NOTES: I put off posting this for a very long time. It started out as a story about Tony and the Vision meeting some aliens. It somehow became an epic about communication, redemption, self-sacrifice, quantum physics, and Howard the Duck. I blame Loki.
It was, in fact, a dark and stormy night when it all began, but that made no difference at all to Jane Foster. The stars were quite unaffected by things like the cyclone that was pummeling Kawakawa that particular February night – as was the telescope Jane had been using to study them, serene in its orbit high above the Earth's turbulent atmosphere. The rain pounding against the windows of her motel room actually made for a nice, soothing white noise to work by as she sipped a cup of jasmine tea and went through her data.
"It's really coming down out there," Darcy observed, pulling the curtains aside to peek out.
"Mm-hm." Jane continued examining tables of measurements as the lights flickered and thunder shook the Opua Rainforest.
"No, really," said Darcy. "This is like a Thor-Throws-A-Tantrum level of storm happening. Are you totally sure he went back to Asgard?"
"Totally," Jane promised. "He said he had to talk to his dad about some stuff to do with the Infinity Stones." Infinity Stones sounded interesting, and Jane had some theories about their nature based on her own rather personal experience of the aether, but at the moment those were little more than hunches. Right now, she was more concerned with a unique phenomenon she'd noticed quite by accident – a tiny gravitational lensing event passing across the face of the Andromeda Galaxy.
"Darcy," she said, "look at this." She pulled up a photograph and pointed to a tiny bright ring superimposed on the faraway galaxy. "See that? I think that's a wandering black hole! It's well above the plane of the galaxy, and there is no star associated with it. It can't be in orbit of anything except the galactic center. Look what it's doing to the light of Andromeda."
Darcy left the window and came to lean over Jane's shoulder and look. "What's that smudge?" she asked, pointing to a dark smear in the lower corner.
"Some kind of foreground object," Jane replied. She'd had to mask it out of the image so that its brightness didn't drown the fainter details she was trying to see. "Probably something in the Kuiper Belt, a dwarf planet or comet." Very ordinary, and not at all interesting from the point of view of somebody who wanted answers to the big questions: what was the universe, where had it come from, and where was it going to go. "Now listen, if we can keep an eye on this lensing event, we can start to plot its orbit. I don't think it can have formed where it is, so we may be able to figure out where it came from and how it got here from there. Maybe we can even get an idea of where the Dark Matter is in our galaxy! That'll give us the closest thing we've got to an outside perspective on the Milky Way." That was exciting: a chance to map the galaxy in a way nobody ever had before.
"Meaning we're gonna spend the next year or so looking very hard at something we can't actually see." Darcy straightened up and pumped a fist in the air. "Science!"
"Science!" Jane agreed cheerfully. "We've still got that generator, right? I want to be able to keep working if the storm takes the power out."
"It's in the car," said Darcy. "That's what I love about you, Jane. Your unerring sense of priorities."
And work, they did. The gravitational lens hovering between Earth and Andromeda continued to occupy Jane for the next three months, taking her from New Zealand to South Africa to the Canaries in search of the best possible view. In Santa Cruz de la Palma, on a blindingly sunny day that could not have been more different from the stormy February evening when Darcy had first drawn attention to the Smudge, when Jane realized something wasn't right.
The black hole was doing more or less exactly what Jane expected it to do, bobbing around the void, minding its own business except for the light it refracted from the galaxy behind it. It would be months more before they got a real idea of its proper motion. But the probable Kuiper Belt object, the one Darcy had christened the Smudge, never went away. It continued to hang around in the corners of Jane's photographs, spilling light in places where she didn't want it and growing slowly but steadily bigger and brighter – which only made sense, she thought, if the damned thing were coming right at them.
That... might be bad.
Jane didn't want to waste her time on this. Somebody else, somewhere, had to be monitoring this thing. Plotting random debris as it wandered around the outer solar system was a job for graduate students, not Nobel Prize-winners. When Jane checked the usual e-journals and websites, however, she couldn't find anyone else who'd noticed it. The Smudge was big and bright by the standards of somebody trying to make out irregularities in the light of a galaxy two and a half million light years away, but it would be faint indeed to people studying the outer solar system, so much closer to home.
