DEC. YEAR 2
MV1 Presents ... The Star Spangled Avenger ...
CAPTAIN AMERICA: MV1 # 478
TALKIN' ABOUT A REVOLUTION
Part Two: Prisoner of War!
written by Mark Bousquet

Created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby

Last Issue … Captain America was teleported to a strange new world and found himself in the middle of a revolution! After witnessing the horror of a farmhouse housing the elderly and crops being torched, Cap sided with the Olanans and their rebellion. Meanwhile, in Wyoming, Sharon Carter and the Falcon were spying on what SHIELD thinks is a secret HYDRA mountain base. As the Falcon makes a recon flight into a "dead area" for SHIELD’s satellites, he is met by a battalion of HYDRA troops that blast him out of the sky! Elsewhere, an old man in grey robes makes a bizarre series of statements at the base of Mount Rushmore.

The Grand Canyon

The old man with the grey robes and the Scottish accent named Ethos stood at the bottom of the Grand Canyon and shook his head.

He walked for a bit - slowly, taking everything in. He listened to the sounds of nature that surrounded him and reveled in their glory.

"All this beauty, but they can not see it for what it is, can not experience the simple joy of Nature without trying to package it and stick it in a bottle to sell. ‘Tis sad. Very, very sad. But not the point, alas. Just another sign of sheep losing their way in the world."

The old man knelt down to pry a piece of bush out of his sandals.

"To all things a beginning. To all things an end."

The Planet Beckque

"How dare they burn out our elderly!" Shio screamed into the night. Captain America and the group of ten Olanans made their way towards the burning farmhouse that they had traveled all this way for. Inside, they were to pick up supplies - both food and weapons - and head back to the encampment where they had left the wounded, the women and the children.

They had little worries of them being attacked even in the absence of ten of the finer fighters. As they had explained to Cap over and over, the Carpans would not, for any reason, travel underground. They hated the tunnels, feared them to the point of mass hysteria.

They reached the clearing that housed the farmhouse and the few crops that they had grown.

That’s when they saw them. Carpans.

"Defilers!" Shio screamed over the roar of flame. "You fight us in the open with robots and tanks, yet you come in person to slay our elderly? Feh! You are not only the devil’s spawn, you are cowards! Attack my brothers!"

"No, wait!" Captain America tried to delay the battle. He was feeling lost, swept up into a tidal wave that he couldn’t stop. He’d agreed to help the Olanans with their rebellion because he saw the damage that the Carpans had laid onto the Olanans. It tore him apart to see women and children without food - to see the ruling class exploiting the workers.

No individual should be slave to his government.

He was angry at the Carpans for what they had done, but he was still too much in the dark to fight them with the passion that the Olanans had - or with the passion that he fought the Axis in World War II.

But his words went unheeded. The Olanans had leapt ahead and engaged the Carpans.

Cap was left with one option - to follow them into battle and try to regain his footing there. It wasn’t going to be easy.

It never was.

Wyoming - Inside Mount Beaulieu

The Falcon awoke.

He ached. He tried to open his eyes. All he could see was green.

He fell back unconscious.

Outside, Sharon Carter cursed Steve Rogers for disappearing on them. * The Falcon had been captured by HYDRA troops. Worse, they were waiting for him. Did they know they were here because of their own security or because someone had tipped them off? Didn’t matter now. Rescuing the Falcon was what mattered.

* ( Last issue - Red and White and Blue Mark )

HYDRA troops swarmed the hill, but only inside the dark area. Sharon moved quietly, keeping to the shadows. This whole moment felt wrong. Where were all the hikers? Why weren’t they panicking? At the very least, she should be able to hear them screaming as they ran back down the hill. But there was nothing but the sounds of HYDRA troops canvassing the area looking for her.

She moved deeper into the dark area. She should leave. HYDRA clearly didn’t want to move outside the dark area and risk SHIELD detection.

She wanted to spit on the ground. It was all part of the game that these super agencies played with one another. HYDRA knew SHIELD was watching them. SHIELD knew that HYDRA was here. But HYDRA wasn’t going to do anything to flaunt that they were here and SHIELD wasn’t going to flaunt that they knew HYDRA was here. They both watched each other move, counter moving in private, but never out in the open. Even though they both knew the other one was there, to admit it openly was tantamount to inviting battle.

