by Alex Irvine
“You don’t kill, Wolverine. Not when you’re on this team. Not when you’re an X-Man. Ever.” Scott held his ground as Logan got close enough to take a swing at him if he wanted to. “The minute you kill someone on our behalf, you’re not one of us. You’re the enemy. Understand?”
“Oh, I understand,” Logan said. “And lemme tell you, bub, if that moment ever comes, you better make sure you’re in another time zone, because you’re the first one I’ll come looking for.”
“Boys?” Rogue’s Southern drawl interrupted. “Much as I love to watch men have dumb fights, I feel like I should point out that we just won.”
Scott didn’t look at her. He wasn’t going to break the stalemate between him and Logan. Either they would fight, or Logan would back down. And after a moment, Logan did. “This isn’t a Boy Scout trip, Summers,” he said. “You want to die for your ideals, you do that. I’m here to win.”
“We’re both here to win, Logan,” Scott said. “All of us are.”
“Spare me the rah-rah crap,” Logan said. He took a deep breath and let it out as his claws retracted.
“Are we done here?” Rogue asked. “Cause if we are, maybe we ought to devote just a little time to thinking about why Molecule Man was here in the first place.”
“Yeah,” Logan said. “The rest were just bodyguards for him.”
“Hmm.” Scott climbed to the lip of the nearest volcanic crater. This was where Doom’s team had been heading when the X-Men’s arrival diverted them. “What’s a good reason to send Molecule Man to a dormant volcano?” he asked, thinking out loud. “There’s really only one, isn’t there?”
“What’s Doom’s plan, to go all Vesuvius on us?” Logan said.
“Think bigger,” Scott said. “Doom is. If he wanted to come after us, he’d have done it. Instead he sent his people here, a long way from our base. About the only thing you can do with a dormant volcano is make it erupt. So…”
“Molecule Man was going to set off these volcanoes,” Rogue finished for him. “But why?”
“Doom’s got his eye on Galactus,” Scott said. “He must think doing this will affect him somehow.” Scott rested a fingertip on the side of his visor and glanced at his team. Rogue nodded, as though she understood, but Wolverine just glowered at him.
“We came all the way out here just to do what Doom was gonna do anyway,” Wolverine growled. “And you wonder why people question your leadership.”
“You guys better get a head start,” Scott said. “Right now we need to slow down Galactus. Run.”
He opened his visor and seared the crater floor with a full-power blast, letting it go on until a geyser of lava jetted up toward the rim and the ground started to shake under his feet. Then he turned and ran, too, catching up with Logan and Rogue as they got to the ship.
Fiery plumes spouted all along the volcanic range, from one end of the horizon to the other. “Whoa,” Rogue said. “The whole plain is exploding, too.” Scott looked out the window as he belted himself into the pilot’s chair. She was right. Fissures opened and spread, pouring lava and belching ash. He got the ship in the air just as the ground disappeared into a molten soup. He revved the engines up to full power, and it wasn’t until they were clear that any of them spoke.
“Sure hope you did the right thing back there, Slim,” Wolverine said.
Scott nodded. “Me, too.”
THIRTY-TWO
JULIA CARPENTER had gone to bed two nights ago in her apartment on 13th and Logan, overlooking the lights of Denver. She’d gotten up in the morning to find herself looking out the same window at miles of swampland, ringed at its far edge by a line of mountains. But not the Rockies, because they were in the wrong direction. She’d spent yesterday patrolling what was apparently part of downtown, pretty much from the baseball stadium down to Civic Center Park—only the rest of the city was gone. Along with the rest of Colorado and, as far as she could tell, the rest of Earth. Everyone else was as confused as she was, but there’d been little violence so far, and her patrols were quiet. Authorities were asking everyone not to panic even though there was no electricity, and the city would run out of water fairly soon. At the moment, though, the situation wasn’t desperate. People were trying to be optimistic and hoping for an explanation.