Luckily, the math she needed to do was easy, the sort that could be done with a high school graphing calculator. All she had to do was plug in the object's position over time and let the computer solve for a conic section. After three months, Jane had no shortage of data. She typed in her measurements and hit enter, hoping for an answer that indicated the thing would go away soon.
The graph she got was both a surprise and a disappointment. The disappointment was that the Smudge was headed more or less directly into the inner solar system, meaning it was only going to get more and more in the way of her observations as time went on. The surprise was that its path was not an ellipse centered on the Sun, like any self-respecting orbit ought to be. It wasn't even a parabola, like the long-period comets that flung themselves out into the cosmos never to be seen again. It was a hyperbola. The Smudge was under the influence of the Sun's gravity, but it was not bound to it.
Jane's stomach turned itself inside-out as she realized what that must mean. This object had to have come from outside the solar system, which made it suddenly very interesting indeed. With the exception of a few weird Chi'Tauri alloys that had been far too extensively worked to be informative, humanity had only been able to directly sample one little cranny of the universe. Material from a truly extrasolar object could tell them about isotope ratios, the abundance of organic molecules, and all sorts of other things about the composition of the galaxy. Darcy's smudge was, in its own way, just as important as the black hole Jane had been watching – and at the speed it was moving, they might have even less time to take advantage of that.
She grabbed her phone.
"What can I do you for?" Darcy asked when she picked up. She never bothered with hello when she knew it was Jane.
"Where are you?" Jane wanted to know.
"Ian and I went to Taburiente Crater," Darcy said. "We asked you this morning if you wanted to come, remember?"
When she thought about it, Jane did vaguely remember that, but it seemed unimportant. "I need you to come back to town right now," she said. "I think we're on to something important. Remember your Smudge? It's coming to visit us."
"Coming to visit?" Jane could picture the puzzled frown on Darcy's face. "Are we talking about an earth-shattering kaboom, end of civilization kind of visit?"
"No," Jane said firmly. "Well... probably not." She'd need to plot the orbit more precisely in order to tell, but space was very big and Earth only a tiny, moving target. "Like... eighty-eight percent sure not."
"So... twelve percent maybe?" asked Darcy.
"Just come back," Jane told her. "The Crater will still be there."
"What's going on?" Ian's muffled voice said somewhere in the background.
"We're all going to die," Darcy told him casually, "so just a day that ends in y, really." She spoke into the phone again. "Okay, we're coming, but if this thing is gonna hit us, then I'm dragging you kicking and screaming to see the Crater before we get a bigger crater smacked on top of it." Then she ended the call – because Darcy never bothered with goodbye when she knew it was Jane, either.
Darcy and Ian arrived at the hotel in Santa Cruz about an hour and a half later, by which time Jane had covered the table with calculations and was now lying on the floor, drawing circles on a bedsheet. She needed so many things. She needed pictures of the object that showed more detail than just a bright Smudge. She needed more precise positional data. She needed spectra. Most of all, she needed to know exactly how much time they had to study this thing before it was gone forever.
"Okay, yeah, this is serious," said Darcy as she walked in and dumped her backpack in a chair. "When Jane's doing math on the floor it means the space-time continuum is in some shit."
"I realize we've had some back luck in the past," Jane said crossly, "but there's no need to assume that everything we study might mean the end of the world." She picked herself up and put a cap on her sharpie. "Darcy, I need you to watch my computer like a hawk and let me know the moment I get any email. I've asked everybody I know for pictures from that sector of the sky. Ian, I'm gonna give you graph points and I need you to draw them there." She pointed to the sheet. It belonged to the hotel, but she didn't care – she'd plotted out an x and y axis in red and drawn a map of the solar system in black, with the orbits of Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, and Jupiter to scale, and smaller circle marking the asteroid belt. "Eric's gonna see if he can get us an afternoon with the astronomical supercomputer at Culver, but until then, we're doing this the old-fashioned way."
