Iron Man took a deep breath of recirculated air. “One of our members has been kidnapped, Namor, by a power we don’t understand. We were hoping that information you possess might help us to save him. We also have reason to believe that that same power may pose danger to you as well.”
“Feh!” spat the Sub-Mariner, almost amused. “When once I urged my people to give the surface-dwellers their chance, when I went myself to speak of peaceful coexistence at your United Nations, I was met with naught but stones, guns, and fear. And now you wish to tell me that, all of a sudden, you are concerned over my well-being? I would say that I was touched, Avenger—but I truly believe that turn of phrase applies more accurately to you!”
Iron Man gripped his anger and held it down, Time could well be running out for Captain America.
“Listen, Prince, I admit that my people and yours have had their differences in the past, and maybe the majority of the blame lies with us, but—”
“Oh, how characteristically magnanimous! You accept a majority, do you? Then I suppose you expect Atlantis to dutifully accept her minority of fault for the poisons you pump into the very water we breathe? For the radioactive wastes that kill our crops and stunt our livestock? For the blankets of spilled oil that cut us off from the life-giving rays of the sun? Oh, how very, very kind of you, indeed!”
“Damn it, Namor!” The last straw had fallen. Iron Man stepped forward; Atlantean weapons were raised. “All I wanted to do was talk! But if you aren’t willing to listen, then by God—”
“Stop!” The Vision had raised a single hand, his voice cutting through the water and the tension like a razor through warm cheese. “Perhaps useless combat may be avoided if our position were to be restated from a different perspective.”
Silence. All eyes were on the Vision as he continued. “A friend of ours is in danger. We are prepared to go to any and all extremes to release our friend from his peril. We believe that the noble Prince of Atlantis would do the same, were the roles reversed. That is why we have come seeking his aid.”
For a moment, Namor merely stared at the Vision. And then his features slowly relaxed, affecting a small smile of approval. “You are a diplomat, red-skin, and a good one. Very well, I will listen.”
So saying, the Sub-Mariner swung one leg over the neck of his sea-horse mount and slid down to the sand, crossing the distance between him and the intruders with a grace and bearing that would have remained unchanged even if the hundred surrounding soldiers had been Avengers. Then, for the next ten minutes, he listened intently as Iron Man outlined in as much detail as possible the events that had transpired in Manhattan some hours earlier. When the tale was finished, Namor looked slightly more puzzled than annoyed.
“I’m afraid I’ve little to offer, Iron Man. My only experience with northern Indians such as you describe came years ago. I was returning to Atlantis from my initial battle with your superhero team”—there was not a trace of embarrassment in Namor’s voice—“when I encountered a tribe of primitive humans worshiping some sort of figure frozen in ice. It angered me to see humans venerating false icons, gods upon whom they would undoubtedly heap their own shortcomings in the name of ‘divine will,’ and so I hurled their deity into a nearby river and left. Naturally, I gave the matter no more thought, and I still don’t see how the incident could have importance.”
However, in the mind inside the gold-and-crimson helmet, pieces of a puzzle shifted and locked into place. For Iron Man also remembered the aftermath of the Avengers’ first battle with the Sub-Mariner. Returning from that conflict in an undersea jet craft, he, Giant-Man, Thor, and the Wasp had been startled to find a man floating in their path, a man frozen in a state of suspended animation inside a block of slowly-melting ice. Taking that block on board and completing the melting process, they had discovered its contents to be the living legend of World War II, Captain America. And none was more surprised than he to find that he was still a living legend! Soon after, Cap had joined the ranks of the Avengers, and had remained one of their most valued members to this day. And neither he nor his fellows had ever discovered the reason for his being found adrift in a block of ice in the North Bering Sea.
Until now.
“Namor,” Iron Man spoke excitedly into his helmet microphone, “I think we’ve every reason to believe that ‘god’ in the ice block you chucked was Captain America, the very Avenger who was stolen from New York!”
Quickly, Iron Man explained his theory, after which the Vision concurred.
