“You’re wasting your breath,” Rock replied. He retracted his stony spears, then turned the bottom of his shell into an enormous hammer, with which he began pounding away at Captain America’s shield. The indomitable shield resisted the blows, but the impact of each hammer strike jarred Cap to the bone. “I didn’t like you self-righteous hero types calling the shots back when I worked for the Feds, and I like you even less now. This is our city— ours!—and nobody’s taking that away from us, not even Captain God-B less-America! ’ ’
We don’t want your city, Cap thought, grunting as another blow from the hammer squashed him between his shield and the pavement, but it seemed that Rock didn’t want to hear that.
All right then, he decided with steely resolve. Nobody
can say we didn’t try to do this the peaceful way.
He counted the seconds between each hammer strike, then, with perfect timing, rolled out of the way during the pause between blows. The hammer came swinging after him, but Cap was already halfway to his feet by the time he blocked Rock’s latest attack with his shield. The red-white-and-blue discus rang like a bell beneath the hammer, yet its patriotically-painted surface was not even scratched.
“What the devil is that thing made of?” Rock complained, frustration evident in his voice. “I’m the Rock. I’m the hardest thing there is!”
You may be wrong there, friend, Captain America thought, proud of the lost wartime ingenuity that created his decades-old weapon. Not even the Hulk’s vast strength, nor Wolverine’s adamantium claws, had overcome his shield’s durability. He had no reason to expect that Rock’s granite appendages would fare any better. Not that Rock himself won’t be a tough foe to bring down, he reminded himself; apparently the shape-changing Squad member had given the Hulk a run for his money on a couple of occasions.
Cap readied himself for Rock’s next move, while watching carefully for a chance to go on the offensive. Adrenalin flooded his body, mixing with the Super-Soldier Formula in his blood and raising all his well-honed reflexes to peak performance levels. But before Rock could strike again, a crimson beam blindsided the monolithic assailant, sending his rocky form tumbling head over hammer. Cap’s eyes followed the luminous red beam back to its obvious origin: Cyclops’s open visor. “Thanks for the assist, mister,” he called to the X-Man.
“No problem,” Cyclops stated, taking the fight to Rock, and Cap paused to take a breath before diving back into the fray. Then a red-hot fireball slammed into his shoulder.
What in blazes—? He clutched his shoulder with his free hand. That smarts, he thought, wincing. I don’t want to take many more of those if I can help it.
Looking away from Rock and Cyclops, Cap saw Hotshot running toward him, with Jailbait chasing after him. In my day, he thought, Jailbait was not a name any young woman would voluntarily assume for herself. Then again, things had changed a lot since the Forties....
“You should have left when you had the chance!” Hotshot shouted angrily. Apparently his temper was just as fiery as his codename, not to mention his trademark fireballs. A volcanic glow suffused his palm as another burning projectile formed within his grip.
Just like the Human Torch, Cap noted.
“Listen, son,” he tried again, keeping one eye on the nascent fireball and another on Hotshot’s expression. He didn’t think the youth was evil at heart, just cocky and quick to fight, like many other boys his age.
Hawkeye used to be the same way, Cap thought, recalling many dustups with the Avengers’ boisterous bowman before he had picked up a little hardwon maturity. Cap felt inclined to give Hotshot the same benefit of the doubt he had always given Hawkeye. “Think again before you do anything you might regret later. You don’t want to do this,” Cap said
“Oh yeah? You don’t have the slightest idea what I want. You don’t belong here!” Hotshot shot back, punctuating his retort with a flying fireball that came whizzing through the air at Cap.
The fireball exploded against Cap’s shield in a shower of bright red sparks. “Maybe not,” he agreed, running to meet Hotshot, “but you ought to learn not to shoot first and ask questions later, especially when you’re not under attack.” A third fireball came at his legs, but Cap deftly hurdled the sizzling globe which landed on the pavement behind him, scorching it. “That’s three misses in three pitches,” Cap pointed out. “If I were you, son, I’d think twice about trying out for the Yankees just yet.”
