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#14
DEC 14 |
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“I’ll Take You There”
September 23, 1972
Unincorporated Westchester County, New York
A green streak of motion whizzed north, almost five times as fast as the fastest car on Route 87 from Yonkers. The streak stayed within sight of the interstate, for what eluded the eye of the travelers left in his dust was that this streak was the Avenger known as Quicksilver, and Quicksilver knew from experience that the interstate was the fastest way to reach where he needed to be. Held tight in his arms was the Avenger known as the Black Widow.
Returned to her fighting weight since delivering her baby, Natasha Barton was back in her tight, black, faux leather catsuit, her long red hair held tight in a bun so it would not whip dangerously in anyone’s face at the speed they were going. She held tight to Pietro, confident he would not and yet still slightly concerned about him tripping and falling at 300 MPH. She had her mouth by his ear so she could yell for him to stop if she had to and still be heard over the roaring wind around them. Not for the first time, she marveled at Pietro’s superpowers, not the least of which were being able to see and hear clearly while moving at incredible speeds.
“We are nearly there!” Pietro shouted to her. Natasha realized he had slowed down to about 75 MPH, so she was not only able to make out what he said, but make out their surroundings as well. They were definitely somewhere rural now. The trees were changing to their autumnal colors, but were still a month away from peaking. They had already left the interstate behind and were on a lonely stretch of country road now. Pietro turned down a long driveway surrounded by trees and sped down it, coming to an abrupt stop right in front of tall metal gates.
A plaque on the gates read: Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters.
Pietro let go of Natasha and she dropped to her feet on the driveway. “Hold on…” Pietro said as he undid the zippered lining of his belt and pulled out a laminated card. He held it against a keypad mounted next to the gate. A laser scanned the card and the gates unlocked. “There,” Pietro said, putting the card away. “That deactivated security for you.”
“For me?” Natasha said. She had been facing the gates, but spun around to face Pietro. “I was only supposed to come with you. You’re the X-Man.”
“Reserve X-Man,” Pietro shot back quickly. “And there is nothing that can be learned here that will help me rescue my sister from the Sentinels any faster. Now, if you’ll excuse me –”
“Pietro, wait!” Natasha called out to him, but Pietro was already a blur of motion vanishing away from her. “We need a way to stop the Sentinels, not just save Wanda…” she said to no one, since she was now standing all alone in front of gates that slowly swung open behind her. Weighing what few options she had left, Natasha let down her hair, shook it out and strode confidently through the open gate.
Inside was a large estate, several acres in size. The driveway wound around some trees and, once she had turned that corner, she could finally see the mansion that dominated the grounds. It was a three-story mansion with two extended wings. It also was in a severe state of disrepair, or perhaps recent damage, with scaffolding left standing on almost all sides.
And, between her and the mansion, stood 500 pounds of fat buried in a very plus-sized black and yellow uniform. The man known as the Blob looked her up and down and smiled.
“Tell me you’re an X-Man,” Natasha said.
“Yeah…” Fred Dukes said reluctantly. “Haven’t been for long, though. They call me the Blob. If you want to fight, I’m game, lady.”
“No, that’s okay. Where are the rest of the X-Men?”
“Inside, waiting for you,” Fred said, jerking an enormous thumb towards the mansion. He looked visibly disappointed for having no excuse to get rough with her. “Where’s Quicksilver?”
“He’ll be right back,” Natasha lied. She knew the X-Men’s roster had changed as much as the Avengers’ had over the years, but she thought the Blob was a ‘bad guy’. Of course, the same had once been thought about Quicksilver, the Scarlet Witch, Hawkeye…and the Black Widow. As Fred turned his massive bulk around and started lumbering up towards the mansion, Natasha followed along beside him.
“Not that I don’t mind the company,” Fred said after they had walked in silence for a moment, ‘but I don’t move very fast. You might want to run up to the mansion on your own.”
Natasha empathized. She had been, after all, delegated to ‘research the Sentinels’ only because her combat readiness was still in question since her leave her absence to have the baby. She had been, in effect, left behind just like this slowest of the X-Men beside her. But she could not allow empathy to distract her from her task here. It was still possible that she would glean some useful information that would help save her teammates – and her husband – in battle. She sprinted for the mansion, then bounded up the front steps in two leaps. Before she could knock on the door, it was opened by a man in a tight black bodysuit that had what looked like an all-white bulls-eye on his chest.
“You must be Havok,” Natasha said. It was not a question because she had been briefed by Quicksilver on the current roster before they left.
“And you’re the Black Widow. Come in,” Alex Summers, also known as Havok, said. He stepped aside and gave Natasha leave to enter into the foyer.
Natasha looked around. Unlike Avengers Mansion, which was decorated like a home, the ‘X-Mansion’ looked bare and unused.
Alex noticed Natasha looking around and guessed her thoughts. “Since Professor X died and most of the original X-Men moved on, we’ve mainly just used the old mansion for storage. Our current facilities for helping young mutants are in Massachusetts now.”
“I see,” Natasha said. “But, is it still here?”
“In the sub-levels. Follow me,” Alex said.
