When the Lights Go On Again 17/20

[seanchai.livejournal.com]

Title: When the Lights Go On Again 17/20
Authors: seanchai and elspethdixon
Rated: PG-13
Pairings: Steve/Tony, Hank/Jan, Carol/Wanda
Warnings: Depictions of torture, and general violence.
Disclaimer: The characters and situations depicted herein belong to Stan Lee and Marvel comics. No profit is being made off of this derivative work. We're paid in love, people.
Summary: Aliens have invaded earth, and the Avengers are scattered. While Steve leads the resistance, Tony once again finds himself playing captive scientist. In the midst of a violent alien regime, separated by seemingly insurmountable boundaries, Steve and Tony have nothing to keep themselves going but each other.
A/N #1:The point in volume three that we're branching off from was originally published around '98-'99, but since Marvel time runs at a slower speed than real world time, early volume three is probably four or so years ago in canon time. Hence 2004 and troops in Iraq.
A/N #2: Unbeta'd because this update is long overdue and we're impatient.

Also, this fic owes a great deal to tavella, who helped us to shape this into something that didn't have gaping plot holes.

X-posted to Marvel Slash.


When the Lights Go On Again




The sleek copper and silver device Imperator Nergal was holding looked like a far nicer piece of welding equipment than the miniature arc welder Tony had had to make do with when he'd worked on their engines and missiles. It wasn't welding equipment, though -- not the right shape, and he could tell from the color of the blue glow at the business end of the thing that it wasn't quite hot enough to melt most metal alloys properly.

Then the Imperator touched the welding tool -- branding iron, Tony's brain corrected -- to the center of his chest, and Tony stopped caring that it was a better quality piece of equipment than the ones they'd been giving him.

The pain was blinding, a searing hot/cold fire that seemed to eat straight through his chest into his heart.

It didn't stop when the Imperator pulled the branding iron away; his chest felt as if it were still being burned, pain that made sweat break out along his sides throbbing in time with his too-fast heartbeat, and Tony suddenly found himself hoping that his heart was going to be able to stand up to this.

Franklin Richards had remade them all, after Onslaught, but Tony's scars were still there on the outside, and it was anybody's guess how much hidden damage still lingered inside his chest.

Tony hung limply in his chains and tried to catch his breath again. His throat felt raw, though he didn't remember screaming, and he had to swallow several times before he could speak.

"P-pick someplace else next time," he managed to gasp. "I h-have enough scars there."

Kammani didn't bother to translate that, just repeated the Imperator's question. "Our people began to fall ill after you returned. This is not a co-incidence."

"Lots of things... coincidences." Tony closed his eyes and let his head fall forward, dizzy and sick and still unable to get his breath properly. Two of his ribs were cracked, the same two that had been broken when they'd captured him, and with his weight hanging from his arms like this, every breath sent a stab of pain through his side.

One more unlucky blow to the torso from his captors, and he wouldn't have to worry about having another heart attack; he would suffocate or drown in blood from punctured lungs before his heart had a chance to give out.

A big, furry hand, warmer than a human's, grabbed him by the hair and pulled his head up. "Look at the Imperator when he speaks to you, Tony Stark," Kammani said. Her voice was still mild, calm.

Did she ever get angry? Her cool, impersonal tones were almost worse than shouting and insults would have been. People were supposed to shout at you and insult you while they hurt you, and occasionally rant at length about how they were going to make you pay for ruining their plans for world domination, or for leaving them, or not being good enough, or--

Tony dragged burning and watering eyes open and blinked a few times until the Imperator's expression of utter contempt came back into focus.

"The rebels took me," he said, for what must have been the two-dozenth time. "Then I escaped. Maybe, maybe they planted something on me. I don't know."

Can't break too soon, he reminded himself, when the Imperator raised the branding iron again. It had to look good, had to look real. He needed to keep this up just a little longer.

Longer. How long had it been since he had come back? A couple of hours? Half a day? Longer? He had passed out at least once, after the blow from the Imperator's tail had re-broken his ribs; time didn't seem to flow properly anymore.

He tried to concentrate on Steve as the little loop of blue fire touched his chest again, on Steve's hands on him, Steve's mouth, the smell of his skin, the taste of him, when Tony had bent down and taken Steve in his mouth, the--

White hot pain lanced through him, and Tony didn't scream this time, just made a choked-off sound through his clenched teeth as his body arched away from the wall, all his muscles locking.

Had to remember not to bite his tongue. He would have to talk eventually, and he couldn't do that if he bit through his tongue.

Steve's hands in his hair, fingers tightening against his skull as Tony rolled his tongue across the hardening length of him and gave inward thanks to the makers of the super-soldier serum for including endurance in their list of physical qualities to perfect. Tony swallowed, taking the entire length of Steve into his mouth with the ease of long practice and a naturally weak gag reflex, and Steve made a low groan in the back of his throat and--

Different kind of pain, this time. The Imperator's tailblade drew a long, cool line across his ribs, and it took almost an entire second before the pain flared up and warm blood started to run down his skin.

This was easier than the burns, Tony decided. Less likely to kill him than the beating. He could do this.

"You're only hurting yourself by lying. Warriors and mechanikos have died, Tony Stark. More will die if you are not honest with us. You swore your loyalty to the Archon, you worked beside our mechanikos for months; surely you have enough honor to help them now?"

Steve's body grinding against his, Steve's fingers gripping his hips with bruising force, sweat covering both of them, and Steve's skin glowing in the lantern-light and--

Loyalty. Honor. Gruenwald had said he had neither, but he didn't know anything about Tony, not anything important. He was an Avenger. Avengers didn't betray their teammates. Didn't betray humanity.

He hoped Isimud hadn't died; maybe he was only a little sick.

