Chapter 5

You ever look forward to something so badly, and then when you got it, it was just okay?  Yeah .... just got back from seeing Winter Soldier, and while it was pretty good, it was just okay, not great.  Things I liked ... Chris Evans (always), Black Widow had a substantial part, and the superheroine parts of women was much more balanced with Maria Hill.  And ooh!  The Falcon!  Finally a bit of sweet, dark chocolate superhero to add a bit of variety!  What I didn't like ... not nearly enough conflicted Sebastian Stan ... wanted more Winter Soldier than they showed.  And expected to see a bit more of Sharon Carter (she was practically invisible).  Lately Marvel seems to be spending more time weaving in future plot threads for future cash-cow spinoff Marvel franchises than they do keeping the plot on track.  Too many spy-things going on, not enough genuine story.  The verdict ... go and see it ... but keep your expectations realistic.

Okay ... back to my legacy Man Out Of Time fanfiction, written just after Cap I and Avengers came out...

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A change of gears here. This is an Adventure/Romance story. Time for a bit of action!  Thanks to everyone who's read this so far and those who hit the big, gold happy star! 

Chapter 5

"The rumors are true," Nick Fury shouted, the rumble of the C-130 Hercules nearly drowning out his words. "Some Chitauri survived Iron Man's destruction of the mother ship and are attempting to regroup on Earth."

The Chitauri were the race of lizard-like aliens who had supported Loki's attempt to subjugate Earth, engineered by a mysterious hooded figure known only as 'The Other.'

"Where are we headed, Sir?" Clint Barton, codename Hawkeye asked. He grabbed at one of the wrist-straps hanging from a bar on the ceiling as turbulence threatened to toss him into Steve's lap.

"Micronesia," Fury said. "We're set to rendezvous with the helicarrier at eleven-hundred hours."

"Just show me where the new mother ship is," Tony Stark said, flashing Steve a cocky grin. "And I'll blow it out of the sky just like the last one." He held out the gauntlet of his Iron Man suit and pretended to aim the pulse reactor at an imaginary target. The high-pitched whine of a pulse reactor charging, and then powering down without discharging, could be heard above the rumble of the engines.

Natasha Romanov didn't say a word. She glanced down at her tool belt and began to slip all manner of deadly things into her cleverly constructed clothing. Assassin's bling, she liked to call it. All girls liked pretty, shiny things. Black Widow's baubles just happened to be lethal.

"I still can't figure out why these ones didn't drop mindlessly to the ground when we took out the mother ship over New York," Bruce Banner said with a frown. "Every Chitauri I've autopsied appeared to be part of a hive mind."

"They're like appendages," Tony Stark said, the tiny gears in his suit whirring as he extended and then curled up the mechanical arm of his suit. "Only enough circuitry to carry signals from the CPU. Not enough to think for themselves."

"What good are soldiers who can't think?" Hawkeye asked. Natasha gave him a bemused stare. So did Tony Stark. Stark had fended off an attempt by Hammer Industries to eliminate the Iron Man prototype with computerized drones.

"Captain?" Fury said, giving Steve a one-eyed stare. "Do you care to enlighten the others?"

Steve stared at his hands. Now all of a sudden he was the resident expert on the Chitauri? It wasn't until he'd gotten a good look at the technology the seven-foot reptilian invaders had been using after the showdown with Loki that he'd realized it looked familiar. Herr Klaiser. One of the Nazi bastards he'd pursued during the Great War and never been able to nail down. There had been crazy stories from traumatized French civilians about lizards devouring the brains of villagers and assuming their shapes. Stories discounted by the brass back in 1945, when Hitler was monster enough without concocting aliens from outer space to pull his strings. Steve still wasn't sure if what the French villagers had described was possible, but Banner's tests on the invaders and a dried tissue-sample Howard Stark had taken from a village Herr Klaiser had decimated all those years ago had similarities.

"We'd noticed some of the German soldiers would drop dead when you killed their leader," Steve said. "We thought it was some kind of Nazi mind control drug. With the Nazi war machine always hot on our tails, we never had time to stick around and do autopsies."

"Midgard is but a single branch of a mighty tree," Thor said. "Asgard has not before battled these Chitauri dogs my brother allied himself with. But Asgardians battled many races before we were driven back to our one true world. Including races capable of changing forms to fool the eye. My brother, Loki, is just such a creature. Although he possesses not the properties of which Commander Rogers speaks."

The other Avengers all spoke up at once, the cacophony drowning out Fury's attempts to shout over everyone and brief them about the situation. Steve looked down at his hands again, noticing the way the tendons moved reassuringly beneath the skin to animate his fingers. Predictable. He'd seen a lot of weirdness in his day, but at least Red Skull had been human. A monster, psychologically speaking, but a monster who had been amped up on the same super-serum that he'd been injected with. The reason Erskine had gone searching for a skinny asthmatic who understood what it meant to be the underdog rather than the strongest soldier, because Erskine knew better than anyone what it meant to be a victim of unbridled power. But this? Brain-eating, shape-shifting aliens from outer space?

