AVENGERS THE EXTINCTION KEY, page 13
“Yeah,” she agreed. “It’s all too obscured by history and myth. What little we know comes from Ptolemy, via the Sumerians and Egyptians who got it from an older, mostly lost source. It’s gotten all bent from what the original Zodiac was exactly. If we’re to believe Strange, their powers come from the constellations themselves, which in turn represent some sort of extradimensional powers. Maybe Strange knows more about Capricorn.”
“But he’s not here,” Tony said. “If he has a phone, I don’t have his number, and I’m fresh out of crystal balls.”
“What about Cap?”
“His phone is right over there, on the charger.”
“Oh,” she said. “Typical.” She leaned forward. “Here’s the thing, Tony. Strange said these guys are getting stronger all of the time. The Tetrabiblos talks about how to make predictions according to the stars and all of that, but it also lays out some worst-case scenarios: hurricanes, chasms in the earth, flooding, civil war, pestilence, desertification—
“This is an end-of-the-world scenario.”
“Okay,” Tony said. “That’s a little alarmist. If this Greek guy—”
“Ptolemy? He may have been Egyptian.”
“—if this guy knew so much, where is he now?”
“There’s only one account of his death I can find,” Natasha replied. “He was said to have died of venom, most likely the sting of a scorpion.”
“You just made that up.”
“Hey, I’m just the messenger,” she said.
“Uh-huh,” Tony said. “But there’s something else bugging me.”
“What’s that?”
“Up until now, none of these guys has been alone. Aries and Scorpio. Leo and Libra. Virgo and Taurus—and then all of the last four in New York. Makes me think Capricorn probably isn’t by himself either. Who else is in Taiwan?”
Natasha frowned. “I noticed that too,” she said. “We should be prepared for at least two of them. Maybe more.”
* * *
TONY detoured a little south to avoid crossing Japan proper. Radar invisibility was all well and good, but a kid on a bike with a cell phone could still blow your cover.
By the time the Quinjet began dropping fast to approach the island of Taiwan just above sea level, it was close to midnight. When they finally grounded in the mountains outside of Taipei, he was fairly certain they hadn’t been tracked.
He and Natasha went back over the aerial photos of the mansion.
“I’ve been thinking about this,” Nat said. “SHIELD estimates at least forty guards down there. I don’t know if we can get to Capricorn without starting a small war, and I’m not sure it would do any good. We know these Zodiac people can pass their roles—and probably their powers—to someone else. They’ve been doing it for thousands of years, so we can assume they’ve made the process more or less foolproof. Kill the current Capricorn, and there’ll be another one to take his place a day later.
“If Strange is right, there’s no long game to play here,” she continued, “but we might not want to get too short-sighted either. Our goal is to prevent them from getting the Key and showing up for this cosmic alignment, or whatever it is. Learning more about their organization takes precedence over killing just one of them.”
“That seems like sound logic,” Tony said.
“Also, Cap wouldn’t approve of a straight-up assassination.”
“Very true.”
“But to get the intel we want, we might need to capture Capricorn and question him,” Nat reasoned, “and like I said, that could get nasty. Nastier than just an in-and-out deletion.”
“JARVIS can provide some cover from the Quinjet,” Tony said. “Between him and the suit, we can button things down outside, if it comes to that.”
“I think I can slip in here,” she said, indicating a section along one of the outer walls. “He’s got his own computer servers, so once I get in, everything we need ought to be accessible through his system. Provided it has the intel we need, we might be able to pull this off without ever letting them know we were here.”
“Yeah,” Tony said. He pointed at the map. “These look like the generators, so I’ll bet the servers are housed nearby. I can’t tap in from this far away, but if I get close enough in the suit, I might be able to do so. They’ll have an automated security system, though…”
“I can find that and disable it,” Natasha said. “Plant a signal booster to let you download everything from a greater distance. So you wait well outside the walls, where they’re less likely to spot you.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Tony said. “But if something goes wrong…”
“We fight a small war,” she said.
Iron Man liked that about Natasha. She always assumed something would go wrong. It was why she was still alive.
* * *
THEY suited up, Tony in his armor and Black Widow in her customary black bodysuit and gauntlets.
They were about a mile out, but in his armor that was next to nothing, even with Nat clinging to his back. They set down a respectable distance from the mansion and continued on foot, clambering up the often-steep, tree-covered slopes until the walls of the house came into sight, dim but clear enough in the darkness.
Natasha padded off to do her thing. Just to be safe Tony moved further back, found a comfortable spot, brought up his long-range sensors and the satellite feed, and made himself comfortable.
* * *
THE walls around the house were only shoulder high, made of poured concrete designed to resemble marble or perhaps alabaster. They seemed strictly ornamental—which they were when it came to stopping intruders. Even a child could climb over them. That wasn’t their purpose. They were for noticing invaders, and slowing them down just long enough for the guards to arrive. She couldn’t come closer than a yard without tripping motion sensors.
