MARVEL SUPER HEROES SECRET WARS

by Alex Irvine

  Have we won? For good this time?

  Steve took a last look around. The portraits of Doom’s mother were gone. He took a deep breath and turned to leave, wondering what he would find outside.

  KURT WAGNER

  He is gone, and we are here. Victory. But my mind, it is plagued with shadows as of other things that happened to other versions of myself. Unglaublich. What did we experience? What is real and what is imagination? Is there any difference in this place?

  I feel as if I have died many times here, perhaps fallen in love many times here, perhaps lived an entirely different life many times here. Everything that might have happened, here on Battleworld it has happened. To me. I think the others feel the same, but they do not speak of it. They busy themselves with getting home, or with burying Zsaji. Peter is hurt more deeply than he can say, and what hurts him most is that he inflicted the deepest wounds on himself. We are all marked by this place, by what happened here. By the terror of knowing that nothing is finally real if a power greater than ourselves wishes it not to be. Who can survive such knowledge unwounded?

  We will vilify Doom. He has earned it, perhaps—but let us also say of him that he alone among us saw the true way to survive the Beyonder’s game. He alone among us refused to be that godling’s toy. That refusal, it saved us, whether or not that was his purpose. And why did he do it? I believe he would claim for power, but no human wants power for its own sake. One wants power because there is something one wishes to do with it. Doom was no different, and there I feel sympathy for him.

  It is not so much to want love from one’s mother. Not so much. Doom was not wrong about that.

  SIXTY-FOUR

  HE MADE sure the entire team was accounted for. Then he made sure that they all got onto the ship headed back to the former Doombase, now rebuilt after the cascading reality shifts caused in Doom’s final moments. Then Steve Rogers excused himself and went to one of the labs. In one hand, he carried the intact part of his shield. In the other, he carried its shards, each splinter painstakingly sifted from mounds of dust and debris.

  Since the first time he’d picked up the shield, he’d known it was something special. Something different. Not just a symbol of Captain America. Not just a weapon. It was one of a kind, unbreakable as his will—returning to him with the same loyalty he showed to flag, country, and comrades.

  Now it was broken.

  Steve set down the pieces on a workbench, fitting them together so their edges touched. The shield had withstood blows from Thor’s hammer. It had deflected bullets, particle beams, and energy blasts of unknown origin. It had saved his life a thousand times, and protected the lives of others. Its edge had laid out bad guys from the Red Skull to the Super-Skrull.

  As long as the shield was broken, Captain America was weakened, not whole. And if Battleworld could grant them any wish, Steve wanted his shield back.

  Steve was possibly the least mystical guy in the world. But here, he’d seen a galaxy blown out like a candle flame. He’d seen Galactus flung around like a rag doll. He’d seen a man—no bigger than Steve was as a kid—pick up a mountain range and drop it on the other side of a planet.

  Reality can change. On Battleworld, reality is change.

  He held his hands over the broken shield.

  This is my fondest desire, he thought.

  *

  In the hours after Captain America had emerged from the Tower of Doom to find Klaw’s monstrous menagerie gone and the rest of the team shocked to see him alive, Battleworld had been quiet. No unusual weather events, no deformations of reality, no monstrous intrusions from the depths of anyone’s id. This was good—because they were all exhausted, and because Reed Richards needed time to work.

  He’d just started to get the hang of how Doombase’s technology operated—particularly the fabricators. These machines were all clustered in one area, adjacent to the room where Spider-Man had gotten his new costume. Other members of the team had since visited the automatic tailor, but none of them had received a brand-new outfit like Spider-Man had. He claimed his suit had some kind of sentience, like it knew what he wanted and could adapt itself in certain ways. Reed was skeptical. If that phenomenon was in fact occurring, it was more likely due to the essence of Battleworld itself.

  He had just finished building the device that he believed would get them all home, and he brought everyone together near the Doombase entrance. The heroes appeared from different parts of the vast complex, and Reed had a moment to consider how familiar this had all become already. The human animal was highly adaptable. Even something as chaotic and unpredictable as Battleworld soon became navigable once human intelligence had a chance to acclimate itself.