Cap came within an arm’s length of the green-skinned pyrokinetic. “This is no game,” Hotshot sputtered indignantly and swung a glowing fist at Captain America’s head as it rose above the outer rim of the shield. “I’m fighting for my city!”
The Avenger easily parried the punch with his shield; despite the youth’s gamma-induced energy powers, he was no Joe Louis. “That’s an admirable sentiment,” Cap said, even as he rammed his fist into the boy’s mid-section. He took care to pull his punch; he didn’t want to batter Hotshot into unconsciousness, just knock the wind out of him. “First, though, you need to learn when to fight.”
Dazed, Hotshot lay sprawled on the marble steps of the plaza. His fingers sparked like firecrackers as he blinked his blurry eyes and tried to shake the fogginess from his head. “Just a lucky punch,” he gasped defiantly. “Just give me a sec, and we’ll see who’s got a lot to learn.”
The kid’s got spunk, Cap noted with approval. Who knows? He might actually make a decent hero someday. He reached down to help Hotshot up.
“Don’t you touch him!” Jailbait shouted, misunderstanding his intentions. “Nobody beats up my boyfriend as long as I’m around.”
A shimmering cage enclosed Cap, cutting him off from his recovering opponent. Crisscrossing lines of scintillating energy, crackling with restless electrons, formed a radiant dome above the Star-Spangled Avenger. Cap experimentally tried to step through the coruscating bars, only to receive an intense electrical shock the instant he came into contact with the energy lines. Cap clenched his teeth to keep from crying out and stepped back from the bars. He stared through the gaps in the cage at Jailbait, who stood a few feet away, her green hands extended before her, palms out.
“Good work, Jess!” Hotshot praised, springing to his feet with all the resilience of youth. He held a hand over his bludgeoned abdomen, though, as he joined his girlfriend. “That’s the way to do it. I’ll bet he wasn’t expecting that.”
Actually, I should have, Cap castigated himself. Bruce Banner had warned them all about Jailbait’s ability to create webs of highly-charged energy, but Cap had overlooked the mild-looking teenager, possibly because she never sounded too enthusiastic about fighting in the first place.
Never underestimate an adolescent girl whose sweetheart is in trouble, he concluded. The smell of ozone filled his nostrils.
Even now, though, she didn’t seem very committed to the battle. “Are you sure we’re doing the right thing, Lou?” she asked Hotshot.
“Remember the Hulk?” he reminded her. “Remember Hydra? Heck, remember the Leader?” He placed a comforting arm over her shoulder. “The whole world wants what we’ve got here, wants to exploit us and steal our technology. We can’t trust anyone.”
“Not even Captain America?”
“Not even,” he insisted. “It’s us against the world, just like always.”
“That’s not true,” Cap said from within the cage. ‘‘You should listen to that young lady, son. She’s the only one of your bunch who is not declaring war before checking the facts.”
He tried to appeal to Jailbait, even if he couldn’t bring himself to call her by that name. “Look, miss, I’ll bet we can work this whole mess out if we just talk it over for a few minutes. All we want is information about the Leader. Call off your teammates, let us make some inquiries, and we’ll be on our way. You have my word on it,” Cap said “Don’t listen to him, Jess,” Hotshot warned her. “He’s trying to trick you.” He expressed his anger by hurling a fireball through a gap in the cage, but, despite his cramp
ed circumstances, the Avenger deflected the flaming sphere with no difficulty. Cap was worried more about Hotshot’s obvious influence over his girlfriend; it was going to be hard to get through to her as long as Hotshot was worked up.
He had to try, though. “Where’s the harm in a ceasefire?” Cap asked her. “Why not give us a chance to explain?”
“Shut up!” Hotshot shouted at Cap. “Stop messing with her head.” He lowered his voice to plead with Jailbait. “Think about it, Jess.” He pointed at Cyclops, now squaring off against Rock. “What’s the real Captain America doing with one of the X-Men? An Avenger hanging out with a mutant criminal? That doesn’t makes sense. This guy’s got to be a fake!”
“You think?” Jailbait asked, eyeing Cap more suspiciously than before.
“For sure!” Hotshot said confidently. “He’s probably not even human. Just an adaptoid wrapped in a flag.”
