Latveria. The Wehrmacht garrison.
The assembly whistle cut through the night with a pitch that left no room for hesitation, and the base answered it.
Lights came on in every barracks simultaneously. Doors opened. Wehrmacht mortal soldiers with set expressions moved through them in orderly streams, each one going directly to their designated post without confusion or delay. The drilling showed. Years of it showed.
In the hangars, the automatic servo robots had already begun their work, pushing the re-inspected Thunderhawk transports out through the wide doors one by one and positioning them on the launch platform with mechanical precision. The aircraft sat in a row under the floodlights, engines not yet running, waiting.
The Lamenters came out of their quarters in full company strength.
Black and white power armor, the yellow teardrop on the pauldron catching the floodlight. They moved toward the platform in formation, carrying ammunition supply crates between them, and the servo robots worked around them, loading heavy weapons into the Thunderhawk cabins: autocannons, storm bolters, cyclone missile launchers, everything the base's magazine could supply on short notice.
Across the platform, in front of a row of officers' quarters, a man stood watching.
Major Zemo wore the uniform of Sokovia, not Latveria, the distinction visible in the cut and the insignia. He had been in Latveria for weeks as a visiting officer, a professional exchange, the kind of arrangement that kept good relations between neighboring states. He had spent the time studying Wehrmacht doctrine and training methodology, and he had found it unsettling in the way that genuinely superior things were unsettling when encountered for the first time.
Now he watched the entire base mobilize in the dark, and a Wehrmacht staff officer appeared at his elbow, slightly out of breath from hurrying.
The officer apologized, briefly, for the disruption to the visit. Hoped for understanding. Zemo, who had spent enough years in uniform to read the tempo of a base going to war, looked at the Lamenters loading their weapons and asked, with the dry humor of someone who had learned not to flinch at reports, whether the terrible things described in the classified briefings were actually coming.
The staff officer grinned despite himself. He shook his head. Then he turned and watched the Astartes for a moment, and told Zemo about the alien invasion in plain terms, keeping to what military discipline allowed.
Zemo's eyes went wide. He said nothing. The staff officer was already turning away.
On the open platform, the air changed.
Portals opened, one after another, each one edged with a faint shimmer that had nothing to do with Imperial technology. Through them came figures in black metal armor covered in engraved runes, each one carrying melee weapons and moving with the economy of people who had been trained for this their entire lives. Kamar-Taj sorcerers, every one of them.
The staff officer at Zemo's elbow stopped walking and looked back over his shoulder.
"The sorcerer units. I've seen references in the internal briefings, but never..." He trailed off, watching them come through the portals in steady numbers. "If they're being deployed for this, then this battle will not be straightforward. Not even with a full Lamenters company." He straightened. "I have to report to the command center. Forgive me, Major."
He ran.
Zemo stood alone on the edge of the platform and watched the sorcerers join the Lamenters on the flight line, watched the servo robots finish loading the last of the heavy weapons, watched the Thunderhawks' engines begin their startup cycles one by one, the sound building into something that filled the base and then went beyond it.
He brought his right fist to his chest in a slow, deliberate Sky Eagle salute.
"For humanity, for Primarch!"
Northern Europe.
The beach still held the last warmth of the evening, the sun near the horizon and the light going golden across the sand. Hundreds of people occupied it in various states of leisure, and Thor was among them, fully horizontal in a beach chair, accepting tropical fruit from Jane with the contented ease of someone who had temporarily misplaced all of his responsibilities.
The metal ring on his right wrist vibrated.
David's voice followed immediately, clear above the ambient noise of the beach. Thor listened without moving for the first few seconds. Then he listened differently.
He turned and looked at Jane. The apology was genuine. She saw it, and she nodded, because she had known what she was agreeing to when she stayed.
Thor rose from the beach chair in a single motion.
His hand came out, palm open, toward the sand, and Mjolnir erupted from where it had been buried, shedding a brief cascade of sand in all directions, and arrived in his grip. The sky above the beach had already begun to change: clouds gathering where the sky had been clear, the light shifting, the first distant thunder rolling in from the north.
The lightning came next, the armor condensing out of it, covering him from boots to shoulders in the time it took the thunder to reach the waterline.
The beach went quiet.
Not a gradual quiet. The noise simply stopped, and then every person on that stretch of sand was kneeling, faces down, in the direction of the figure standing among them with a hammer and a storm.
Thor looked at them, and something in his expression acknowledged what they were offering.
"Midgard is in danger." His voice carried without effort over the sound of the incoming weather. "Brother Nolan has called for aid. Asgardian Legion, take up your weapons and your armor."
He looked at the water, and at the sky beyond it.
"Now. Follow me. Attack!"
West Coast of America.
The Inquisition base was still unfinished, sections of it open to the sky where construction had not yet closed the upper levels. Tony stood in one of the completed rooms with his arms folded, watching the projection that Jarvis had assembled from drone feeds and satellite data.
Manhattan. The portal above it, ten kilometers across and still active. The Chitauri pouring through in numbers that would take some time to fully quantify. And moving among the city's upper structures, visible even on the compressed satellite view, the long dark mass of a Leviathan, a void creature the size of a cargo ship, its bulk already responsible for a collapsed office block and counting.
Tony watched it for a moment without speaking.
"Inquisition, assemble."
Behind him, a portal opened. The edges of it burned with a characteristic cold light, and the figure who stepped through wore a red cloak over black rune armor, both garments marked with symbols that did not belong to any human tradition Tony recognized.
"I am Doctor Strange, Nolan's aid, Mr. Stark, please follow me as soon as possible!"