the military and first responders the space needed to go in and secure the city.
"What city shall we liberate next?" Otto asked, supremely pleased with himself.
Agent Quartermain was staring into his SHIELD-issued phone, absorbed by the unending flood of updates.
"The two Sentinels in Las Vegas have been downed."
"They had Sentinels in Vegas?" Marion asked, sounding genuinely puzzled.
"Yeah, some of those high-rolling casino owners pooled some money together to invest in some extra security for the city. Not just because it's a prize pig for some super-powered prick to try and knock-over, but there was also that time Iron Man and Hulk smashed through half the city."
Clay made a sweeping motion with his hand over the screen of the device, and cast it towards the window. Two images appeared on the pane, each of them featuring a Sentinel with a painted tuxedo on their armor. One was gripping the handle of an enormous slot machine, the other leaning against the side of a building with its head tilted down under a black fedora.
"As you can see, they also made for interesting props."
LAS VEGAS
One of the bespoke Sentinels lay reclined over Caesar's Palace, its head thrown back in the blazing mid-day sun, an arm missing. The structure underneath it crushed by the weight of the machine tumbling onto it.
What remained might have been salvageable had the flaming husk of a Chitauri carrier not slammed into the Sentinel. All three constructs went up in a furious explosion, a pillar of fire and smoke that dwarfed everything around it. The casino was obliterated, dust and debris falling like rain in the aftermath. Striding through the cloud of haze, Gigan screeched. A pair of fighters sped past him, trying to escape and regroup with others. The cyborg's visor illuminated briefly, casting a crimson river that spread into multiple points and burst in a cacophony of flares reminiscent of World War 2 bombings. Both fighters managed to emerge from the chaos though, gliding on a steady downward angle until crashing into a strip of establishments riddled with neon lighting.
His paltry enemy dispatched, Gigan paused in stride, swiveling his head to look at the remains of the Sentinel.
"What is he doing?" Octavius cursed, surprised by the sudden appearance of alien lettering flashing across his screen. It came in what looked like haphazard blocks, like pieces in a Tetris game and just as random. He taped a few digital buttons on his panel, deliberately at first, then with greater frustration. "He's not acknowledging my commands!"
Now Gigan's whole body turned in the robot's direction with a curious chirp, taking a step towards it.
"I think he's analyzing it." Observed Marion, narrowing her eyes. "Some earlier programming resurfacing upon contact with foreign technology?"
She glanced to her right to see if Quartermain was taking an interest, but saw that he had stepped to the back of the room, a finger stuck into his left hear, his phone raised to the right.
Tattling to Fury no doubt. She muttered in her mind.
The cycloptic cyborg came to a stop just two paces from where the former mechanical bouncer lay, still transfixed. Suddenly he moved his left foot laterally and gestured with a splaying of his arms, dropping the left appendage horizontally at the belly, while conversely raising the right one vertically. Gigan issued a series of wails and sharp barks, continuing to encircle the Sentinel warily.
Octavius tilted his head, "This is not a technological reaction." He realized. "This is instinct."
"He's posturing for some kind of communication." Agent Marion gasped, fascinated. "We need a zoologist to see this."
Gigan clanged his blades together in a rapid switch, the right one now dropped, and the left held up.
"He seems confused by the lack of response. Perhaps he does not understand that the machine is no longer functional?" Otto cradled his chin in his hand. The metal tendril of the droid on his shoulder brushed up against his cheek, drawing his attention for a moment.
"Yeah, this is all very interesting-" Agent Quartermain interjected, putting his phone back in his pocket. "But the Chitauri are on the ropes, without the mothership to provide reinforcements and command, they're scattering and being destroyed piecemeal. But, CONUS [*Continental United States] they're trying to make their last stand is at the Port Arthur Refinery in Texas."
"That's the largest Godamn refinery in the country!" It was less the concern of Claire Marion that Port Arthur was vital to the energy manufacturing of the United States, than it was that a major HYDRA nerve center operated out of the massive facility.
"The military is doing their best to corral them towards the water, they've even conscripted a few Sentinels out of Houston, but it seems the Chitauri are determined to scorch the earth in the wake of their retreat." Clay paused, closed his eyes, and took a deep breath before continuing. "The Council wants the Gigan sent to be the hammer to the military's anvil, and smash the Chitauri between them."
