Daisy Johnson walked into Director Coulson's office with no idea what to expect. Her partner, Mack, was still recovering from his injuries, so she'd had a hard time keeping busy as of late. Besides that one stint with the Wolverine a month earlier, there had been little excitement around S.H.I.E.L.D. for her lately. She was getting a bit tired of Fitz and his ideas on how to make the world better through gadgets, and Simmons yammering on about her newest social insights into the integration of human and inhuman societies. So, when Coulson told her he had a little project for her, she breathed a sigh of relief.
"Daisy," Coulson said as she entered, "I've got a bluebook case for you."
"UFOs?" Daisy asked. Project Bluebook was an old CIA operation looking into cases of alien visitation to the United States, most of which ended in some sort of debunking. Swamp gas, weather balloons, or LSD.
"Montana," Coulson confirmed. "Some old rancher said he saw blinking lights and he had a few steers that were cut into strange pieces. I'm thinking that there's not as much money in ranching as there is in book deals to conspiracy nuts, but we said we'd check it out."
"Why SHIELD?" Daisy asked. "Don't the FBI have their X-Files division or something?"
"Would you trust X-Files if it turned out to be another Loki?" Coulson asked.
"I guess not," she agreed. "But why send me alone then?"
"Because this one is probably just another hoax and it's better than sitting around the office, isn't it?"
Daisy was on a plane the next morning for Montana. She drove the rental car to a rural community and parked at the address she had been given. The rusty mailbox read Maxwell on the side. She went up the stone walkway and knocked on the farmhouse door.
"Are you Frank Maxwell?" Daisy asked the older man who answered the door.
"That would be me," he said with a smile, opening the door a little wider.
"I'm Agent Daisy Johnson with S.H.I.E.L.D. I'm here about the call you placed last week," Daisy told him.
"Oh, are you here with that other guy?" Frank asked, curious.
"What other guy?"
"Big fella, long wool coat. Don't remember his name. He said he was here to look at the crash," Frank said with a shrug.
"There's a crash site?" Daisy was a little surprised to hear this. Supposedly there were just lights in the sky. Now there was a crash site.
"It's out that way," he pointed out around the back side of his house. "Feel free to go have a look. I ain't going anywhere near it, no way, no how. My cows have been killed off one by one since that thing fell from the sky. Whatever is in there...shotgun does nothing to stop it..but go look at it if that's what you people do. "
"Okay, I guess I'll go do that," Daisy said, glad that maybe there might be something of interest happening on this trip after all.
Daisy made her way around the back side of the house. She had to go past a barn, over a fence, across a field, up a small hill. As she came up over the top of the hill she saw the crashed ship in the middle of the field in the distance. It didn't look like any ship she had ever seen before but it was definitely alien and was twice as large as the barn she had just gone past. Daisy knew she should probably call Coulson and let him know that this wasn't a hoax but curiosity moved her forward. She'd just take a look at the ship and then call.
Daisy crossed the distance to the ship, which was black metallic and crescent shaped. There were markings on the outside in an unknown writing. Daisy followed the ship around the outside, looking for some sort of door or entrance. Eventually she found a crack in the smooth surface which seemed to be some sort of hatch door. There was no handle or obvious way to open it from the outside so she moved on, further around the ship. She hadn't gone far when a noise startled her. She turned around and the hatch door was opening with a mechanical hiss. Daisy raised a hand to defend herself and reached for a gun with her free hand.
A man walked out of the hatch door. He didn't look alien. In fact he was wearing a familiar looking wool coat.
"Victor?" Daisy said, stunned to find him here of all places.
Victor turned to her. "What the hell are you doing here Daisy?"
"Me? This is my job. This is what SHIELD does. What are YOU doing here?" Daisy asked, her hand still raised and gun still ready.
"Salvage," he said with a shrug.
"Salvage?" she said with disbelief.
He nodded. "I got people who will pay a lot for alien tech. They just needed someone who could deal with possible hostile aliens to get it for them. Now I smelled you coming a mile away. I just came out here to tell you to get the hell out of here. This is my ship now, not SHIELD's. You need to leave."
"I can't just leave," Daisy said. She couldn't just let him have the alien tech. There was no telling who he would sell it to.
"Then I guess we're gonna have a problem."
"Look, you can't just take stuff off this ship like it's yours," Daisy decided quickly that she had a better chance of reasoning with him than she did of fighting him.
"Sure I can. Who's gonna stop me, little girl? You?" Victor said, taking a step closer to her.
Daisy took a step back in response. Victor started to grin, amused that he could scare her. A noise inside the ship ended his smile. He immediately raised a gun that had been at his side, took aim into the ship and fired. Daisy heard a shrill scream and what sounded like a lot of feet running away.
"What was that?" she asked.
"I don't know. There are a bunch of those bastards in there though and they aren't so good at dying." he said irritated.
"How many?" she asked, a little concerned about the open door of the ship and the people in this community who might be in danger.
"A bunch," he repeated, still irritated.
"Well are they friendly?" she wasn't happy about this at all. "You can't just shoot at an alien species that might be friendly."
Victor raised his gun and shot into the ship again, eliciting another shrill scream. "They're not friendly."
"Maybe they would be if you weren't shooting at them," she argued.
