by Greg Cox
Iron Man was not alone, she observed. Many yards away, at the very tip of the island, Captain America faced off opposite Cyclops, the two men circling each other warily. Iron Man dived toward the Hulk, who had apparently been driven out into the seething torrent of the river by his antagonists. Storm looked about for the other Avengers, perhaps the Scarlet Witch or Thor, but saw only the costumed crusaders she had already spotted: Iron Man and Captain America.
It matters not, Ororo decided, ready to defend her allies against any number of new assailants. She knew not why the pair of Avengers had laid siege to the embattled Hulk, and to the X-Men as well, but she determined that they would not strike another blow without suffering the consequences. Rogue, she recalled, had begun her short-lived career as an Evil Mutant by striking out at Captain America, Iron Man, and the other Avengers, permanently crippling Ms. Marvel. Could it be that Rogue’s disappearance, and the Avengers’ unexpected arrival here, were all part of some long-delayed act of retaliation? Stranger things had happened in this uncertain life they led. In any event, she had no intention of remaining soggily upon the sidelines, not while the elements remained hers to command. It is just as well, she mused, that the Thunder God has not accompanied his allies. No Asgardian deity shall dispute my dominion over the skies.
“Be well, my friend,” she whispered to the Beast. She shook her flowing white mane, throwing off a spray of tiny droplets. Mud caked her long legs from the knees down, but she paid it no heed, throwing out her arms to capture a sudden breeze beneath her wings. Her ascendant will, and eternal empathy with the elements, fed the breeze, lending it strength. “I will return shortly.”
Disregarding the throbbing of her head. Storm rose upon the wind to a vertiginous height above the Horseshoe Falls. There she saw Iron Man blasting the Hulk with his celebrated repulsor rays, apparently intent on pushing the persecuted brute over the crest of the Falls. Unnatural orange beams, unlike anything in nature, emanated from the Avenger’s metal gauntlets.
Sentinels wield weapons such as those, Storm thought, finding the armored warrior’s resemblance to those hated mechanical storm troopers quite unsettling. But the heavens harbor weapons of their own, purer and cleaner than those spawned by science.
She summoned her own power to her, the idea occurring to her that this coming battle might well be what the Fates had intended all along. Perhaps only by defending the Hulk against a common foe could they persuade the surly and suspicious monster that their interests were his own.
Genuine thunder, like the crashing of gigantic atmospheric cymbals, joined the pandemonium of noises clanging discordantly about and above Niagara. All of Storm’s frustration and discomfort, which had been building ever since her “demise” in the Danger Room, merged with the tempest building around her, flowing out from her fingertips in the form of a crackling lightning bolt that lit up the sky between her and Iron Man. Raw electrical fire converged on the metallic Avenger as if he were a living lightning rod.
“Leave the Hulk alone!” she commanded Iron Man from on high. “Pit your vaunted technology against the untamed power of Nature herself!”
* * *
NO sooner had Iron Man’s repulsors started pushing once more against the Hulk’s immovable bulk, the accelerated neutrons colliding with the densely-packed atoms making up the Hulk’s lime-green epidermis, when the Avenger was struck from behind by a powerful electrical charge strong enough to overload the EMF force-field that was his armor’s first line of defense. Tony felt the shock all the way through multiple layers of tessellated metal tiles.
“What the devil was that?” he exclaimed as soon as the muscles in his face stopped twitching. Emergency displays reported that his armor had been subjected to over 350 gigawatts of electrical force. Since when did the Hulk fight back with energy powers?
Breaking off his assault on the Hulk, he performed a flawless barrel roll that left him facing upward at the sky. Sunlight in his eyes kept him from seeing anything at first, until his polarized lenses kicked in, and he spied Storm aloft above him, angry thunderclouds roiling behind her outstretched arms. The whole sky turned overcast quickly, nearly turning day to night as the sun disappeared behind gray and tempestuous clouds. Thunder rolled across the heavens. Violent winds whipped the clouds into a threatening display of nimbostratus fury.
Guess there’s no doubt now whose side the X-Men are on, he thought resentfully.
