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Super-Villain Team-Up #20 by Jess Nevins

FUTURE OF PAST DAYS

Part 2: Apocalypse Then

It had all been going so well, Paste Pot Pete thought. (He told everyone to call him the Trapster, and he was always careful to refer to himself in that way - but inside, where he was always conscious of his many, many failures, he still thought of himself as Paste Pot Pete. The loser). Captain America had led them on a night patrol, as had become their custom; the Sentinels had infrared vision, but they were less careful in their patrols at night, which left more opportunities for the Avengers to work. They'd been out in the City for hours without being discovered; part of that was due to Fabian's cloaking mechanism, but the rest was luck, working for them, for once. (Pete had known bad luck often enough that he knew when he wasn't suffering from it, and he'd learned that, when luck was with you, you had to ride it hard before it disappeared). They'd finally managed to get into the Baxter Building - something they'd been trying for since the Fall - Christ, was it only a few months ago? It seemed like a lifetime. They'd hoped that the FF had held out, like the Avengers had, and that Richards and Doom together could discover a way to stop their enemy, or at the very least find a way off-planet; Doom had said something about a captured "Skrull" spaceship, and that sure sounded good to Pete. Pete's knowledge of the Baxter Building had even come in handy - his criminal past an asset, for once! Pete, trusting that the Sentinels wouldn't have tried to upgrade Richards' security system, had turned off the sensors for the air ducts and had led the Avengers straight up to Richards' lab. Captain America had even complimented him on his getting them there without alerting the Sentinels! Cap - telling him that he'd done a good job!

But the Baxter Building had been stripped clean; it seemed like every bit of machinery had been removed. All that was left was the Fantastic Four. Their remains, anyhow. Paste Pot Pete, who considered himself (with some reason) to be a hardened man, had found the sight too grisly for a prolonged inspection; the FF had gone down fighting - but they'd gone down hard, and messy.

Even that hadn't been all to the bad; they'd often wondered why the FF weren't responding, and now they knew; now they could move on. And then, in the tunnels below Grand Central Station, they'd found Machinesmith's labs - and, again, Pete had been valuable; none of the others had known where he might be. Pete brought them straight there. But Machinesmith, too, had been killed.

They'd been making their way back to the Mansion when it all went vertical on them. A Sentinel patrol found them and chased them all the way to Bed-Stuy; they'd left a trail of gutted robots behind them, but there seemed to be an endless number of them, and only a few Avengers. Worse, Henry had taken a bad shot to his legs, which had slowed them down still further. Pete remembered that he had one of his alley-traps in Bed-Stuy - he'd meant it for Spider-Man, back in kinder days - and had led the Avengers there, only to find that the Sentinels wouldn't come into the alley. Then Layna had shown up, and Pete had thought they were saved. But then something went wrong with Layna, and then...

The Avengers facing Layna were frozen by the sight of her convulsing body; they knew the darkforce was dangerous, but they'd never seen this happen before - not to her. The Speed Demon got ready to grab Captain America and run through Darkstar's still-open warpgate; they had to get him back to the Mansion, no matter what else happened. Quicksilver, his perception several times faster than the others', noticed that the muscles around her mouth were twitching - almost like she was trying to say something. Captain America kept a watch on the Sentinels; Hank Pym tried to keep a strong grasp on his gun and tried harder not to think about what was left of his leg.

Then It walked through Darkstar's warpgate, and the Avengers backed away from it, and from Darkstar. Captain America, Fabian Stankowicz, the Trapster, Hank Pym, Quicksilver, Mr. Immortal, Jolt and the Speed Demon formed a tight, tense circle as they watched the Nimrod unit assume a position beside Darkstar.

Mr. Immortal said, "Aw, man....this ain't good."