Ian grabbed marker and knelt down to begin. "Call 'em."
They spent the rest of the afternoon finding the exact positions where the Smudge had shown up, and translating those into coordinates that could be plotted on the sheet. From that they could make a better guess at its future course. No matter how excited Jane was about what the object might represent, even she couldn't help but find the results a little worrying.
"Email!" Darcy announced.
Jane jumped, nearly spilling a stack of papers from her desk. "Who's it from?"
Darcy clicked the link. "Oh, never mind," she said. "It's just your phone bill. How much data did you use last month?"
Jane just shook her head. "Okay, Ian. Azimuth zero hours, forty-nine minutes, forty-seven point four seconds... radius ninety-six..."
"Email!" Darcy said again. "This one's from somebody in Chile."
That was more like it. Observatories in the Andes were in the perfect place to have recent pictures of the Smudge. "Let's see," she said.
Sure enough, they'd sent a photograph. The resolution wasn't great, and even with the telescope's adaptive optics there was a bit of atmospheric distortion, but even so it contained new and surprising information. The Smudge was not one object, but a dozen small ones in a line, like a string of beads. It reminded Jane of the fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, which had hit Jupiter in 1994. Jane had been thirteen at the time, and the event had made a great impression on her. She'd sat in front of the television for hours, eyes wide as she took in the news of explosions the size of the Earth and all that scientists could learn just by watching them.
According to the scale information the Chilean team had provided, the largest of the objects was around fourteen kilometres across. Three or four more were eight to ten kilometres, and there was a trail of smaller ones, five or six hundred thousand metres in diameter. Mere pebbles, as such things went, but Jane couldn't help thinking that these cosmic pebbles would be more than enough to wipe every trace of multicellular life from any planet that got in their way.
"Dr. Foster?" asked Ian. "What was the rest of the coordinate?"
Jane looked over her shoulder at the path he was plotting. It was impossible to be more specific at this kind of scale – she really needed that astronomical computer – but the objects definitely appeared to be heading for a close encounter with the inner planets. Jupiter wasn't going to be able to catch them like it had with Shoemaker-Levy 9. It was way around the other side of the Sun.
Darcy was looking at the same thing. "Are we still at eighty-eight percent not going to die?" she asked. "Because I think you might wanna call Thor. This is gonna require some Avenging."
"There's no need to jump to conclusions," said Jane. "We haven't even heard back from Eric yet."
Eric didn't get in touch until very late that evening, which was, itself, worrying. If he wasn't calling them back, Jane thought, it was because he was checking and double-checking, wanting to be absolutely sure before he delivered his results. Jane kept working in order to keep her mind off it, but there was only so much she could do with what she had. Eventually, she wandered out onto the hotel balcony so she wouldn't have to watch Darcy and Ian make out on the sofa, and stood there staring up at the night sky.
There was the Andromeda Galaxy, a hazy blue patch just above the red stars Almach and Mirach. It looked very much fainter and more diffuse to the naked eye than it did in the long-exposure photographs most people were familiar with, more like a wisp of cloud than an island universe all its own. Somewhere between Jane and that far-off swirl of stars was her wandering black hole – and somewhere, equally invisible but very much closer, was the approaching Smudge.
It needed a better name. By the rules of the International Astronomical Union, it would be Comet Foster-Lewis 1. Giving it a real name would require some more thought.
Jane's phone beeped, letting her know she had a text. Her heart beat a little faster as she flicked the screen and held it up to read.
Closest approach Nov 9. It's gonna be a near thing.
Jane swallowed hard. If Eric didn't have a definitive yes or no for her, it meant he thought it was too close to call. The Smudge might pass them by, or it might not. Only more time and better measurements would tell – which in turn meant that in that moment, out of seven billion people on the planet Earth, Jane Foster and Eric Selvig were the only ones who knew the date the world might be going to end.