The cloud cover above the female X-Man grew darker and more turbulent with each passing moment. The polarized lenses lightened automatically in response to the changing light. Sensors in his armor reported an unnaturally rapid increase in the barometric pressure and humidity. Storm’s doing, no doubt; Iron Man wondered if the mounting intensity of the atmospheric disturbances were any measure of the woman’s mood.
If so, he decided, I’m in serious trouble.
A gale force wind blew him farther away from his green-skinned quarry, out over the American Falls on the other side of the island.
Talk about getting the brush-off, Iron Man thought wryly, using his boot jets to halt his involuntary retreat. Gouts of orange flame spewed from the soles of his boots as he fought back against the zealous zephyr, slowing advancing into the wind toward its imperious mistress.
“Sorry, Miss,” he informed her, even though the deafening clamor made any real attempt at verbal communication a lost cause, “but you can’t blow Avengers away like old leaves.”
A lifelong ladies’ man, Tony could not help noticing the female X-Man’s exotic allure. The combination of stark white hair, dark skin, and captivating blue eyes produced a singular beauty that Iron Man didn’t need any high-tech sensors to appreciate. It seemed a shame to lash out at such a strikingly attractive woman, but years of contention against the likes of Madame Masque and the Viper had seriously eroded whatever chauvinism and/or chivalry might once have restrained him.
She started this, he remembered, so he wasn’t about to play sitting duck. Maybe she can explain what this is all about later—after I shut down this meteorological menace of hers.
He fired his repulsors at her, ready to catch Storm before she fell unconscious into the river. “Careful,” he reminded himself; the X-Man was nowhere near as indestructible as the Hulk. He wanted her contained, not a casualty.
He shouldn’t have worried. The orange repulsor rays fell far short of their target, dissipating completely several yards before they came within striking range of Storm.
Of course! he realized, mentally (but not physically) slapping his forehead. The accelerated neutrons that gave his repulsors their punch traveled along a shaft of ionized air projected from his gauntlets; obviously, that conductive shaft had been unable to make headway against the tremendous atmospheric forces controlled by the mutant heroine.
Her own thunderbolts, needless to say, encountered no such resistance. Even as Iron Man watched his repulsor rays fade away, Storm let loose with another concentrated blast of lightning. He tried to evade the bolt, but the jagged electrical spear followed him wherever he flew, drawn by the crystallized iron in his armored suit.
Zap! Sparks flew as lightning struck his helmet, sizzling in his ears. The refractory coating over the outer layer of high temperature enamel shielded his flesh and blood from much of the lightning bolt’s charge. The armor’s internal displays, though, flickered alarmingly, before coming back on-line. Diagnostic routines reported minor malfunctions throughout the sophisticated circuitry of the suit, including damage to the secondary neural net processor, the ventral foot altitude sensor, and even, ironically, the LIDAR weather scan sensor port.
Ouch, he thought.
Storm had drawn both first and second blood. Iron Man realized he had to strike back, ideally with a weapon that didn’t depend on the atmosphere as a conductive medium. His plasma bolts were not an option; they were too powerful to use against an opponent who was neither armored nor invulnerable.
Never mind whose side she’s on, I don’t want to blow her to
atoms. Tight-beam sonics were less lethal, but Storm might be able to deflect the sound waves by manipulating the very air through which they traveled.
Magnetism, on the other hand, functioned just as well in a vacuum as it did in a gaseous environment. Maybe that was the ticket. Iron Man arced above Storm, swooping around to catch her from behind. The projector in his chestplate flared brightly as he attempted to snare Storm with his tractor beam, the same beam he had used to pluck that unfortunate shipwreck victim from the river. In theory, the magnetic beam would seize hold of the iron in Storm’s blood, holding her fast within the beam while he towed her back to the authorities.
A little trick I learned, Iron Man recalled, from the X-Men’s old nemesis, Magneto.
The irony was not lost on him.