Cap sensed he was losing ground in his campaign to strike a peace initiative with Jailbait. I might get her to come around eventually, he thought, but we don’t have that much time to spare. His blue eyes probed beyond the confines of the glimmering cage, searching for an alternate strategy. Looking around the plaza and its surroundings, his gaze lit upon Freehold’s impressive cathedral. That imposing edifice stood several stories above the level of the street, its stained glass windows looking out over the plaza. Cap noticed in particular a marble ledge running along the second story of the cathedral. He hefted his shield and calculated the correct angle. Yes, he thought. That looks like just what the doctor ordered.
He lifted his shield until it was parallel with his chest, then aimed it at an open space between two crackling lines of electrical energy. “Jess, watch out!” Hotshot yelled, spotting Cap at work. “He’s trying something!”
Captain America flung his shield like a frisbee and it went spinning out of his hands. At the same time, Jailbait mentally tightened her cage so that it fell like a net over his head and shoulders, delivering painful electrical shocks wherever the lines of the snare came into contact with him. Cap stiffened in pain, nearly biting his own tongue off, but his shield had escaped the net, soaring out over the heads of the two mutated teenagers.
“Hah!” Hotshot crowed. “He missed us by a mile.” He hugged Jailbait to his side. “You did it, Jess! You stopped him!”
Cap watched as his shield flew gracefully toward the waiting cathedral, striking the correct comer of the sturdy ledge, and ricocheting back toward the unsuspecting teenagers. Without a single wobble, the metal disk slammed into Jailbait from behind, knocking her onto the pavement. Sorry about that, miss, Cap thought sincerely, but your hotheaded boyfriend didn’t give me much choice. He knew the shield hadn’t hit her hard enough to do any permanent damage; after several decades of constant practice, he could gauge the force of a rebounding shield to the nearest ounce.
With Jailbait’s concentration broken, her luminescent net flickered for a split-second, then disintegrated entirely. Cap seized his freedom with breathtaking speed. Hotshot was still staring aghast at the prone figure of his girlfriend when
Captain America barreled into him. Hotshot was sent tumbling down the steps even as Cap retrieved his shield from where it had landed after knocking Jailbait unconscious.
Flying toward the hypertrophic organism known as Ogress, his synthetic body lighter than air, the Vision experienced a peculiar sensation that it took him approximately 1.73 seconds to identify as trepidation. The mere sight of the jade giantess was apparently sufficient to induce a disturbing fluctuation in his synaptic functions. How unusual, he thought, ascending higher, out of reach of even Ogress’s exceptionally long arms. Better to delay his conflict with the mutated attorney while he performed a hasty selfdiagnostic in hopes of isolating the cause of his uncharacteristic consternation.
Vivid images sprang from his memory banks, of his intangible right arm plunged up to the elbow in the broad green chest of the Hulk, of the extreme discomfort he had experienced when the atomic structure of the Hulk’s organic substance refused to be displaced by the Vision’s own rapidly solidifying limb, and of that indelible moment when the Hulk tore the Vision’s arm from its socket, throwing his entire system into the cybernetic equivalent of shock. The Vision found he could not dismiss these disruptive memories, despite a concerted effort to do so. A human being, he suspected, would label such persistent and counterproductive recollections as “post-traumatic flashbacks”; the Vision preferred to think of them as an unwanted perturbation of his artificial thought processes.
The reason these freshly-recorded memories were resurfacing now was readily apparent; obviously, some portion of his analytical faculties had equated his present antagonist, Ogress, with another hostile green brute: the Hulk. Hence, his previously inexplicable trepidation at the prospect of engaging in hand-to-hand combat with Ogress. A predictable consequence of his recent dismemberment, perhaps, but not one that he could permit to interfere with the proper execution of his duties as an Avenger.
My course is clear, he resolved. Captain America and Cyclops require my aid.
