The navy personnel escorted Jarvis and Dido down several flights of steps and a long hallway lit by sickly fluorescent lights, to a giant vault door that opened onto a bunker. Had Jarvis been in a position to compare them, he would have noticed that it wasn't nearly as nicely outfitted as the the one Tony and Wheeler had been confined to earlier, but much more secure. Deep under a mountain in the island's interior, it was intended to survive a direct attack. It was also quite a bit more crowded than the other had been – as well as civilians, those injured in the earlier battle had been moved in, along with the medical staff looking after them.
A computer would have had to stop and analyze each face in the room, comparing them to a library of photographs, in order to find the familiar ones. But somehow, whether by sheer coincidence or by another quirk of how the human brain worked, the first person Jarvis saw when the big metal door swung open was Miss Potts.
She saw him, too – she'd been dealing cards to Agent Wheeler, Colonel Rhodes, and another man with his arm in a sling, but upon noticing Jarvis she jumped to her feet. "Oh, my god!" she exclaimed. "Jarvis! You're all right!"
Before Jarvis could say anything in reply, she came hurrying up to throw her arms around him in a hug. For a moment, as with Dido's kiss, he didn't know how to respond to it, but then he raised his own arms to return the embrace. The warm, firm pressure wasn't so shockingly intimate as the kiss had been, and communicated a different type of affection.
"Does Tony know you're all right?" Pepper asked, still clinging to him.
"Yes," said Jarvis. "I spoke to him upstairs."
She nodded as she finally loosened her grip. "You should have seen him when he thought you were dead. He was gutted. I've never seen him so upset."
"He was?" Jarvis was startled. He felt a poke in his back, and turned to see Dido smiling at him.
Colonel Rhodes appeared to be injured – he was moving slowly, favouring one leg, but he came and put a hand on Jarvis' shoulder. "Look who made it out!" he said, grinning.
"That was all him," Dido said. "He knew exactly when we had to go – he just had the AI upload itself out of there, grabbed me, and off we went, just in time."
"That's not true," Jarvis protested. When he'd realized that the house was about to be destroyed – not just knocked about a little, but actually smashed to bits and dragged down into the water – he'd frozen. He remembered kneeling there on the pavement as time seemed to stop with the Kraken's tentacle about to come down, and really understanding that there wouldn't be any going back because there would be nothing to go back to. After that, there was an odd little skip in events, and the next thing he remembered was feeling his insides heaving and knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was about to find out what vomiting felt like.
It had felt repulsive.
And then... then he'd just felt utterly lost. What could he possibly do now? The answer, of course, was anything he wanted... but there was nothing he wanted. He wanted to be useful, to have a purpose the way he had last week when all he'd been was Mr. Stark's computer and life had been so much simpler, but that would never be possible again. When Miss Windham urged him to get up, there'd been a half-second in which he had almost considered accepting her offer. But he had not, because he knew in his gut, the same way he'd know what was wrong with the server and known that he had to go get the armour working, that he would hate himself for it later.
Back in the present, Dido said something else, but he didn't catch it. The next thing he heard properly was her sad sigh as she added, "I wish I'd let you show me that Rothko!"
"It was only a Rothko," Miss Potts replied, resigned. "You know. Squares and stripes."
"Seventy-two million dollars worth of squares and stripes," Dido reminded her. "Dad told me not to go any higher than seventy. I went to seventy-one because I knew he'd forgive me, but not seventy-two. If I'd known it was Tony who was bidding against me, I might've murdered him."
"In all honesty," Pepper said, "he just told me to pay whatever it took to keep you from having it."
"I figured it was something like that," Dido agreed. "Puts it all into perspective, doesn't it?"
Jarvis remembered the painting they were talking about: the highly publicized auction of the Carnegie Rothko had taken place in New York, shortly after Dido moved out of Tony's house less than a month after moving in. Jarvis had never been particularly interested in Tony's art collection. He knew all the facts and figures relevant to it, but the paintings themselves defied logical analysis and were therefore quite foreign to him. Perhaps he could now learn to appreciate them... but the paintings Tony and Pepper had loved were now at the bottom of the ocean, along with so many other things.
Jarvis turned away from the two women and looked around the room. It was a cafeteria, although the kitchen was closed, and it was quite large and well-lit but felt airless and confined, and his heart sank as he realized that he was once again shut up somewhere with no idea what was going on. There wasn't even a radio here that could at least tell him when things started going wrong. Stuck in this bunker was as useless as he could possibly be, and he hated the very thought.
A light caught his eye – one of the nurses was using a tablet computer, and that gave Jarvis an idea.