And somewhere along the line, they were both watching AIM, who was watching them both.

It made Sharon sick, but she played the game. She admitted she liked the intrigue and the espionage - she loved every challenge. Which is why, she supposed, she was so attracted to Steve …

During the cold nights she told herself she played the game because playing the game the way they did kept more people alive thank risking everything by just walking up to every HYDRA facility with 1,000 SHIELD troops and seeing who had the bigger guns. SHIELD didn’t have enough troops to take on both HYDRA and AIM, and neither AIM nor HYDRA wanted to be the one to take a war to SHIELD because, win or lose, the other agency would be waiting for that battle to end and then join it themselves and take an easy victory.

So they kept on with the espionage and the minor skirmishes and Sharon supposed it was the way to go.

Of course, right now, with the Falcon and possibly Cap being held prisoner inside this mountain, it didn’t seem like such a good idea.

The Planet Beckque

Captain America joined the fray, but the battle was already over. There was only six Carpan soldiers and they were no match for the ten Olanans. Shio raised his knife to strike down a Carpan.

"No, please!" the Carpan screamed. It reminded Cap of the Nazi officers that beat the enemy down relentlessly and cruelly, but then once they were captured, begged and pleaded endlessly. It was the whine of a bully. It made his stomach lurch.

Shio plunged his knife downwards for the killing blow. "Take this, dev-!"

SP-TAAAANG!

Shio’s knife shattered against the hard alloy of Captain America’s shield.

"What is this?" Shio asked incredulously.

"No killing." Cap said defiantly as the shield returned to him.

"But these are-!"

"I don’t care. No killing. None. End of story."

"Bah!" snorted Shio. "This is war. Perhaps you do not understand what happens in war, stranger!"

"I understand perfectly, Shio," Cap spoke flatly, letting everyone know that there was no doubting his word. "I’ve been in war. A great and terrible war. I know the pain you suffer watching your friends die. I know the struggle to fight against all odds. I know true evil the likes of which I hope you never have to know. Through it all, I fought as hard and as long as I could alongside my compatriots, but I never once intentionally killed a single man."

"That is foolish!"

"No, that is showing your opponent -"

CRASH!

Everyone turned to look at the source of the noise.

"See what your delay has cost us, stranger!" Shio accused. "That twenty foot tall robot is the height of Carpan technology! It will kill us all!"

Cap sized the robot up. It wasn’t twenty feet at all. More like sixteen feet when it’s legs were fully extended. It moved slowly, deliberately. Cap could hear it’s gears grinding as it walked.

The way the Olanans gaped at the site of the giant robot, Cap’s mind had automatically figured the "Devil Bot" to be current level Sentinel-class. It wasn’t. It was more like … Cap tried to place the sight of the bot walking awkwardly, his mind searching through years and years of battles and research.

It was just like a low level Nazi robot he had fought back in the ‘40’s.

Looking at the Devil Bot with this new perspective, Cap saw the flaws even more clearly than he had before: the joints. The knee joints and the elbow joints most of all. He went to work, firing his shield at the right knee joint-

SP-TAAANG!

The Devil Bot was off balance. The Sentinel of Liberty leapt, swinging his feat around to connect with the same knee. The entire Devil Bot shifted it’s weight over that knee as it lost it’s balance. Cap jumped to the side - in the direction of where his shield had landed - as the Devil Bot fell to the ground. With shield in hand, Cap leapt up onto the Devil Bot’s back and used his shield as a battering ram, smashing the arms apart at the elbow joint.

The Devil Bot whirred and clicked below him, but without hands, it couldn’t stand.

"These things have humans inside them?" Cap asked.

The Carpans and the Olanans all looked at Cap with wide eyed stares. Somehow they found the will to all shake their head No.

"Let’s bring these folks back to camp, then," Cap said, pointing to the Carpans. "But no rough stuff with them. Treat them with respect. They’re prisoners and we’ll afford them the same "luxuries" that any of us have. That means they get the same amount of food as you Olanans do - no less. It’s that or we allow them to escape. Your call, Shio."