“Grrr!” Ogress roared at him, shaking her immense fists at the unreachable android. Even from high above, she looked much larger than the Hulk and arguably more bestial in manner and appearance. Unable to lay her hands on the flying Avenger, Ogress turned her attention to targets closer at hand, scanning the vicinity with a predatory gleam in her eyes. The Vision realized he needed to intervene immediately, before Ogress could unleash her considerable wrath upon either Captain America or Cyclops.
“You are unwise to look away from me,” he warned as he swooped down at her, increasing the mass in his outstretched fists enough to accelerate his descent along the desired approach vector. His thermoscopic beams preceded him, specialized lenses in his eyes focussing the discharged solar energy upon the distracted Ogress. “Do not attempt to harm my companions or I will be forced to take further action against you,”
Neon-red heat rays fell like a spotlight upon Ogress. Her transformation having reportedly rendered her mute, she could respond only by howling in pain and anger; discouragingly, the Vision believed he detected more of the latter than the former. Her coarse green hide showed no sign of blistering beneath the thermoscopic barrage, but the furry tufts upon her bare arms and legs began to smoke and smolder. She snarled at the Vision, baring her brick-sized teeth, then loped across the plaza to the cooling relief of the spewing fountain. Like a prison searchlight, the Vision’s heat rays chased her down the low marble steps, but the intense photonic bombardment did not even slow her down; hurdling the raised curb of the fountain in a single leap, she splashed into the churning pool. Cascading streams of water rained on her, providing partial protection from the burning thermoscopic beams, which raised dense clouds of steam, concealing Ogress from the Vision’s visual receptors.
Floating silently above the pool, his saffron cloak billowing above him, the Vision extinguished his heat rays and considered his tactical options. He could narrow the focus of his eyebeams, significantly increasing their Iaser-like intensity, but he was reluctant to employ potentially deadly force against an opponent who was merely defending her homeland from unwanted intruders. True, the circumstances hardly warranted the excessive animosity and violence with which he and his traveling companions had been greeted, yet the Riot Squad could not reasonably be considered villains on the level of, say, the Masters of Evil or the Sons of the Serpent.
The sheltering steam dissipated, revealing the titanic form of Ogress. Bending over, she dug her mammoth fingers into the base of the fountain, tearing loose a huge chunk of cement that she hurled at her android attacker. The washing machine-sized cement fragment shot like a cannonball toward the Vision, only to pass harmlessly through his spectral form.
“I cannot fault your accuracy or endurance,” he informed her, “even if you have failed to take into account the full difficulty of defeating an intangible foe with such a crude physical attack.”
Unfortunat
ely, the Vision realized, that same intangibility limited his ability to subdue Ogress long enough for the three heroes to complete their mission. To achieve anything more than a stalemate with this female goliath, he would have to become solid enough to touch and be touched.
With that in mind, he descended to the floor of the plaza, experiencing yet another surprising surge of apprehension as soon as his yellow boots touched down on the pavement. For exactly .753 seconds, his basic self-preservation subroutines threatened to override his higher cognitive functions. A photographic afterimage of the Hulk, triumphantly flourishing the Vision’s sundered arm superimposed itself over the daunting sight of Ogress, waiting impatiently for the Vision beneath the spray of the fountain. For .753 seconds, his legs malfunctioned, unable to take one step nearer the fountain despite his deliberate intention to do so.
Ogress is not the Hulk, he told himself emphatically. That she is is a false equation.
Or was it?
His cybernetic synapses still firing off nonstop signals to retreat, the Vision walked purposely into the fountain, passing like a ghost through the raised concrete curb. Ogress, watching him approach, cupped her gargantuan hands over the fountain’s central spout, redirecting the full force of the pillar of water at the Vision so that it jetted into the Avenger like a liquid battering ram. The Vision increased his mass and density, however, becoming hard as diamond and as heavy as neutronium. The high-pressure spray broke harmlessly against his immovable form.
Physically, the watery cannonade could not deter him; psychologically it was another story. The surging torrent only raised more associations with his catastrophic encounter with the Hulk amidst the driving currents of Niagara Falls. He remembered the cataract carrying his broken body over the edge of the Falls, and his motor functions froze once more, leaving him standing immobile at the edge of the circular reservoir. Not again, he thought, feeling an alarmingly human sense of panic.