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CHAPTER FOUR
Spider-Man & Thor
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The spaceship appeared as if from nowhere.
A five-tiered, five-story ziggurat (roughly the size of a football field) capped three ten-story square columns (roughly the size of basketball half-courts). One end of the ziggurat's hull – a white ceramic-metal compositethatabsorbed heat and radiation to supplement the ship's fusion power systems – was open to accommodate glowing blue engine ports. The base of each column featured a vertical sliding hatch on either side, painted with diagonal yellow and orange stripes.
It emerged from what looked like a hexagonal window in empty space, surrounded by a radiating hexagonal grid pattern that quickly faded from the visible light spectrum. The ship moved at physics-defying velocity, one-tenth the speed of light, but immediately started decelerating. Hard.
The peoples and governments of Earth were not yet aware of the Universal Neural Teleportation Network, an artificial warren of wormholes scattered around the galaxy, activated by releasing exotic particles at specific locations in space. The most anyone on the planet (other than a few people in SHIELD) knew about it was Dr. Reed Richards. His work – theoretical and practical – proved the existence of exactly one "space-fold aperture" (it was a jump point) used by unknown aliens (it was the Kree, and the Skrulls) on several occasions in 1989 and 1995 (it was a thing). This previously unknown jump point was located at Sol-Earth Lagrange 4, a point of stable gravitational equilibrium some nineteen million miles ahead of the planet in its orbit.
The space-fold aperture opened at 0736 Greenwich Mean Time. It took NASA a grand total of thirty-five minutes to notice the object; calculate its trajectory toward Earth; panic; realize it was slowing down; establish its rate of deceleration would allow it to enter the atmosphere safely; understand they were almost certainly looking at an alien spacecraft; panic; then contact NORAD, the US Air Force, SHIELD, and the president. It took SHIELD five minutes to contact the Avengers. It took less than ten minutes to scramble the quinjet from Avengers Tower.
They did not have the entire team on board. War Machine and Winter Soldier were deployed... somewhere else. Somewhere far away. Somewhere classified.
The team did have Spider-Man. Peter Parker spent the night at Avengers Tower on occasion, and tonight was one of those. When the alert woke him he didn't hesitate to suit up, gear up, show up at the landing pad. But he did not approach the quinjet until Captain America gave him a nod. Then he threw himself into a seat by the ramp, strapped in as if that would prevent anyone questioning (or objecting to) his presence. No one did.
By the time they lifted off, the spaceship was ten minutes from the atmosphere. NASA calculated and recalculated its projected course in real time, plotted the results, transmitted them to SHIELD and the Avengers. Slowly diminishing ovals on a map of the Earth represented their best guess at where the spaceship might enter the atmosphere and where it might make landfall or splashdown.
The quinjet sped toward the rapidly changing coordinates at the center of the oval representing ground and sea level. As minutes passed, it became clear they were circling back to New York City. As luck or irony would have it, the spaceship arrived in Manhattan at Gansevoort Peninsula – five acres of land reclaimed from the Hudson River in Manhattan's famous Meat Packing District – at 0440 local time. It hovered diagonally across the southwest corner of the square landmass, three columns hanging inches above solid ground. Almost immediately the column hatches facing the city rose, released dozens of humanoid aliens of dozens of descriptions (but all clad in nearly identical short sleeved, short legged, yellow plastic jumpsuits), then slid back into place. The aliens scattered, took refuge in the construction site paraphernalia and the early morning darkness.
New York might be the city that never sleeps, but it was also the city that had to pay its electric bill, so in the smallest hours of morning the gloom of night closed in. Spider-Man's job was to turn off the dark. Find the switches, turn on the construction site lights. Stay out of sight, spray aliens with webs if the opportunity arose, but don't engage. Just before Captain America debarked the quinjet, he poked Spider-Man's chest twice on the words "don't engage". Following, Black Widow poked his chest once; then, with a grave expression, tapped his nose through the mask.
Captain America and Black Widow entered the alien craft through a small hatch on the spaceship's topside, cracked open with three of the quinjet's air-to-air mini-missiles and a few bursts from the fifty-caliber rotary gun. Their job was to find the controls to the larger hatches below, stop them from cycling open to spew out wave after wave of alien interlopers.
When the rest of the team left the quinjet to take tactical positions around the perimeter of the construction site, Hawkeye, Falcon, and Iron Man each poked Spider-Man's chest once as they passed him on their way down the ramp. Vision, Wanda, and Thor did not.
Doctor Bruce Banner would stay on the quinjet, wait to see if the situation developed into a Code Green. (Even though everyone,especiallyBruce, hoped it wouldn't come to that.)