During her brief stint as Spider-Woman, Julia had seen her share of strange things, but this took the cake. She’d heard rumors that someone dressed as Doctor Doom had been spotted with two women on the 16th Street Mall. Was he behind this? Surely someone even more powerful was responsible for moving Denver into a swamp. Doom couldn’t have done that, she thought. Julia tried contacting her college friend Val Cooper, who worked for the government and had helped her get her spider-powers, but all the phone lines were down and there was no cell service. Large, multicolored and oddly shaped creatures from the swamp loped up and down the street outside her building. She’d gone home after determining that there was no direct threat, but she kept her Spider-Woman costume on under her clothes just by way of precaution. People were on edge; as Denver’s only super hero, she had to be ready when trouble started. She tried not to worry about her lack of experience. She’d only been Spider-Woman for a few weeks. In that time, she’d only caught two muggers, a man locked out of his car (oops), and a shoplifter.
That morning, she’d pulled the curtains wide to see whether she’d imagined yesterday, if it was some sort of hallucinogenic aftereffect of the serum that had turned her into Spider-Woman. Nope, she thought to herself as she looked over the swamp at the mountains. Those sure aren’t the Rockies. Because the Rockies weren’t volcanoes as far as she knew, and these mountains certainly were. Smoke belched from the whole sky in that direction, and glowing lava slid down the distant slopes.
Nearer to her, past the border with the swamp, she saw a quick movement. A tree fell with a crash, and in the space it opened up she thought she saw the Lizard, recognizable in his lab coat even at a distance of a few hundred yards. Julia went out onto her balcony and blinked a few times. Is this real? How could the Lizard be in a swamp next to Denver? But then, she reminded herself, what was Denver doing next to a swamp in the first place? She didn’t know whether the Lizard was doing anything wrong, but clearly she needed to ask him a few questions.
But then she saw the Lizard turn and speak with another person who had appeared next to him. Julia squinted. The other person looked like a slight woman with short dark hair, and she seemed to be on friendly terms with the Lizard. But wasn’t he a monster?
The Lizard and the woman both moved out of view for a moment. Julia took the opportunity to step inside and pull off her street clothes, revealing her Spider-Woman costume—black and white with thigh-high boots, elbow-length gloves and an upper-face mask that allowed her hair to flow freely while still keeping it out of her eyes. This was the sort of thing Val Cooper had prepared her for: investigating the arrival of infamous villains in Denver. And maybe even to figure out why there was a swamp where there had been a shopping mall two days ago.
When Julia stepped out to her balcony again, she was surprised to see a huge vehicle plowing through the swamp. It was some kind of giant bulldozer, bright red, with a fifteen-foot-wide front bucket. Way too big to be a regular city maintenance vehicle—and anyway, those were yellow. But at this point, nothing seemed unusual. She crouched on her balcony and sprung to the nearest tree, trying to stay high. She needed to find out what was going on, but the thick vegetation blocked most of her view from the ground.
Then, a flash of light and an explosion rocked the swamp from the last place she’d seen the Lizard and his friend. She dropped to the ground and took off at a run. She saw the huge bulldozer retreating now, churning up mud and roots as it carved a track away from the city. Julia realized that if the trees were blocking her view, whoever was driving the bulldozer probably hadn’t even noticed Denver; they’d just driven on, with the Lizard lying in a scooped-up mass of mud in the bucket.
What had happened to the woman
? Julia headed into the swamp, slogging through the low spots between slippery rocks and the strange trees clustered on hummocks of dry land. In five minutes, she’d found the bulldozer’s track; a second later, she found the Lizard’s friend.
The woman was lying on her side, her legs in the water and her torso slumped against a rock. There was a hole right through her back, and Julia was at first certain she was dead. When she got closer, the woman moved, ever so slightly, and Julia switched from investigative mode to rescue mode. Should she head to the hospital? Was there even one in the surviving part of Denver? What could she do?
She cautiously rolled the injured woman over to see whether she should try CPR. Julia gasped.
The woman dying in her arms was Janet Van Dyne, the Wasp. The leader of the Avengers.
Suddenly, the situation started to make sense, at least in a way. The Lizard. Doctor Doom. The Wasp. Volcanos where there had been shopping malls. Some global catastrophe was afoot, and the Avengers were involved, and someone with a giant bulldozer was trying to kill them. And Julia—Spider-Woman—was done catching shoplifters. She was about to graduate to the major leagues.