  Reed surveyed the company of heroes. They’d had their difficulties, but they had banded together and fought as one when it mattered most—even when they had known that to do so would probably kill them all. He was proud of them—not that they needed his admiration.

  What they did need was his brainpower to help them get home, and Reed thought he had just about solved that problem. He held up the device, which resembled a remote control—because, in essence, that’s what it was.

  “I’ve relied a little on the fundamental nature of Battleworld in the construction of this device,” he said. “It’s best that I admit that up front.”

  “Great,” Wolverine said. “We’re all gonna click our heels and say there’s no place like home, right?”

  “Not quite. The machines I worked with are quite rigorous in their technological capabilities,” Reed said. “Where the nature of Battleworld comes in is during those moments when, dealing with unfamiliar machinery, I allowed myself to be guided by my intuition…which is in turn directed by desire for a particular outcome.”

  Still skeptical, Wolverine said, “Even better. You’re hoping the machines read your mind.”

  “You’re welcome to stay here if you don’t trust what I’ve done, Wolverine,” Reed said. “But you’ve all felt it. This…inherent property of Battleworld that made your deepest wishes seem possible. Haven’t you?” Reed looked around at the group. He could tell they knew what he was talking about.

  “Felt it, hell,” Captain America said. “I did it.” He held up his shield, once again a perfect circle. “You’re never going to believe how.”

  “Lemme guess,” Hawkeye said. “You just wanted it real bad.”

  “Yep,” Cap said. “Real bad.”

  “It’s time to go,” Reed said.

  They gathered on a rise of land near Zsaji’s grave—but not too near, lest Colossus fall into another self-pitying fugue. The other X-Men were taking turns offering their support and keeping him on the right track, but the loss had been hard on him. Reed suspected this was the flip side of the attraction he had felt for her, and that like the attraction it was a byproduct of her healing powers. He was, in a sense, undergoing Zsaji withdrawal as her healing energies left his body.

  Johnny Storm had also been uncharacteristically withdrawn and irritable, likely due to the same effect—but because Johnny was prideful and witty where Colossus was stoic and introspective, the two men dealt with the effects quite differently.

  Wasp handled her grief with grace. She looked grim and tired, and Reed thought he saw the tracks of tears on her face, but she held herself tall and met his gaze.

  “If you look up at the sky,” Reed said, “you should be able to…there.” He pointed, and they all saw a tiny flash about forty degrees above the horizon. “That is the construct on which we all appeared. This device will teleport us to it using a mechanism similar to what the Beyonder used to bring us down to the planet’s surface.”

  “Hey! Someone else is here!” Spectrum pointed, and they saw a human figure climbing the side of the hill toward them. “Who is that?”

  “That’s Doctor Curt Connors,” Spider-Man said. “But he’s supposed to be the Lizard, unless he figured out how to de-Lizard himself. Hey, maybe that’s what Battleworld taught him.”


  “And he’s not the only one coming back,” Cyclops said. Swooping in tight arcs near Connors was Lockheed the dragon. When he saw that Connors had spotted the rest of the heroes, he flew to Colossus and alit on his shoulders. Colossus reached up to pet the dragon, who made a purring growl and snorted smoke.

  “The dragon led me here,” Connors said as he came within speaking distance. “Is it…?”

  “Yeah, it’s ours,” Cyclops said. “It belongs to Kitty Pryde. But where’d you come from? And why aren’t you the Lizard anymore?”

  “The Enchantress tried to drain my life force to give her a little boost so she could teleport to Asgard,” Connors said. “But instead she just drew out the Lizard part of me. I think it’s gone for good.”

  “Can’t say I’m sorry to hear that, Doc,” Spider-Man said. “You gave me a lot of trouble sometimes.”

  Connors cracked a smile. “You mean the Lizard did. I’m hoping when I get back to Earth I can start to set some of those things right. We are going back to Earth, aren’t we?”

  “That’s what I was just talking about,” Reed said. “This device will send us in small groups to the Beyonder’s construct. From there it will relay us on home. Who wants to go first?”

  The X-Men gathered, along with Magneto. Lockheed still curled around Colossus’ shoulders. “One big happy family,” Wolverine commented. Magneto did not respond. Reed aimed the device at them and touched the button; with a small crackle of energy and a whoosh of displaced air, they were gone.