Tony ground his teeth and hissed as the Imperator made another cut. At least he wouldn't be here long enough for any of the wounds to get infected - God knew what kind of germs that blade had it. "Not lying," he forced out, his jaw clenched tight enough that it felt like his teeth were going to crack.

The Imperator's branding iron hit him directly over the heart this time, and his whole body convulsed, agony stabbing though his ribs and arms and spearing him directly through the heart.

He couldn't breath, couldn't see, couldn't...

"...knew this would happen. It is unfortunate that I could not conduct this interrogation myself, without assistance." Something brushed his face gently, and Tony moaned, turned his head away from the touch.

"Ah. Good. You are not dead."

'No thanks to you and your sadistic boss, Arch-Captain,' Tony thought. He tried to say as much, but all that came out was a sort of whimpering gasp that didn't sound at all like a sound an Avenger ought to make.

He kept his eyes closed, just concentrating on breathing, and tried to think, tried to remember the story he and Hank had worked out. Bits of it kept sliding out of his grasp, the details slippery and vague. If he didn't give them the information soon, he might not be able to do it at all, and with nothing to misdirect them, they would have to figure out that it was the water making them sick. It was too obvious a source for them not to.

And maybe if he told them something, anything, they would leave him alone for a little while. Then he could pass out again and all of this would go away.

His chest felt like there were iron bands inside it, and getting enough air to speak took several gasping breaths. "Stop," he panted. "Please. St-stop. I can't-" he broke off, shuddering and breathing as deeply as he could as a wave of pain hit him. "I'll tell you. I'll tell you everything. Just... stop."

The words were far too easy to say, despite the fact that they were lies, and Tony felt tears well up in his closed eyes. His squeezed them shut more tightly, and the tears stopped. "I can't, I... please."

There was a long moment of silence, but the branding iron and its accompanying electric shocks didn't touch him again.

Tony opened his eyes, his eyelids feeling unnaturally heavy, and squinted at Kammani and the Imperator. Both of them were staring at him.

"Do you know why we are falling ill?" Kammani asked, her voice gentle and almost kind.

"Yes," Tony admitted. He let his eyes close again -- it would be better to keep them open, to watch their reactions to his words, but he didn't have the energy.

"What is causing the illness?"

"A virus," Tony said, letting the exhaustion and vertigo that swamped him color his words and hoping they would take it for defeat. "Airborne. I released it in the lobby when the guards brought me in."

The blow slammed his head back against the metal wall and made bright lights flash behind his closed eyes. There was blood in his mouth again, and he fought down a wave of nausea. Being sick while hanging from his arms would be bad. Vomiting with broken ribs would also be bad, a level of misery he never wanted to experience again and especially not right now.

Steve...

"Too late," he mumbled, making an effort to smile as best he could with his split and swollen lips. "Too many people've been exposed. You can't stop it now."

The Imperator hit him again, and all the pain went away.

***

The 42nd Street entrance to Grand Central was both more and less heavily guarded than Steve had expected. A dozen Argonians with ray guns were at their posts in front of and to either side of it, and Ben Grimm took a glancing hit to the arm from one of them that barely left a scorch-mark on his rocky skin. Beyond that, they put up little resistance.

Four of them fought with the dangerous speed and skill Steve had grown accustomed to, but the rest were slow and obviously off their game. 'Thank you, Hank, he thought, as he slammed his shield into an Argonian's face and it sagged limply to the ground. You did it. This was exactly what they had needed, an edge that made up for the Argonians' advantage in numbers and firepower.

One brief, nasty fight later, Steve and his team were inside the station, having sustained only two casualties -- both former policemen, neither of them fatally injured.

The huge, arched ceiled was the same bright blue Steve remembered, and he wondered for a second what it had been like for Tony and Clint to spend all those months in enemy territory that had once been so familiar. Then more warriors were rushing them, this time augmented by black-uniformed humans, and he had no more time to think about anything but fighting and not getting killed.

The sound of gunfire echoed off the stone walls and floor, deafeningly loud. Steve was almost glad for the noise -- it made it harder to hear the human guards screaming when they were shot.

Cherbourg had been like this -- fighting in the streets of the town, sometimes house to house. He almost expected to look to his right and see Bucky instead of Clint, wielding an M16 that ought to have had too much of a recoil for him with practiced skill and a bright, manic grin.

He should have been able to look to his left and see Tony, to hear the whine of repulsor gauntlets firing next to him instead of more gunshots.

Tony would be alive when they found him. He had to be.

Steve raised his shield to block a ray gun blast, and then ducked and rolled under a widely lashing tail, the poisonous black barb missing him by inches. Hank had given them all a vial of anti-venom, but if Steve managed to get himself stabbed in the wrong place, the wound itself could be debilitating enough to take him down even without the poison.

At least Ben was relatively indestructible -- one person on his team whom he didn't have to worry about. Jan, Firestar, and Clint, though, were all too easily hurt.

That was, if anyone managed to get near Firestar. Steve could barely look at her straight on; the air around her glowing faintly and wavering from heat. Swords that came too close to her might simply melt.

Ray gun blasts, on the other hand, wouldn't have that problem.

"Firestar," he shouted, as he saw one of the human guards take aim with a ray gun he'd snatched from the hand of a fallen Argonian, "down!"

She went up instead, a bright flare of red against the high blue ceiling, and Steve threw his shield at the guard, knocking him to the floor.

Firestar raised both hands and sent a stream of microwave energy downward, and suddenly swords and guns of the Argonians immediately beneath her were glowing red-hot.

Steve reached up and caught his shield as it came spinning back toward him, and then he and Clint charged the suddenly disarmed aliens, Ben a massive and welcome presence at their backs, and then Steve was kicking, punching, dodging fists and tailbarbs and the sledgehammer-like body blows with their tails that seemed to be a favorite Argonian hand-to-hand move. He had no idea where Jan was, couldn't look up to search for her without leaving an opening his opponents would be only too eager to exploit.