Natasha followed, reflecting on how the Avengers seemed to be the only major superhero presence left in New York, what with the Fantastic Four’s recent and very public move to New Jersey, some of the older, inactive heroes retiring to California, and now discovering that the X-Men had been in Massachusetts for who knew how long. She wondered if this was good or bad for New York, before abandoning the thought altogether.
Alex led Natasha out of the foyer and down a hallway towards the east wing of the mansion, but stopped at an elevator in mid-hall. Inside the elevator, Alex inserted a key into the number pad on the wall and pressed ‘B1’. The elevator lurched into motion as it descended to the first basement level.
The door opened on what appeared to be an ordinary boiler room with doors to the left and right. The left door was open, though, and no sooner did Natasha and Alex step into the boiler room than a man in a blue and white, tight bodysuit stepped though that doorway to meet them.
“Good timing, folks,” the new man said, looking to Alex before looking over Natasha. “Lorna was just about to start without you.”
“And you are?” Natasha asked, stepping forward to confront the man she did not recognize from her briefing.
“Oh, right, I’m not iced up,” Robert Drake said. “Here’s my calling card,” he said before he breathed a breath of cold air into Natasha’s face and a single snowflake escaped his lips.
“Nice, Iceman,” Natasha said. Robert turned to the doorway and Natasha followed her through into a storage room. “As one of the original X-Men, you should be able to tell me more about the Sentinels than anyone.”
“I can tell you they’re bad news,” Robert said as they moved to a door in the southwest corner of the storage room. “Every Sentinel is like a miniature weapons lab on the inside. It analyzes you as it fights you and comes up with the best weapon to defeat you, then makes that inside itself.”
“How do they house that much computing power?”
“Well they can, because they’re pretty big…” Robert said, opening the next door for Natasha.
“Right,” Natasha said as she stepped into a room that seemed to house nothing but a Sentinel robot.
The room itself was large, at least 30 feet on a side, with a 12 foot high ceiling, and every surface was tiled in gray with recessed lights embedded in the ceiling and walls at regular intervals. In the center of the room was a circular recession in the floor and standing in that recession was the Sentinel. If the robot was built anatomically correct, then it was about knee high in the hole. Even then, the head of the robot almost scraped the ceiling. Standing in front of the robot was a green-haired woman wearing green tights, a matching cape and something on top that looked like a metal corset, with a matching metal tiara. The woman turned her head and gave Natasha only a nod of recognition.
“We kept this one and destroyed the rest after the last time Sentinels attacked us,” Robert said. “We thought we could reprogram it, use it for training purposes, but…”
“With Professor X gone and the Beast AWOL, we have a shortage of mechanical engineers around here these days,” Alex said as he joined them in the room. “As best as we can tell, we can’t wipe the computer system without dismantling the whole robot first to get the computer out, but then it’s no good to us if we can’t get it back together. So for a while now we’ve just kept it like this, deactivated.”
“I’m sorry,” Natasha said, “but if the Sentinels are back, we need you to dismantle this one. We need to know what makes them tick.”
“We agree,” Lorna Dane, also known as Polaris, said. “If you’re ready to observe, I’m going to use my magnetic powers to peel the robot open. Angel is in the control booth,” she said, pointing to a bank of one-way mirrors through which Natasha could not see, “monitoring the situation from there. Everything good in there?” she asked more loudly.
“It looks good. Still reading nothing from the robot,” came Warren Worthington’s – the Angel’s – voice over an intercom.
“Were you expecting it to reactivate on its own somehow?” Natasha asked.
“With a Sentinel, you always expect the worst,” Robert said from beside her.
Natasha shivered from an intense blast of cold and found Robert was covered in a thick sheath of protective ice now. She sidestepped away from him and closer to Lorna.
“We think the heads might actually unscrew,” Lorna said, “so let’s try that first…” Lorna only gestured with her hands and moved them in the air as if twisting something invisible. In response, the squeal of metal moving against metal echoed through the chamber as the robot’s head began to pivot slowly clockwise. Around and around the head spun, a little faster – and easier for Lorna to manipulate with her powers – with each revolution. It really did unscrew. Lorna raised her hands and, in response, the head levitated away from the body, dangling cables beneath it.
When a hose sprang forward out of the neck cavity of the robot, pouring gas into Lorna’s face, it happened so quickly that no one could react fast enough.
“Lorna, no!” Alex and Robert both shouted at the same time.
“It’s live! The robot is live!” Warren shouted from the control room too late.
Natasha, at the same time, pushed the gas-belching hose away and grabbed hold of Lorna before she fell to the floor. “Smells like poison!” Natasha said as she held her breath.
“Got it!” Robert said. He pointed at the hose and it became encased in ice, too thick for more gas to escape through. “Whoa!”
Robert shouted because the robot was moving now. It raised its right arm, as if intending to smash it down on the little humans around it, but Robert pointed and the shoulder joint became jammed with ice and snow.
