If someone puts their hands on you, make sure they never put their hands on anybody else again.
–Malcolm X

ASSAULT ON THE VAULT

Part I

By Desmond Reddick

Stratoplane
Cloaked 30 feet over The Vault
Rocky Mountain Range, Colorado

“Like a bunker buster, yes,” Thin Man said to the assembled team behind him as he prepared the on-board armaments. “We can’t just blast into the medical wing like we did last time. It’s topside, so it’s close to the helipad. We’re going to open a hole that puts us right in their cell block fifty feet underground.”

“Shee-it!” Bandit whistled.

“The Israelis use similar weapons to collapse cave structures,” Batal spoke quietly and measuredly.

“Right, then you all seek out Legionnaires and place the disruption disks anywhere in the vicinity of the control panel for their cells. That gets our men out.”

“And what kind of resistance are we expecting?” Red Wolf asked.

“It’s likely to be as bad or worse than it was last time. Which means as many Starktech Guardsmen as they can throw at us and possibly ULTIMATUM troops and V-Battalion members. It won’t be pretty.”

“And, uh…you expect the four of us to take on an army with no team training?” Bandit asked. He wasn’t afraid, just sniffing out bullshit.

“No, I expect you to help me release my friends, who will be more than happy to help us take on an army,” Thin Man said.

They sat in silence as Thin Man finished typing out programming instructions for the Stratoplane on a small hardened holographic screen, like the ship a construct of Kahalian technology.

“Besides,” Thin Man said again, turning to look back at his new team. “We’re going to have some help.”

“They’re awaiting charges, Colonel,” Bishop said curtly. He respected the man in front of him but was beginning to grow tired of being questioned about how he ran his prison.

“With all due respect, Mr. Bishop, I have fought alongside most of those prisoners long before you were born..”

“With all due respect, sir,” the sneer came into Bishop’s voice more readily, “right now is still long before I will be born.”

“Good lord, one of those!” Jim Hammond squeezed the bridge of his nose between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand as he kept pace with Bishop down the hallway of the administrative wing. The warden of The Vault couldn’t possibly be giving Hammond a headache; as a synthetic android, headaches were below him. Frustration, however, was something he could feel in spades. And being faced with time travellers when he was trying to finagle a head-to-head with supposed terrorist prisoners was enough to be considered ultra-frustrating.

“Look, Mr. Bishop, you are one of Xavier’s men, am I right?”

Bishop nodded.

“I had a great deal of respect for Professor Xavier. I would like to think that it was reciprocated. Can I leverage that to get at least a little bit of face-time with the Liberty Legion?”

Bishop thought about Cyclops and the favor he gave him. Funny how that turned out. Bishop would never have guessed Havok to turn on his family. But desperate times and all that, he supposed.*

[*See: X-Men #50-52 and Astonishing X-Men #7]

“I can give you five minutes with one of them at their cell,” Bishop conceded. “You can choose which one when we get there. They’re all in Block H.”

REET! REET! REET!

The alarm cut the air and made even the synthetic man jump in shock.

“Jailbreak?” Human Torch asked.

“No, that’s an interior breach alarm. We’re under attack! Again!”

“We’re at your disposal, Bishop,” Hammond said looking back at his colleagues. “Let’s put an end to this, team!”

KRA-KOOOOM!!!

Dust poured through the hallway in a wave swallowing everything in its wake.

The newly-assembled Liberty Legion set about locating their targets. They placed the steel discs Amadeus Cho gave them on the walls of the prison beside their cell door control panels.

They stood guard, waiting for the disruption disks to work.

KLANG! KLANG! KLANG!

“Bandit!” Thin Man pointed into the rolling dust cloud. “Now!”

The two men, wearing infrared goggles, focused their powers at the five oncoming Guardsmen. The Guardsmen, though they realized through their own infrared vision that the two interlopers could see them approaching, did not worry about Bandit’s powers. They expected that their suits would not only protect them from the electricity, but that Stark’s patented insulation would even absorb the power and convert it to repulsor power.

And they would have. Had Thin Man not opened subspace portals through their suits to their unprotected bodies. The electrical charges were drawn through the portals directly onto the chests of the men inside the Guardsmen armor thanks to the negative charge Thin Man rigged to work with the subspace projectors.

The five Guardsmen hit the ground unconscious the very second the disruptor disks clicked.

Blue Diamond, Challenger, and Red Raven stepped out of their cells wearing their charcoal-grey prison jumpsuits. Thin Man closed his eyes for a second and tried to access a subspace portal out of the prison, but, as he predicted, there was a signal blocking his ability to do so. It was evident that he was still able to use his powers inside the facility, so he assumed thankfully that there was a containment field around the prison.

Thin Man threw the three small duffel bags he brought with him at his newly freed teammates.

“Suit up,” he said, turning to join the fight that was sure to start, “there’s no easy escape. We need to fight for the time being!”

“Twister!” The voice burst from somewhere beyond the dust that still obscured their vision. “Clear us a field of vision!”

An unnatural wind picked up immediately, clearing the path between the blind combatants.

“Shee-it,” Bandit whistled, quieter this time.

Blue Diamond chuckled as he sidled up to him.

“No kiddin’,” he said.

Lined up in front of them in the massive courtyard were dozens of Guardsmen—likely all that were on duty—an entire platoon of ULTIMATUM soldiers, a group of costumed heroes joined by a giant robot with a small man on top of its head, and another group of heroes led by the original Human Torch.

“This is going to be soooo sweet!” Superpatriot said clenching his hands into fists.

“Wait for my mark!” Flag Smasher took point holding his huge studded mace. “We’re going to wipe them from the face of the world!”

“It would appear that the odds have been stacked against us here,” Batal said assuming a fighting stance while Red Wolf nodded in agreement.

“Nice team you assembled here, Bruce,” Challenger said, “was stating the obvious one of the criteria?”

“Hey, uh…Thin Man?” Bandit asked.

“Yes?”

“Are they the ones that are here to help us?” Bandit pointed to Human Torch and his team who stood farther away from the other attackers.

“No,” Thin Man replied.

The dust cloud blown into the far wall of the prison accumulated above the black smoke from a smoldering chunk of insulation and began to take shape in the air above the Liberty Legion’s enemies.

“They are!”

Out of the smoke a green-skinned bald man wrapped in a large, dramatic, black and red cape floated down from the ceiling while a blue-skinned man rode an ice bridge out of the blackened smoke.

“Long time no see, Bruce, Elton,” Jack Frost said before looking to Human Torch. “Jim. It seems that this is a little bit of an unfair fight. The Vision and I are here to even the odds!”