by Alex Irvine
Because you would have destroyed Asgard, Thor thought. Just to impress our father, you would have annihilated all the Nine Realms. “So you took the world I love as recompense for your imagined slights? No. The Earth is under my protection, Loki.”
Loki chuckled. “And you’re doing a marvelous job with that. The humans slaughter each other in droves while you idly fret. I mean to rule them, and why should I not?”
“You think yourself above them?”
“Well, yes.”
“Then you miss the truth of ruling, brother,” Thor said sadly. “A throne would suit you ill.”
Suddenly furious, Loki raged at Thor. “I’ve seen worlds you’ve never known about! I have grown, Odinson, in my exile. I have seen the true power of the Tesseract, and when I wield it—”
“Who showed you this power?” Thor interrupted. “Who controls the would-be king?”
“I am a king!” Loki screamed.
Stepping right up to his brother, Thor shouted back. “Not here! You give up the Tesseract! You give up this poisonous dream!” Then he softened. “You come home.”
“I don’t have it,” Loki said. Furious, Thor brought Mjolnir to his hand, ready for battle. “You need the cube to send me home, but I’ve sent it off, I know not where.”
This was a lie, Thor knew it. “You listen well, brother—”
He was cut off by Iron Man, rocketing in from the side at close to the speed of sound and hitting Thor with the force of a train.
CHAPTER 12
Tony braked and skidded to a halt as the Asgardian rolled away from him, tearing up trees and brush as he went. He got to his feet and extended a warning hand. “Do not touch me again,” he said.
Tony flipped up his faceplate. “Then don’t take my stuff.”
“You have no idea what you’re dealing with.”
“Uh, Shakespeare in the Park?” Tony joked. “Doth Mother know you weareth her drapes?”
“This is beyond you, metal man,” Thor said. “Loki will face Asgardian justice.”
“If he gives up the cube, he’s all yours. Until then…” Tony’s faceplate clamped back down. “Stay out of the way.”
He turned to walk back to a place where he could make a clean takeoff. “Tourist,” he muttered.
That was the last straw, apparently, because the next thing Tony knew, the Asgardian’s hammer had hit him about as hard as he’d ever been hit in his life. The force of the blow carried him through the trunk of a tree and laid him out flat in the dirt.
“Okay,” he said. It was on.
He got up and hit the Asgardian with a repulsor blast, but that didn’t keep him down for long. The Asgardian got up, raised his hammer high, and brought down a bolt of lightning, channeling it straight into Tony’s suit. Inside the helmet, every heads-up display went nuts. Systems shorted out, and Tony was having a hard time moving. “Power at… four hundred percent capacity,” Jarvis said calmly.
“How about that,” Tony said. He took advantage of the overcharge and unleashed another repulsor blast that drained the excess power and blew the Asgardian farther away into the forest. The Asgardian came back at him, flying through the air, and Tony flew to meet him. They swerved through the air, pounding on each other and shattering trees and rocks as they hit them. When they came back to ground, they kept grappling, exchanging punches that dented Tony’s armor and caused cascading alerts through all of his systems. The Asgardian caught both of Tony’s forearms. His grip was strong enough to start to crumple Tony’s armor. Tony got free by firing a repulsor blast into his face, but they closed on each other again and the Asgardian nearly crushed Tony flat with a hammer blow. He jetted out of the way at the last moment and circled around for another go.
As Tony reared back for a punch and the Asgardian prepared to answer with his hammer, Captain America’s shield sang out of the darkness, deflecting hard off the Asgardian’s hammer and Tony’s gauntlet before returning with perfect accuracy to Cap’s waiting hand. They both looked up to see him standing on a nearby outcropping of rock.
“Hey!” he said, like a father showing up to break up a fight between two of his sons. “That’s enough!”
He dropped down to the ground next to them. “Now I don’t know what you plan on doing here—”
“I have come here to put an end to Loki’s schemes,” Thor said.
“Then prove it,” Cap said. “Put that hammer down.”