“It would seem logical to assume that the man who attacked us at our headquarters was one of the Eskimos who worshiped Captain America—probably the shaman, judging from the extent of his powers. That would explain why he referred to you as a ‘wing-footed stealer of gods,’ as well as why he chose you as a target for—”
“AAIIIEEEEE!”
The scream was more of surprise than fear, and came from the stretched-open mouth of one of the Atlantean warriors. For the tanklike vehicle at whose controls he sat had begun to rise, teetering, despite the fact that its lift engines had not been activated. The driver’s fellow soldiers turned to gape, though not so much at the tank as at the creature who stood beneath it, slowly lifting the massive war machine until he held it at arm’s length over his head, looking for all the world like some snaggletoothed, furry Atlas.
It was Brother Bear.
“Namor, that’s it!” Iron Man’s amplification circuits duly boosted the urgency of his words. “That’s Kenojuak’s monster! The one that attacked us!”
“Then by Neptune’s trident,” the Sub-Mariner answered grimly, “if it’s come for a god-stealer, then a god-stealer it shall have!”
“No, Namor! Wait!” Iron Man reached out, but the Sea Prince was already gone, his powerful ankle wings carrying him swiftly over the sand toward the hulking, yellow-green, monstrosity. In his wake, Iron Man watched with clenched fists and narrowed eyes.
“You know something, Vision?” he said softly. “I’m almost going to enjoy this.”
The Atlanteans had pulled back, leaving Brother Bear alone with the war tank raised over his head. As the ranks parted, Brother Bear saw his primary objective coming through the water toward him, and he smiled—an unclean slash of tooth and gum that could curdle cream. Then, raising his burden higher, he snapped his arms forward to send the sleek war machine flying straight at the onrushing Sub-Mariner.
Namor didn’t swerve. Instead, he merely brought his own hammerlike fist back and, as the terrified driver dove for safety, rammed it into the tank with an impact that split the vehicle down the middle, sending scraps of metal and sputtering components spinning and scattering over the ocean floor. He then continued toward his original target, confident that he would repeat his actions against the grotesque bear-creature.
But if Brother Bear was concerned, he didn’t show it. Instead, he raised his left paw up behind him and, when the Atlantean prince drew close, brought it back around in a move that was uncannily fast, as if the hairy arm met no resistance from the water whatsoever. The paw hit Namor’s right shoulder with incredible, and irresistible force; so much so that instead of slamming into Brother Bear, the stunned monarch angled off to slam into the silt and sand of the ocean floor, digging a shallow groove in the upper layers for several yards until at last coming to an ignominious halt, upended and unmoving.
Immediately, the fur-matted servant of Aningan Kenojuak was caught in a barrage of laser bolts and metal-tipped spears, as the angered Atlantean Army moved forward. It mattered little that Namor was more powerful than all of them combined, and that he had fallen to a single blow. It mattered only that he was, after all, their prince.
Nearby, Iron Man saw the futility of the attack, just as he saw Brother Bear begin a slow, deliberate shuffle toward the still-groggy Namor. Triggering his boot jets, he took off in the direction of the battle, calling out over his speaker system, “So much for teaching Subby a lesson, Vision. We’ve got to stop that monster! Come on!”
However, the Vision had already plied his usual array of weapons and tactics against this particular menace, and had met with failure. Thus he stood his ground and proceeded with the one course of action that seemed sensible given the circumstances: he thought.
Meanwhile, Iron Man reached the remains of the laser tank and, with a single, swift jerk, ripped the treads from one side. Then, swim-flying in a curve around Brother Bear, he swooped in behind the creature and looped the length of tread around its massive shoulders, pulling it taut. For a moment, he hung there, suspended, looking something like a pet owner walking a stubborn dog as he strained to tug his monstrous opponent off balance. For his part, Brother Bear stood fast, choosing only to twist his head around slightly and offer a low snarl in acknowledgment of the temporary stalemate.
Nearby, the Vision came to stand next to the furious Sub-Mariner. Namor regained his senses, and scrambled to his feet, then motioned for his soldiers to withdraw. This was one fight he wanted for himself.