He hooked an Argonian's feet out from under it with one foot, and backed that up with a simultaneous right to the jaw, watching it overbalance and hit the floor with satisfaction. Then another Argonian was on him, its claws scrabbling across the mail and leather of his costume, but this one was weak and slow, sick from Hank's poison, and Steve felt a sickening twist of guilt in his stomach as he knocked it unconscious with the hardest punch he could throw. Using his shield on this one would have been overkill.

He caught a blur of motion and a flare of yellow light out of the corner of one eye and mentally positioned Jan off to his left. She was still airborne, which at the very least meant that she couldn't be badly injured.

He had no idea how long it took for them to completely take the main concourse, but when it was over, the entrance to the corridors and the staircase leading up to the Meridian were covered in Argonian and human bodies, and Steve had lost two men, one firefighter and one of the policemen who had been wounded entering the building.

Both were clearly dead, the policeman sliced open from sternum to groin and the fireman staring blindly up at the ceiling with a black hole burned through his torso right next to the 451° badge half the ex-firemen had begun wearing once Steve had started sending them out to set explosives and start fires near Argonian installations.

There was blood all over the marble floor, bright red human blood and the deep purplish stuff Argonians bled when you cut them, like some horrible piece of modern art.

Their blood was the most alien thing about them -- it didn't even taste the way blood should taste, and Steve knew that intimately, because he had had it spattered all over his face when he'd cut an Argonian's throat at the Battle of George Washington Bridge.

There was blood on his costume, too, a dark stain covering his thigh. He didn't know if it was human or Argonian; red liquid on blue leather always looked purple.

Clint was crouched next to the limp body of an Argonian, wiping the blood off the Argonian short-sword he was holding on its black tunic. He must have taken the sword from one of them.

"I think I knew this guy," he said quietly, looking up at Steve. There was a smear of purple across his right cheek, almost the same color as the costume he'd used to wear. Then the lost look on his face vanished abruptly, to be replaced by a determined expression that reminded Steve painfully of Bucky. "So," Clint went on, more loudly, rising to his feet, "what now?"

"Now we do what we came here to do," Steve told him. "Firestar?"

"Yes?" Firestar landed on the marble floor a few feet in front of him, the air around her body still shimmering with heat.

"Stay here and help hold the lobby. We're going to need a path back out of here when this is over." He turned, and indicated a short, dark-skinned National Guard sergeant who had been with Carol's team at One Police Plaza the day before yesterday. "You're in command, Sergeant Garcia." Firestar was barely out of her teens, still inexperienced, and since Vance's death, she had made killing Argonians a matter of personal vengeance. Command and personal vendettas didn't mix well.

Sergeant Garcia nodded, looking for a moment as if he were about to salute.

Steve was already turning to Carol. "Time to split up. Remember, keep an eye out for Hank." Carol, Clint, Simon, and Spiderman had been given the objective of searching out and destroying the controls and power source for the Argonians' shield and freeing the captive scientists who were imprisoned with it.

If Hank, Spiderman, and the various scientists and engineers Carol's team would hopefully be able to liberate weren't able to deactivate it, maybe Simon's special touch with electronics could do the trick.

Or maybe they would, miraculously, be able to find Wanda and Tony in the lower levels and free them. The two of them could make short work of the shield device if they could only get close enough to it, Steve was sure.

They would find them, he told himself, and they would still be alive when they did. Pietro, too.

Steve wasn't giving up on any of his teammates.

Carol nodded once. "Let's go, people." She didn't look back to see if her team followed as she started toward the elevator Clint had pointed out for them on the station's floorplans. It hadn't been included in the plans Sam had dug up all those months ago, but he had been able to show the rest of the team the empty space where it ought to have been.

Her team followed in her wake, Clint one step behind her, sword in one hand and gun in the other, and Spiderman bringing up the rear, stepping carefully around the crumpled Argonian and human bodies on the floor, clearly trying to avoid stepping in their blood. He had probably never seen anything like this before the battle at One Police Plaza, and even that hadn't been as bloody as this.

"Let's see if any of these guys are willing play 'take us to your leader,'" Ben rumbled, gesturing at the fallen Argonians and humans around them.

The Argonians, Steve guessed, would not be forthcoming with the information. The human guard who lay half-curled into a ball at the foot of the stairs, both hands pressed to a gunshot wound in his thigh -- not from Clint, Clint had better aim -- was eager to tell the where to go, in exchange for a pressure bandage and the promise that they wouldn't let Firestar burn him to death.

"The Campbell apartment," he said, through gritted teeth, as Steve wrapped the bandage around his thigh. "The one with the painted ceiling and the balcony. I think it was part of some fancy hotel suit before, or maybe a restaurant."

"And how," Jan asked, her voice calm and soothing, the same tones Steve had heard her use on Hank when he was on the edge of losing control, "do we get there?"

***

An alarm was sounding somewhere, blaring over the loud speaker system that had once announced the arrival of trains and needlessly warned people that there was a gap between the train car and the platform. Hank could hear machine gun fire from the upper levels; he needed to get up there, to help the others.

If the shield was still up when the attack occurred, Hank was supposed to rendezvous with the rest of the team to help them disable the shield's controls and free Tony, Wanda, and Pietro. It had all sounded so simple two days ago, when he and Tony and the other had planned it. In practice, with uniformed Argonians streaming past his hiding place, swords and plasma guns drawn, shouts ringing off the underground levels' low ceilings, it was a nightmare. Some of the Argonians were stumbling, slow, clearly sick and weak but responding to the alarm anyway. Not enough. There should have been almost no one left standing, but Steve had insisted the levels of sodium ascorbate in the water be too low to be lethal.

He should have pushed for higher levels, shouldn't have listened. Argonians were tougher than humans.