The Sentinels in the alley suddenly backed away, withdrawing to the mouth of the alley. Captain America was about to remark on this when he heard The Voice above him. His head jerked around--

To see the Nimrod unit projecting a holographic image from its chest. An enormous (10' tall) human face - a red half-mask ending just beneath the nose - looking down at them, from above them, horizontal to the ground. The mask was blank - no eyes, no nose, no features whatsoever - but the rest of the face seemed to twitch and jerk with a number of tics. The face of their enemy - the Scarlet Centurion.

"AH-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA! `Up the rushing mountain, down the roaring glen, we dare not go a-hunting, for fear of little men!' Have you been scaring my Sentinels again, Mr. Pym? AH-HA-HA-HA-HA!"

From what Doom and Captain America and the Speed Demon had told Pete and the others, the Centurion didn't used to be this way. He'd been a braggart, like the Wizard - over-full of himself - and a smug conqueror who, not satisfied with ruling one Earth, wanted more. He had not, however, been insane.

"And so many of you in one place! They said that machines would make life easier for the consumer, and they were right - one-stop shopping for Avengers! AH-HA-HA-HA-HA!"

From what Doom had said, it was the dimensional travel that must have done it. The Centurion had arrived with his armada ready; Doom thought he could only have gotten such a wide array of lethal machines from conquering many, many Earths. To do that would require a great deal of cross-dimensional and cross-time travel, which Doom said would drive anyone, given enough of it.

"All those months of hammering away at the Mansion, and you walk into my arms! Oh, my dears - if I'd known you were coming, I'd have baked a cake - a wake cake! AH-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA!"

Pete, of course, had never heard of the Centurion - not before the Fall. Pete had never moved in those circles. He'd gone straight for a while, after the heroes returned from wherever they'd been, back in ‘97, and then had decided that he owed it to people to play the hero. He'd gotten some training from Cap, who alone of the others seemed to believe in him. He'd started patrolling Hell's Kitchen, and he'd had some successes; after he'd rolled up the Mafia drug ring in Harlem and taken down Blacklash he'd even made the cover of the Post (under the headline "Pete Pastes Pot Punks!"). But he'd never aimed that high; he'd been content just to keep his neighborhood clean, and occasionally show the Spider-Mans and the Daredevils that, yes, he was for real.

"Let's see now - tinker (looking at Fabian), tailor, soldier (at Captain America), sailor, thinker (at Pym), hero (at Jolt), stinker (at Speed Demon), zero (at Pete himself)! Almost there, anyhow - all we need is a tailor and a sailor, and I can be the Scarlet Mother Goose! AH-HA-HA-HA-HA!"

Of course, during the Fall everyone got to know who the Scarlet Centurion was. It had actually started a few months before that, when the Sentinels had taken over the US. Something about having to "control the mutant menace" - Pete had never been sure exactly what it was all about, although a part of him was glad at seeing the X-Men finally get theirs (on one level Pete knew that sort of thinking was wrong, but he could never forget how it had felt to have them hunt him down and catch him when he was trying to go straight.) The Sentinels had first made sure there weren't any more mutants - free mutants, anyhow; most of the others were in the concentration camps, wearing suppressor collars. The giant robots had started working on solidifying their control over the continent when the Centurion had arrived. After that it was a matter of days before humans and mutants alike were dead or in hiding, and the rest of the world was like the US. Pete and a few of other costumes had found their way to Avengers Mansion, and had spent the time since huddling behind the Mansion shields, trying to find some way to undo all that had happened and defeat the Centurion.

"I've been called a lot of things in my time - last Earth I conquered, the heroes there called me `Epoch, the Lord of Time' - but I have to say that this Earth made me laugh the most. Would that make this Earth-Comedy? No, wait, I forgot - that was the one where you put the nuclear reactor in New York City, eh? AH-HA-HA-HA!"

Pete, finally over-full with irritation and worry, snapped, "What did you do to Layna?"

"Hmmm? Oh, I changed her channel. All I was getting was reruns, so I made sure she was wired for cable. Did you know that the human brain is basically an organic computer? And that, under certain circumstances, the brain can become a transmitter? And receiver?"