Darcy was right after all. It was time to call Thor.
Tony Stark was going through some calculations of his own when Pepper returned to the Tower penthouse that night. He heard her come in and kick her shoes off with a thump – which was somewhat worrying. She was usually more gentle with her eight hundred dollar Louboutins. Tony closed the holoscreen he'd been working with, and climbed the steps to the living room in time to see her sit down heavily on one of the sofas.
"Everything okay, Pep?" he asked.
She turned her head to look at him, grimacing. "You would not believe the day I've had."
Tony sat down beside her, and she moved to lie with her long legs hanging over the arm of the sofa and her head in his lap. "Do you need me to vaporize anybody?" Tony asked sympathetically.
"Yeah. The fashion editor of the Times and about six other people." Pepper pulled her hair out of its ponytail with a miserable face. "Who decided that the colours I wear were going to affect the company's stock? Nobody ever sold their shares because of something you work to work."
"That's not true," Tony said. "The day I showed up naked after Beyoncé's Oscar party, we dipped five points."
Pepper began to smile. "I forgot about that. I think I blocked it out."
He bent down to kiss her forehead. "How about I make dinner tonight?"
"Sure." She giggled. "Wieners and beans sounds good."
"Very funny. I've been practicing," Tony said proudly. "I still can't make a decent omelet, but I can throw together a stir-fry. FRIDAY's been giving me lessons."
"All right," said Pepper. "I've got Pepto-Bismal in the cupboard if we need it."
"But first," Tony said, "you have to get off of me."
She shook her head. "Nope," she said, rolling over onto her side and curling up, head still in Tony's lap. "I'm comfortable."
The conversation might have continued in this vein for several more minutes, but there was a sudden flash of brilliantly coloured light through the big penthouse windows, accompanied by a vibration shook the entire Tower. Pepper sat up, startled and Tony got to his feet.
"Is that Thor?" asked Pepper.
"Nobody else feels the need to make an entrance like that every single time," Tony replied, heading for the stairs to go meet his guest. "It's just unnecessary."
"What is it when you do it, then?" Pepper asked, following him up.
"Stylish," he said.
FRIDAY had recognized Thor, and when Tony and Pepper entered the hangar he was already inside, his red cape morphing into a dark blue cloak with an ornate pin at one shoulder. He greeted them with a raised right hand.
"Hey, Thunder-Thighs," said Tony. "How's the quest for the Infinity Stones?" If Thor were back on Earth, the most likely reason was because he'd learned something about those mysterious cosmic objects, and needed some kind of help in dealing with them.
"It proceeds," said Thor, "but I have not come about that." His face was grim. "I fear your world is in grave danger."
Tony hesitated a moment and Pepper, worried about him, put a hand on his arm. A threat to the world that did not come from the Infinity Stones? What had happened? Was it something he'd done? He would hardly have been surprised anymore. All he said, however, was "again?"
"Jane has been in contact with me," Thor explained. "There is a group of large objects in the outer solar system that may be on a collision course with your planet."
That shouldn't have been a relief, but Tony sighed anyway. Not his fault, then. He could deal with that. Tony had technically retired from Avenging and taken up a support position as Team Sugar Daddy – but if the world needed saving from an outside threat, instead of from him again... he could do that.
"A meteor?" asked Pepper, gripping Tony's arm a little tighter.
"A dozen meteors," said Thor gravely. "Do not fear, Virginia. Jane will be flying in from Morocco with her friends, and with their help, we will find a way to counter this threat." He sounded entirely confident, and it seemed to help Pepper feel better.
"Suddenly, my day doesn't seem so bad," she said, and bit her lip. "Where are the others? I know Rhodey's giving a speech at the Air Force Academy this weekend."