Hank hadn't been able to find Tony or Pietro, not specifically, but he'd located the section of subway platform where prisoners were being held; one of the square metal boxes the Argonians had erected to serve as cells had been completely encased in yet another purple forcefield. Hank was getting really, really tired of those goddamned things. In this instance, though, it was almost a stroke of luck, because he would bet money -- and was probably betting his friends' lives, come to think of it -- that that was where Wanda was being held.

There had been armed guards surrounding all the cells, with a double guard on hers, so a solo rescue attempt would have been doomed to failure, especially since the guards had refused to all conveniently succumb to the sodium ascorbate; the ingestion delivery method had been too imprecise, wasn't affecting everyone. So Hank had waited, biding his time until the others showed up.

And now, if the chaos around him was any indication, they had.

He probably should have been afraid, but all he felt was overwhelming relief. Standing around helplessly while the Argonians did things he probably couldn't even imagine to Tony had been driving him crazy. It had begun to feel as if they would never come, and he'd been halfway convinced that something had gone wrong with the signals he'd been sending Spiderman, that his jury-rigged attempt to trigger Spiderman's "spider sense" had been a failure after all.

But it had worked, and they were here, and now he just had the get to them.

He really ought to have given himself the ability to fly as well; Jan could simply have stayed tiny and flown for the upper levels as quickly as a man could run. But he'd been the first person he'd tested the Pym particles on, and his body had never accepted biological modifications as well as Jan's. He hadn't even been able to get himself to grow antennae, so wings had been out of the question.

It made sense, when you thought about it. In most ant species, only the females had wings.

Hank let himself return to normal size, using one of the numerous pillars in the entrance to the subway station to hide himself from sight. He'd meant to keep going, to make himself as tall as the low ceiling would let him -- eight feet, maybe eight and a half -- but his ears started to ring when he hit five-foot ten, and he had to close his eyes and grab onto the column for a moment while he waited for the floor to stop tilting.

Changing size burned through the body's energy as quickly as a low-level energy mutation did. That, combined with the fact that Hank hadn't had a real meal in over thirty-six hours, was starting to make him feel dizzy when he grew or shrank.

Next time, they needed to plan this better. He should have brought something to eat with him, shrunken down and hidden in his pockets. He wasn't going to be much good in a fight like this. He didn't even have a gun.

Then again, he'd never used guns before the Argonians had shown up. He'd never needed them.

When the dizziness had faded, he forced himself to grow again, until his head nearly brushed the ceiling. Then he stepped out from behind the pillar and swatted the nearest Argonian out of his way.

It went down in a heap, weakened by Hank's poison, and he ran for the stairs that would take him up into the station's lower concourse. He could hear gunfire and the sound of someone screaming; human, not Argonian.

Had the attack on the police station been like this? The others had been fighting the Argonians for months while he'd been sitting around in the basement being next to useless.

A plasma blast stuck one of the support pillars, just ahead of Hank, vaporizing a chunk of tile and concrete. He kept going, ignoring the sliver of tile that sliced a stinging line across his cheek and plowing forward through the dust-filled air.

They might never find Tony and Wanda without his help, not in the warren of underground tunnels and subway platforms this place had. The team needed him. And Jan was up there, somewhere--

He nearly ran straight over the Argonian officer at the foot of the steps. She was standing on the second step up, sword in hand.

Hank swung at her, intending to knock her out with one solid blow to the skull, but she swayed backwards with a speed and grace reminiscent of a snake's. This one hadn't ingested any of the poison, or not enough for it to matter.

That was okay. He could still handle this. He just needed to get her sword or plasma gun away from her and the fight would be over.

The alien dodged his next blow as well, but the follow-up punch with his left hand caught her in the torso. She folded up, her sword clattering to the floor as he struck downward at her left wrist with a precision Steve would have been proud of.

Hank grabbed her by said wrist, holding her in place, and reached for the plasma gun still holstered at her waist.

The heavy blow that slammed into his thigh confused him for an instant -- he had one hand immobilized and she was using the other to try and block his access to the gun -- and then the pain hit. Searing, burning pain that immobilized his entire leg, as if someone had pumped acid into the muscle there.

Her tail. He'd forgotten about the tail.

His fingers closed around the butt of the plasma gun.

Plasma guns did not make good weapons at point blank range, he thought, a moment later, as the Argonian slid to the floor and Hank tried not to choke on the horrible stench of burned fur and seared meat. His hand and forearm were probably burned, but if they were, the pain was so minimal compared to the agony in his leg that it didn't register.

He had about five minutes to inject himself with the anti-venom ampule in his pocket, or he'd be unconscious on the floor soon. Maybe worse; Clint had been taken down by a single scratch, and he could tell by the way his leg buckled under him when he tried to climb the steps that this was more than just a scratch.

Hank stumbled over the dying Argonian and went sprawling, catching himself with both hands before he cracked his head on the steps.

He fumbled the anti-venom ampule out of his pocket with shaking hands, his fingers feeling thick and clumsy. There was blood all over his right thigh -- he couldn't inject it into muscle there. The Argonian's tailbarb had done too much damage for that. It would need stitches. A bandage.

Hank jammed the needle into his left thigh, hoping he'd gotten it in at the right angle, and depressed the plunger. It would work; he knew it would work. The tingling numbness in his face and hands and the hard, rapid pounding of his heart were shock, adrenaline. Not Argonian venom. It wouldn't be affecting him this quickly in any case.

He wrapped both hands around his leg, blood hot and wet against his hands, and lowered his forehead to them, closing his eyes and just trying to breath, the pain pulsing with every beat of his heart. Serotonin caused smooth muscle contractions, intense pain. It wasn't actually life threatening, didn't actually mean that his leg had been flayed open. It just felt like it.

He had no idea how long he stayed like that, but after a while he realized that more Argonians would surely be coming soon, and that he didn't want to be huddled on the steps when that happened.