  “Avengers next?” Reed suggested. They gathered, and Captain America said, “We’ll need to meet and debrief once we’re all home.”

  “Understood, Cap,” Reed said. Again he touched the button, and the Avengers were teleported away.

  That left Johnny, Ben, Connors, Spider-Woman, and Spider-Man. And, of course, Reed himself.

  “Hey, can I see that thing?” Ben Grimm asked. “I wanna do it once.”

  “Of course, Ben,” Reed said. He handed it over, and Ben changed into his flesh-and-blood form.

  “Be easier to get the button right with ordinary fingers,” he said. “Everyone ready?”

  SIXTY-FIVE

  YOU’LL want to hold the device out and press the button with it pointed back in our direction to make sure we’re all included in the teleportation field,” Reed said. “Come in a little closer to the group, Ben.”

  Ben took a few steps back, instead. “Hey, what are you doing?” Johnny asked him. “You heard Reed.”

  “Yeah, I heard him,” Ben said. “But I think I’m gonna hang out here a little. You guys go on ahead.”

  “Ben, you can’t be serious,” Reed said.

  “Sure I can,” Ben said. “We’ve done all this jawing about what Battleworld gave us. Xavier walked, Spidey got new threads, Connors got to be human again. You know what I learned here? How to be me. I mean, both kinds of me. Both sides. I ain’t ready to let that go just yet.”

  He pointed the device at the group. “The Fantastic Four needs you, Ben,” Reed said.

  “You can sub in someone else for a while,” Ben said. “There’re plenty of people who can add some muscle. Listen, tell Alicia I’ll be back. I’m not stayin’ forever. I just…I just want to enjoy being able to be me for a bit, okay?”

  “I can web him up, Reed,” Spider-Man said.

  Reed held up a hand to stop Spider-Man. “Ben,” he said. “This is an enormous risk you’re taking. Your gift from Battleworld might survive when you get home, but we can’t guarantee that the construct will be there forever.”

  “I know,” Ben said. “But I got a feeling. Look, we won. The Beyonder’s still around, and we’re the ones who helped spring him out of Doom. We won the game. That means we get what we want. And we all want to go home.”

  “That’s a lot of logic-chopping considering we’re talking about a being from another dimension who was willing to kill all of us,” Spider-Man said.

  “Whatever,” Ben said. “This is what I’m doing. I still got the gizmo, right? That means I can come along whenever I feel like it. Now get out of here.”

  “Don’t lose the device, Ben—” Reed started, but Ben pressed the button, cutting off the rest of Reed’s admonition. The last group vanished in a crackle of energy,.

  He was alone on Battleworld.

  Nice guy, Reed Richards. Bit bossy because he was so much smarter than everyone else, but his heart was in the right place.

  He didn’t understand Ben, though, because Reed’s powers didn’t take anything away from him. Ben’s did. They’d made him a freak, and he couldn’t just put down his freakishness or hide it away in a secret identity—until he’d come to Battleworld, at least.

  Ben Grimm looked at his hands, holding the teleportation device. His human hands, skin and bone and veins and little hairs. Sooner or later, he’d go back to Earth. He didn’t want to be a hermit, or lord over whatever alien critters were still roaming around this place. But he did want to be just Ben. At least for a little while. That wasn’t so much to ask.

  Special Excerpt

  Guardians of the Galaxy:

  Rocket Raccoon & Graat — Steal the Galaxy!

  Original prose novel by DAN ABNETT

  • CHAPTER [BECAUSE WE MUST START SOMEWHERE] ONE •

  LAST ORDERS

  A TALKING raccoon and a mobile tree walk into a bar—

  Wait. My linguistic circuits inform me that in the vernacular of more than one hundred and fifty-six thousand civilized cultures, that opening sentence definitely sounds like the start of a joke.

  The sort of joke that might also include the words “Why the long face?” or “I’m afraid not” or “Ouch, it was an iron bar.”