The quinjet's pilot – a Lieutenant Nakia Shauku (call sign "War Dog") on loan to the Avengers Tactical Support Cadre from Botswana's Defense Force Air Wing – flew to a safe distance half a mile out, held position over the Hudson kept an eye (and a target lock) on the alien spaceship's propulsion outlets; maintained situational awareness of three NYPD aviation units and five news helicopters jockeying for position around Gansevoort Peninsula, and a dozen F-15s circling a three-mile perimeter; and occasionally warned off a helicopter if it strayed into the quinjet's line of fire.
The fuse boxes and master switches for the construction site's lights were at the base of two crane towers in the center of the landmass. Spider-Man got there without attracting the attention of any aliens the ship's hatches already released, made quick work of the locks on a shed, a cage door inside the shed, and two metal cabinets inside the cage. He wasn't familiar with the abbreviations on the labels inside the electrical cabinets, so he just threw every switch he could find. Floodlights around the perimeter of the construction site came on – along with the lights in two temporary office trailers and a large storage shed – bathing the area in harsh white glare and crisp dark shadows.
When Spider-Man left the power shed, more waves of aliens had already swarmed the construction site. More unique humanoids of varied description, no two alike. Gangs of small four-armed hominids with bristly, brindled fur and ashen skin on their faces, hands, and feet; some of them perched in exoskeletal power frames like bipedal forklifts. Giant anthropomorphic robots with exposed cable musculature between titanium plates at the joints, across the chest and abdomen, around the head, down the spine. Tall, powerfully built saurians with maroon scales on scarlet hides, and heavy parietal bone plates, moving in small squads. All of them looking for a way to leave the peninsula by land or by water.
Heeding Captain America's instructions, Spider-Man climbed the closest crane tower to the relative safety of the horizontal jib. Eight stories above the fray he could see the big picture, take stock of the overall situation.
Wanda Maximoff held a stretch of sand and gravel beside the alien ship, on the south shore of the square lot. Many of the aliens headed that way first, but most quickly changed course when they saw the fiery red auroras of her telekinesis at work. The rest found themselves pinned under cement bags or wrapped in scrap metal picked up from the construction site. A respectable barrier was accumulating between land and river.
Vision hovered in front of panoramic third floor windows on the west end of the Whitney Museum of American Art's temporary installations space. A yellow beam lanced from his forehead again and again, mostly intentional near misses to turn the fleeing aliens back onto the peninsula. He had, of late, experimented with variable beam width and intensity, which served him well tonight; he could bathe a small area with concussive microwaves that battered those he struck and scared the wits out of those nearby.
Below him, NYPD patrol units and SWAT teams converged, breaking out riot shields and heavy weapons, preparing to form up and advance. Vision calculated he would need to intervene in a few minutes to prevent them escalating the current conflict from a disorganized riot to an actual battle, which could end in a massacre on one or both sides.
Iron Man controlled the territory from the Whitney to the north end of the tiny peninsula. He used repulsors on the aliens, micro-missiles on the power frames, and direct blasts from the ARC reactor on a twenty-five-foot robot that got past Thor. (Who was, to be fair, fighting two more giant robots on his own). Iron Man chafed at being on the perimeter (again) but he knew the aliens had to be kept off the tangle of roads by the riverside lot — the Hudson River Greenway, the Lincoln Highway, West Street, Tenth Avenue, Little West 12th Street, and Gansevoort Street. If aliens got into Manhattan proper they could cause untold chaos, or they might never be found, or (worst) both.
Falcon patrolled the north sea wall, sweeping back and forth; laying down lines of flares to ward off the fleeing aliens; deploying clusters of miniature concussion grenades when a group of them didn't take the hint; incapacitating strays with controlled bursts from his Steyr SSP machine pistols. If the fighting continued much longer he would run out of ammunition, have to fall back or enter the fray hand to hand. He already knew getting up close and personal would be a bad decision, but it was the decision could live with.
Hawkeye, atop a cargo container just inside the chain link gate to FDNY Marine Company 1, discouraged any aliens from charging Pier 53 with explosive, electrical, and just plain pointy arrows. Several firefighters stood ready to assist him on the ground if the aliens got past the flimsy barrier, holding chemical fire extinguishers, axes, and a fire-rescue rotary saw.
Just off its berth, Fireboat 343 (the busiest fireboat in the world) discouraged fleeing aliens from entering the river with multiple water cannons. Fifty thousand gallons of water per minute concentrated through six nozzles was enough to send any of the aliens tumbling. So far.