He managed to pull himself upright again, using the stair rail for support, and started hauling himself up the stairs with it, his leg threatening to go out with every step. It still burned, would keep on burning until the anti-venom took effect.

He was wheezing through his gritted teeth, he realized, as he reached the top of the steps, a repetitive, annoying sound that was almost a whimper. It hurt so badly that he had to fight down nausea, sweat prickling along his skin.

He had left bloody handprints along the rail and the wall, long red smears like something from a murder scene. Good. The more his leg bled, the less venom would get into his system.

The sound of the fight had stopped. Hank tried to go faster, knowing with a sickening lurch in his stomach that he was too late, that the Argonians had captured or killed the rest of the team, and all the non-powered resistance fighters they'd brought with them. Killed and captured them all because Hank had spent the last ten or fifteen minutes collapsed in a stairwell whimpering over his leg.

He was near the water filtration system, he realized suddenly, only a few yards away from the entrance to the Metro North platform the Argonians had converted to house it. Over a day and a half in here, and he'd ended up in the exact same place.

It was cold up here. Why was it so cold up here?

His leg went out from under him again, and this time, Hank's attempt to catch himself failed spectacularly. He hit the floor hard enough to knock the breath out of himself, cracking his chin on the cold marble, and the pain that went through his leg at the impact was blinding.

There was a roaring noise in his ears, drowning out any other sound, and he wheezed desperately, trying to draw air back into his lungs. The anti-venom wasn't working, he thought, as everything started to fade out.

"Not fair," Hank thought. This was supposed to be his chance to help, to save the day, to finally do something. And then, "Jan". And then everything went grey and full of hollow echoes and he wasn't thinking of anything anymore.

***

"You know," Spiderman commented, bouncing on his toes slightly, "it kind of feels like this thing ought to be playing music."

"Can you be serious for five minutes?" Carol snapped.

"We're stuck in an elevator. Come on, you can't tell me that doesn't make you think of elevator music."

"It does now," Clint muttered darkly. He was fidgeting with the hilt of his commandeered plasma gun in a way that boded ill for whomever would be waiting at the bottom of the elevator shaft.

"I like elevator music," Simon volunteered.

"You do?" Spiderman turned to stare at him. "No one likes elevator music."

"When the elevator doors open, a bunch of heavily armed alien prison guards are probably going to try to kill us," Carol reminded them, as patiently as was possible under the circumstances.

The fabric over Spiderman's nose wrinkled. "I'm sorry, I'm just trying to distract myself from the fact that five minutes ago, I was wading through alien blood."

"Deep breaths," Carol reminded herself. "It's not his fault that he's twelve." And yelling wouldn't help anything.

The service elevator that led to what Clint had described as the Mad Scientist Dungeon was large, clearly designed for moving freight and more than big enough for the four of them. It also descended extremely slowly, or maybe it only felt that way because they were going incredibly far down.

She hated waiting.

"I go out first," she said, when Clint stiffened and shifted his weight to the balls of his feet in a way that meant they were probably about to reach the bottom. "Simon, Clint, you're behind me. Spiderman, I want you in back."

Nobody argued, not even Spiderman.

The doors opened silently, minus the little ding that the Waldorf-Astoria's elevators always made, a discrete sound that managed to convey with only a few decibels that you were in a building more expensive than most people would ever be able to afford.

Carol brought her submachine gun up -- it was lucky she still had at least some of her super-strength left, because otherwise trying to fire a fully automatic weapon from the hip would have been an exercise in futility and wildly uncontrolled sprays of bullets -- and braced herself, finger hovering over the trigger.

There was no one on the platform outside the elevator.

Carol stepped cautiously out, already looking around for threats, and then froze as a plasma bolt splashed into the rock wall just a few feet in front of her, meting a foot-wide section of the metal catwalk as it did so.

She whipped around, bringing the gun up again -- Simon was a faintly glowing presence at her left now, and Clint was on the catwalk, too, plasma gun out and ready -- and found herself staring down at chaos.

About ten feet below them, grey-coated humans had surrounded a handful of black-clad humans and were trading punches with them, a confusing mêlée of dark and light fabric. There were two dead Argonians on the concrete floor. One of them looked partially eaten, as if it had been ripped apart by some large carnivore.

"Damn," Clint said. "I wish I'd been here when this started."

Right on the heels of his words, a metal tentacle whipped out from behind one of the massive engine turbines that dominated the chamber and slammed an Argonian into the side of the steps leading down from catwalk so hard that the metal bent. There was a long, frozen moment, while the Argonian -- grey uniformed, Carol saw -- struggled weakly, and then the tentacle snatched it back out of sight again, so forcefully that she could actually hear the dull snapping sound as the alien's spine broke.

"Well," Spiderman commented, "it looks like they got Doc Ock back online."

He shot a webline at the catwalk's railing and was swinging down to the cavern floor on it before Carol even had a chance to give the order.

Damn it. The kid didn't even have any weapons, just his stupid webs.

"Simon," she started.

"Already on it," he said, as his lower body disintegrated into a haze of ionic energy. Without the sunglasses, his eyes glowed the lurid red of a neon sign.

Carol flew down to the floor after him, leaving Clint to follow behind them on the stairs.

Fighting the human guards was barely even a challenge. Unlike the Argonians, they weren't armed with plasma guns, so they had no way to really hurt her, and the same vitamin deficiency that had affected Tony and Clint had left half of them just as debilitated as the poisoned Argonians.

With the Avengers' additional firepower added to the scientists' effort, the fight was over in minutes.

Carol cold-cocked the last of the human guards with the butt of her gun -- all of his buddies had already either gone down or surrendered -- and nodded to Clint. "Get their weapons. Start giving them out to the scientists."

Clint, however, was staring at the huddle of grey-uniformed Argonians who'd been backed against one of the giant turbines by Doc Ock and a pair of scientists wielding confiscated plasma guns. "What about them?"