"That could get really messy." Marion said, biting the corner of a fingernail. "The refinery could still go up in an inferno if some stray rounds hit the right spot."
"That was also Fury's objection." Her partner sighed. "But the Council's position is that even if it does, then it'll take the aliens with it. Their objective is to move it away from population centers."
"And the Gigan?" Octavius asked. "In the…unlikely event he should be damaged?"
"Fury didn't mention the council making any particular distinction when it came to which aliens got smoked."
They could hear the whine of the scientist's claws tightening, the idea of the WSC so casually willing to throw their project under the bus did not sit very well with man who had taken it on as his life's greatest work.
"Then we shall have to proceed very carefully then." He steamed through his teeth.
Otto dismissed the curious display of extraterrestrial script to a minimized window for later examination, the entire thing already saved. Then he swiped his hand from right to left, summoning a map of the United States that featured up-to-date locations of known Chitauri forces. As Agent Quartermain had informed them, there was indeed a cluster of red dots moving in a south-easterly direction in the Texan region bordering the Gulf of Mexico.
Octavius magnified the particular section, and highlighted the Chitauri signatures, designating them as priority targets.
"Gigan, proceed to new coordinates." He ordered.
Gigan flinched, as if stung by something. An undulating chitter voiced his displeasure at having his investigation curtailed. He flexed his right arm, still focused on the downed Sentinel, but his body shivered as if his movement was being restrained.
"Proceed to new targets!" Otto commanded once more.
This time the cyborg screeched, like a cat being gripped by its tail, irritated but unable to countermand the overpowering force acting upon him. Finally, Gigan put his arms to his side, and ascended into the sky faster than a rocket.
Octavius smiled tightly, content his control was supreme over the creature's will.
PORT ARTHUR, TEXAS
A series of explosions sent earth and twisted metal into the sky, thunderous pounding provided by artillery units of the United States Marine Corps, Army, and Texas National Guard. The white phosphorus rounds proving to be an effective deterrent, even if they didn't actually damage the alien armor the Chitauri retreated from the substance. It was raining in the southwest of Texas, and the water falling from the sky transformed the powder into a sticky paste that refused to wash away from where it settled.
A crack of lighting contested for audible supremacy, a blinding flash heralding the sky-sundering boom, briefly illuminating the Chitauri stalkers and carriers moving steadily through the evening.
Likewise unveiled by the momentary series of bolts, Gigan waited at the perimeter of the refinery. His glowing eye stood out in the shadows of the storm clouds, a sinister lighthouse drawing ships to their destruction.
"A scene of massive destruction here in Port Arthur…" The female anchor's voice played over the scenes of the battle that took place hours earlier. Smash-cuts of the cyborg cutting through the Chitauri one after the other, scenes of Gigan standing alone on a battlefield of destroyed fuel tanks and flames up to his hip. "The monster once feared as part of a trans-dimensional invasion has now been made into a weapon on behalf of mankind."
A carrier drove itself into Gigan's left side, gripping onto him with its frontal prongs, shocking him with its energy like a giant flying taser. Unfortunately, in the battle of giant flying weapons, it was still pathetically outmatched. Gigan's multi-blade-tipped tail came up behind it and stabbed deeply into the hull. Then, since the appendage on the end was its own gruesome instrument of violence, it began to spin in place, tearing and disemboweling everything inside.
The top of the carrier burst apart from an explosion welling up from within, the ship drifting away from Gigan pitched comically to its right side until it went skidding into a field of inter-connective pipelines.
"As you can see-" The polished voice continued on televisions around the world. "the cyborg, confirmed by SHIELD to be called 'Gigan', made a tenacious stand at the outskirts of the Port Arthur oil refinery plant, acting as a bookend to the advancing American military."
In a crowded internet café in Hong Kong, a throng of Chinese people surrounded a single man's laptop as it sat on the small round table. They looked on in awe at the footage of the monster destroying the invaders war machines. China itself had only a slight experience with Chitauri. After the Battle of Beijing, government officials exercised far less restraint and concern for collateral damage then they might have otherwise.