“Uh, no, bad call,” Iron Man said. “He loves his hammer—”
The Asgardian interrupted Tony by smashing him out of the way with a backhand swing. “You want me to put the hammer down?” he roared, and leaped high into the air, bringing his hammer down toward Captain America.
Cap got low and held his shield up.
The impact of the hammer on the unbreakable shield sent out a shock wave that smashed every tree within a hundred yards to kindling. The Asgardian rebounded from the force of the blow, sprawling on his back. For a moment, there was silence, broken only by their heavy breathing and the sound of tree branches crashing down to earth.
Then Captain America said, “Are we done here?”
Tony powered down. As much as he hated to admit it, Cap was right. They were fighting over nothing, wasting time while their enemies got closer to using the Tesseract. Thor leaped back up the side of the mountain and picked up Loki. Tony and Cap waited while Natasha brought the Quinjet around. At least all the blown-down trees gave her an easy location to aim for.
CHAPTER 13
Bruce looked up from his work, taking a break from the delicate operation of constructing a sensor that could detect the Tesseract no matter where in the world it was being held. He looked out the window of his lab just as a squad of armed S.H.I.E.L.D. agents escorted Loki past. Loki gave Bruce a knowing smile as he went by. Bruce wasn’t sure why, but he didn’t like it.
He rubbed his eyes and got back to work.
Loki was sealed into a glass-walled cell, approachable only by a catwalk. At the other end of the catwalk stood Nick Fury, looking down at the control panel linked to the cell’s revolving door. “In case it’s unclear,” Fury said, “if you try to escape, if you so much as scratch that glass…” He touched a button on the panel, and the floor below the cell opened up like an iris. Loki looked down… all the way to the ground, thousands of feet below. “Thirty thousand feet, straight down in a steel trap. You get how that works?” Riffing on what Loki had said to him before, in the lab in New Mexico, Fury pointed at Loki and said, “Ant.” Then he pointed at the control panel and said, “Boot.”
Loki chuckled. “It’s an impressive cage,” he said. “Not built, I think, for me.”
“Built for something a lot stronger than you,” Fury said.
“Oh, I’ve heard. A mindless beast. Makes play he’s still a man. How desperate are you, that you call on such lost creatures to defend you?”
“How desperate am I?” Fury echoed. He walked slowly over the catwalk to stand in front of Loki. “You threaten my world with war. You steal a force you can’t hope to control. You talk about peace, but you kill because it’s fun. You have made me very desperate. You might not be glad that you did.”
“Ooh,” Loki said. “It burns you to have come so close. To have the Tesseract, to have power, unlimited power, and for what? A warm light for all mankind to share… and then to be reminded what real power is.”
“Well, let me know if real power wants a magazine or something,” Fury said, and walked away.
Loki knew he had been heard throughout the ship. He could hear the echoes of the speakers, and even if he had not, he always knew when people were listening to him. That was part of his power, to make them listen… and to make each of them hear something just a little different. Just what he wanted them to hear. Perhaps he was in a cage right now, but he had been in cages before. Not once had one been able to hold him for long.
“He really grows on you, doesn’t he?” Bruce said. They were gathered outside the detention area
to debrief and figure out what to do now that they had captured Loki. None of them believed the mission was over. It had all been a little too easy.
“Loki’s going to drag this out,” Cap said. “Thor, what’s his play?”
“He has an army called the Chitauri,” Thor said. “They’re not of Asgard, nor any world known. He means to lead them against your people. They will win him the Earth, in return, I suspect, for the Tesseract.”
“An army,” Cap repeated. “From outer space.”
“So he’s building another portal,” Bruce said. “That’s what he needs Erik Selvig for.”
“Selvig?” Thor asked.
“He’s an astrophysicist,” Bruce said, thinking Thor needed an explanation.
“He’s a friend,” Thor said.
“Loki has him under some kind of spell,” Natasha said. “Along with one of ours.” She didn’t say who.
“I want to know why Loki let us take him,” Cap said. “He’s not leading an army from here.”