Carol winced. "They don't surrender." She didn't finish the thought, because what it entailed wasn't something she wanted to contemplate, let alone do.

Clint shook his head. "That's the warrior caste. These guys are different."

"I could tie them up and hang them from the ceiling," Spiderman offered, holding out one wrist. "It'll clean me out of webfluid, but-"

"Do it." They'd made it this far without killing prisoners. They weren't going to start now.

"Ant Man said the Avengerss were coming. Your timing is just about perfect."

Dr. Kurt Connors -- also known in tabloid magazines and police blotters as 'The Lizard' -- was liberally splashed with purple alien blood, including smears of it all over his crocodile-like jaw that Carol connected uneasily with the mangled Argonian officer on the floor. "We'll need your help to evacuate everyone," he said. "There are wounded, and several of uss are too badly affected by sscurvy to walk."

"What about the physicists?" Clint asked. "They're three levels up," he added, to Carol. "How many of them are-"

"None of them." Connors' voice was grim. "The last of them died two weeks ago."

Spiderman looked down at the floor. "The Spot could have left whenever he wanted to. Why did he-"

"Fissk ordered him to stay. He was Sysstevich and Schultzss's contact with the outside. The aliens killed him for giving them false information."

Which bit of information made the survival of any rebels they captured unlikely. They had taken Wanda over a week ago, had had Tony for nearly two days. It was probably wishful thinking to hope that either of them was still alive.

"It's things like that that keep me from feeling bad about having Hank poison them all." Simon nodded at the lurid ball of energy that filled the entire far side of the room. "Is that the power core for their shield?"

Connors nodded. "The controls for it are protected by a ssecondary energy shield. Ant-Man was unable to bypasss it."

"Get Octavius," Carol told Simon. "See what the two of you can do."

Simon winced, but nodded.

"We need to find out where they're holding Wanda and the others," she went on. Wishful thinking it might be, but it was all she had left to cling to. They needed Tony and Wanda; her hex powers might be able to affect the shield's power core, if all else failed, and Tony would surely know how to disable it, after months spent locked up within sight of it. If he was conscious and coherent, that was. If Wanda wasn't already dead.

"Leave that to me." Clint was still staring at the captive Argonians. "Mechanikos Isimud," he called out, striding over to them. "Nice to see you're still alive. Tony would have been sad if you'd bought it. Now," and he smiled at one of the grey-clad aliens, setting the edge of his sword against its throat, "tell us where they've got Tony, and you get to stay alive."

It blinked huge black eyes at him. "Auxillery Soldier Barton? But... but you swore the oath. You're an honorary citizen of Argon, one of the tailblades of Alulim." Was that actually hurt she heard in its voice?

"Yeah, well that didn't make them take the damn tracking chip out of my arm," Clint snapped.

"But..." Its ears wilted. "Arch-Captain Kammani trusted you. Tony Stark trusted you."

"Of course he did," Clint said, very slowly, his voice level. "I was his contact. And now he's trusting me to get him out of here."

"So it's true." The Argonian's ears wilted further, until they were flat against its skull. "If I show you where Tony is, you must promise to let the others live. Do not feed us to the Great Spider. We are not warriors but," he broke off, then finished, in a rush, "it would be an unworthy death." He straightened visibly, so that he towered a good half-foot over Clint, his ears coming back up slightly. "At least kill us quickly and cleanly, with honor."

"Show us where the prisoners are being held, and you all live," Carol told him. "But first, you're going to turn the shield generator off for us." A low-level technician probably wouldn't have access to whatever security codes would be needed to do that -- if the Argonians were smart, and experience proved that they were, only their highest ranking officers would have access to the shield controls -- but it was worth a try.

Its ears stiffened. "I cannot. Only the Archon and the Imperator have the proper fingerprints to deactivate the shield over the controls. And even if I could do so, I would not. I am not a traitor." It glanced at Clint then, its tail lashing once.

"Fine, just take us to the prisoner, then. But it better not be a trick." Spiderman stared up at the Argonian, his head canted to one side slightly, as if he were eying it consideringly. "I am really hungry, you know."

"Everything the two of you told me was a lie, wasn't it?" the Argonian said softly, still looking at Clint.

Clint pulled his sword away from its furry throat. "Not everything. Just the parts where we didn't mentioned that we were spies." He looked uneasy suddenly, and painfully young, despite being only a few years younger than Carol.

"The engines that exploded, all the miscalculations and mistakes I thought I'd made. Tony was giving me false data."

All right, that was enough of this. While they were standing around here talking, this Argonian's friends were doing God alone knew what to Tony. And to Wanda.

She had never properly apologized to the other woman for leaving her at the docks, never told her--

"Of course he did," she snapped at the Argonian. "He wasn't a traitor. Spiderman, start tying them up. You and Simon are staying here to help evacuate the scientists. Get everyone upstairs and out of the building."

"Yes, ma'am," Spiderman said. He was already beginning to web up two of the half-dozen Argonians. They stood stiffly, their ears quivering every time he touched them.

Carol kept her gun aimed squarely at the Argonian's back on the long elevator ride back up. Clint obviously knew it, possibly even had some kind of rapport with it, but that didn't mean they could trust it. Clint had spent months trapped in Argonian hands, totally dependant on their goodwill for survival; Carol wasn't inclined to trust his judgment when it came to them, at least not unreservedly.

Firestar was waiting when they came out of the elevator; when she saw their prisoner, her eyes narrowed, and the air around them became noticeably warmer. "Don't trust him," she snapped.

"We don't," Carol said flatly. "Simon and a guy who looks like a six-foot-tall lizard are going to start bringing scientists up through this elevator. Some of them need medical attention."

"I'll tell Sergeant Garcia. We'll need to get outside quickly, though. He's afraid the Argonians are going to counter-attack." She kept glaring at Clint's Argonian. She'd been shy once, Carol remembered, hesitant to use her powers at their full force and nervous about being on the Avengers.