"Excuse me, Miss," he said, touching her arm. "May I borrow that?"
She looked up at him in surprise, then closed the program she'd been using. "I suppose so," she decided, "but please be careful with it."
"Of course," Jarvis promised. He sat down in one of the room's rather uncomfortable plastic and metal chairs. The tablet was already connected to the base's wifi, so he began patching in to the main server at Stark Industries. The security system didn't like the intrusion, but he'd already outwitted the server once this week and had no problem doing it again. He slipped around the features and firewalls, until he could make direct contact with the AI now running at the computer's core.
You are not authorized to access that information, said the voice. His voice. Several people looked over to see what was going on.
"What are you doing?" asked the nurse who owned the tablet.
"Jarvis?" Pepper came to look over his shoulder. "What have you got?"
He couldn't outmaneuver the AI, but he did know how to talk to it. "I am authorized," he murmured, entering another sequence of access codes. "You know me."
Access granted, the computer conceded. Streaming suit audio and video now. Up popped a window displaying, admittedly at rather poor resolution, what Tony was seeing and hearing. A distant light was flashing Morse code, letting the people on the island know that a series of depth charges had been laid, and the USS Waterton was about to drop anchor offshore.
"And now, we wait," said the voice of Captain Rogers.
That was working – good. Jarvis next tried to access the code he'd written to locate the monster in real time from seismograph readings. It was possible that the AI would have deleted that in order to make room for itself, but luckily it wasn't so. The program was there, tucked into a back corner of the file system. The Navy had no equipment to display the holographic map he'd built for it, but right now a two-dimensional version would do.
What he saw when he loaded it wasn't exactly good news. Jarvis took a deep breath. "Sir?" he asked.
"Jarvis?" asked Tony's voice from the tablet speakers. "Is that you?"
I didn't speak, Sir, said the computer.
Tony groaned. "Okay, ground rules so we all know who I'm talking to. We've got JARVIS in the computer, and... uh... Ned in the bomb shelter, okay?"
It was merely the most convenient way to handle the situation – Jarvis knew that. The computer had no other designation, but he had the nickname Dido had misguidedly given him. And yet he still felt terribly upset at the thought that he wasn't even going to be able to hold on to his name.
Yes, Sir, said the computer.
"As you wish," said Jarvis. "I've been able to pull up the tracking software I created. Would you like me to put it through to the suit display?"
"What? Hell, yes," Tony said. "Let's see it."
Jarvis patched it in.
"Shit," Tony whispered. "Guys, we gotta head for the ship, right now! It's coming up right underneath the Waterton!"
It had been half an hour at least since anything had deigned to happen – Tony should have known they were due for another nasty surprise.
The USS Waterton had dropped its charges, then circled the island once just to make sure the Kraken knew exactly where the noise was. Since then, the Avengers had just been sitting on that half-a-wall, watching the Milky Way drift by overhead and waiting for any sign of the monster. There'd been none, not until Jarvis managed to bring up his tracking software. Then they realized that the Kraken was in fact a step ahead of them.
The Mark V couldn't fly, but Thor was clearly not aware of that – when Tony announced that they had to get to the ship, the god promptly grabbed Clint and Natasha and took off with them, leaving the others to follow as best they could on the ground. Steve and Tony started to go, but Bruce called for them to wait.
"Give me a moment, and I'll catch us up," he said.
Steve and Tony stood back. Bruce took a deep breath, then a second and third in quick succession, hyperventilating to force his heart rate up. Steve politely looked away, but Tony couldn't help watching, fascinated. It was difficult for Bruce sometimes to keep the Hulk in, but he never had any trouble letting it out. Within seconds, he'd begun to swell. Bones creaked, seams stretched, and a deepening voice groaned first in pain and then in rage as Bruce's inner monster emerged. The green giant brought his fists down on the pavement so hard that it buckled and cracked under the blow, then straightened up and narrowed his eyes at the two smaller figures in front of him.
There was a nervous moment in which it was impossible to say just how much control Bruce might have. Then the Hulk scooped Steve and Tony up, hefted them to his shoulders like two sacks of potatoes, and set off. After a short running start, he took a flying leap. Tony wasn't normally fazed by flying, but he had to shut his eyes as they bounded over the buildings and free-fell towards the anchored ship. The Waterton's metal deck rang like a gong, the whole ship swaying violently at the impact. Sailors scattered like cockroaches.
The Hulk dropped his two passengers and stepped out of the dent he'd left. A moment later, Thor came down with Clint and Natasha to a far more delicate landing beside them.
"What kept you?" asked Tony, getting to his feet.
"Everybody, quiet!" Steve ordered.