Parts of Shanghai and Guangzhou no longer existed after select teams of Chinese solders, loyal to their nation beyond compare, braved the peril and moved themselves into positions near concentrations of Chitauri forces. Once there, having sacrificed however many men it took, they detonated a miniature nuclear device. Over a dozen of these counter-strikes took place, eliminating swaths of Chitauran forces. The capitol of Beijing had been spared suffering such devastation only because it had been the first city protected by the strategy before any hostiles had reached it.
The crowd around the computer screen watched with grave concern, most of them remembering very well the terror struck in the nation nearly two years prior when the same monstrosity had been laying their capitol to waste. Now it was going from place to place eradicating a different alien menace, at the command of Earthlings no less.
Hardly any less concerned about Gigan's new situation, a council of Russian military and civil officials sat in a darkened conference room, eyes glued to a flat-screen monitor on the wall.
The sons of the motherland had resorted to a different, and possibly more devastating method of battling the Chitauri. In the wake of the kaiju attacks, the Russians had started manufacturing ammunition designed to penetrate the incredibly resistant hide of the block-busting monsters. Coated in uranium and fired from an array of weapons made to shield the bearer from its effects, these new bullets were successful in piercing the Chitauran armor. Shot from rifles, machine guns, tanks, and even artillery, the uranium rounds also polluted the environment around them, poisoning the land and water.
While confident that they had dealt with the attempted conquest, the fact that the Gigan was now under the command of the American government had them clenching their teeth in anxiety. One of the younger uniformed officers covered his mouth as he leaned forward in his seat, watching Gigan lobotomize a Chitauri carrier as it tried to ram him. A thin beam lancing out from the red gem in his forehead to boil through the ships innards and come out the other side.
"Congratulations Fury, the monster seems to be living up to your expectations." Standing surrounded by the holographic silhouettes of the World Security Council members, SHIELD Director Nick Fury watched the projected news feed of the ongoing battle. A rectangle floated in the darkness before all assembled, its fuzzy borders blending seamlessly from the action into the shadows.
"It's a shame the Helicarriers are not capable of keeping up with him." Came the deep Texan voice.
"That was a logistical consideration we had." Fury remarked, not taking his gaze away from the feed. "Our remote operators are doing a fine job on their own working up the west coast after the Gigan relinquished manual control."
"So we noticed." The British woman said. "San Francisco and Monterey are now cleared for recovery crews to get in without Chitauri threats looming over them."
"The public reaction has also been positive." A Korean man, betrayed only by the accent coming from the vague mask of a person, touched something out of view, and in his place appeared several data windows. In them were continuous feeds of social media platforms in a dozen languages.
"The Gigan is being hailed as a guardian, vanquishing the foreign invaders."
"Not too long ago, Gigan was the foreign invader." Fury spat. "I'll never be surprised by how short people's memories can be."
"Be that as it may director, the results are undeniable." The melodic voice of the Japanese woman sounded the most optimistic Fury thought he had ever heard. "Project Insight has been a successful blunt instrument. The only question remains regarding its capabilities analyzing future threats, which was the original intent of the project."
"The algorithm took a bit of a backseat once we started incorporating technology from the cyborg." Nick explained. "But its development continues and should be ready for beta testing within the month. Octavius was hoping to model it on Gigan's operating system, but the cipher for the alien code remains beyond his grasp."
"All the same, Nick." Said the Texan. "The Gigan has been instrumental in defeating the Chitauri, and the rest of the world sees that. I think it's safe to say that your project has been a resounding success."
Fury dipped his head. "Yeah, let's just hope we don't have to put our trust in that thing to the test too often."
Port Arthur remained mostly intact, technicians having done the best they could on short notice to drain the pipelines of fluids and cutting off access valves. This meant that the loss of the oil in its separate stages was kept to a minimum, and saved the great bulk of the facility from erupting in an apocalyptic conflagration.
The northwest sector of the plant however was a desolation. In stark contrast to the methodical and well-maintained system built by the engineers, the area had been reduced to a wasteland of blackened soil and unrecognizable metal shrapnel, littered with debris and hunks of downed Chitauri bio-mechanical war craft. Pillars of black smoke fumed from multiple spots, dark veins rising up against a grey landscape into polluted clouds.
A stalker, hobbling on three legs desperately tried to backpedal, dragging itself through the rubble like a wounded animal in winter snow. The stump where the limb was severed still trickled with dark green ichor bleeding in continual droplets to leave a trail of the sickly substance behind for the predator to follow.