“Stay back!” Alex yelled at the others. He had a huge build-up of energy reserved for this encounter and, after seeing Lorna collapse, he was ready to expend all of it. He aimed with his hands and a bolt of pure cosmic energy ripped straight into the Sentinel. It punched a large hole through the robot’s outer casing, exposing a gaping ‘wound’ through its internal mechanics and electronics.
“Polaris is not conscious!” Natasha shouted as she pulled Lorna away from the robot. “That might have been some kind of nerve gas!”
“Meet me at the doorway!” Warren said over the intercom.
Sparks flew from the robot’s chest cavity and its head hung limply at its side, tethered only by cables. Its right arm was still frozen, but it lifted its left arm and pointed across the room towards the exit. Then its fingertips shot outward like tiny missiles, each trailing a thin cable behind it. Two of the fingertip-missiles struck light fixtures, broke them, and affixed there. The lights in the chamber visibly dimmed.
“Oh no you don’t!” Robert shouted. He made ice knives in his hand and hurled them one at a time at the cables leading back to the robot’s hand.
“Shoot it again!” Natasha shouted at Alex, but as she pulled a twitching and convulsing Lorna across the room, she managed to glance at Alex’s face and saw the look of regret there and she knew he could not do it again.
Natasha made it to the door with Lorna twitching in her arms before Warren reached them. Warren had his white-feathered wings spread behind him, bearing him aloft off the floor when he was not running forward.
“I can get her to the infirmary and try to administer an antidote,” Warren said as he quickly took Lorna from Natasha. “Before I left the booth I called in our remaining members, Banshee and Blob, from the grounds.”
“Just go!” Alex shouted. “As soon as I recharge, this robot will be a smoking pile of dust.”
“That’s just what it did too,” Robert said after cutting the last of the robot’s cords. “Recharge. Must have had a hidden battery inside we missed it could use to start up and then had to draw fresh energy right away.”
“Then let’s stop it before –” but Natasha’s words were drowned out by the roar of the jet mounted in each of the robot’s feet that propelled it up and out of the hole in the floor.
Before it could land, Robert pointed to the floor in front of the robot, coating it with ice, but the ice melted from the heat of the robot’s jets just as it touched down in a crouching position. When it stood up, its headless-ness allowed it to stand erect, though its neck still almost scraped the ceiling. The frozen arm finally cracked and shattered the ice holding it at the joint and had full movement again. All three of them could hear the whirring of loud machinery inside it as it moved.
“Haovk’s blast knocked out its main weapon in the chest,” Robert explained. “It must be building a new weapon inside there.”
“Let me try,” Natasha said, running towards the robot.
“Don’t let it grab you! It’ll tear you apart!” Alex shouted.
“Distract it!” Robert said and he began constructing an ice wall in front of the robot, as Natasha came up on its flank.
Natasha unclipped a plastic explosive disc from her belt with one hand as she grabbed the Sentinel’s arm with the other. The robot tried to snatch her in its hand, inadvertently lifting her higher. She swung her body up towards the robot’s chest and tossed the disc deep into the hole left by Alex’s blast. Natasha flipped backwards over the robot’s hand, twisted in mid-air, and landed in a summersault that took her tumbling away from the robot just as the explosion went off inside it.
The explosion erupted out of the open hole in the robot’s chest like a geyser, spewing tiny pieces of robot parts so hard out its front side that they struck the ice wall hard enough to crack it.
Robert expanded the ice wall around the robot quickly to catch ricocheting debris.
The robot itself grew silent before falling forward, face first into a pile of slushy ice on the floor.
“That’s it, then…” Natasha said, standing up and dusting herself off. “No more Sentinel. And we’ve learned nothing here that will help the Avengers.”
“Oh, I think you’ve learned something useful you can tell them,” Alex said. He fired another bolt of energy from one hand, hitting a small turreted weapon that just popped out of the robot’s backside and smashing it to pieces. “Never make the mistake of thinking it’s over when a Sentinel is around.”
Ten minutes later, Natasha and all of the X-Men were gathered on the upper floor of the mansion, standing around the bed in which Lorna was laying. Lorna drifted in and out of consciousness as Alex dabbed his fiancé’s forehead with a wet washcloth.
“She’s going to make it, right?” Robert, no longer sheathed in ice, asked.
“Aye, she should.” Banshee, aka Sean Cassidy, said. “Nerve gas is a fearful thing, but I think Warren gave her an injection o’ atropine fast enough. She’ll pull through.”
Natasha barely knew this Lorna, but the concern of Lorna’s teammates moved her. The risk of life and limb had always drawn the Avengers close together and she could see it had the same effect on these X-Men.
“We appreciate that you stuck around, Black Widow,” Warren said. “If your team needs help against the Sentinels, you can count us in.”
“Sure thing,” Fred said at the back of the room. “I always wanted to take on a Sentinel.”
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To Be Continued...
Next: In Black Widow #15: The Avengers’ adventure against the Sentinels goes pretty much like it did in Avengers #103-104, which deposits Natasha in Australia next time during the climactic battle against the Sentinels. But will the Black Widow be at the forefront of the battle or sidelined by circumstances? Be back here for “Natasha’s Outback Adventure” to find out!
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