But first, she was going to have to save the Wasp’s life.
*
Spider-Woman possessed superhuman strength, so she easily lifted Wasp over her shoulders. She was retracing her steps out of the swamp when she saw a kind of spaceship nose-deep in dust; coming away from it were Janet Van Dyne-sized footprints. Julia carried the Wasp into the ship, gently placed her on the floor, and then spent a frustrating amount of time figuring out how to get the ship off the ground. She’d never seen anything like the tech that controlled it.
Eventually she did get the ship into the air, though. When a holographic map materialized, Julia learned to spin it to get her bearings. There was Denver; there were the volcanoes; there, far on the other side of the volcanoes, was what looked like a village. It was the closest thing to a settlement she could see within a thousand miles. That had to be where the Avengers were, because they sure weren’t in Denver.
The ship was fast, and she found the village in less than half an hour. She also found Galactus straddling a mountaintop with a huge machine in front of him, pieces slowly settling into place as he built it. Julia gaped up at him. She’d heard of his encounters with the Fantastic Four and Avengers, but she had never seen the Devourer of Worlds. How many heroes and villains were here in this strange place? Galactus paid her no mind, fortunately, as she circled around him to land in the center of the village.
She’d been hoping to find some evidence of an advanced civilization with medical facilities and perhaps the Avengers themselves. But she’d never expected to see the Fantastic Four—and Spider-Man, her namesake—spilling out of the strange little conical huts to meet her.
THIRTY-THREE
EVEN against Battleworld’s general backdrop of bizarre impossibility, seeing Spider-Woman suddenly appear in the village was a surprise to Steve. Even more shocking was his realization that she was carrying the Wasp, who was clearly in need of immediate medical attention. “Find Zsaji,” he yelled to Hawkeye as he ran to meet them.
“Sure am glad to find you here,” Spider-Woman said. “Wasp needs help. Or, I don’t know, maybe—”
“We’ll help her,” Steve cut her off. He didn’t want to hear Spider-Woman say Wasp was dead, even though that was almost certainly the case. Wasp was limp in a way that Steve had learned to recognize during the war.
He carried Wasp to Zsaji’s hut and laid her on the pallet recently occupied by Colossus. As Zsaji bent over Wasp, She-Hulk shoved her way into the hut. “Janet!” she cried out, kneeling next to the pallet. “Zsaji, you have to help her!”
Zsaji said something in her own language. Even though none of them knew the words, they all recognized the tone: low and mournful, matching the expression on Zsaji’s face as she laid her hands on Janet Van Dyne and nothing happened.
“No,” She-Hulk said. “She can’t be…” She whirled on Spider-Woman. “What happened?”
“I found her like this in a swamp near the edge of Denver,” Spider-Woman said.
“Denver?” Steve echoed.
“There’s a big chunk of it miles from here,” Spider-Woman said. “Including my apartment. It’s right on the border between the city and the swamp. Wasp was there with the Lizard, and then some kind of big bulldozer-tank-thing plowed through. They took the Lizard and left her like this.”
“She can’t be dead,” She-Hulk repeated. “Zsaji, please.”
Zsaji—head bowed, white hair falling limply over her eyes— stood up and left the hut without another word.
“Zsaji, you can’t leave!” She-Hulk said. “Please, you have to help her!”
Hawkeye and Thor were watching from near the door. They parted to let Zsaji pass. Thor took a step forward to She-Hulk’s side. “She is beyond help,” he said. “Zsaji would not have withdrawn if anything could be done.”
Cap rested a hand on She-Hulk’s shoulder. “Jen,” he said. “Come on outside.”
*
For a while there was nothing to say. The heroes clustered in the village plaza, taking what little comfort they could in each other’s presence. It was She-Hulk who broke the silence. “They have to pay for this,” she said.
“Who?” Hawkeye asked. “We don’t know who did it.”
