Читать онлайн «Thor Meets Captain America»

Loki’s dwarf rolled its eyes and moaned pitifully as the sub levelled off at periscope depth. With stubby fingers the gnarled, neckless creature pulled at its yellow-stained beard and stared up at the creaking pipes.

A thing of dark forest depths and hidden caves, Chris Turing thought as he watched the dwarf. It wasn’t meant for this place.

Only men would choose such a way to die, in a leaking steel coffin, on a hopeless attempt to blow up Valhalla.

But then, it wasn’t like Loki’s dwarf had been given any choice in being here.

Why, Chris wondered suddenly—not for the first time. Why do such creatures exist? Wasn’t evil doing well enough in the world before they came to help it along?

The submarine’s engines rumbled and Chris shrugged aside the thought. Even imagining a world without Aesir and their servants in it was by now as hard as remembering a time without war.

Chris sat strapped in his crash seat—he could hear the swishing of icy Baltic water just behind the tissue-thin bulkhead—and watched the gnome huddle atop a crate of hydrogen bomb parts. It drew its clublike feet up away from the sloshing brine on the deck, scrunching higher on the black box. Another moan escaped the dwarf as the Razorfin’s periscope went up, and more water gurgled in through the pressure relief lines.

Major Marlowe looked up from the assault rifle he was reassembling for the thirtieth time. “What’s eating the damn dwarf now?” the marine officer asked.

Chris shook his head. “Search me. The fact that he’s out of his element, maybe? After all, the ancient Norse thought of the deep as a place for sunken boats and fishes. ”

“I thought you were some sort of expert on the Aesir. And you aren’t even sure why the thing is foaming at the mouth like that?”

Chris could only shrug and repeat himself. “I said I don’t know. Why don’t you go over and ask him yourself?”

Marlowe gave Chris a sour glance, as if to say that he didn’t much care for the joke.

From his left, Chris’s assistant, Zap O’Leary leaned out and grinned at Marlowe. “Dig it, dad-dyo,” O’Leary said to the marine. “There’s an Aes over by the scope, dope. Be my guest. Write him runes in his spitoon. ” The eccentric technician gestured over toward the navy men, clustered around the sub’s periscope. Next to the Skipper stood a hulking figure clad in furs and leather, towering over the submariners.

Marlowe blinked back at O’Leary in bewilderment. The marine did not seem offended as much as confused. “What did he say?” he asked Chris.

Chris wished he weren’t seated between the two. “Zap suggests that you test it by spitting in Loki’s eye. ”

Marlowe grimaced. O’Leary might as well have suggested he stick his hand into a scram-jet engine. At that moment one of the marines crammed into the passageway behind them made the mistake of dropping a cartridge into the foul leak-water underfoot. Marlowe vented his frustration on the poor grunt in richly inventive profanity.