The Black Widow stayed out of range of the sensors until she reached the southwest corner, where the aerial view had shown an elevation. Trees and other vegetation had been cut back from the wall, and for the most part the ground around the barrier sloped down and away, often at steep angles. In this spot, however, the terrain rose from the wall, though maybe not as sharply as it looked from above. Eyeballing it, she thought it was enough. Tony could have flown over it, of course, but the odds were good that he would have tripped some other sort of alarm.
She climbed the slope and found her footing. This was a perfect jump. She flipped twice and landed without a sound, passing well above the range of the motion sensors.
Moving around to the back, she found a small loading dock that marked the kitchen entrance. Servants’ entrances were high-traffic, and tended not to have alarms that spent way too much time going off. If they did have them, they often disabled them unless there was an overt threat. They instead relied on the staff knowing one another and reporting strangers. This was far from ideal, as servants could be fooled, rendered unconscious, or killed.
There were two bored guards lounging on the dock itself, and she took them out with the Widow’s Bite shots from her gauntlets. That got her into the kitchen, where she found a man and a woman cleaning up. After rendering them unconscious, she put them—along with the guards—in a walk-in pantry and locked it from the outside.
Proceeding toward where Tony guessed the servers would be, she found it easy going. Too easy, really. Like they knew she was coming. She began recalibrating her expectations. Coming to a set of doors she stood quietly for a moment, listening. A flickering light on her left gauntlet told her Tony still had track of her.
She pushed the door open slightly.
Then wider.
If the servers were there, they were someplace behind the tastefully appointed office, the massive desk, the bookshelves, the guards.
And Capricorn.
He was waiting for her, sitting behind the desk on the other side of the room. He was a big man with sallow skin and dark eyes. He wore an expensive-looking suit. So did the twelve armed men lined up around him, six on a side.
She sized it all up. Difficult, not impossible. She hadn’t expected to find him sleeping, after all.
“Black Widow,” he said. “I’m honored. May I introduce myself? They call me Capricorn.”
“I met some of your men,” she said. “In New York.”
“The tablet,” he said. “Yes, that was rightfully ours, so we took it back.”
“And murdered a man.”
“Surely that doesn’t bother someone with your reputation,” he said. “After all, standards must be kept. If I allow one thief to prosper at our expense, why would others hesitate? The logic cannot be lost on you.”
“No, it makes perfect sense,” she said, “but put yourself in my shoes, and apply the same reasoning. Your men attacked me and killed the man I intended to interrogate. How can I allow that to go unpunished?”
He smiled. “I remember in school there was a sort of ‘logic’ problem that went around. We loved to discuss it. ‘What if the unstoppable force met the immovable object?’”
“I fear I did not attend that sort of school,” Natasha replied. “Where I studied, we had no time for such abstractions.”
“Well, everyone thought they had an answer,” he said. “Some said the unstoppable force would keep bouncing off of the immovable object, others that they would cancel each other out. But no answer could satisfy the terms of the conjecture. Do you know why?”
“Yes,” Natasha said. The man on the far right stood far too stiffly. He would be slowest. The guy at Capricorn’s left hand was the one to watch out for. “It’s a silly proposition,” she continued. “If an unstoppable force exists, then by definition an immovable object cannot also exist, and vice versa. It’s a situation you can hypothesize with language, but which can’t exist in reality.”
“Exactly,” he replied, the smile growing larger. “So you can frame your dilemma as being the same as mine, but it’s just as silly. I am what I am, and so by definition, you cannot be what you imagine you are.”
“If you say so,” she said.
She sprinted, firing her pistol at the man to Capricorn’s left. She’d been right about him; he was already taking aim at her. He even got a shot off, although it missed her by nearly a foot. She danced to the side, fired again, shot a wire from her gauntlets to fasten at the base of the chandelier above them, and was suddenly off the ground. She used her Widow’s Bite to subdue the next three, and then she was close enough to settle the rest of them hand-to-hand. Capricorn spent his time stumbling back toward an exit, but before he had reached it, it was just the two of them.
“Now,” she said. “Let’s have another talk about the ‘unstoppable force.’”
She saw his eyes cut and knew someone was behind her. She spun, bringing up both guns—just in time to see the pincers as they sank into her skull. She felt an immediate dislocation, and saw the pistols drop from her numb hands.
Then her thoughts came apart like paper tissue in the stream of a firehose.
FIFTEEN
GIVEN what the Sorcerer Supreme had told them about Hanlin, Thor had expected a wasteland or perhaps blasted ruins, the remains of a once-great kingdom. In his wanderings, he had seen many such places. There were far more dead empires than living ones.
But, when Strange’s powers brought them to their destination, he had to quickly dodge a man on a two-wheeled motorized vehicle. The driver honked his horn, as did the woman in the small car that whizzed past an instant later.
They had materialized in the middle of a hard-packed road of red earth.
“Oops,” Strange said, but that, fortunately, was the end of the traffic—Thor couldn’t see any other vehicles in either direction.
“Morning rush hour, I guess,” Cap said.
The road stretched off across a relatively flat landscape made up of fields and scrub punctuated by isolated trees. In the distance he saw the crowded, dirt-colored houses of a modest village. Further up the road stood some sort of building surrounded by a little more greenery.