Catching Storm with the beam proved easier said than done, though. At the last minute, the flying mutant banked to the left, escaping the beam, then performed a graceful loop-the-loop that left Iron Man sweeping an empty swath of sky with the tractor beam while Storm climbed toward the clouds above him. Iron Man hastily adjusted his own trajectory to try to bring her back in line with the brilliant purple ray emanating from his chest. The chase turned into an intricate aerial ballet that tested the limits of Iron Man’s maneuverability. He had always thought that his sleek metal armor was the last word in aerodynamic design, but Storm not only glided effortlessly upon the prevailing winds, the very currents of the air seemed to go out of their way to accommodate her every swoop and spiral. No matter which way she turned, she always had a strong tailwind at her back, whereas he was constantly buffeted by an opposing squall. Iron Man started to feel like he was competing in a game that had been stacked against him from the start. How did you win an air battle when the air itself was fighting for the other side?
* * *
ALL he needs to do is strike me with that ray once, Storm thought, redoubling her efforts to stay one cloud ahead of her mechanized adversary.
She had no idea what sort of energies were at work within that radiant purple beam, but thought it best to stay well clear of its path. Too much was at stake to risk being immobilized once more; her head still ached from the psychic and physical toll of the Hulk’s shock wave while the Beast remained out of commission, so that only she and Cyclops remained to stand against the Avengers, the authorities, and, quite possibly, the Hulk. One mistake, she knew, and she would feel the unguessable effect of Iron Man’s weapon upon her own form and flight. Such a defeat would leave Cyclops alone and outnumbered.
Never! she vowed. Despite the occasional tensions between them, Cyclops was a dear friend whom she was not about to surrender to the uncertain mercies of their present adversaries.
And then there was Rogue, who might be at greater risk than them all…
For all that was at stake, the skyborne pursuit was exhilarating in its way. Mighty winds blew her through the firmament, drying her hair, skin, and garments as she soared up and down and back and forth, changing direction constantly so as to confound her armored opponent. Bursts of cleansing rain washed the island’s mud from her limbs. Only soaring thus through the open sky did she ever feel truly free, unhemmed by walls or ceilings, and at one with the elements. Thunder pounded in perfect synch with her heartbeat while lightning gathered behind her eyes and within her fingertips. She pitied Iron Man; trapped as he was in his cold metal shell, how could he possibly savor the miracle of flight as she did? He was cut off from nature, not to mention his fellow man.
I could not endure that. Storm knew. The very thought of trapping her body and soul inside a cramped, lifeless machine made her shudder.
A luciferous streak of light fell across her path, and she barely dived beneath its ominous glow in time. Glancing to the left, she caught a glimpse of Iron Man zooming toward her on an intercept course, steel-clad fists tearing through the gossamer fabric of her clouds. His gilded mask was surprisingly expressive, the angled slits of his mouth and eyes conveying grim determination. Parallel rows of signal lights ran along the top of his helmet, blinking in sequence according to some unknown computer program.
Computers. Storm had no doubt that computers controlled many of the functions in Iron Man’s armor, just as they did in most technology these days. Despite her reverence for the natural world and its ancient ways, she was not uninformed about modem computers—and their weaknesses. An electromagnetic pulse of the right magnitude, she recalled, could seriously disrupt a computer and its operations. Shadowcat, the X-Men’s resident computer genius, had explained this to Storm rather vigorously after a couple of unfortunate accidents involving Ororo’s powers and the Xavier Institute’s computers. She and Kitty Pryde had even managed to duplicate the phenomenon in the Danger Room.
Let us see, she resolved, if Iron Man’s formidable technology can be as temperamental and touchy as Kitty’s precious programs.
A luminescent white glow filled her eyes, masking her vibrant blue irises and dark pupils. Calling upon memories honed through constant repetition, she released the pent-up electrical energy in her fingertips in a single high-intensity pulse that flared so briefly that it had vanished completely from sight before its effect was felt…
* * *
“WHAT the heck?” Colonel Lopez exclaimed as a harsh burst of static assailed his ear.