“Don’t we? Who else would it have been? Who else would have shot her and then taken the Lizard? It was Doom’s people, and we all know it! Why are we standing around? We’re Avengers, aren’t we? Well, one of us needs avenging!” Tears stood in She-Hulk’s green eyes as she spoke. Cap saw the group reacting to her, nodding along and exchanging glances. They all wanted to go after Doom.
He understood it. He wanted to go after Doom, too. But in a war, the side that went off hell-bent on revenge usually ended up on the losing end.
“Aye,” Thor said. “We cannot let Janet Van Dyne’s death go unanswered.”
“Then let’s go get ’em!” the Thing said.
Before the situation got out of hand, Steve stepped in. “No,” he said.
“What do you mean, no? Janet’s dead, Steve!” She-Hulk squared off with him, ready to fight just to do something with the pain she was feeling. She and the Wasp had been very close. “Magneto kidnapped her, and Doom’s men killed her! Everyone shares the blame! We need to do something!”
“We don’t have time for vendettas, Jen,” Steve said. “Magneto’s with the X-Men now, more or less on our side. We can sort it all out later. Right now we need to focus on Galactus, or none of us will live long enough to argue about revenge.”
He looked around the group and saw that they were listening, at least for the moment—except She-Hulk. Steve went on. “I’ve lost people close to me, too. All of us have. All of us loved Janet. But if we go off trying to get even, and we’re tangled up with Doom’s people while Galactus starts up that machine, we’re all going to die. Everyone on this planet will die. Maybe everyone in this universe will die. We need to stay on-mission. The time is coming when we’ll have to hit Galactus with everything we have, and we need to be ready. I’m sorry, Jen. There’s no time to settle scores.”
She-Hulk didn’t back down, but she looked away.
“Then let’s get it over with,” Hulk interjected. “We go up the mountain and take on Galactus right now.”
“Sounds a lot like suicide to me,” Spectrum countered. “You saw what happened to Reed.”
“Think about this,” Steve said. “Doom might well have done this to Janet as a way of goading us into attacking Galactus. Then he’ll stroll in and finish us off.”
“That’s where things are headed anyway,” the Hulk said. “We should do it on our terms.”
“That’s the point. The only thing we can do on our terms is ignore Doom’s provocations. If we go after him, that’s playing into his hands because he’s got his eye on Galactus. If we go after Galactus before we need to, that’s playing into his hands because we’ll
be weakening ourselves while Doom holds back.” Steve looked from one of them to the next, seeing various degrees of agreement and resentment. He settled on She-Hulk. “We can’t risk it. Much as I’d love to put Doom down myself, we just can’t. Yet.”
“You can’t, maybe,” She-Hulk said. “But I can. And I will.”
She strode away from them. Steve let her go. Holding her back would start a fight they couldn’t afford. “Where’s she think she’s going?” Hawkeye asked.
“Let her go,” Steve said. “She needs some time. And we need to keep an eye on Galactus.”
“Speaking of which,” Spider-Man said. “Here’s a little ray of sunshine. Galactus looks like he’s taking a break from building his World-Muncher.”
They all looked up to the mountaintop and saw that he was right.
THIRTY-FOUR
VOLCANA got a strange, bone-deep thrill when the volcanoes started erupting, like Battleworld was part of her—or she was part of it. The forces at work were the same ones raging within her body. She watched Doom’s monitors as they recorded eruptions across the entire range between Doombase and the distant fragment of Denver.
Then her good mood was destroyed as Doctor Octopus radioed in. “Molecule Man is badly hurt. The mutant Wolverine circumvented our defenses,” Octavius said. “We are returning at full speed. Be prepared to administer immediate emergency medicine, or we will no longer have Molecule Man at our disposal.”
Volcana turned to the Enchantress, who was the only other person in Doom’s command center. Doom himself, as far as they knew, was still aboard Galactus’ ship. Klaw, who had delivered Doom’s instructions, was babbling rhymes in the hallway outside. The Wrecking Crew was on another level of the base, probably doing something stupid. They had brought back the Lizard and put him in a stasis chamber until Doom could return and decide what to do with him.
“Amora!” Volcana said. “You heard them! Owen is hurt! We have to go to him!”
