Chapter 174: Zombie Marvel Universe?
Titan.
A planet picked clean of everything it ever had. Cold. Desolate. Nothing left but ruins and the particular silence that belongs to places where the end already came and went.
It was also, incidentally, home to Thanos, Director of the Universe's Department of Population Control.
On a throne set among the rubble, Thanos sat in full armor and watched Ebony Maw approach across the wasteland. His voice, when he spoke, was as unhurried as everything else about him.
"Still no word from the Chitauri?"
Ebony Maw inclined his head. "Not yet."
"Could it be..." Maw ventured, "that something went wrong?"
"Something went wrong."
The phrase landed, and Thanos found his mind drifting, unbidden, to a certain bald woman who had made Earth her personal jurisdiction, and to a certain old man who treated the planet like his own back garden.
Surely, he thought, they wouldn't involve themselves over something this small. That would be an absurd level of overprotectiveness.
He let the thought sit for a moment, then his expression settled into a faint frown. He turned to Ebony Maw.
"Maw. Contact the Chitauri commander. Find out what's happening."
"And while you're at it, check on Loki, son of Odin."
"That boy enjoys playing clever. Make sure they haven't let him play clever at their expense."
He gave Maw a dismissive wave. Ebony Maw withdrew.
Once clear of the throne, Maw moved without delay and opened a channel to the Chitauri commander as instructed.
The Chitauri commander, who answered every call the moment it came through, did not answer.
Thirty seconds passed.
Then the channel connected.
When it did, Ebony Maw got a clear look at the Chitauri commander's face, and at what surrounded him.
The commander's eyes were wide and moving constantly. The environment behind him had stopped resembling an environment. Fire everywhere. In the corner nearest the camera, bodies were piled against the wall, blood pooling out from under them in thick dark streams, hissing where it met the flames.
The Chitauri commander didn't wait for Ebony Maw to say anything. He lunged at the camera.
"We need backup! We need backup right now!!"
"Those Earth bastards hit us with an unknown virus! And biological eggs!"
"The whole planet has fallen! The whole planet!"
"SEND BACKUP!" He kept screaming, and every few seconds his head jerked back toward a door somewhere behind him that was making sounds that doors aren't supposed to make.
Ebony Maw watched the spectacle with his usual complete absence of sympathy.
"So," he said, tone unchanged. "Your mission failed, then."
The Chitauri commander opened his mouth to respond.
The lock on the door behind him broke.
One clean snap. Then the door came open, and through it came the dead.
They moved fast. Not shambling. Fast. They crossed the room and reached the commander before he had finished processing the sound of the lock breaking.
He tried to raise his energy weapon.
He didn't fire it.
The tide took him.
"AAAAAA—"
Wet. Final.
The channel cut out.
Ebony Maw had ended the call a moment before the conclusion arrived. He had seen enough. He had, he noted privately, never seen a Chitauri produce that quality of emotion before. It was almost interesting.
He tried the channel again. Several more times.
None of them connected.
Ebony Maw let his long, pale fingers rest against his chin, eyes narrowing slightly.
"So it appears," he murmured to himself, "that your operation has failed."
He would have to report this to the master.
He turned and brought everything he had seen and heard to Thanos.
Thanos, when he heard it, went still for a moment.
"Maw."
"Are you telling me... that the people of Earth deployed a virus capable of destroying an entire planet?"
"That would appear to be the case." Ebony Maw nodded.
"The Chitauri commander didn't specify where exactly the virus came from. But given what happened, retaliation from Earth seems the most likely explanation."
Thanos was quiet for a moment, working through it.
Then: "I have a task for you."
"I need to know whether the Chitauri Scepter was brought back to the Chitauri homeworld. Take Cull Obsidian and make the trip."
"If you can recover the Scepter, good. If not, I want to know exactly what brought an entire planet down that quickly."
He paused.
"Take precautions. If whatever they used was fast enough to take an entire planet, it's probably airborne."
He said it as a reminder, then turned away. The matter of Ebony Maw's logistics was Ebony Maw's problem.
The Chitauri homeworld was not a short flight from Titan, even by the standards of people who could fly. Getting there on thrust alone would take longer than the mission was worth. Space-fold technology would be required.
A ripple of displaced space moved through the void.
The ship carrying Ebony Maw and Cull Obsidian vanished.
When it reappeared, it was in orbit around the Chitauri homeworld.
Inside the ship, Ebony Maw stood at the viewport and looked out.
From up here, the Chitauri homeworld looked completely calm. Still. Quiet. A planet that had no interest in advertising what was happening on its surface.
But Ebony Maw knew what was happening on its surface.
"Cull Obsidian," he said, his voice carrying the particular tone he used when delivering information he considered it beneath him to repeat. "I'd strongly advise you to suit up before we land. Don't assume your physical resilience makes you immune to whatever's down there. Don't test it."
Cull Obsidian glanced over at him.
For a brief moment, Cull had actually considered the possibility that Ebony Maw was expressing something resembling concern for a teammate. A novel experience.
That possibility lasted until Ebony Maw's next sentence.
"If you get infected and become a liability, my mission suffers for it. And if the master is displeased with the outcome, neither of us will enjoy the consequences."
So. Still Ebony Maw, then.
Ebony Maw spread his arms.
A faint current of telekinetic force moved through the ship, and a metal containment suit came sailing out of a storage compartment and locked itself around him with the precision of something that had been waiting for exactly this. The whole sequence had a practiced elegance that Cull Obsidian found thoroughly unnecessary.
Cull looked at the other containment suit sitting a short distance away, picked it up without ceremony, and began working his way into it.
He got most of the way there before he stopped.
It is a well-documented and thoroughly inconvenient reality that heavily muscled individuals cannot reach the clasps between their own shoulder blades. The geometry simply doesn't work.
"Hey. Maw. The back clasp. I can't reach it. Give me a hand."
Silence.
"Maw. I know you heard me."
"Hey!"
"Don't walk away!"
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