The Power of Ten Book Four: Dynamo

Time flitters by...

I blinked. Something one of my thoughtstreams was checking on intermittently was no longer obfuscated. “He just popped up!” I exclaimed to nobody, but several people /heard anyways.

-He’s been missing for months. Where’d he flark off to?- Sama /responded instantly.

-He’s out there on some random planet called Sakaar in the Fornex Galaxy.- I focused on the place where Bruce Banner had finally appeared. -Some sort of obstructing effect just faded away from the place... oh, that’s not good. I’m seeing the aftermath of a nuclear event...-

I brought up a Portal through my uniform, no need to spend Valences, and, my downtime interrupted as normal, flitted through it to a place several galaxies away.

-------

The mushroom cloud was still rising when I came in. I analyzed the signature as I promptly began weaving Raggador’s Radiation-eating Rings, containing the ash and immediately beginning the process of soaking up the ambient radiation from the surroundings. I couldn’t do anything for the blast, but the seven interlinked rings descended from the sky, drawing in the contamination and sending the ash back down towards the ground, raining down directly as compressed packets of cleansed earth.

Of course, it was all very showy and advertised that I was there, but par for the course.

A couple megatons, and by the architecture, it had gone off in the middle of a populated area. I made a face as I considered the persons responsible for this, scanning for life signs, beyond the one obvious one winking in my Awareness below.

“Dr. Banner?” I could feel his thoughts, so I knew which persona was in control.

There was a shudder in the earth, a feeling of almighty rising rage held under murderous control, and he rose from under the dirt and ash, raising his head to look at me and the rotating Rings of magic around me, his eyes almost glowing with wrath.

“Dynamo!” he ground out, raising a huge fist. “You’ve come to finish the job!?” he roared at me, the shockwave breaking past my face as he pounced at me.

I blinked and shifted thirty feet left, waving the wind currents aside as he hurtled past me, Red Eyes watching him go past. “Greetings, Dr. Banner. I’ve been looking for you for nearly six months after you disappeared from back home,” I replied with Voice. “The effect concealing your presence was disrupted and went down less than one minute ago. I apologize for my tardiness and have come to bring you back home.”

He hit the blasted and fused ground, whirling back at me. “You work with Richards! Richards and Ross sent me here!” he roared at me, pointing a finger.

“Reed did no such thing. He even designed the gamma-reader that found your last location on Terra outside Noxitchal. I tracked the ship for two hundred and fourteen light-years through hyperspace, and then lost it in the remnants of a Class K spatial rift, while your presence here was completely masked by whatever effect was just destroyed by this erupting Skrull warp core.”

His distorted, angry face wobbled. “Skrulls?” he repeated blankly.

“You mentioned General Ross?” I asked archly, moving down closer to him in a crackle of lightning so he wouldn’t have to go bouncing around. “He and his daughter were captured and replaced by infiltrating War-Skrulls nearly two years ago. The scanners just caught the imposters and freed the prisoners several weeks ago.”

He just glared at me, the wrath in his eyes becoming a deadly simmering. “The Skrulls...” he rumbled, promising all sorts of Hell for them. Then his head spun around. “Caiera!” he shouted loud enough to split a human’s eardrums, and bounced off in a new direction.

I took another look around at the ruins of this place, grit my teeth as I located the epicenter, and went after him.

---

I followed him into the ruins of a techno-barbaric palace, now all blasted to ruins. He bolted towards a grey-skinned humanoid woman rolled up in the corner, who at a glance was obviously dying of radiation poisoning.

“Caiera!” he shouted, lunging for her.

“Stand aside!” I ordered, and slapped him away with a boom of impact, else he’d not even slow down. He crashed into the wall off to the side, further bringing it down, but it gave me enough time to kneel down next to her. “Healer on duty!” I promptly began to leech the radiation out of her, blinked once, and then merely redirected it while using Cosmic power to rebuild her cell damage.

The woman blinked hazily up at me as her vitals rapidly stabilized, the energies inside her linking to the planet and beginning the restoration of her strength. Her fingers instinctively crossed over her belly, staring up at me with a silent question.

“The babe is fine. Actually, he would have survived this,” I assured her, golden lightning crackling over her and making her bones light up while I ignored the big green presence behind me looming ominously. “He would have inherited the power inside you, plus the radiation boost would have sustained him easily and accelerated his growth fantastically.” I held out my hand behind me, and the Rings of Raggadorr dominating the skies shrank down into a seven-sided polyhedron filled with glowing energy, which I absently tossed over my shoulder to the jade giant glaring down at me.

“Nibbles for the boy as he’s growing. I’m sure you can identify the energy signatures of a Skrull warp core just by the feeling, Dr. Banner. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have people to save here.” With a crackle of lightning, I was off on Healer duty.

---

The Hulk stared at the multi-colored thing in his hand, then down at his wife. He silently lowered his hand, took hers, and effortlessly pulled her to her feet.