The man on the two-wheeled conveyance pulled over, and aimed something at them. Thor lifted his hammer and began to whirl it. Strange quickly held up a hand.
“I think he’s just taking a picture with his phone,” the sorcerer said. “Why don’t you hold off for just a second.”
Thor cocked his head. The man on the scooter put the phone away and continued down the road. Thor let his hammer slow, stop, and hang at his side.
“We were ambushed in the last location,” the Asgardian pointed out.
“And may be again,” Cap said. “Nevertheless, let’s stay restrained until we’re sure.”
“Of course.”
Cap studied their surroundings. “What are we looking for?” he asked Strange.
“We should be near what little remains of the ancient city,” Strange said, “and the well Scorpio was seeking. If you’ll give me a moment, I should be able to—”
“I think it’s there,” Thor said, pointing ahead.
“Why?” Cap asked. “Oh.”
Down the road, a dark cloud of smoke rose toward the clear blue sky.
Thor looked at Cap.
“Shall I take a look?” he said.
“Go ahead,” Cap said, “but if there are hostiles, report back instead of engaging. We don’t want to walk into another ambush.”
“Understood,” Thor said. He whirled Mjolnir and let it pull him toward the fire. From the air he could see that they were in the broad bottomland of a river valley flanked by hills on either side. Besides the nearby village, a larger town lay in the distance. He came to earth near the column of black smoke, which emerged from a red-brick building—or what was left of it. Cautiously he searched the area for signs of the enemy.
About a dozen people were scattered around the building, watching from a respectable distance, but there was no obvious sign of whoever had set the fire. He waved his hammer to signal an all-clear, reckoning that Strange likely had some eldritch way of spying on him.
Then he heard a weak cry from within the burning building.
Thor hesitated only an instant, fearing a ruse then deciding it didn’t matter. He rushed up to the flaming structure and, after a moment, chose what looked like the front door. It was on fire, but he hardly felt the heat as he knocked it in.
“Hello!” he cried. “Where are you?”
For a moment he heard nothing but the crackling of flames. Then he made out another faint cry. He charged down the flaming hall. Almost immediately his lungs began to sting from the smoke, which he thought to try and clear by whirling his hammer. The rush of wind, he realized, would only fan the flames to greater strength. He could call for rain, but the sky was empty and dry as bone, and it would take too long to summon clouds…
The building, he realized, was some sort of shrine. Many objects were venerated, placed in transparent cases and labeled in various scripts. Few looked valuable to his eye—clay pots, ornaments of metal and stone, assorted scraps—but he could never tell what people were going to worship.
Following the cries of distress Thor came to a stair which descended below the building and into the hard red earth. Here the fire was hottest, burning from the brick and earthen walls, with no wood or other fuel in sight. It was as if he was descending in a volcano.
He entered a larger gallery and saw the source of the cries—an older man on his hands and knees. Another man stood over him—or at least something man-shaped. His skin looked more like the armor of an insect and was dark, a sort of blue-black. His eyes shone like sparks of electricity. His fingers were overlong and ended in sharp points. A pale mist arced over his head from somewhere along his back, looking for all the world like the ghostly tail of a scorpion.
Behind him stood a woman holding a crackling whip of energy. “Step away from him, Scorpio,” Thor warned, “or face the wrath of the god of thunder.”
The scorpion-man grinned.
His teeth were very white.
“In a very short time, you will see what it is to face the true gods, Asgardian,” he said. “Gods more primordial, and far more powerful than your upstart clan.”
“I’ve warned you,” Thor said. With an underhand snap of his wrist he sent Mjolnir flying.
Virgo’s whip flashed, wrapping instantly around the uru weapon. She could not stop it, of course, but the effort yanked it out of line, so it missed Scorpio by a hair’s breadth and cratered into the wall. In the same heartbeat Scorpio stooped and sank his fingers in to the old man’s neck. He stepped back with a mocking smile, touched his wrist, and vanished.
An instant later, Virgo did the same, leaving Thor alone with the old man. He was gasping, his skin already taking on a gray tone. Quickly Thor gathered him in his arms.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll have you out of here in just a moment.”
He looked back the way he’d come, saw the flames, and thought better of it. Instead he whirled Mjolnir and hurled it at the ceiling. The hammer smashed through it, and through the ceilings above, then came back to him. Holding the man to his chest, he leapt up through the hole. Wind rushed down to meet him as the fire greedily sucked at the outside air, but no mere wind could deter him.
Coming down as gently as he could outside of the building, he took several paces to make sure they were at a safe distance. Then he lay the man down.
The poor fellow still struggled for breath, and his flesh had turned an awful bluish hue. What could he do? He had no power over venom. He remembered Natasha’s tale of her ruse gone wrong, how quickly that man had died from this same villain’s touch. What use to have the power of the storm in his very hands while a man lay dying?
“Let me see him.”
Thor looked up, startled, to see that Strange was there. Cap was at his side.
“He was in the building,” Thor explained. “Scorpio—”
