Sisters Ch.4 – The wind of other worlds
Two disclaimers. One: I do not own any of the Marvel Comics characters featured here, intend no violation of copyright, and will not profit . Two: what follows, like what has gone on before, is intended mainly as a fiction with internal consistency and dramatic cohesion, which means that a number of things may be different from the various canons. I am going to use mainly the story ideas of the animated series AVENGERS, EARTH'S MIGHTIEST HEROES, which was mostly excellent (give or take a terrible Black Panther and the worst Korvac story I've ever seen) and was left practically unfinished when it was decided to end it at the second year.
"Ich fuehle Luft von anderen Planeten" (I feel the air of other worlds) - Stefan George
...
When Samantha was young and Buffy was growing up, superheroes and aliens were very much out of fashion. People with unusual or even superhuman powers had appeared or been suspected for a long time, but they were and remain so rare that nobody had ever thought of making anything out of them. The same may be said about alien lifeforms – a few may have manifested themselves or been suspected from time to time, but nothing really ever came out of it The improbable appearance of Captain America during the second world war made the idea of superhumans popular and saleable for a while, but the sudden disappearance of the super-soldier, and the continued and frequently disastrous failures to replicate him. had discredited the idea. For a while, masked characters almost disappeared from the scene, and most of the known ones turned out to be small-time heist artists, or leg-breakers for various gangs.
All this had changed when Samantha was in her second year at the academy; and she had been among the first to hear the rumblings. It started with an unusual nervousness about her father. She could perceive that something was worrying or even frightening him, though of course she knew better than to ask. But one bright February morning, during Parent's Day, as they were dining, both in civilian dress, in a ski lodge far from the Academy, with no military of any kind in sight and the sun lighting up the mountain snow, he brought up the matter himself.
"Tell me, Sam, did you get the impression I've been unhappy of late?"
The question was unexpected, and Samantha waited a second or two before answering.
"Unhappy... is not the word I would use. You've been anxious, even scared-looking. I'll admit It's worried me."
"You're perceptive. I should never forget that. Well, Sam, I should tell you that this is confidential, but what the Hell - it will be on the front of all the papers in about three days. Ross has screwed up big time, and this is probably going to end his career. It's going to be the biggest scandal since the Pentagon Papers, and unless they find a way to kill an unkillable monster in a couple of days, it will blow up. And I'm probably going to be called in to clear the mess."
"What is happening? Or can't you tell me?"
"Oh, I'm not allowed to, but I'll tell you all right. You've heard of Captain America, haven't you?" Samantha just nodded.
"Well, he wasn't a legend, and he wasn't a fraud. But both he and the man who had started the program, , were lost during the war, and nobody else has been able to reproduce the Super-Soldier process.
"What was confidential... and still is, but I don't give a damn any more... is that all three services have been busy trying to rediscover the process and start it. Only the latest version failed - and failed spectacularly. Perhaps we should say that they succeeded, because they did create a superhuman. But as for making a soldier out him... The subject turns into a sort of gigantic, uncontrollable green rage monster, harder than steel and roughly as reasonable as an earthquake. For some reason, he calls himself the Hulk."
"Dad, a hulk is a prison ship!"
"I know, but that's how he calls himself, and I'm not going to argue with an eight-foot, half-ton mass of rage who can lift and throw a tank one-handed and survive a direct hit from a howitzer."
"Dad! Are you serious?"
"As serious as I can be, Sam. Worst of all, he is out of control, and I estimate that it will be two days at most before the media get to hear of him - and then Ross and a lot of staff officers and bureaucrats are going to be cooked. And guess who they are lining up to clean up the mess?"
...
General Carter had been pessimistic. It took four days, not two, before the media first heard about the Hulk, and one more before he was on all the front pages. It was then only a matter of time before angry or terrified bureaucrats and disgusted junior officers gave the whole show away; including its violations of federal law, its experiments on live patients, and the reckless use of deadly gamma rays, which only , it seemed, had survived. As General Carter had predicted, his Army colleague Ross, who had presided over the program for ten years, was indeed "cooked" and lucky to escape jail; and Carter, who, being Air Force, was both outside the circle and technically well able to understand the science involved, was given the task to wind up the super-soldier program and investigate its results.
...
The family would still gather around the TV of an evening. But that particular evening, they would have even if they had fallen out of the habit. The news made the whole world stand up and take notice, mostly not in a good way.
"The man's a flake" – this was Hank. Joyce just shook her head.