Was it really any stranger than a 92-year-old man being the lynchpin of a top-secret operation involving a man in an iron suit, a not-so-jolly green giant, a Norse god, an assassin and an archer amped up on a less complete version of the same serum he'd been injected with, only with less complete results? The perfect soldier. Horse manure! Compared to the super-egos all around him, Steve was nothing but a pesky fly waiting to be swatted!

Fury whistled, restoring order at last. He turned the floor back to Steve. He was the only soldier on the planet who'd battled the Chitauri not just this generation, when they'd come in guns blazing behind Loki, but also the last, when their tactics had been more subtle. Now that they had been driven underground, it was Steve's experience they needed to hear. Not just bluster from a bunch of cocky superheroes over-confident after their stunning victory in New York.

"We learned to go after the officers," Steve said. "They're formidable soldiers. Difficult to kill, but not much different than killing a super-solider. At the time, we simply thought it was Red Skull experimenting with a variant of the super-serum he'd stolen from Doctor Erskine when he killed him."

Clint gave him a grim nod. Although S.H.I.E.L.D. had been experimenting with Doctor Erskine's super-serum for as long as it had been in existence, they had yet to replicate Doctor Erskine's success. Steve noted the subtle way Clint moved closer to Natasha, still loading her cat suit with weapons. There was something going on between those two. Steve was certain of it. But whatever their relationship was, they were keeping it discreet.

"Training does matter," Steve added, noting the flash of concern. In a fight between the Nazi bastards he'd battled and the two assassins, he was certain pure brute training and not just serum-enhanced reflexes would win. "The lower ranking soldiers die the same as regular humans. Easier to kill than the drones we took on in New York. But not easy. I suspect shape shifting into human form gives them our vulnerabilities."

Thor snorted. Steve gave him a cold, hard stare that communicated 'don't mess with me, big guy.'

"Either we missed a command ship," Fury said, his expression grim. "Or they've got a base somewhere on the planet and are setting us up for another invasion."

"Steve?" Natasha asked, one artfully-plucked eyebrow raised in a question. "What are we really facing?" She knew he would not speak until the squabbling superheroes shut up and showed a little decorum for the chain of command. With Natasha, on the other hand, it was all about following orders.

"We don't know what we're facing," Steve said. "My experience is 67 years out of date. All I know is that the officers distinguished themselves from the foot soldiers by wearing Nazi SS uniforms and helmets, while the lowest-ranking soldiers would integrate into the regular population so you couldn't tell who was one of them. I have no idea what they'll be wearing now. Or if Herr Klaiser is still pulling the strings. If he is, he'd be extremely old."

"You're that old," Stark said, giving Steve a wicked grin.

"Now there's the pot calling the kettle black," Bruce Banner said, probably the closest the emotionally reserved scientist ever came to cracking a joke.

"Says the kettle," said Stark.

"Banner!" Fury interrupted. "Your report?"

"From the uniforms we pulled off the Chitauri who invaded New York," Banner said. "It appears a system of visible rank is important to their chain of command. Chitauri with showier symbols of rank on their uniforms all possessed more highly developed cranial structures."

"Visual clues to show who's boss," Tony Stark said, patting his bright red suit with his usual cocky pride. "Something I can relate to."

The Avengers continued comparing notes about the Chitauri they had slain in New York and this new information. Steve excused himself and moved to the back of the C-130, where the real soldiers were busily preparing their cargo for unloading when they rendezvoused with the helicarrier so they could move onto the next mission.

"Captain," the men greeted, giving him a salute. All wore modern camouflage cargo pants and loose-fitting tops, far more comfortable and durable digs than the wool uniforms he'd worn back when he'd still moved inside the chain of command of a regular army.

Steve stared down at his garish, red-white-and-blue uniform, thankful that at least here he didn't have to wear his ridiculous winged helmet. His rank now was officially Colonel, not Captain. A fiction the military had cooked up so he'd have the rank to coordinate regular troops with the superheroes. The Avengers got all the glory, but it was the massive military machine efficiently moving in the background which quietly cleaned up after them and plugged any holes in their plans.

It had been thus since the first hominid had picked up a stick and used it to defend his brother...

"At ease…" Steve said, returning their salute. The men gave him a grateful smile and returned to their duties, glancing over at him from time to time, their expressions one of curiosity and openness.