"Steve and Sam are in Omsk, tracking down a lead about their missing friend," said Tony. That made sense – if he were looking for a guy called the Winter Soldier, he too would have considered Siberia a good place to start. "Clint's changing diapers in Iowa and I think Romanov went with him so he and Laura can catch some sleep now and then. Fury's vanished to wherever it is he goes, and Wanda and the Vision are in Sokovia cleaning up land mines." He didn't mention Bruce. Nobody had seen Bruce since their final showdown with Ultron. Wherever he was, he clearly didn't want to be found, and Tony was willing to give him the space – especially since he suspected that he was one of the things Bruce was hiding from. "Who should I call?" he asked Thor. "If the bad guy here is a giant rock from space, I'm not sure all of us are going to be useful."
"Call as many as are willing and able to help," said Thor. "Jane will arrive on Monday morning. There is no hurry," he promised. "The objects will not come dangerously near for months yet."
"Well, that's something," said Tony. "An enemy we have time to plan for? Too much of that, and the Avengers are gonna get lazy."
Thor had never gotten the hang of driving a car, so on Monday morning it was Tony and Pepper who went to JFK airport to pick up Jane. Tony had never met Jane Foster in person, though he'd seen her on the news, and his first impression was astonishment at how tiny she was. At five foot three, she was barely as tall as Natasha. He would have expected the woman who'd won the heart of the Mighty Thor to be a little more physically impressive.
"Dr. Foster!" Pepper waved to get her attention as Jane entered the airport lobby, trundling a suitcase behind her. "Over here!"
She spotted them and grinned. "Ms. Potts! It's great to meet you finally!"
"Please, call me Pepper." The two women hugged like old friends, while Jane's three companions – a dark-haired woman, a thin young man, and an older fellow in a colourful sweater – joined them.
"Nice to meet you, too, Mr. Stark," Jane added, shaking Tony's hand more formally. "Thor's told me a lot about you." Her voice managed to suggest that some of it had been complimentary. "This is my intern, Darcy Lewis, her intern, Ian Webster, and I think you've met my thesis advisor, Dr. Eric Selvig."
The thin kid nodded, and the young woman held up a hand and wiggled her fingers in a little wave.
"We have met, yes," said Dr. Selvig. "I'm afraid it wasn't under very pleasant circumstances."
"It wasn't at my best back then, either," Tony said. He honestly wasn't sure what his 'best' even was, or whether he had one. "All in the past. Thor's waiting for us at our new HQ."
Happy was outside with a limousine for all the extra people. He got their luggage into the back, and everybody piled in for the drive to the new Avengers building upstate.
"Helen mentioned meeting you at the Nobel Prize dinner," Pepper said to Jane.
"Helen Cho?" Jane asked eagerly. "Is she here?"
"Not at the moment. She went back to Seoul for a relative's wedding," Pepper said. "Hopefully she'll stop by before you head out again. We can grab Maria and Natasha and have a Girls' Night," she suggested.
"Wait... do you guys all know each other by proxy already?" asked Tony.
Nobody answered him. "Has anybody heard from Sif?" asked Darcy. "She checked in months ago, and there hasn't been a peep since."
"She's fine," Pepper promised. "Melinda's looking out for her."
"Oh, good." Jane smiled.
"Apparently, the answer is yes," Tony said, mostly to himself. He wondered if there were some kind of conspiracy going on among the women in his life... he would have to look into that. Who the hell were Sif and Melinda? "Dr. Foster," he said, "how do you contact Thor when he's on Asgard?" Tony had been wondering about that.
"I've got this device he gave me," Jane began. "It's..."
Darcy interrupted. "The Quantum Pot!" she said, delighted. "Oh, he's gonna love the Quantum Pot!"
"It looks like a squat little cauldron that projects a life-sized hologram," Jane explained. "It can communicate over immense distances instantaneously, or even between parallel planes, like Earth and Asgard. I haven't had time to study it properly."
"She's afraid if she takes it apart, she won't be able to put it back together," Darcy said.
"I've had other projects on the go," Jane corrected her. "I think it works through quantum entanglement. The atoms in the pot are in a permanent state of interaction with the atoms at the destination, so they can affect each other without the time lag normally imposed by the speed of light."