"But a dangerous flake," Buffy's father carried on. "Listen to him! He does not even make sense. He will not make weapons because they make things worse, but he will use his own armour as a freelance universal vigilante. And they let him do it."
"I guess he can do it," said Joyce. "With that armor, to arrest him would be a nightmare... and they would have to deal with his lawyers afterwards. If I were the President, I'd just stand back and pray to God that he stays within the law."
"He of all people? Be serious, Joy – I know you always want to believe the best of everyone, but Stark is bad news. He's been at the Betty Ford Clinic, and he has bedded half the loose female population of this city. And I wish he'd stuck to that."
Buffy nervously broke in. "He's no longer drinking, Dad. And he's stopped sleeping around."
"How do you know that?"
"Are you kidding?! Dad. Seriously, everyone knows about Tony Stark. Like, girls would kill to hook up with him. So whenever anyone sees him with someone, everyone knows. And for at least, like, six months it's only been his admin, Pepper Pots. So. We're pretty sure they're about to tie the knot, and a lot of my friends are pretty freaked."
Hank Summers did not answer. He did not know how to direct this discussion, did not like what was coming out. He did not fancy himself a prude, but he did not like his twelve-year-old adopted daughter speaking so freely about sex. And he did not like the implication that some of her friends would go to bed with an adult man, especially if he was rich and glamorous. He had tried in vain to get a leading animator dismissed from Talbot for downloading child porn, and he did not like to be reminded of it.
...
Once superheroes began to come back to the front pages, they suddenly seemed to be all over the place. There even was a flying person who claimed to be the Teutonic god of thunder, Thor, although he looked very little like the traditional picture of the bearded, red-haired immortal warrior.
And Samantha became involved. One fine day, as she was putting together the materials for her next research article, she came upon something that...
"Sir! Has anyone said anything about this?"
"Lietuenant! Do you normally break into your CO's office without warning and without explaining yourself?"
[abashed] "Sorry, Sir. I behaved like a child. But this is important."
"So I gather. I hope once you've explained yourself I will have grounds to agree with you."
"Sir, I think you will."
She took him through dozens of photographs and three videos shot from two separate satellite telescopes. She went through a whole list of satellites and other artificial space objects. She even commented on confidential space activities.
"So you see, there is nothing else it could possibly be. It moves in a way that no natural object would. It only appeared briefly, but during that appearance it made a sharp turn, slowed, and sped up and turned again. That is not a meteorite."
"No... no... Whatever you may have discovered, it's serious. But before we publish, you have to let me make some inquiries. It may be that we are not supposed to know what it is."
"The thought did occur to me, sir. But even so, we ought at least to know that we have to shut up about it. And whoever it is ought to know that their operation can be observed."
Lieutenant Samantha Carter went back to her materials, excluding the strange moving object from her work. There still was enough material for a very interesting item about the situation of dead and broken satellites in orbit; in fact, the alien object would have been a distraction. Then, almost a week after she had stormed into Colonel Seirce's office, she was back there – this time, by his request. And there she heard for the first time of SHIELD - SuperHero Investigation, Examination and Law-enforcement Directorate; and of their infant department, the Sentient Worlds Observation and Response Directorate. They had not heard about the Air Force's Deep Space Telemetry Office either.
...
When Buffy started having nightmares, she was about twelve. For a while, nobody really noticed. Even Joyce took months to realize that her adopted daughter was having troubled nights; and when she did, she mistakenly concluded that she was reacting to the frightening super-battle she had witnessed one day in the summer of 1993, on the beach of Los Angeles, between Iron Man and a monstrous robot. And the battle had indeed been terrifying, with molten and burning rubble falling over terrified spectators, and several bystanders injured. But Buffy had just stood there, looking at the horrible clash without visible fear and emotion, absorbed and silent.
Two years later, she would be interviewed by a psychiatrist, and the episode would come up. She would be still quite clear about it, and would explain that she had had this extraordinary impression of remembering, as though there was a memory of similar things in her; even though she had had a peaceful life, and had certainly never witnessed super-battles, or battles of any description, before. She did not even like war movies. But the interview was going to go bad almost immediately - with the psychiatrist intent on finding something wrong with her by hook or by crook – and so she would not volunteer the wider truth: that ever since she had been having bad dreams, she had also had a strange feeling of memory, of remembering them, even though she had never had any such dreams before.
Actually, this was the voice of the Slayer, echoing across time. The nightmares were the first sign of a still unseen, unforeseen future; long before even the Council of Watchers had heard of her.