“That despicable cur shall pay for what he’s done! I’ll hang his ears from the rafters of the royal throne room! By Neptune, no one lays hands on a Prince Of The Blood with impunity!”
“If you insist on pursuing your current strategy, Namor,” the Vision stated calmly, “I’m afraid that a large portion of that princely blood will soon mingle with the water around us.”
“Eh? What do you mean?”
“I mean, Sea Prince, that this creature defeated seven Avengers—the selfsame team that you, yourself, have fought to a standstill in the past. Alone, you could never prevail; yet together, there may still be hope.”
The Sub-Mariner, though stubborn, was not stupid. In the space of a heartbeat, he had accepted the truth. “You have a plan, red skin?”
“You are the one Brother Bear seeks. It is you he will follow. Therefore, you must swim away from us, into the valley beyond Atlantis, where—”
“What? Prince Namor, run from battle? You are either mad, android, or you have sorely underestimated the mettle of the one true Sub-Mariner!”
Yards away, Iron Man had heard the entire exchange, and now responded. “Namor, for once can’t you just stifle your bloody arrogance? If you can’t live with the idea of running, then think of it as leading the danger away from your people. But however you label it, you’d better do it fast!”
As if to illustrate Iron Man’s words, the tread holding Brother Bear chose that moment to snap, causing the Golden Avenger to tumble backward awkwardly while the glowing polar menace resumed its forward stride, faster now, as if sensing the ambivalence of its prey.
Only short, deadly feet away, Namor looked around at his courageous, but obviously inadequate, troops, made a decision and sprang from the ocean floor, his ankle wings taking him in a smooth, graceful curve over Brother Bear’s head and into the mouth of the proximate valley. The sound he made could have been that of the rapidly displaced waters in his wake—but seemed suspiciously similar to a disconsolate grunt.
Brother Bear, angry at seeing the successful conclusion to his mission swimming frustratingly away like a carefree trout, growled his displeasure and turned to follow; while Iron Man and the Vision had taken flight immediately after Namor and quickly approached the mountainous sides of the undersea valley.
“If I read you right,” Iron Man called out, “you want to pull a Jericho number once our fuzzy playmate enters the valley. Close?”
“You are most discerning, Iron Man,” answered the Vision.
“There’s often a thin line, old friend, between discernment and desperation. I’ll take the right side.”
Brother Bear lumbered between the flanking mountains of the valley when the two Avengers split apart, Iron Man zooming over the supernatural assassin’s head as if pursuing the Sub-Mariner. Then, some hundred yards into the valley, he turned to face the towering inward mountain directly to Brother Bear’s right, at the same time cybernetically activating the tractor-beam unit mounted on his chest plate. The tractor beam was a unique development of Stark International, and worked through experimental magnetism techniques to exert a tremendous pull on anything with even a microscopic mineral content. When the beam struck the mountain, the mountain quivered.
Inside his armor, Tony Stark felt droplets of sweat trickle down his temples as he increased his concentration, thereby increasing the intensity of the tractor beam. In seconds, the mountain began to rumble . . . and then to topple!
Contemporaneously, the Vision had dematerialized, his physical form becoming so light that he was able to easily enter the mountain on Brother Bear’s left, passing between its molecules like a wraith. Quickly, he explored the undersea monolith’s interior, analyzing strata and structure until at last, at the mountain’s base, he found what he sought: a fault line. It was a small one, true, but it should provide enough latent instability for him to carry out his part of the plan.
Matter-of-factly, the Vision positioned himself along the fault line and then, in less time than the oft-mentioned split second, he increased his density from lighter than hydrogen to several times heavier than uranium-238. The results were impressive. Inside the mountain, the rock strata literally exploded, shattered by the incredible pressures; while outside, the coral-covered mound actually jumped, as if kicked from beneath, and began to slide along the fault line, tottering and tipping over to fall straight toward Brother Bear.
In the center of the valley, the glowing bear-thing must have realized that he had no hope of avoiding the tumbling masses on either side. For he merely stood there, head turned slightly, lips drawn back in a snarl that went beyond human anger. If he had had the mental and vocal abilities to curse, he would have undoubtedly let loose a string of expletives that would put a longshoreman to shame. And then the cascading debris hit—and where once stood Brother Bear, there now stood a new mountain.