Gigan's foot came down along the path of blood, the single metal toe marred slightly with black soot. On his right hook, hung a Leviathan, gutted in its underside like a fish, and held aloft for the cyborg to examine it more closely. The creature writhed in pitiful agony, its death-throes being drawn-out to sate the kaiju's curiosity. A rare moment for Gigan to exercise some free-will.
The leviathan mewled weakly, blood bubbling up from its gullet to splatter over its teeth. Gigan stared down at it, raising it slowly closer to his own face. In a sudden lurch, Gigan took the creature's head in his mouth , teeth sinking into the Chitauran armor with ease. The mandible pincers stabbed into either side and delivered a decisive killing strike through flesh and skull, directly into the brain. The wriggling on the scythe came to an abrupt stop, the serpentine body going limp.
Thinking it had managed to escape while the enemy was distracted, the Chitauri stalker turned away to find itself confronted by a trio of HAMMER Tech Sentinels. Clad in armor made to resemble the bulky and menacing gear of SWAT officers, this new generation unlike their forebears were designed for much more than capturing mutants.
The three androids raised their right arms, currently configured into energy cannons, a bright yellow light building in the back of the cavity. All at once they fired, the blasts slamming into the stalker in unison, peeling the armor back and exposing the mass of tissue interlaced with circuitry. The stalker took a few rigid steps back and froze, then, fell over in the direction of its lost limb.
"CHITAURI THREAT, ELIMINATED." The Sentinel in the middle of the formation emitted, a horizontal white bar under its eyes contracting and expanding with each syllable.
Gigan turned his head in the direction of the three robots, releasing the dead leviathan from his beak.
"What will it do?" Agent Marion asked, Quartermain, Octavius, and herself unable to avert their attention from what was to them, a tense situation. "Will they fight?"
But Otto dismissed her worry with a raised hand. "The Sentinels are clearly designated as non-hostiles in his programming, he should ignore them."
Sitting by herself in her corporate office, at the head of a long glass table with the blinds drawn along the wall-to-wall window, Justine Hammer stared at the laptop computer in front of her. She steepled her fingers against her lips, the bangs of her light brown hair drooping forward to create blinders to all else but what she saw.
So far, she was happy with what she had seen of the Sentinels capabilities. They had done a reasonable job combating the Chitauri and showing the public that her machines were well worth the money. The fortuitousness of the alien invasion doing wonders to sell them, which in turn, would help to fund the next generation of HAMMER Sentinels.
The Leviathan slipped from Gigan's arm with a SCHLOCK-ing noise before hitting the ground. It was that sound that drew the Sentinel's attention to the cyborg, the three of them turning in his direction with the synchronicity of a flock of birds. Gigan chirped twice, one short bark followed by a wail. Then he began the same strange dance he had exhibited to the fallen machine in Las Vegas. Slapping the flats of his scythes together twice, then posturing with one pointed down and the other raised, accompanied by a shrill call.
"He's doing it again!" Agent Clay Quartermain exclaimed, hands on his hips. "He's trying to communicate with the damn Sentinels!"
"You said the Gigan is programmed to recognize them as friendlies…" Marion wondered aloud. "But what about their programming? Did Hammer give him the same courtesy?"
Gigan stepped to his right in a wide arc, again presenting the black-clad trio with his queer display.
From the perspective of the Sentinels, the visual of the monster was not considered with any judgment of behavior as strange or normal, rather they were abiding to their current programming of scrutinizing the subject for any sign of being a Chitauri weapon. Putting aside the splatter of blood on Gigan's beak and pincers, after slaughtering dozens of the alien craft, he was now covered in biological residue.
"CHITAURI SIGNATURE DETECTED." The middle Sentinel declared. "ELIMINATE TARGET."
Gigan's gesturing halted suddenly when the androids raised their arm canons and fired.
"Oh no!" Otto cried, his fingers scrambling across the window pane to access data windows. "Those HAMMER-TECH tin cans are mistaking him as one of the Chitauri!"
"Can they damage the Gigan?" A fretting Quartermain asked, face wide open in alarm.
Octavius shook his head. "I highly doubt it, but Gigan can rip them to shreds!"