"Uh," Shio had to shake himself out of his fog. His face showed that he was clearly impressed with this red, white and blue stranger. "Sure, Captain, treat them as equals. Not a problem."

"It’s settled then. Let’s move back to our main base."

Mount Beaulieu

Sharon Carter knew she had to get out of here as quickly as possible because she almost could not believe what she was seeing. She saw, from her hiding place ten feet up in a tree, HYDRA shock troops combing the woods, looking for her.

That wasn’t anything shocking. What was shocking to her, however, were the mass amounts of tourists that walked up the main mountain trail, into the dark area and right by all the HYDRA troops without a care in the world.

Even more bizarre, the HYDRA troops paid no heed to the hikers.

She watched the hikers move up and enter various caves. She watched hikers exit different caves.

She watched this off-and-on procession for a full twenty minutes, almost awed by the simplicity of the plan.

HYDRA was using these hikers to transport items into their secret hideaway unseen by prying eyes - be they SHIELDs or AIMs or the Secret Empires. It was brilliant. Who’d notice hikers? No one.

It made Sharon shudder. Just how long had this been going on? The dark area had only been under SHIELD surveillance for two months, but that didn’t mean this had only been going on for that long. This could have been going on for years, with the dark area constructed only recently because the intensity of the operation had picked up. Whatever they were building or planning must be almost at completion.

She knew she had a decision to make. Rescue Falcon or alert SHIELD.

Just like when Steve disappeared, she knew she had only one choice. She said a quick prayer for Sam and made her way out of the woods, slowly, deliberately, but out of the woods and away from Sam nonetheless.

She hated leaving a man behind and she swore to any god that would listen that she would not abandon Sam the way she had been abandoned all those years ago by SHIELD.

The Planet Beckque

And so it went in the Olanan rebellion against their oppressive Carpan masters over the next several days. Cap and a small band of Olanans would head out from their main base to make hit-and-run attacks on selected locations. Cap taught them strategy - where to attack and why.

The Olanans bonded with Cap - and Cap came to think of them, if not as friends, then surely as trusted allies.

It was a problem he had sometimes - knowing when an ally became a friend.

Most of his friends were Avengers, but being an Avenger didn’t automatically make them a friend. When did the line get crossed?

He felt good about helping the Olanans, about restoring the rights of the individuals. The Olanans talked constantly about regaining their rights and protecting their wives and children. They had locked the Carpans away in a large cell and Cap made sure they were well fed (as well fed as possible, at least). They weren’t comfortable, but then again, neither were the Olanans or himself.

Steve spent a lot of time exploring the planet when he was away from them. While he knew he was doing good, he also wanted to get home. That was still his number one priority. He prodded the Olanans for information about anything that might give him the means to return home: strange occurrences, local legends, visits from aliens … anything.

He investigated several claims, but nothing ever came of it. It was dead end after dead end.

Steve felt like the world of his apartment … Bill Anderson … Sharon … the Avengers … his freelance art career … was from another lifetime.

Cap’s actions did not go unnoticed by the Carpans. Their ruling council met every night to discuss what the stranger had done that day. They were concerned about the Olanans newfound ally. He was single-handedly tilting the balance of the war in the Olanans favor.

"What do we do?" one of the seven members of the ruling council asked. "We must do something, even if we fail."

"We have no choice. We go into the tunnels and hunt him down."

Dead silence.

"B-but we can’t. The tunnels are-"

"The tunnels are where he keeps our friends. We must conquer our fears and slay the stranger! To the tunnels!"

"To the tunnels!"

Seven knives crashed down and stuck themselves into a recon photo of Captain America.

to be continued …

AMERICAN GRAFFITI

letters c/o mariner2@tiac.net

Next Issue: YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION?, CONCLUSION! Captain America learns why the Carpans fear the Underground Tunnels! (If anyone writes in and says "Carpan Tunnel Syndrome" I’m going to send Osborn Inc. pumpkin bombs to your computer.) The Falcon in captivity! Sharon Carter’s suicide run to save him! Do NOT miss the final chapter to this MV1 classic-in-the-making!

-- Mark... 25.November.1998