How he missed those simpler times, when the military had made him continue pretending to be the clumsy young man who'd been sent off to Army boot camp. Sure, there'd been a few bullies. Bullies he'd had to quietly put back into their place when they pushed him too far. But most of the guys he'd served with had been just … guys. Ordinary guys trying to do what was right. He'd found the routine of the military to be reassuring, the camaraderie once he'd earned the trust of his fellow soldiers to be unlike any relationship he'd experienced before, or since. He wished, not for the first time, that he could be allowed to don a regular uniform and blend in with the enlisted troops. To simply be a small cog in an enormous set of gears powering a mighty army instead of the rallying point others looked to for inspiration. It had never occurred to him, when Doctor Erskine had approached him about testing out his serum, that becoming a better soldier would mean never being able to simply be the soldier he'd always dreamed of being.

Steve walked over to where his souped-up harrier jet was jammed into the belly of the plane, its' wings neatly folded upwards like a cricket so it would fit inside, and gave it an affectionate pat. The technician who was elbows-deep in grease doing its pre-flight maintenance looked up and gave him a smile.

"Is it true, Sir?" the soldier asked, "that you stole this technology from the Nazis?"

Steve glanced at the name tag Velcroed to the airman's battle fatigues. Identity. On his arm, one silver bar. Rank. On the other arm sat the airman's branch insignia, a wheel with wings. Transportation. Role. A predictable means of understanding who one was addressing, their rank, and the skills that cog in the wheel possessed so an officer could readily recruit whatever resources were at hand to complete the mission.

"Yes, Lieutenant Hernandez," Steve said, using the visual information to properly address the soldier.

Hive mind. Peggy standing in front of a map of Europe, symbols pinned all over the map showing what resources were ready to be mobilized in which location. A memory clicked in Steve's mind. Something he had observed when they'd snuck into an occupied village to extract some American GI's who'd been captured by Herr Klaiser. He'd ask Banner about it as soon as they had a quiet moment.

"I never could figure out why the Jews helped the people who were rounding them up and killing them to build these things," Lieutenant Hernandez said. "If it was me…"

"If it was you," Steve interrupted. "You would have done the exact same thing the Jewish scientists did. The Nazi's had their families. It was either the death camps or drag your feet and hope the Allies got their act together before there was nothing left for them to sabotage."

Steve's mind jumped back to Doctor Erskine. If Erskine hadn't escaped and made his way to Allied territory, the war might have turned out differently. He would have turned out differently. Doctor Erskine had understood it wasn't what one blustered openly to the public, but what one quietly did when faced with unimaginable choices that made the true measure of a man.

"Always wondered why it took the German war machine so long to solve technical problems we solved in a matter of months once the war was over," Lieutenant Hernandez said, his expression mollified. "What was it like? Freeing all those people from the concentration camps?"

Steve's mind travelled back to his mission invading the Mittelwerk, an enormous munitions factory with tunnels stretching for miles beneath the ground. Hitler had used Jewish slave-laborers from the nearby Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, carving out tunnels and manufacturing the munitions the Nazi war machine was using to exterminate them. Even as they'd stormed the facility, trying to get their hands on the scientists and research into the next-generation V4 rocket, including their star scientist, Klaus Von Brun, the Nazi's primary concern had been executing as many Jewish scientists as possible to eliminate any information they might share with the Allies by planting a bullet into each of their brains.

"It took that long because the Jews sabotaged them every step of the way," Steve said. "I was with the unit that freed them. Over 20,000 Jewish laborers Hitler worked to death in the Mittelwerk."

"Twenty thousand?" Hernandez whistled. The technician looked down at the wheel assembly he was greasing. "I heard it was … bad."

Steve recalled the emaciated workers he'd freed. Walking skeletons. Only their too-large eyes and fact they remained animated letting the Allied troops know some were still alive. Steve shuddered. The Chitauri invasion had been bad, but only he had ever witnessed first-hand man's inhumanity to man on a scale as large as the Nazi death camps.

"It was a delicate dance the Jews played," Steve said. "Stay alive another day, knowing the work they did was killing other families, or die, knowing their families would be killed the moment they were no longer useful as a carrot to make them work. What would you do in that situation?"

"Never thought of it like that, Sir," Hernandez said. His expression was thoughtful.

Steve ran his hand along the sleek lines of his Harrier Jet. Jet-engine technology had been in its infancy when he'd disappeared beneath the ice, something only capable of propelling crude V2 missiles into the air to drop bombs on hapless European cities. The Harrier was one of the few technologies which pleased him about being cast forward into the future, visible proof his mission to snatch jet engine and rocket technology from the Nazi war machine had paid peacetime dividends. The Harrier was, of course, a weapon of war. But the civilian jumbo jet he'd flown from New York to Los Angeles had been a delight, not even the colicky infant who'd wailed the entire trip enough to mar his enjoyment of the sheer peacetime … ordinariness … of the technology he'd freed from the hands of his enemies.

Steve nodded for the airman to carry on and climbed up into the cockpit, leaning back into his seat and closing his eyes. He allowed the reassuring rumble of the C-130 Hercules' four turboprop engines to seep into his bones and lull him to sleep. Turboprop engines. Living proof that, sometimes, the old stuff still worked better.

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