Just as he spoke, the diagnostic windows he had summoned, showing Gigan's vitals and structural integrity glitched, warping into a red filter. Images of the Sentinels then appeared, overlaid by scrolling rows of the same alien text he had seen before. As it rolled on, the outline of the Sentinels was highlighted, Octavius understanding that the programming had just flipped.
The barrage of yellow energy blasts caught Gigan off guard, forcing him to raise an arm as a shield. As the hits bombarded his armor, the conflict between his previous designation of them as non-hostiles, and their present aggression was resolved. In a blink, Gigan disappeared.
Their target vanished from perceptible range, the Sentinels assault ceased, cylindrical heads swiveling in all directions.
"TARGET… ERROR."
Forming a firing line, the androids stood within arm's reach of each other, facing the same direction. A standard configuration for engaging a singular threat.
The small warp in the fabric of space came too quickly for their scanners to register, and just as fast as he had evaporated, Gigan emerged into reality directly behind them.
The Sentinel to the right of center was lifted off its feet by a length of curved scythe bursting out of its chest and holding it aloft, sparks flying out in arcs.
The Sentinel on the left of center hadn't managed to spin its head around before it was clamped onto by the spikes of Gigan's tail, the central spear piercing the cylinder as the surrounding claws pinched to hold it in place.
The middle Sentinel managed to pivot its head in place, coming nearly beak-to-nose with Gigan a second before it was obliterated by a stream of crimson energy from his optic. When the beam ended, only a smoking stump remained.
Gigan gave out a wild shriek as the headless android fell, his upper body bent over and dorsal sails rattling in the overt show of anger.
Otto Octavius swallowed a lump, watching how quickly the multi-million-dollar machines had been utterly neutered. Truthfully, he was in awe of just how seamless the cyborg was in furious battle. His own technological appendages were linked directly to his brain, and was a relatively small example of what were essentially articulate prosthetics. The Gigan was a complete fusion of artificial and organic, and suffered no loss of agility and speed despite the massive scale of operation.
"It's beautiful." He muttered, putting a hand up to his glasses in an absent-minded impulse. "A thing of unearthly grace and sublime efficiency."
"It's an alien Edward Scissorhands that shoots lasers out of its face." Quartermain complained to Marion out one side of his mouth.
The Sentinel's head crumpled into a jagged lump of twisted metal, Gigan's tail claw wrenching the rounded cylinder from the shoulders with a savage ferocity. Once the head was free, the tail pulled back and whipped itself across the android's chest, the blades along the crest of the appendage slicing through the armor and carving a ghastly wound through its innards.
With only the one was left, Gigan ascended several dozen meters above the ground, keeping the limp machine skewered on his arm. Reaching some height satisfactory to the cycloptic cyborg, he drove his left scythe into the lower portion of the Sentinel's torso, likewise breaching the opposite side. In one smooth effort, Gigan pulled his arms apart and ripped the automaton in half.
Both pieces dropped and crashed to the ground in ungainly heaps, one of the legs breaking at the knee upon impact. The upper body landed on its stomach, the eye-lights in the head blinking on and off. With its left arm configured in its normal hand setting, it tried to escape the danger and crawl away, dragging itself along one pull at a time.
Gigan landed directly on top, his left leg crushing the outstretched arm to pin it against the ground. He reached down with his left scythe and jabbed the tip of the hook into the top of the cylindrical head, methodically pulling back on it. With the head exposed, Gigan swung his right scythe and severed it in one clean stroke.
"Gigan!" Octavius barked. "Return to base immediately!" The nerves of the scientist were beyond hot. In a more animated world, one might have seen steam shooting out of his ears. "Abort mission and return to base!"
Quartermain pressed his palms against his temples, his eyes closed in strained contemplation. "Fury is going to be on a warpath." He predicted. "And that's after he's done getting an earful about his pet project going rogue and turning three of Texas' state-owned Sentinels into scrap metal."
"Look on the bright side." Agent Marion offered. "At least we know who's got the biggest stick on the block."
The sound in his head was like a knife lodged in his brain, it was the call of the Will. Gigan's mind rebelled against the command, phantoms of his own free will raising a flare of defiance to the little voice. He stumbled forward, leaving the decapitated Sentinel behind, tail thrashing like a fish out of water. The monster screeched, neck craned back to cry out towards the sky. Again the voice of the Will rung through his primitive conscious, and he felt his artificial muscles and joints straining to respond to it.