He yanked his walkie-talkie, which he had been using to converse with the commander of the Canadian forces across the river, away from his head and glared at the malfunctioning device. “Hello?” he asked, cautiously raising the walkie-talkie back toward his ear, but the line was as dead as his chance at a promotion after this fiasco. He shot a blistering glance at his second-in-command, who looked just as befuddled as the rest of his troops. Judging from the confused and/or irritated faces he saw along the front lines, his walkie-talkie wasn’t all that had screwed up. Suddenly, in a single instant, all their expensive electronic hardware had just gone completely FUBAR: Fouled Up Beyond All Recognition.
Playing a hunch, he checked his pocket compass just in time to see the needle swing toward Goat Island, southwest from where he was standing, then back again toward magnetic north.
“Typical,” Lopez muttered. The supertypes’ freakish powers were even messing with his compass. Not to mention the drastic changes in the weather. He felt another layer of stomach lining burn away and searched his pockets for a Turns. Blast it, he thought, why couldn’t all these heroes and mutants and monsters stay in the Big Apple where they belonged?
* * *
FIRST, his computer crashed. Then Iron Man did.
The luminescent displays before his eyes blinked out of existence. His glowing chest unit went dark. The limbs of his armor locked into place, the servos that amplified the motion of his muscles grinding to a halt. And, perhaps most significantly, given his current altitude and position, all six micro-turbines in his boots shut down at once, turning the world’s most sophisticated man-shaped flying machine into several hundred pounds of dead weight.
“Whaaaaaaaaaaaa—!” Iron Man exclaimed, the single syllable stretched across a vertical drop of over a thousand feet.
He hit the river with an enormous splash. Ordinarily, a Plexiglas layer would automatically drop into place to prevent water from entering through the mouth slit in his helmet. But with the armor frozen until the computer rebooted, Tony found himself coughing and sputtering in a desperate attempt to keep from drowning in the icy water. The wild rapids tossed him about like a piece of driftwood. Rocks clanged against his helmet as he took a bumpy ride down the river. Fragmented glimpses of sky and spray spun before his eyes when his head wasn’t dunked beneath the waves altogether. Blurry smears of water speckled his protective lenses.
Have to hang on, he thought fiercely, guessing at once what had happened. He knew too well what the right kind of EMP could do to his armor, and how long he needed to recover. Thanks to constant improvements in the software, it took precisely 2.34 minutes for his armor to reboot, a significant gain on earlier systems which had ne
eded a full three minutes to come back to life. All he needed was a couple of minutes and he’d be raring to go again.
Unfortunately, he went over the Falls in seconds.
Using the Internet, Iron Man had scanned the history of Niagara during the flight from Manhattan. Over the years, he had learned, at least fifteen people had deliberately gone over the Falls in barrels and other “protective” devices, five of whom had met horrible deaths. Now, against his will, Iron Man’s armor had become merely the latest high-tech barrel.
Beneath multiple layers of diamond dust, enamel, iron, and microcircuitry, a comfort layer of firm rubber padding cushioned Tony Stark’s vulnerable human flesh. Tony had never been more thankful for that padding than now, when he abruptly found himself bouncing roughly over the rapids at the crest of the Falls, then smashing repeatedly against the side of a cliff as he plummeted downward, spinning helplessly out of control. A hundred bumps and jolts jarred his bones while the omnipresent pealing of millions of gallons of cascading water drowned out the rest of the world. Frothing chaos was all he could see, rotating wildly before his eyes. Inside the armor, Tony held his breath as he braced himself for the worst, i.e. hitting the bottom.
But which Falls had he gone over? The Horseshoe Falls, which emptied into the fabled Maid of the Mist pool, or the American Falls, which fell directly onto a deadly pile of rocks at the base of the cataract? Not even the most reckless daredevils of yore had ever risked a trip over the American Falls; the unlucky souls who accidentally took that fatal plunge never survived. To his horror, Iron Man realized he had no idea over which Falls he had been flying when the EMP knocked his armor for a loop; his extended dogfight with Storm could have taken him over either drop. Could even his armor, its protective force field off-line, protect him from a crash landing upon those deadly rocks? He had to admit he wasn’t sure.