Pete thought he heard something coming from the Darkstar's warpgate. Cap thought it, too; he'd shifted his grip on his shield and altered his stance. Then...

"No, you didn't know that, did you? Here, let me demonstrate!"

It was at this point that Pete knew - he knew - that he was going to die here, and so he should make his peace with his god. Suddenly cast back to his Jewish roots, he began muttering in Hebrew, drawing a quick glance from both Captain America and Quicksilver.

Several figures shuffled forward from out of the warpgate. They were visibly dragging their feet, and their bodies seemed to twitch - but they were marching forward anyhow. Daredevil, Klaw, Electro, Living Lightning, Spider-Man, Jean Grey, and Professor Charles Xavier. Layna floated down to stand beside them.

"I'm sure you're wondering why I've called you here today. It's to show what the human brain is capable of. The little fellow in green and yellow, and the one next to him - wasn't he an Avenger at one point? I've fought so many Avengers it's hard to keep track of who is who. A few Earths back, the Avengers were led by a flying rabbit! Oh, well - if I don't like what I find, I just retcon it away, ha ha!

"Anyhow. These two (and the giant holographic face seemed to incline towards Electro and the Living Lightning) are basically living electricity generators. It was a relatively simple thing to reverse the flow of the energy, and then assert control of their bodies. Daredevil, though....did you know there's a world where they call him the Red Devil? And his archenemy is a Chinese giant who is somehow related to that red fellow with the prosthetic next to him? Daredevil, he projects this type of radar which allows him to see in a 360 degree arc. I just tinkered with the quantity, and then the quality, of the signals his brain received. Same with Spider-Man; his "spider sense" is just a different sort of transmission than most people have. Klaw, well, manipulating sound waves is something even your backward little time could manage. And the two mutant telepaths...well, that was easier still. In my time telepathy is fairly common, and we know how to deal with it. So I just sent a different set of thoughts into both of their brains. It's like the telepaths say in my time when they're arguing - `Aw, you know what I mean' - AH-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA!

"One thing I'm wondering, though; after they get through killing you, will Doom try to bring the rest of the Avengers against me and continue the fight? And if he does, will I have to name this lot the Squadron Something? Given the amount of struggle they put up, maybe I should call them the Squadron Useless! AH HA HA HA HA HA!"

And with that the Centurion's puppets leapt forward. Pete instantly noticed that Daredevil was at least a step slow; they'd jousted several times before (DD, like Spider-Man, was one of the last to accept Pete's reformation), and Pete had become painfully familiar with DD's fighting style. This wasn't the Hornhead Pete had known and feared. He leapt right at Pete, but was actually slow enough for Pete to put him down with a block-elbow-backhand combination. It was only when DD collapsed that Pete thought that, just maybe, Hornhead had been fighting whatever the Centurion was doing to him.

Pete looked up and ran to help the others, cursing himself for letting his attention be drawn in the middle of a fight, but the others had taken care of their enemies. Quicksilver and the Demon had already taken out Xavier and Marvel Girl - even telepaths are only as fast as their thoughts, and the speedsters moved, and thought, so much faster than ordinary humans. Fabian had done something to Klaw; all that was left of him was that weird prosthesis (Pete absently thought that Fabian had probably already figured out how Klaw was being controlled and had somehow countered it and neutralized Klaw; Fabian was bright that way). But Cap had his hands full holding off Spider-Man, who, even controlled by the Centurion, was still faster than normal - faster than Cap, even - and had already webbed Mr. Immortal to the alley wall. Darkstar had conjured up a spider-shaped black something that had wrapped itself around Jolt and - by the look on Jolt's face - was doing something incredibly painful to her. Electro and the Lightning were blasting at Hank, who was barely dodging out of the way; his wrecked leg should have slowed him down enough for them to fry him, but they, like DD, seemed to be resisting the Centurion's control, and that seemed to be slowing their aim. That couldn't last much longer, though. Clearly, Hank needed help the most and the soonest.