None of them were the people they had been before the Argonians had come.

Isimud, hands webbed together in front of him, led them past Argonian and human bodies and down a staircase splashed liberally with drying human blood into the station's lower levels. Some of the human guards had clearly turned on their alien masters, because they passed more than one group of black-uniformed dead bodies that included aliens and humans alike, all of them dead from plasma burns and sword wounds.

Grand Central station had always been a confusing maze, but it was even worse now, with all the familiar subway signs gone. She thought the four Argonians they ran into -- two of them swaying on their feet from the poison -- were on the old 7-line platform, where the Times Square to Grand Central shuttle had once run, but with all the walls re-tiled in different shades of blue and green, and the signs replaced by angular copper script inlaid directly into the walls and floor, it was impossible to tell.

Their prisoner shouted a warning, but the other Argonians, their reaction times slowed by the poison, didn’t respond quickly enough, and she and Clint made short work of them in the brief fire-fight that followed.

Their prisoner's ears were flattened against its skull, its tail lashing violently. "Do that again," Carol told it, "and the deal's off, and Spiderman eats your friends for dinner." She wasn't sure which part of the whole situation was more surreal; the fact that she was threatening to commit wholesale murder of prisoners of war to force their captive's compliance, or the fact that she was threatening someone with Spiderman.

Steve was going to be disappointed in her. Steve could deal with it. If it got Wanda out of here, she'd threaten to commit as many war crimes as she needed to.

The cells were located on yet another subway platform, square metal structures with no openings save for a tiny grill in what she assumed was the door. Unlike most of the things the Argonians had built, they were completely undecorated.

Carol took out the first pair of guards barehanded, silently enough to hopefully avoid alerting the others. She sent Clint and his sword after them. It was unbloodied when he rejoined her and the prisoner, and Carol suspected he'd just knocked them unconscious with the hilt.

There were half a dozen metal holding cells, running the entire length of the platform, with wide sections of open space between them. The nearest was entirely surrounded by a dully-glowing violet force shield.

It took only a little prompting to get Isimud to give them the codes to lower this one. Apparently, releasing prisoners wasn't as treasonous as lowering the shield around the city, nor were the security protocols as highly classified.

One of the unconscious guards probably had a key, but Carol didn't bother to look for it. One good punch, then another, and the cell door warped inward, coming partway off its hinges.

The interior of the cell was dark, the only light a sullen red glow coming from--

"Coming in here was the last mistake you're going to make." Wanda's voice echoed off the metal walls of the cell, her slight Eastern European accent making it sound harsh, as the red light coalesced into two hex spheres, one for either hand. "I'm going to take you apart, starting with your fingers."

"It's me." Carol turned slightly, so that she wasn't just a backlit silhouette, hoping the light from the door would make it obvious that her profile was human, not Argonian. "We came to get you out."

Wanda slowly lowered her hands, the red light fading. "Carol?"

She wanted to step forward, to wrap her arms around Wanda, bury her face in her hair and make certain that she was real, that she was all right. She couldn't make herself move. "We've already got the scientists," she said. "Tony and Pietro are next."

Wanda made a hoarse, choked off sobbing sound, and threw herself at Carol, burying her face in her shoulder. "They're cutting him into pieces. They brought me his finger." The words were muffled against Carol's combat vest. "In a box. They brought it to me in a box."

Considering the hacked-apart bodies of the National Guardsmen the Argonians had slaughtered months ago, and their prisoner's conviction that his captors would be willing to eat him, dismembering prisoners seemed right up the Argonians' alley. "Are you-- did they hurt you?" she asked, running her hands over Wanda's back and sides, feeling for blood or other obvious signs of injury.

Wanda was shaking, leaning heavily against her. Oh God, they had hurt her. All-to-vivid images of the sorts of things one could do to the human body with knives, fists, and other implements flashed behind her eyes. The shield must have been there to contain her powers; she wouldn't have been able to defend herself.

"Did they hurt you?" Carol demanded again, then realized belatedly that she was gripping Wanda's arms hard enough that it was probably painful. All she ever seemed to do was hurt her.

She carefully loosened her grip, trying to take a step back. Wanda let go, and let her.

She shook her head. "I'm fine. Just hungry. They mostly left me alone. I think they're afraid of me." Her hands started to glow again. "They should be."

She pushed past Carol toward the door, squinting as she walked out into the light. She stopped when she saw Clint, and then her eyes went to the Argonian standing miserably next to him, tail wrapped around it's feet.

"You," she snarled, pointing at it with a finger that crackled with reddish-pink energy, "tell me where my brother is."

***

"You have told me repeatedly, Imperator, how great the depth of your military knowledge is," Irkalla said. She kept her voice calm and level, letting her tail wave gently back and forth behind her. "So your inability to prevent human saboteurs from infiltrating our base and releasing airborne viruses into the air surely has an explanation. I am waiting to hear it."

One of Nergal's ears flicked back. "I warned you that the humans were being accorded too much trust and leniency. If harsher measures had been taken against rebellion and treason-"

"Your harsh measures have proven singularly ineffective, Nergal," she interrupted, pointedly avoid the use of his title. "Arch-Captain Kammani elicited more information from the scientist who brought the virus in in two days than you've gotten out of those two captive insurgents in a week. There must be a cure for the virus, a way to guard against it. Only a fool designs a biological weapon without taking safeguards. Make the prisoners talk."

Nergal's tail lashed violently, his control over his anger was visibly failing. With Mamitu's death, his powerbase had begun to crumble, and he knew it. Arch-Captain Kammani was far more popular as an officer than her abrasive and hot-tempered predecessor had been, and after her public triumph over Mamitu by force of arms, the army's loyalty had naturally swung in her favor.

If it came to a military coup, Irkalla and Nergal both knew, the bulk of the army would follow Kammani, not Nergal.