Iron Man and the Vision made their way through the silt-filled waters to stand at the base of the still-settling knoll. They were soon joined by the returning Sub-Mariner.
“Your plan was a sound one, redskin,” the Atlantean intoned, speaking with assured satisfaction. “Our mutual enemy has been vanquished.”
“For the moment, Prince Namor,” the Vision answered with his usual even modulation. “But only for the moment.”
“Eh? What do you mean? The beast is buried under tons of stone and sand!”
“What the Vision means,” Iron Man joined in, “is that Brother Bear isn’t your everyday frolicsome forest creature. He’s a supernatural construct that isn’t going to die just because we want him to. As soon as he claws his way out of that rubble, he’ll be on the rampage again. And the only hope we have of stopping him for good is to get hold of the Eskimo medicine man who conjured him up—and maybe in the process pull Captain America’s fat out of the fire.
“Look, Namor, maybe we could do it without you—but maybe we couldn’t. Either way, your help would make things a lot easier. So what do you say?”
Namor considered, his face shadowed with a frown. “How do I know this isn’t some surface man’s trick? A ploy to get me away from my people so that the air breathers might exploit them as they have in the past?”
Iron Man’s sigh was barely audible through his speakers. “I guess you’re just going to have to trust us, Prince. Because when that bear-creature gets free, he’s going to cause more havoc and carnage than my people ever could. We’ve got to work together, Namor.” He paused, and then, “Please.”
The Sub-Mariner stood erect, hands on slender hips, his face fixed with a look of cautious resignation. “No,” he said, “I will not trust you.
“But I will help you.”
Interlude
The low drone of chanting was interrupted for the second time in less than an hour, and for the second time in less than an hour a curious face poked its way out of the log cabin’s door. The face, bespectacled and bearded, belonged to one Fredrick Quintin Zitz, ex-radical, ex-revolutionary and neo-homesteader in the wildernes
s of southern Alaska. Pulling his olive-drab army coat tighter around his throat, Fred Zitz stepped from his cabin onto the packed snow walkway before it, raising his squinting eyes to look for the source of the whooshing sound that had broken his concentration. And just when he was about to reach nirvana, damnit!
Fred had learned about nirvana back at Berkley in the sixties. He’d learned about a lot of things then: about love and sex, about politics and power, and about the marvelous combinations of chemicals that could do everything from expanding your mind to exploding your local draft office. It had been a time of growth and movement and commitment, and Fred had grown and moved and committed himself to a series of very special ideals. The world had been a vital place, and he had belonged in it.
Vaguely, Fred realized that the whooshing distraction had already passed over his cabin, and so moved around to the side of the structure, kicking at hard lumps of snow with his fringed boots and stepping past his old Volkswagen beetle, the one with the peeling flower decals and the tattered ecology flag that hung limp and windless from the bent radio-antenna.
He had come to Alaska some years before, when the decade had changed—and everything else had stopped changing. It had almost seemed as if the world had heaved a collective sigh and said “the hell with it,” with everyone deciding to live for themselves and let the future fall where it might. At first, Fred had occasionally given in to the hope that mankind would pull itself from its self-inflicted quagmire of apathy and abandon—but then he would flip the dial on his battery-powered radio. And between the incessant barrages of butter-slick ads and the mindless hum of disco music (a term he considered contradictory), he would sigh and realize that relevance was still being relegated to boogie fever and the methodical elimination of panty lines.
And so Fred Zitz now spent his days doing simple chores. In summer, he would tend his small organic garden, harvesting and preserving crops to be eaten or smoked during the long winter months. And when that winter came, he would hunt and trap small game. (Fred had been an ardent anti-war activist, but had subsequently decided that it was all right to kill as long as one did so only for food. After all, he figured, every time you order a Big Mac you’re sanctioning someone else to kill a cow, right?) And, of course, he meditated.
Marvel Novel Series 10 - The Avengers - The Man Who Stole Tomorrow Page 6