Tony frowned. "Quantum entanglement only allows two observers at different locations to see the same system at the same time," he said. "You can't use it to transmit information."
"We can't," said Jane. "The Aesir may have found some loopholes in quantum theory that we haven't noticed yet."
That might well be – and for what Tony had in mind for dealing with their visitor from the outer solar system, it could be useful. He would have to talk to Thor about it.
To nobody's surprise, Barton and Natasha both asked to be excused from Avengers Versus Giant Rock from Space – they operated best within an atmosphere. Nobody could find Fury to talk to him, and Maria Hill hinted rather strongly that he wouldn't have wanted to be bothered with this anyway, as it was definitely beyond anything that could reasonably be considered his jurisdiction. Rhodey had come, though, as had Wanda and the Vision, and Steve and Sam showed up to see what was going on. For the plan forming in Tony's mind, that was more than enough.
They all gathered in a glass-walled conference room at Avengers HQ so that Jane and her friends could give their presentation. She closed the blinds and took full advantage of the mainframe's holographic display to show the path she'd calculated for the train of objects.
"Of course we want to keep it from hitting us," Jane said, "but I'm also concerned that we get some samples for study. As far as I can figure, this object came from somewhere in the vicinity of Nu Andromedae, a binary star about six hundred light years away. It's a chance to look at material from outside the solar system in context that we may never get again. At least, not until humans have mastered interstellar travel for ourselves, and we have no idea how long that might take."
"You got a name for this thing?" asked Steve.
Darcy beamed. "Yes, we do! We discovered it, so we totally get to name it."
"Are you naming it after yourselves?" asked Tony with a raised eyebrow. Not that it would be a problem – astronomers were actually encouraged to do so.
"Nope," said Darcy. "We came up with a real name for it, from mythology and everything." She and Jane exchanged a glance and a smile. "Jane said it looked like beads on a string. So there's a really famous necklace in the same mythology Thor comes from..."
"You speak of Freja's necklace, Brisingr," said Thor.
"Exactly!" Darcy nodded. "This is Comet Brisingr!"
"Freja will be pleased that you thought of her," said Thor. "Less so that you have given the name of her necklace to something so destructive."
Jane returned to her presentation. "We're not in a rush," she assured everybody. "It's still far beyond the planets. Beyond Pluto, even."
"Pluto's a planet," said Tony.
"Pluto has never been a planet." Jane glared at him. "It was initially misclassified."
Tony had initially assumed that their shared interest in physics and astronomy meant that he and Jane would get along fine. With that pronouncement, he realized he'd been wrong. "I will buy Pluto and have it declared a plane," he said.
"You can't buy Pluto," said Jane. "The UN has ruled that the planets of the solar system are the collective property of mankind! Nobody can own them!"
"You just said Pluto's not a planet. Therefore I can buy it if I want," said Tony firmly, arms crossed on his chest.
Jane rolled her eyes. Next to Tony, Pepper rubbed her forehead, and Steve muttered something under his breath that may or may not have been the words Earth's mightiest heroes.
"Anyway," Jane went on, "that's the situation. We have some time to play with. The closer it gets, the easier it'll be for us to reach it, but the more difficult it'll be to change the object's course enough to keep it from hitting anything."
"Don't worry," said Tony. "I've got the start of a plan already."
"You do?" Jane was both startled and pleased.
"We can fragment it before it gets out of the Kuiper Belt," Tony said, "and get you plenty of samples while we're there." He looked around the room. "I won't need you guys," he told Wanda and the Vision, "you can go back to fomenting revolution in the Balkans. I won't need you, either," he added, looking at Steve and Sam. "Go freeze your balls in Russia. I'm gonna need you," he pointed to Rhodey, "and you," he said to Thor. After a moment's thought, he looked at Pepper and said, "and you."
"Me?" asked Pepper.
"You, me, and Rhodey have special skills," said Tony. "Now, Thor. Darcy was right – I love the Quantum Pot. Can you get me one?"