Silence fell. Tony could suddenly hear the whirring and clicking of every little piece of his suit as he scanned his surroundings. The only other noise was the loud breathing of the Hulk behind him, like a panting draft horse. Jarvis' map was showing the Kraken right underneath them, but nothing was visible. The ocean was dark and flat to the horizon, reflecting the stars overhead.
Then, somewhere beneath his feet, there was a deep, sonorous groan. For a second time, the ship pitched furiously – Tony had to grab a railing to keep from being thrown over the side. The ocean began to froth, and the Kraken rose.
By daylight, the monster had been invisible under the water. By night it could be clearly seen as it welled up. Each scale of its hooked armour was cobwebbed with a ghostly ice-blue glow that pulsed and rippled as the animal moved. It was an alien sight, deeply disturbing in a way Tony couldn't quite put a finger on. He had to force himself to keep looking at it.
"What do you think, guys?" Tony asked softly. The question was directed not at the other superheroes, but at the two Jarvises.
It appears to be a type of large cephalopod, displaying extensive bioluminescence, said the computer, stating the obvious as only a machine could.
"It's impossible," said the man. "It must need the water to support itself. Otherwise it would be crushed under its own weight."
Steve stood up straight, shifting his shield to a more comfortable carrying position. "All right," he said. "Barton, Romanoff, you're with me. Our job is to provide cover for the crew as they get off the ship, and as much as we can to funnel the Kraken towards the guys with the firepower." He pointed to Thor, Tony, and the Hulk. "Thor, you've fought this thing before, so you take the lead."
"It is done!" Thor declared. Electricity crackled over the head of Mjolnir.
"Try not to wreck any more of the Navy's stuff," said Clint. "I think Park might try to bill us."
Four tentacles loomed out of the water, like a stand of sequoias. As they widened towards the bases, Tony could see that the lips of the suckers were serrated like saws, and these toothed edges became more and more pronounced until at the centre they reached the edge of a huge mouth with what Tony was going to have to call a 'beak' for simple lack of a better word. It was made of three rounded pieces the size of monster truck tires, each with a notched edge that made them look like overlapping circular saws. These rolled aside from a black mouth lined with even more spiny teeth, and then the Kraken screamed.
This was no mere sound. It made the ship vibrate and the ocean fizz like soda pop. Tony's helmet filtered out the worst of it, but the holographic display inside flickered, and he saw the others, with the one exception of Thor, clap their hands over their ears, grimacing in pain.
The Hulk stepped to the edge of the deck and bellowed back, then wrenched part of the railing away and leaped down to lay into the nearest tentacle. The Kraken tried to impale him on its hooked armour, but he grabbed the scale and ripped it from the creature's body in a spray of blue gore.
It was on.
Jarvis wasn't the only one who wanted to know what was going on outside – soon, nearly everybody in the room who was able to stand had crowded around him, looking across the table and over his shoulders trying to see what was on the tablet screen. The crowd quickly became hard to take, and he was obliged to figure out a way to display the video feed on the room's small television in order to get some air. Even then, Pepper, Dido, and Colonel Rhodes stayed with him, watching and listening.
It was difficult to follow the battle from the picture on the screen – all it showed was what Tony saw, and without additional context it was almost impossible to say what was actually happening. Ship, sea, and tentacles spun by, Thor hurled Mjolnir amidst cracks of purple-white lightning, Tony fired his repulsor beams, and the Hulk attacked with nothing but fists, feet, and teeth. Watching made Jarvis begin to feel ill again, but he couldn't bear the thought of looking away.
Pepper was standing directly behind him, leaning down to watch as if being physically closer to the tablet screen would help somehow. She kept covering her face with her hands, but a moment later she would part her fingers to peek through. Once or twice she actually leaned down to hide her face in Jarvis' shoulder, but she always looked up again.
He could hear the computer occasionally giving calm advice, and every word was like a pinch. Jarvis himself had nothing to offer right now. Despite the uplink he was still too disconnected from the situation to know what to do. He probably wouldn't have been able to suggest anything the computer hadn't already said anyway.
He was helpless. Useless.
It was a surprise, then, when he heard Mr. Stark shout to the others, "guys, Jarvis has a plan! He says this thing's too big to support its own weight out of the water. If we can get it up on the beach, it'll be squashed!"
Had that been a plan? Jarvis hadn't intended it as anything but an observation. How would they go about removing an animal that size from the water?
"It will be no easy task!" Thor warned. "My companions and I tried many times to tempt the beast onto land so that we might have an advantage over it, but it never took our bait!"
"Yeah, but we know what it's after now!" This voice was Captain Rogers'. "Go back to the island and hammer on something by the beach. Rhythmic, evenly spaced blows. Maybe that'll bring it in!"