  Please understand, gentle reader, what I am about to tell you is most certainly not a joke. It is a story about the fate of worlds. The Destiny of the Universe, no less. It is a story during which this Galaxy, and possibly many other galaxies—not to mention several terations of the entire space-time Multiverse—will be in serious jeopardy on more than one occasion. This is a serious tale. Billions of innocent lives depend upon its successful conclusion. One false step in our narrative, and stars will snuff out, spiral galaxies will unwind, supergiants will detonate in clouds of luminous atomic heartbreak, and the ancient and mighty civilizations of the cosmos will fall, screaming, as the dreadful blackness of eternity rips out the throat of All Creation.

  So let us not, loyal and friendly reader, get off on the wrong foot by thinking that I am about to tell you a joke.

  I am not. Are we clear? I will suspend my literal speech protocols {literal speech protocols suspended} because that’s possibly what’s causing the problem. I will try to be more…informal and more human (because I am presuming that you are human, loyal reader. You look human, at any rate. Except for those eyebrows. Really? Really? Did you trim them yourself?). I am a synthetic. A synthetic humanoid. I am an instrument of measurement. A recorder of data. I was manufactured in the matter forges of Rigel. I was made to observe. So cut me some slack, okay? I don’t do organic nuance.

  Where were we?

  Oh yes, right. A talking raccoon and a mobile tree walk into a bar.

  The bar is in Dive-town, a minor suburb of the continent-spanning supercity/starport cosmopolis of Lumina on the planet Xarth Three. Occupying a long-season, “sling-loop” orbit around the binary stars Fades Primary and Fades Secondary in the Xranek Group, Xarth Three is a class M world with a population of 9.9 billion and a gross industrial export principally comprising—

  {halt expositional protocol}

  —just checking with you, loyal reader, but that’s going to become tiresome, isn’t it? If I keep reverting to data-delivery mode every time I hit a proper noun? I am an encyclopedia. But I want to tell this story without sounding like one. Here’s an idea…if I’m going too fast or not explaining things, tell me, and I’ll back up and fill in details. I’m very good at filling in details. If details are what you want, you’ve come to the right place.
>
  {resume narrative mode}

  The bar is in Dive-town. The suns are setting like hot coals spitting as they sink into murky water. In the streets outside, neon lamps are pulsing. Necrodroidal trash-gangs are howling at the rising moons, eager to begin a night of vicious turf wars and lucrative organ scavenging.

  The bar is called Leery’s. No one who frequents the bar can actually remember who Leery was, or why the bar bears his (or her, or its) name. Not even Nrrsh, the Skrull who runs the place.

  Nrrsh has been wounded (presumably in the course of numerous Kree-Skrull wars) so many times that a great deal of his biomass has been systematically replaced by cybernetics and prosthetics. It’s fair to say that he is not so much a Skrull with cybernetic parts, but rather a collection of cybernetic parts with one remaining Skrull arm vaguely involved. This does not in any way prevent him from being fiercely Skrullian and singing the traditional anthem “Tarnax! Tarnax! Always shifting!” lustily every Skrull-Day, or when he has had one too many Timothies.

  {data note—we’ll come back to the subject of the Timothy later}

  Leery’s is typical of most Dive-town hostelries: split-level, multi-bars, a dancefloor, an orchestra pit, a ranged sequence of fighting arenas, and a quasi-siderial gateway to the Multiverse that no one ever uses because they are too busy getting hammered, betting on the arena fights, dancing, or having a flarking good time of it.

  As our talking raccoon and mobile tree enter it, Leery’s is business as usual. The dancing girls are dancing (I say dancing girls—I mean a shoal of eighty coalescent pseudo-moebea swirling in stylish, syncopated formation. With ostrich feathers). The band is playing (I say band—I mean a close-harmony squadron of Kymellian interpolatory trumpatoonists who are using brass acoustic-tubes to produce disconcerting and frankly uncomfortable horse-fart noises at ultralow frequencies. With a samba beat). The joint is jumping (I say jumping— and it is. The deep and immense rock-fuse piles upon which Dive-town was built, bored down into the planet’s mantle in ages past by the first constructors of Xarth, are actually being affected by the ultralow infrasound frequencies of the Kymellian band’s horse-farting and are beginning to twitch. Just a little bit. Oooh, just a little bit).