At that moment something blue jumped out of the ship and landed on Victor. It looked similar to an octopus except it was as large as he was and it had a sharp claw at the end of each tentacle. The alien creature was making a very heroic attempt at tearing Victor apart. He was screaming with rage. He got his arm free and shot it once through the head. The alien screamed and somehow managed to tear the gun out of his hands. It was bleeding blue blood through its lighter blue skin and the gunshot wound was definitely healing faster than Victor could tear off any tentacles. He somehow got himself free of the creature's grasp long enough to throw it some distance away from him. Snarling, it got back up and started running towards him like giant spider. Victor reached for his discarded gun on the ground and at the movement, the alien suddenly stopped, seemingly noticed Daisy for the first time, and turned to charge in her direction. Daisy didn't even think twice. She quaked it. The quake flattened the alien almost instantly. Blue blood splattered everywhere. It didn't get back up.
"I think it's dead," Victor said, stunned.
"Kind of looks that way," she agreed.
"I changed my mind. You're not leaving. You're staying to help me get rid of the rest of them," Victor said firmly.
"I'm what? No..no I'm not helping you."
"It wouldn't be for me. It would be to help out all the nice people who live in this town. That is what SHIELD does right? Protects people from alien threats?" Victor said.
"Yeah, but we don't just board an alien ship and murder everyone inside," Daisy argued. "Besides, you only want the ship, and I still can't let you take it."
"How about we worry about the ship after we deal with the aliens?" Victor said as the sound of more scurrying feet approached and he raised his gun and fired again.
Daisy sighed. He was partially right. The aliens would have to be dealt with either way. "Can we try not killing them?"
"You can try whatever the hell you want," Victor said as he crossed the few paces between them and grabbed her arm. He dragged her back to the door of the alien ship and pulled it shut behind them.
It took a moment for Daisy's eyes to adjust to the dim light inside the ship. Victor let go of her as soon as he had shut the door and shoved her aside while he set to work on some sort of control panel screen on the wall.
"What are you doing?" Daisy said, furious with him. She was pretty sure she knew what he was doing. "Are you locking the door?"
"Yeah, that's the best way to make sure none of these critters escape and try to come back for the ship later," he said. "And if you're stuck in here, you'll have to defend yourself, the job will get done a lot faster."
"I can't believe this…" Daisy muttered. She would just have to find a way to get out of his sight and open the door herself. Or if that failed maybe she could call SHIELD for backup. "You mean they can't open the door to their own ship and escape?" she asked as an afterthought.
"Not since I changed the codes," he shrugged, stepping away from the panel he started reloading his two guns.
Daisy knew she shouldn't really be surprised that Victor knew how to hack into an alien ship but Logan had told her that his brother was a lot smarter than people gave him credit for. She guessed that this was what he meant by that.
"How many times would I have to shoot you before you'd let me out?" Daisy asked him, frustrated, knowing that she couldn't hope to actually escape by shooting him.
"You'd run out of ammo before that happened. You could try that quake thing but it doesn't work so well on me as it does on our hosts here. So you can either help me kill those things and I'll let you out when we're done here, or try and fight me and get yourself killed. It's your choice." Victor said moving away from her down a dark corridor.
Daisy didn't follow him. She stopped in front of the control panel and looked at the alien writing on the screen in front of her. There were picture symbols next to the writing. She reached up to touch a picture that looked similar to a door and Victor caught her arm, wrenching it away from the panel a little too harshly.
"Don't touch that!" He all but shouted at her.
She pulled her arm free of his grasp and glared at him.
"If you spend all your time trying to escape, you're gonna get yourself killed," Victor told her. "I don't really care if you live or die. It's no loss to me. But if you want to live, you go where I go and you pay attention." he said, and then he turned and walked away from her again.
Daisy took one last glance at the control panel and then she set off after Victor. The ship was dimly lit and seemed to get darker as they went deeper inside.
"Where are we going?" Daisy asked, just wanting to know what to expect.
"To the bridge. There's a lot of them that have locked themselves in there."
"It sounds like they're hiding there. That's a defensive strategy not an offensive one," Daisy started to argue. "What are you gonna do, break down the door and start killing them all?"
Victor nodded. "Something like that."
"Maybe you don't have to kill them. They've crashed on an alien planet and are stuck here. Maybe they'd give you the ship if you let them live," Daisy suggested.
Victor stopped walking and stared at her like she was nuts. "Where are they gonna live? Area 51? Or does SHIELD have a ship somewhere that can take them back home?"
"I don't know...but there has to be a solution besides massacre."
Victor seemed to be thinking about her words for a moment. "Nope, massacre is all I got." he continued walking, letting her know the discussion was over.
She followed him reluctantly for a while longer down the long corridor. They passed multiple open doorways and a few times he turned down a different corridor. He seemed to know the ship fairly well.
"How long have you been here?" Daisy asked, wondering how he knew his way around so well.
"About four days. Only killed nine of them in that time but I did get to learn the ship pretty well."
"Four days? Who do you work for that knew about crash before SHIELD did?" Daisy was a little concerned about that.
"It's better if you don't know," Victor said.
"Why? I don't believe for a moment that you're trying to protect me from the truth," Daisy said, irritated.
"No, I'm just trying to protect myself so I still get paid. If my people knew there was a SHIELD agent here…"
"Is it HYDRA?"
Victor didn't reply. He stopped short because he'd heard something. Daisy heard it too. Something was coming towards them around the corner.