“I don’t think we should be focusing on Loki,” Bruce said. “That guy’s brain is a bag full of cats. You can smell the crazy on him.”
Thor took a step toward Bruce. “Have a care how you speak,” he warned. “Loki is beyond reason, but he is of Asgard… and he is my brother.”
“He killed eighty people in two days,” Natasha pointed out.
Acknowledging this, Thor backed down a little. “He’s adopted.”
Bruce was already moving on to the problem at hand. “I think it’s about the mechanics,” he said. “Iridium. What do they need the iridium for?” They knew Barton had stolen a supply of iridium from under the Stuttgart Museum, taking advantage of Loki’s diversion. But they didn’t yet know what Selvig could use it for.
“It’s a stabilizing agent,” Tony Stark said as he entered with Coulson. “It means the portal won’t collapse on itself like it did at S.H.I.E.L.D.” Thor had turned to meet Tony as he came in. The Asgardian’s posture was aggressive, to say the least. “No hard feelings, Point Break,” Tony said. “You’ve got a mean swing.”
Thor didn’t understand the joke, but he understood the point of what Tony was saying. He let it go. It wasn’t the first time he had fought with someone who turned out to be an ally.
Tony went on. “Also, iridium will mean the portal can open as wide and stay open as long as Loki wants.” He had wandered out into Fury’s command station, and now he put a hand over one eye and tried to watch all of the monitors. “How does Fury even see these?”
“He turns,” Maria Hill said. Clearly she didn’t think it was funny.
“Sounds exhausting,” Tony said. “Anyway, the rest of the raw materials Agent Barton can get his hands on pretty easily. The only major component he still needs is a power source with high energy density. Something to kick-start the cube.”
“When did you become an expert in thermonuclear astrophysics?” Hill asked. She was still irritated by his mocking of Nick Fury.
Without missing a beat, Tony said, “Last night. Selvig’s notes. The extraction theory papers. Am I the only one who did the reading?”
“Does Loki need any particular kind of power source?” Cap asked. Like the rest of them, he was learning to ignore Tony’s constant joking.
“He’d have to heat the cube to a hundred and twenty million Kelvin just to break through the Coulomb barrier,” Bruce said. He was talking about the physical barriers to creating a portal between different places in space and time.
“Unless Selvig has figured out how to stabilize the quantum tunneling effect,” Tony said.
Bruce shrugged. “Well, if he could do that, he could achieve heavy ion fusion at any reactor on the planet.”
“Finally, someone who speaks English,” Tony said.
Cap looked at Thor. “Is that what just happened?”
Tony reached out to shake Bruce’s hand. “It’s good to finally meet you, Dr. Banner. Your work in antielectron collisions is unparalleled. And I’m a huge fan of the way you lose control and turn into an enormous green rage monster.”
“Thanks,” Bruce said. He didn’t look too excited about Tony mentioning the Hulk.
“Dr. Banner is only here to track the cube,” Fury said as he came in. “I was hoping you might join him.”
“Let’s start with that stick of his,” Cap said. “It may be magical, but it works an awful lot like a Hydra weapon.” He’d seen plenty of those in action when he was fighting the Red Skull in Europe. Loki’s scepter seemed to use the same kind of energy, or at least that’s what it looked like to him.
“I don’t know about that, but it is powered by the cube,” Fury said. “And I would like to know how Loki used it to turn two of the sharpest men I know into his personal flying monkeys.”
“Monkeys?” Thor asked. “I do not understand.”
“I do!” Steve said. “I understood that reference!” It was a small victory for him. Most of his slang was seventy years out of date.
“Shall we play, Doctor?” Tony asked Bruce.
Bruce gestured toward the corridor that led to his lab. The scepter was there and so was all of their equipment. “This way, sir.”
CHAPTER 14
Once they arrived in the lab, Bruce got straight to work while Tony looked over the equipment. The doctor scanned a device over Loki’s scepter. “The gamma rays are definitely consistent with Selvig’s reports on the Tesseract. But it’s going to take weeks to process.”