Everyone in the bunker knew when Thor tried it: Mjolnir and its wielder were powerful enough to shake the entire island, and Jarvis began to worry about the proximity of the San Andreas Fault. It would be no good if, after all this, they ended up setting off an earthquake as well – particularly after Jarvis had taken care when choosing the sites for the original explosions to avoid exactly that. The idea that this situation could still get worse, that Jarvis' mistakes could compound themselves yet further, sat heavily on him.
Then the video feed suddenly calmed. Tony was standing still now, and while the ship was still rocking in a way that made Jarvis' stomach rock with it if he watched for too long, it did not seem to be under attack. The scene blurred as Tony looked around, then stilled as he focused on a glow moving below the surface of the water. The Kraken was on its way to shore.
"Look out, Thor!" said Tony. "Here he comes!"
During the battle, the Waterton's anchor chain had been torn off and the ship had begun to drift away from the island. With no way back to shore, all Tony and the others could do was stand and watch as the Kraken tried to haul itself onto the beach. Zooming in with the suit optics, Tony could see that the Hulk was still clinging to it, tearing suckers off and smashing plates of armour with single-minded determination, but the Kraken seemed to be treating him more as an annoyance than as any serious threat. The pier splintered under the weight as the monster emerged from the water, and for half a second Tony dared to hope that this might really work. It certainly wasn't any crazier than anything else they'd done this week.
Then, however, the Kraken stopped. With most of its body still in the water, it began to send out questing tentacles, searching for the source of the sound that had attracted it. Tony could just barely see Thor darting out of the way as the huge limbs curled around trees, boulders, and buildings. Dido's plane was swept into the ocean by a tentacle that just barely missed taking the SHIELD aircraft with it. Another tentacle swept the roof off the mess hall on the first pass, then brought half the building down on the second.
"It will come no further," said Thor. "It knows it is vulnerable when out of its element."
Tony swore softly. What hadn't they tried yet? If the Hulk couldn't get through that armour, it wasn't likely that anything else would be able to. There had to be something. This monster was alive, and anything living could die.
"If we can't make it crawl out of the water by itself, maybe we can push it," was Clint's suggestion. He was standing below a satellite dish, high up on the ship's superstructure. Natasha was perched next to him, with Steve holding onto a railing a level or two down. "Can any of you guys drive a boat?"
"I'm not familiar with this type," said Steve.
Natasha leaned forward to take Clint's arm. "I can do it!"
This seemed to startle even him. "You can drive a boat?"
"This is a ship," Natasha corrected. "And if you three want to help me, then yes, I can."
"That's what's great about this relationship," said Clint. "It's so full of surprises."
Tony found some stairs and ran up to join them on the destroyer's bridge. He'd done some sailing himself, in his own yachts and also in the smaller boat he and Rhodey sometimes went fishing in, but certainly nothing so large and complex as the USS Waterton. Natasha, however, seemed to know what she was doing. With most of the crew having evacuated onto the island, it would take all four of them to get the ship underway. Natasha shouted at them which screens to watch and which switches to throw, and took the wheel herself to direct the ship towards the Kraken. If all else failed, Tony thought, maybe they could at least impale the damn thing.
The Waterton had a lot of inertia. Though the Avengers moved quickly, the ship was slow to start. Once it did, however, Tony could immediately see the problem with their new plan: the thrumming of the engines and propellers was enough to take the Kraken's attention away from the island again. Thor did his best, pounding holes in the runway with Mjolnir, but the monster slid back into the sea. Its giant, glowing body pushed up a wake ahead of itself as it swam.
"This isn't going to work," said Steve.
"We might at least be able to wound it," Natasha said.
Clint shook his head. "Great, we can make it angrier."
"This was your idea," she reminded him.
Ship and Kraken collided hard, with a jolt that threw Tony right over a console and through a window. For a moment he dangled in space, hanging on to the frame while shattered glass rained down below him. Steve and Natasha ran to grab him and pull him back up, but the ship lurched again as tentacles began to wind around it. The Kraken was through letting these small creatures toy with it. It was determined to pull them under.
Clint ran out on deck and fired off several explosive-tipped arrows in quick succession, aiming for the cracks between the plates of the Kraken's armour. The first glanced off and tumbled into the sea, but two more found their marks, lodged between the plates, and blew, leaving gaping blue wounds. The Kraken flailed and brought the injured tentacle down hard on the forecastle. Metal bent and glass smashed, and Steve and Natasha lost their grip on Tony. He landed hard on the deck and promptly began sliding down it, trailing sparks all the way, towards the Kraken's maw.