Her face was determined as well, but in a different direction. Caeira ran her hands over herself. “You know her? She is a mighty healer,” his wife inquired, amazed at how she had not even the slightest burn on her now, and even her clothing had been fixed.

The wrath retreated, burning into the background, to simmer there with many other old grudges as the Hulk looked around. “Dynamo. She’s with the High Guard, a bunch of heroic types from my homeworld. She’s cleaned up the radiation and now she’ll be saving as many people as she can.” He paused as his face worked. “She can probably fix everything up but the dead, and find out exactly what happened, too...”

“We should help, my husband.”

Bruce Banner handed over the polyhedron. “I think this is better held by you. It’s for our son, after all.”

Caiera took it, and felt a stirring in her belly in some surprise. “I see. I will use it properly for him!”

---------

The images played out damningly. The image of the Red Warriors who had entered the ship, tampering with the ship’s power core, then fleeing. I marked them all and their lived-lines, locating them nigh-instantly a hundred miles away, congratulating themselves for their vengeance on the faithless.

I turned my gaze in a certain direction in the playback, and the image of the one who was watching them do all this, not interfering or stopping what was going on.

“Miesk...” the Hulk rumbled, his face darkening ominously.

I wasn’t going to spend years raising the dead here, but a combination of Mass Healing and superspeed had saved thousands from immediate death, and tens of thousands from lingering deaths or permanent injuries.

Some of the red-skinned people were shouting out names, identifying those who had performed the sabotage. Bruce Banner glowered at them, and at the insectile warrior who had been his friend and ally, and not bothered to stop what had befallen here.

He was unrepentant as he lifted his spears. “’Never let them stop paying for what they’ve done!’ Those were your own words! Vengeance upon them!” the insect-man shrilled, and the red-skinned Sakaarans fell silent despite themselves.

“You have mated with the last of the Brood.”

The air temperature dropped a hundred degrees, frost wafting through the air and coating everything as breaths became fog. The startled insect and his bodyguards snapped their heads my way as the Brood once-drone among them crouched down.

“That drone is the last of its kind in this universe,” I went on, stepping forward and staring at the once-sterile drone whose singular status had activated her species’ survival genes. “The eggs you’ve fertilized are destined to be implanted into more sentient creatures, warping and transforming them into more Brood who steal their memories, skills, and innate abilities for their own.” I lifted one hand, seething with ominously quiet lightning. “The Brood were hunted to extinction across twenty-three galaxies, for the simple reason that over a TRILLION of them are on their way from the Negative Zone, and they have been providing intelligence for that invasion force.”

“We are in need of a queen!” the six-armed warrior-bug shrilled back defiantly.

I didn’t even reply, not concerned with his survival instincts after he’d allowed a million people, most of them completely innocent, to die.

Lightning blew out of the ground, blowing Miesk, his bodyguards, and the Brood to bloodspray, which didn’t even rain down wetly before it ignited in vivus and was gone on the wind.

The Hulk on his throne said nothing as I asked calmly, “As the warriors of Sakaar suffered the greatest losses in this event, who would care to visit their opinions upon the traitors who think they got away with their treachery?”

They were a martial culture. Dozens of armed and armored red-skinned Sakaarans immediately stepped forwards, staring at the image off to the side in the air I conjured up with a wave of my hand.

“By your Majesty’s Will, I do not think we need them back alive. I will reopen the Portal in an hour.”

Bruce Banner just nodded once, the image sharpened, and as the traitors on the other sides gaped in stunned amazement, a howling horde of the warriors whose families they’d murdered came through a Rift in the air and set upon them.

I let the Portal fade after the lynch mob was through, as we didn’t need to see what was likely to be a series of rather long and excruciating deaths without intact corpses.

The Hulk’s face was inscrutable. “A trillion Brood?” he repeated to me.

“A tiny fraction of the invading Negative Zone,” I answered casually to his skeptical face, and he blinked. “Their greatest value is converting living natives of our universe into their own soldiers, of course, in addition to the priceless intelligence on navigation and the species they will encounter here that they’ve given to the greater invasion.”

“How large is this... invasion?” he asked, and there were a whole lot of people listening to me attentively.

“Rough estimates are at least a quarter of a quadrillion invaders, spread out across at least twenty galaxies. The invasion will start within several months. Three arms of it going to invade the Kree, Shi’ar, and the Skrulls, and the remnants of those forces will unite to clear the Milky Way.

“We expect all three Empires to fall and their galaxies to be largely swept clean of indigenous species. We are fighting to slaughter enough of them that they won’t be able to take on what’s left of the Milky Way.”

Bruce Banner closed his eyes, breathing deeply. “How safe are we here?”

“You’re not in the direct path of the main fleets, but as they conquer, they are going to spread, and the spatial rift that is manifesting here is going to draw their attention as an item of interest. It’s a habitable planet, so they’ll be coming. Who knows how long they will take, but the very least of their species will outnumber you hundreds to one, with not-inferior technology.

“So... you’re just waiting for extinction here. You’ve no ability to defend the planet from ecological wipe and colonization on the scale that is coming.”