Pete hesitated for a moment with his hand on the trigger of his trap mechanism, but passed on that (might need the trap after they get out of this) and instead grabbed two round spheres from his belt, pulled the tabs on them, and threw them at the electricity- wielders. They shifted their fire and blasted the two spheres - but, as he'd anticipated, their resistance to what the Centurion was making them do slowed them down, so that they only hit the spheres when they'd gotten too close. The spheres burst, spewing a thick grey goop on to the two; if not for Pete's grabbing and hauling Hank out of the way, he'd have been touched by the goop, too. Whatever the goop touched seemed to bubble and melt; the effect on Electro and the Living Lightning was unpleasant.

"Geez, Pete, what did you throw at them?" Hank gasped out; Pete noticed for the first time the electricity burns on Hank's body, and saw that Hank hadn't been totally successful in evading the bolts.

"Something I came up with recently; it's an adhesive resin that turns acidic on contact with oxygen. It burns and rebonds itself to whatever it comes in contact with."

"Christ - it's killing them!"

"Better them than you, Hank - duck!"

Pete managed to shove Pym to the ground just before Darkstar's force-bolt hit them. Pete had trained with Layna many times in Avengers Mansion since they'd both joined up; he knew what she was capable of, and knew that if he didn't act fast, they'd both be dead. So Pete stifled a plea for forgiveness, grabbed Hank Pym's gun, dove, rolled and fired at her. The gun's beam of Pym Particles struck her and quickly began miniaturizing her. Within seconds she was out of sight, on her way to a sub-atomic universe. Pete ignored the sympathetic look Hank shot him - Layna and Pete had become real close in their time in the Mansion - and moved to help Cap, but Quicksilver and the Demon were already there, and had beaten Spider-Man down. (Pete felt bad for feeling a twinge of glee at seeing Spider-Man lying beaten).

As they moved to help Jolt (neither the thing tormenting her nor the warpgate had disappeared when Darkstar had been shrunken), the Centurion began talking at them.

"I should have known that wouldn't work. Never send a human to do a machine's job, ha ha!"

Pete grimaced; he had a bad feeling about this. At the sound of metal scraping a concrete he turned and looked at the Sentinels at the alley's mouth; they were moving aside to allow something through.

"Oh god," Pete thought. "We're dead."

It was about as bad as Pete had thought it could get. He knew all of the androids and robots that the Centurion was somehow controlling and was sending at them: the Growing Man, Ultron, the Super-Adaptoid, the Awesome Android, the Vision (Wanda mustn't see this - she'd been agonizing over him in the months since The Fall, and to see him controlled by the Centurion would break her heart), Quasimodo, Arsenal, Jocasta, and the Kree Sentry. Worse still, above the androids, flying right at the Avengers, were other, more familiar figures - the armors of Iron Man, War Machine, Vindicator, Stingray, Mach-1, Titanium Man, the Crimson Dynamo, and the Porcupine.

Pete whirled - at the rate the armors were coming, the Avengers didn't have much time - and shouted, "Cap, we are leeeaaaaving!"

Cap nodded and said, "Pietro - opera" as he began backing towards the warpgate.

Quicksilver nodded once and said, at superspeed, "Centurion? Are you listening?"

The Centurion, also at superspeed, said, "You rang?"

Quicksilver said nothing in response, instead vibrating. Pete, running to grab Hank, was two steps closer to him when Quicksilver broke through the sound barrier. Doom had come up with this idea; he and Hank had devised sound-triggered ear-plugs which would protect the Avengers' ears if and when Pietro tried it. The Centurion seemed to have no such protection, though, judging from his reaction - he was roaring with pain. Those who the Centurion was controlling had frozen in mid-step. Pete took advantage of the pause, grabbed Hank and bolted for the warp-gate, jamming down on the trigger of his trap control as he did. >From the walls and floor of the alley sprinklers popped up and began spraying the androids and robots and armors; it was one of Pete's older solutions, but it should work to slow them down, at least. Fabian, too, was running at Layna's warpgate, and it looked like the Speed Demon had already gone; Pete could hear Cap shouting "--go! We'll hold them here!"