"Return!" It commanded, the literal words of Otto Octavius translated to a baser concept, imbued with an inherent context of where it meant to return to. "Obey! Return!"
Unable to overcome the systematic control the Will exerted on his body, Gigan's forward motion ground to a halt, the titan collapsing onto his right knee. He tried to rise, tried to power his way through the tension, but it was not enough. Gigan's other knee came down, along with his scythes, putting him on all fours in a submissive posture.
The gleaming red light in the cyborg's eye glitched, fizzled, then went blank completely.
"Looks like he shorted out." Quartermain remarked, looking quizzically at the screen.
But Agent Marion understood full-well what had occurred. "You can't serve two masters." She enjoined. "The Sentinels forced his natural instinct towards self-preservation to supersede his programming."
"Which triggered a surge of free-will against my commands…" Octavius finished, tilting his head to one side in an unconscious gesture of awestruck realization. "Fascinating."
"Ma'am? The board of directors is calling for you." Still staring at the computer screen, Justine Hammer had no reaction to the young male aide in a business suit standing behind her chair. The video in front of her replayed the astoundingly fast incident between her Sentinels and the cyborg, the entire encounter not lasting more than 10 seconds from the time Gigan was fired upon. She watched the monster rematerialize out of nothing, then incapacitate three of her very well designed, very expensive machines with well-honed efficiency.
"Ms. Hammer, the board is waiting to talk to you." He reiterated.
Finally Justine was subtly broken of her fixation, inhaling sharply before she reached out and shut the lid of the laptop. She rose from her chair, buttoning the three buttons of her crimson suit to make herself more presentable.
"Thank you, Roger." Justine told him professionally. "Any clue as to what those old buzzards want to gripe about?"
Roger smirked sheepishly. "They didn't spell it out, but I imagine they'll want to discuss current events."
"Good." She said with a chipper tone as she passed him. "Because I do believe our stock is about to take a wild upswing."
A thin, horizontal red light appeared in Gigan's eye, pulsating for a moment until the center of the line bubbled into a single mass that absorbed the rest of the light. As smooth as silk, the cyborg's head lifted to look forward and its body straightening out to stand erect. The battle for control was over, all that remained, was the Will.
His dorsal sails unfolded and stretched out, activating the cells within that allowed him to defy the pull of gravity. The coordinates for his objective was the first thing on his mind, accomplishing his task the only thing that mattered. Gigan loosed a screech as he rose into the sky with virtually no resistance from the forces of nature, like a helium filled balloon released by a child. In seconds, he was gone.
UNKNOWN LOCATION
"Machines…
Aliens…
Monsters…
They think their grand visions of the next great super weapon will make them invincible. They are wrong."
The voice spoke in a cold, severe tone, a theatricality woven into the pronunciation that betrayed a charismatic tongue. Set before the mysterious orator were several video screens arrayed along a wall displaying a different news feed on each of them. Images of Chitauri craft in various conditions of destruction, city blocks laid to waste, and Gigan striding through smoke and fire.
"The hubris of the homo-sapiens knows no bounds. Thinking they can tame the fury of the titans, bring the gods under their leash."
A newscast in Chinese, hosting a video of an embattled Gigan between the two sitting anchors played scene to a fierce debate. Another in Russian displayed a stoic commentator conjecturing about the nature of the American's mercenary. Then there was an American newscast out of Las Vegas, the reporter giving her account while having the fallen Sentinel in the background.
"In enslaving the monster, they have cloaked themselves in a blanket of false security. It will not keep them warm, nor will it protect them from the inexorable scope of my righteous wrath."
On the screen in the center, the image froze on a shot of Gigan looking directly towards the camera, his beak open in mid-screech.
"Once more I will strike terror into the hearts of men, I will put them in their proper place beneath me. Beneath us."
A shadow was cast over the wall of screens, a rounded head set atop broad shoulders.
"And should they be so foolish as to send their pet abomination to oppose us… to resist the ascension of homo-superior…"
An arm was extended, and the television with Gigan's face on it was extracted from its kindred by an invisible force, floating gracefully forward.
"Then I will crush it…"
In a second, the flat screen was crumpled into a misshapen clump, bits of glass and plastic falling to the floor.
"With a wave of my hand."