And there was Thor, in the middle of it all, punching and sometimes throwing aliens that attacked him, directing aliens that did not to the construction site office trailers to wait for the chaos to settle. Mjolnir he turned loose on the giant robots, looping about in large arcs to smash into (and quite often through) the mechanical monsters. Every once in a while one managed to grab the hammer on the fly, only to be lit up with hundreds of thousands of volts. Three of the maroon saurians jumped him from behind a stack of barrels, nearly bore him to the ground, punching and kicking with martial prowess. It took considerable effort to fight them off, even more to beat them unconscious. Thor would have bruises later, a rarity for the Asgardian hero, but a source of considerable amusement for some of the Avengers. When the last giant robot finally crashed to the ground, Thor spared a quick second to check on his teammates as he waited for Mjolnir to return to his hand.
The spaceship's lower hatches opened again.
The column nearest the river released another wave of small, four-armed aliens who immediately ran toward the water. High volume streams of Hudson River water and a flight of cluster-bomb arrows greeted them.
The column nearest the beach revealed a massive coiled, serpentine form with too many limbs and a head like an amphibian warthog. It opened one eye, regarded the havoc outside, then closed the eye again and did not stir.
The column in the middle disgorged a dozen more maroon saurians, each one seven feet tall if they were an inch. They ran en masse at the unsuspecting Asgardian. A few in front leveled short blunt staffs before them, orange-tinted energy sputtering from the tips. A few in the back readied what looked like outsized pistols, the muzzles glowing the same color as the staffs in front.
Although he could not see or hear the charging squad behind him, Thor was aware of them. He had taken their measure. He knew them to be worthy adversaries, perhaps the equal of Asgard's rank and file, but he had taken their measure. Once Mjolnir was in his grasp they could not stand against him.
Spider-Man did not know this. He only knew he had to warn his teammate before these aliens reached him, but there was no way to get Thor's attention before he was overrun. The battle was too confused, too frenzied, too loud. There was too much chatter on comms. He couldn't intercept the charging aliens, either, not on his own. He thought he might take on one or two, or briefly occupy a few if he was careful. But a dozen would barely slow down to trample him underfoot on their way to tackle Thor. Spider-Man was on the verge of panic.
I need to help! I need to get–
Thor was about to look for young Spider-Man when he heard something impact the ground directly behind him, felt something grab him by one hip and the other thigh, heard someone shout "GE-E-E-ET...!" He was swept off his feet with blinding speed, slung sideways in a quarter circle, released just as the same someone bellowed "HELP!" He spun a dozen yards through the air – Mjolnir close behind – before he ran into something, several somethings, all falling to the ground in a tangle of bodies and limbs and weapons.
This works, too. Have at thee!
Hawkeye had a clear view of Spider-Man's leap from the crane jib, his throw, and Thor's quick... flight... into the on-rushing aliens. "Haven't seen that before..." he muttered, but the smart-sound features in the comms carried his comment to the others.
Tony reacted first. "What?! What's new? I can't see through the crane towers. What's happening?"
Vision and Wanda also had unobstructed sightlines.
Vision noted the tactic, set a personal reminder to review the weight and durability of the rest of the Avengers for future reference.But not War Machine. He chose not to break focus on his part of the mission, other than maintaining situational awareness of the ongoing battle and the surrounding area.
Wanda spoke up as she wove red energy in the air, knitted a lattice of rebar and heavy cable into a flexible mesh she could use as a barrier or a restraint. "Spider-Man just pitched Thor into another wave of aliens."
Bruce and Lt. Shauku watched on screens in the quinjet. War Dog established a floating target lock on Thor's location. Mini-missiles would most likely hit the aliens instead of Thor, but they wouldn't do much more than knock any of them around a bit, based on what she'd seen. She kept her thumb off the firing button, waiting for the situation (or the team) to call for intervention. The scientist refrained from comment, but he replayed the video segment. Somewhere in his mind, the other guy laughed to see Thor manhandled and thrown by such a tiny teammate.
Sam broke the quick second of shocked silence on the comms. "Cap said 'don't engage'... an' I guess he didn't, technically."
"Which ones?" Tony asked.
Hawkeye answered, "The big red ones. Fresh batch."
"Is Thor alright?"
An expanding sphere of crackling electricity erupted within the pile of saurians, destroying weapons and throwing bodies in all directions. Thor stood in the center, head thrown back, arms raised, Mjolnir in one hand and a struggling saurian's ankle in the other.
"AAHHH-HA-HA-HAAHHH!"
Wanda spoke through a grin. "He's good."