Irkalla took a step closer to him, her robe swaying with the movement. She kept her tail in motion behind her, back and forth, back and forth, sinuous and graceful. It was vital that she move it naturally, not draw attention to it, or Nergal might become suspicious. He was larger and stronger than she was, and her unquestioned superior in the dueling circle; her only hope lay in taking him by surprise.

The poison that coated the end of her tailbarb had symptoms similar to the virus that was currently striking down most of the warriors and mechanikos in Grand Central. When she announced Nergal's death, it would be as one more casualty in the fight to secure and hold this miserable planet.

A casualty so great that, coming as it would on top of the devastating blow the humans had just dealt them, cutting their losses and retreating to a different, safer planet to lick their wounds and recover from their losses would be the only logical course of action.

To stay would be suicide. The humans had found a new weapon which killed silently and unstoppably; the longer they remained here, the more of them would fall victim to it, until the humans had decimated them to the point where they were no longer able to rebuild their population.

"Once again, Irkalla, you criticize what you do not understand. Your jumped up sub-captain is little more than a translator -- a mechanikos could serve her role in the interrogations just as well, and has."

"And yet," Irkalla said, struggling to keep the tension out of her voice as she surveyed his tall, heavy-muscled form and tried to decide upon the best place to strike, "she has still had more success than you have. I thought Arch-Captain Mamitu was merely your attack dog, but I'm beginning to wonder if she was not in fact the power behind the throne. You seem to be singularly useless without her."

"You are the one who caused this situation," Nergal snarled. "You and your pet arch-captain, trusting and coddling the humans, countermanding my orders. I know she slew my second-in-command at your behest -- do you think I am a fool?" His ears had flatted back against his skull, and his lips were drawn back in a snarl, displaying his impressive set of fangs. She had thought him handsome, once, before Argon had fell and she had seen him reveal his true nature.

"You have been working against me from the beginning!" he shouted. "Undermining my authority. You wanted our occupation to fail. Wanted me to fail."

Irkalla smiled at him, resisting the instinct to flatten her own ears in the face of his naked rage. Nergal had always maintained a veneer of civility before, openly sneering and disrespectful, but always under control. She needed to strike now, before he took action himself -- if his anger prompted him to attack her, she would have no chance. "I told you once before, Nergal, I am Alulim's heir. I was trained in strategy from childhood. Sometimes, one must make... sacrifices to achieve a greater goal." She took a step closer to him, putting herself within tail's reach, and brought her tail up, poised to strike.

"It was mistake to let you live," he shouted, his own tail lashing like a whip, light flashing off its bladed tip. "I should have killed you along with the rest of the council."

Naram-Sin, the only mechanikos on the council, dead in an accident that wasn't an accident. Elderly Gudea, murdered by slow-acting poison.

She had long suspected that their deaths had been at his hand.

"A true warrior does not kill by deceit," she spat. "She does not use poison and treachery." He had reminded Irkalla, again and again, that she wasn't a warrior.

Time for her to remind him.

The loud crash from the hallway outside made both of them twitch, and they spun towards the doorway in unison as Arch-Captain Kammani burst in, her uniform torn and in disarray. One of her ears was a ragged mess, gore matting the dark fur on the side of her head, and her drawn sword was red with alien blood.

"Archon!" she cried, skidding to a halt. "We are under attack. You must retreat to safety. I will lead you down below; we can put you on one of the trains to another station-"

"I will not run like a frightened mechanikos," she said, still snarling. The fighting rage that had taken hold of her as she prepared to strike down Nergal still held her in its grip.

The humans had planned this, she saw. First the virus, to weaken them in preparation for the attack, and then an assault on their center of command.

The scientist who had brought the virus in must have known. Kammani and Nergal had not gotten the complete story out of him after all. Humans apparently possessed more endurance than she had credited them with.

"Fool," Nergal began, "why are you not-"

Irkalla ignored him as the useless distraction he was, speaking across his words. "How far have the humans penetrated?"

"They have taken the lobby, nin-Irkalla, and some of them have entered the tunnels."

Irkalla swore inwardly. "We lack the strength to retake the great hall. Pull everyone back to the lower levels and seal off the entrances. Then extinguish the lights. If they wish to come into our tunnels after us, they may meet us on our terms." She had already acknowledged the necessity of retreat, she reminded herself. This was merely a more dramatic and immediate version.

They were the blades in the dark, the guards in the tunnels, the tailbarbs of Alulim. Nothing that came into their tunnels after them lived long enough to leave them.

Kammani drew breath to speak, but her words, whatever they were, were rendered inaudible by the deafening noise as a giant fist that appeared to be made of animate stone smashed the carved wooden doors open once more, tearing them from their frame with a deafening crash.

All three of them -- Kammani, Irkalla, and Nergal -- brought their weapons up, facing the door with blades in hand and tails poised and ready.

A human stepped into the destroyed doorway, clad in red and blue leather, a brightly painted metal shield in one hand. Behind him loomed a massive creature that resembled a statue come to life.

"You," Kammani hissed. She moved, placing herself between Irkalla and the intruders, and said something in the humans' tongue.

The human pointed at Nergal with one red-gloved hand and shouted something, his voice as loud and commanding as Nergal's had ever been.

"He says," Kammani translated, "that the Imperator must drop his weapons and surrender, or he will kill him."

***


Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four | Chapter Five (a) | Chapter Five (b) | Chapter Six (a) | Chapter Six (b) | Chapter Seven | Chapter Eight | Chapter Nine | Chapter Ten | Chapter Eleven | Chapter Twelve | Chapter Thirteen | Chapter Fourteen | Chapter Fifteen | Chapter Sixteen | Chapter Seventeen | Chapter Eighteen | Chapter Nineteen | Chapter Twenty (a) | Chapter Twenty (b) | Chapter Twenty One