At the last possible moment he caught hold of a grate and halted his fall, and found himself looking the Kraken in whatever it had instead of a face. Its huge, mutilated eye was only yards from him. Tony thought fast: the Kraken might already be blind, but its eye had to attach to an optic nerve, which would in turn be linked to a brain. He brought up one hand, and fired the repulsor directly into the eye.
There were gasps in the bunker cafeteria as the Kraken's eye filled the screen, followed by the beginning of cheers as Tony's hand came into view and the beam went off. The monster cried out in pain and the picture dissolved into static – apparently the vibrational frequency of the Kraken's voice upset the suit's transmitter. The next thing anyone could see, when the snow cleared and a proper picture returned, was the enormous three-edged beak.
The cheering died out in horror. Miss Potts rested her face against Jarvis' shoulder again, unable to look, while he couldn't stop himself from shouting, "Sir!" as the beak loomed closer and closer. Then, in the nick of time, a huge green hand appeared. When the image stabilized, it became clear that Tony was clinging to the suckers on the Kraken's tentacles, while the Hulk wedged the beak open with his own nigh-indestructible body.
"Nice catch!" said Tony.
The Hulk grinned, then stretched. He couldn't break the Kraken's jaw because it didn't have one – as an invertebrate, the beak was the only hard part in its body. Instead, there was a cracking sound, and one of the three disks suddenly snapped free. Blue blood ran from the wound, and the picture distorted as the Kraken screamed again.
Jarvis suddenly felt like there was something he ought to remember. He tried to recall everything the computer had been able to bring up about molluscs... the blood was blue because it was based not on iron, as in vertebrate blood, but in copper. Molluscs had three hearts. They could change the colours of their skins. The teeth inside their mouths were attached to an organ called a 'radulla'.
"Right in the eye!" Tony complained, climbing up the tentacle from sucker to sucker, away from the Hulk's struggle with the beak. "Right in the eye and it didn't do a thing!" He'd been hoping to hit the brain, Jarvis thought...
And then, there it was. One last time, right when he needed it, there was a tiny soundless, lightless explosion inside Jarvis' head. An idea.
He sat up straight. "Tony," he said, his heart pounding. "The Kraken is a mollusc. Its brain is not behind its eyes. It wraps around the throat!"
"What?" Tony asked. "You're kidding me. Is that true?"
He was asking the computer. Unknown, it said. In uploading to the Stark Industries server I had to sacrifice a great deal of my database. Wikipedia seems to agree with him, if that helps.
The Hulk went sailing past as the Kraken finally succeeded in dislodging him. For half a second the mouth was clearly visible, with the missing piece of the beak leaving a black hole directly into the animal's greatest vulnerability.
"Sir," Jarvis said, "you need to fire the beam down the..."
"Yeah, I got the idea," said Tony. "Just let me get a clear shot."
He tried, several times. Miss Potts hovered over Jarvis' shoulder, repeatedly covering her face as she watched. Shot after shot went wide, and Jarvis kicked the table in frustration. It wasn't Tony's fault – the server running the suit program wasn't as fast as the computer in the house had been. The tentacle Tony was clinging to was moving, and so was the target, and the hardware just couldn't keep up with the calculations the software needed it to make. Tony muttered something Jarvis couldn't make out, but which was almost certainly obscene.
"I have to get closer," he decided.
"No!" Pepper protested. "You can do it from where you are!"
"This thing's too big and too fast, and it knows it's vulnerable there!" Tony looked down at the Kraken's mouth – it was curling its tentacles close around the gap, protecting it from Tony's fire. "Pepper?" Tony said, as he began to make his way down the tentacle again, sucker by sucker. "I love you to pieces."
"I love you, too," she said, her voice cracking.
"Jarvis," Tony added, "thanks for everything, and I mean everything. And Rhodey, you take care."
"Good luck, buddy," said Colonel Rhodes.
Jarvis opened his mouth to make some reply of his own, but the computer got there first. You're welcome, Sir, it said, and Jarvis decided to remain silent. Tony had said he would use the name 'Ned' if he were talking to the human Jarvis – and he hadn't.
"Geronimo!" said Tony, and swung himself towards the gnashing, blue-stained beak. Pepper turned away entirely to hide her face in Colonel Rhodes' shirt, at last unwilling to watch any more. Dido leaned down to put her arms around Jarvis' shoulders and squeezed gently, resting her cheek against his.
He watched the screen.
The beak consumed the field of view. An armored hand appeared, and everything lit up white as the beam fired. Again, the Kraken screamed. The lights in the room flickered, and the tablet's connection was lost.