Pete, half-carrying and half-dragging Hank, leapt through, and landed in the Mansion's war room, where Doom, the Falcon, Wanda, Roger Bochs, and the Mad Thinker were standing, looking at the Demon; by their expressions, they were only just realizing that the fight in the alley had gone wrong. Pete, still holding on to Hank, shouted "Close the gate! Close the gate! They might be--"

The Thinker, shaking his head and looking grim, said, "I predict a 97.5% probability that--"

KA-THOOOM!

The explosion threw almost all of them off their feet; Doom, as always in his armor, was the only one still standing. Pete converted his fall into a roll and came up, paste-gun in hand; what he saw almost made him drop his gun.

The first figure through the warpgate was the Nimrod unit; the second was one of the more recent Ultron models - 14, maybe? The third was the Centurion himself, holding one of Fabian's cyborg arms.

It all got confused after that. The Centurion was saying something and Doom was shouting back as he unleashed force bolts at the Centurion, who simply laughed them off and kept talking. Wanda was unleashing hex bolt after spell after hex bolt at Ultron, who somehow was still standing and trying to fry her. The Demon and Box were fighting Nimrod - or trying to. More figures were stepping through the warp - Wolverine, Techno, Commcast, Deathlok - even a set of the Kang armor. The Thinker tried to run but was caught by one of Nimrod's bolts and blown against the wall. The Falcon was helping Hank out of the room. Shouts and the discordant sounds of advanced weaponry and the smell of ozone filled the air.

Pete wasn't sure how, but he ended up running down the hallway with the Falcon and Hank. His gun was in his hand - had he fired it? It was hot, he must have been using it - and the three were running from the fight. The Falcon was saying something about getting to Doom's time machine. But - they weren't going to use that for at least another few days. Weren't they?

They were at the top of the staircase when they heard the explosion behind them. They stopped and turned; it was the Iron Man armor, flying towards them. Behind it could be seen several Nimrod units.

Hank tore away from Pete's grasp, yelled, "Run!" and began firing his gun on the robots. The Pym Particles did their work, making the Iron Man armor disappear, but the Nimrod units returned fire, and the resulting explosions threw the Falcon and Pete down the stairway. As they picked themselves up they could still hear the sound of Hank's gun, but when Pete moved to run back up the stairs the Falcon grabbed his arm and began running towards Doom's lab. "C'mon, Pete - we gotta get to the machine!"

Pete ran. He'd left Layna to her fate, though it had torn him in two to do so; he'd left Cap facing an army of the enemy, and he owed Cap for his redemption. He'd have to leave Hank Pym behind, too. As they entered the lab, he said, "But, Sam - what are we going to do? Cap was the one--"

The Falcon, first into the lab, grabbed the belt - Doom had managed to cram all of his time machine's circuitry into a belt - and tossed it to Pete. "He's gone, Pete - it's up to us! Grab my arm and hit the--"

The roof and the walls simultaneously burst inward as Ultron, Wolverine, and the Kang armor flew into the room. Without missing a beat the Falcon grabbed one of Doom's industrial work-lasers, screamed "GO!" to Pete, and flew at the three. Pete, knowing he'd have only a second to move, slapped the button and began strapping the belt on to his waist. As he faded away, he saw the Falcon somehow dodge the Kang armor and blow Wolverine backward with the laser; the Ultron armor fired at him - but too slow and too late. Pete managed a smile as he entered the time-stream; the Centurion may have gotten most of them, but as long as one Avenger was still living, hope was not lost. The smile didn't last long, though.

jess - next issue: "Sherman, set the Wayback machine for 1996...."