Tony was already looking at the structure of the S.H.I.E.L.D. computers they had available. “If we bypass their mainframe and route directly to the Homer cluster, we can clock this at around six hundred teraflops,” he said. That was a lot faster than what Fury was working with as the system stood.
“All I packed was a toothbrush,” Bruce chuckled.
“You know, you should come by Stark Tower sometime. Top ten floors, all R & D,” Tony said. “You’d love it.”
“Thanks, but the last time I was in New York, I kind of… broke Harlem.”
“Well, I promise a stress-free environment. No tension, no surprises…” As he spoke, Tony walked behind Bruce and gave him a little zap with an electrical instrument.
“Ow!” Bruce said.
Tony looked closely at him. “Nothing?” He’d been testing Bruce to see how well he controlled the Hulk. The little shock hadn’t provoked any kind of unusual reaction, which Tony seemed to find a little disappointing.
“Are you nuts?” said Captain America as he came into the lab.
“Jury’s out,” Tony said. Turning back to Bruce, he asked, “You really have got a lid on it, haven’t you? What’s your secret? Mellow jazz, bongo drums…?”
“Is everything a joke to you?” Cap said.
“Funny things are,” Tony said.
“Threatening the safety of everyone on this ship isn’t funny. No offense, Doc.”
“It’s all right. I wouldn’t have come on board if I couldn’t handle pointy things and little surprises.”
Tony shook his head. “You’re tiptoeing, big man. You need to strut.”
“And you need to focus on the problem, Mr. Stark,” Captain America said. What was Tony doing, trying to get Bruce to turn into the Hulk? What good would that do any of them? They had more important things to do than stand around while Tony Stark played stupid games.
“Do you think I’m not?” Tony asked him. He paused and then fired off a series of questions. “Why did Fury call us in? Why now? Why not before? What isn’t he telling us? I can’t do the equation unless I have all the variables.”
Cap wasn’t following his line of thinking. None of that mattered to him. “You think Fury’s hiding something?”
“He’s a spy. Captain, he’s the spy. His secrets have secrets.” Tony waved at Bruce, who was buried in his instruments. “It’s bugging him, too. Isn’t it?”
“Ahh, I just want to finish my work here,” Bruce said, trying to stay out of it.
“Doctor,” Cap said. He wasn’
t going to let this go.
Bruce sighed and took off his glasses. “‘A warm light for all mankind,’” he quoted. “Loki’s jab at Fury about the cube.”
“I heard it,” Cap said.
“I think that was meant for you,” Bruce said to Tony. “Even if Barton didn’t tell Loki about the tower, it was still all over the news.”
“The Stark Tower? That big ugly…” Tony looked up. “Building?” Cap finished. “In New York?”
“It’s powered by an Arc Reactor, a self-sustaining energy source,” Bruce pointed out. “That building will run itself for, what? A year?”
“That’s just the prototype,” Tony said. “I’m kind of the only name in clean energy right now,” he explained to Cap. “That’s what he’s getting at.”
Cap didn’t know what he meant by “clean energy,” but he could tell it was another of Tony’s typical boasts, so he let it pass.
“So why didn’t S.H.I.E.L.D. bring him in on the Tesseract project?” Bruce asked. “What are they doing in the energy business in the first place?”
“I should probably look into that once my decryption program finishes breaking into all of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s secure files.” Tony looked at a tiny computer tablet, barely bigger than a credit card.
“I’m sorry,” Cap said. “Did you say—”
“Jarvis has been running it since I hit the bridge,” Tony said. “In a few hours, I’ll know every dirty secret S.H.I.E.L.D. has ever tried to hide.”
“Yet you’re confused about why they didn’t want you around,” Cap said.
“An intelligence organization that fears intelligence?” Tony said. “That’s historically… not awesome.”
Cap felt his temper starting to rise. He got it under control. There was one angle on their situation that none of them had talked about yet. “I think Loki’s trying to wind us up,” he said. “This is a man who means to start a war, and if we don’t stay focused, he’ll succeed. We have orders. We should follow them.”