Chapter 175: Ebony Maw: This Is the End!
"So this is what the Chitauri homeworld looks like now."
From altitude, drifting above the streets, Ebony Maw looked down at the dead moving in every direction below him. "Calling it a living hell isn't an exaggeration."
Then, quietly, to himself: "Although... could a civilization as primitive as Earth's actually have developed a weapon like this?"
He had trouble believing it from the start, and distance hadn't helped.
Two hundred and fifty years ago, the humans of Earth hadn't even entered their industrial age. The idea that they could, within a couple of centuries, have produced something capable of destroying an entire civilization stretched credibility. There was a gap between where they had been and what this implied, and that gap bothered him.
What bothered him more was the alternative explanation taking shape in his mind: that this wasn't a human weapon at all. That some more advanced civilization, Asgard being the obvious candidate, had developed it quietly and chosen to deploy it through human hands. Using Earth as a convenient proxy while keeping their own fingerprints off the outcome. Very much the kind of thing a civilization that prided itself on honor would do, when honor became inconvenient.
Either way, Maw intended to be careful.
Cull Obsidian was less concerned.
His position was simple: anything Earth had made couldn't hurt him, and whatever had happened to the Chitauri was a Chitauri problem, not a Cull problem. Their constitutions weren't remotely comparable. The only reason he'd put on the containment suit at all was to prevent Ebony Maw from finding a way to blame him for anything that went wrong.
They swept their eyes over the streets below and selected a landing point that looked relatively manageable. Then they descended from the ship.
The moment their feet touched the ground, the sound reached them.
Teeth. On bone. That specific wet cracking sound that came from something tearing through another body with its mouth.
Ebony Maw's brow furrowed.
"This virus really does take biological appetite to its absolute limit. They're eating their own kind."
Cull glanced over at him. "Is cannibalism actually unusual, on a cosmic scale?"
"The only reason we call it beneath us is because we've decided to call ourselves 'civilized' and 'refined.' So we consider ourselves above it."
"But civilization and refinement have never been what kept the universe running."
"A species fighting to survive in an extreme environment will eat what's in front of it. That's not aberrant. That's just what survival looks like."
The observation was unexpected enough that something flickered across Ebony Maw's expression. He hadn't expected Cull to produce a perspective worth considering.
Cull wasn't done. He was watching the dead on the street, the way they packed together and chased down the living Chitauri still running among them.
"Besides, I don't actually think they qualify as the same species anymore. They look identical, same size, same basic shape. But whatever this virus did to them has made them into something different. Something else entirely."
He turned to Maw. "What do you think?"
Maw didn't answer.
Cull waited a few seconds, then looked over.
Ebony Maw was already gone, having used his telekinesis to float off toward a point in the distance, apparently mid-thought and thoroughly uninterested in finishing the conversation.
Cull stared at the empty space where Maw had been standing.
"You contemptible showoff."
"Hey! Wait for me!"
He called it over their suit channel and moved after him.
The containment suits had optical camouflage built in. As a result, the two of them could move through the streets without attracting any attention from the standard dead. The zombies moved past them, around them, through the spaces they'd just occupied, without reacting. It was smooth going in a way that the streets themselves certainly weren't.
They found the crashed command ship without much difficulty.
It was hard to miss. Fires still burning at multiple points across the hull. Black smoke climbing in thick columns. And underneath the smoke, faint and wrong, an aroma that the human brain is hardwired to recognize as meat cooking, which was not an association that did anything good for the mood.
"If the Chitauri Scepter was brought back, it'll be on board," Maw said. "Let's take a look."
They found an entrance and went in.
The interior stopped them both.
The ship had gone in nose-first at a sharp angle and hit the surface with enough force to bury part of its hull. The corridors that had been horizontal were now vertical. Every passageway had become a shaft.
"Cull. I can't tow you. Do you have your own way up?"
Cull's expression made his feelings on the question clear. "What do you think."
"Then there's nothing to be done," Maw said, and actually spread his hands as though the situation were completely reasonable. "I'll go in alone to find the Scepter. Keep watch at the entrance."
He clasped his hands behind his back, lifted himself with his telekinesis, and floated up into the dark interior of the ship, not looking back and not waiting to hear whether Cull had actually agreed to stand guard.
Inside was worse than outside, which Maw had not particularly expected.
The smell of blood and hydraulic fluid had nowhere to go. The crash impact had been violent enough to reduce most of the bodies to pulp, the collision force compressing them into surfaces and compartments, though a small number of zombies were still mobile and wandering the shafts.
Maw waved the command center door apart and floated in.
The ship had an internal recording system. A black box, essentially, the same principle as the recording devices installed in aircraft. The fastest way to determine whether the Scepter had been aboard and where it might be now was to pull those records, rather than drift through the ship looking at nothing in particular.
He found the operational panel that still had power, ran through the interface, and pulled up the logs.
The records were comprehensive. The entire invasion sequence was documented from the Chitauri side: departure, approach to Earth, the engagement itself. The boarding action was in there too, the full footage of the Astartes operating inside the ship, which Maw found himself watching with considerably more attention than he'd expected.
The quality of that powered armor. The completeness and speed of the zombie outbreak once the T-Virus entered the ventilation system. All of it, documented in sequence.
He watched and kept a running commentary going mostly for himself.
The gist of the commentary: the Astartes hardware was genuinely impressive. The outbreak had been remarkably fast. The Chitauri military had been, from top to bottom, comprehensively useless. Not just useless. Useless in layers. They had launched an invasion of Earth, been repelled, had their own ship boarded, and had then managed to lose their entire homeworld to the counter-infection. A species with that record deserved whatever description covered the failure entirely.
He was getting into the footage when something moved above him.
A long, dark shape had lowered itself from the ceiling of the command center without making a sound. Smooth, black, jointed at angles that nothing biological should be jointed at.
It raised its tail.
The tail spike drove downward at the back of Maw's skull.
The air split with a clean hiss.
Then it stopped.
The spike hung in the air several centimeters from Ebony Maw's brain, held there by something it couldn't see, unable to move forward.
The Alien threw its full strength into the push. The spike didn't move.
Maw turned his head slightly.
"I did see you in the footage, as it happens."
"You're remarkably effective assassins."
"Unfortunately, you picked the wrong target." He raised one hand and closed it.
The sound it produced was brief and wet.
Green blood went across the entire room.
Several drops reached Maw's face.
The Alien's blood was corrosive. The moment it contacted his containment suit, it ate through the material and left a hole roughly the size of a thumbprint.
Ebony Maw registered the situation immediately.
He stopped breathing, turned away from the mission entirely, and moved for the exit at speed.
The universe, however, had other ideas.
A vent directly in his path exploded outward.
Several Aliens came through it.
At the same moment, Lickers that had been waiting in the dark corridor heard the noise and moved to block the passage.
Ebony Maw took this in.
Something sank in his chest.
They had been waiting for exactly this moment.
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