PROLOGUE

"Sir!" Nick Fury strode over to the technician as the man's screen began to flash a red warning. "Something entering Earth's atmosphere."

Fury's brow furrowed as he leaned in over the technician's shoulder to examine the screen. "One of ours?"

"Negative, sir. NASA reports no satellites or space debris in this area." The technician squinted at the screen. "The disturbance appears to be some bizarre weather pattern...a super-tornado or a lightning storm or something."

Fury stroked his goatee thoughtfully. "The Bifrost." He turned to a pair of officers standing at ease by the door. "You two," he barked. The men snapped to attention. "Get Stark and Rogers on the line."

The men glanced at each other. "Now, sir?" one of them asked tentatively. "It's 0300 hours. Mr. Stark-"

"I am well aware of both the current time and Mr. Stark's feelings about being awoken at such a time, Lieutenant." Nick Fury gave the two a severe look. "Phone both of them, and Agents Romanoff and Barton while you're at it. There's somebody that I think they will all very much want to meet."

"Sir," the technician burst out as the two officers left the room, "these readings don't look anything like the Bifrost."

Fury spun about, his eye flashing. "What do you mean?" he said curtly. "You just described the disturbance as similar to a super-tornado or a lightning storm. Are those not the same descriptions used in connection with the Bifrost?"

"Affirmative, sir. But this isn't like any diagrams of the Bifrost I've seen." The technician frantically tapped at the screen and slid graphics around to allow Fury to see all the data, dialog boxes overlapping each other in a glowing collage of numbers and diagrams. "It's smaller, for one thing. And the readings are completely erratic; the electricity levels keep jumping between being off-the-charts and barely detectable. It's almost as if..."

"Almost as if what?"

The technician's eyes widened. "The Bifrost appears to be broken, sir."

Fury's expression darkened. "So noted," he muttered. "Dr. Selvig," he said loudly, "take a team out to the crash site, and make sure you have medical staff with you."

"Yes, sir."

Fury leaned back into the screen to peer at one of the smaller dialog boxes, nearly hidden beneath all the other data flashing across the screen. It was pulsing a frantic neon orange against a screen full of red. He frowned. "Open this window," he ordered, pointing his finger at the box in question. The technician tapped the box, bringing it to the foreground. "Enlarge it." The technician complied. Immediately, he let out a quiet gasp. "What does it say?" Fury demanded.

The technician shook his head. "It must be an equipment failure, sir. There's no way these readings could be correct."

Fury gritted his teeth. "What does it say?" he repeated.

The technician flinched at the edge in Fury's voice. "There's something inside the disturbance, a physical object hurtling towards the Earth."

"We already knew that," Fury said in a forcibly even tone. "What's the problem?"

"The temperature readings indicate that the object is made out of ice. But the visual representations...I'm not sure this is even an 'object' we're talking about."

"Show me."

The technician grimaced, but nodded nonetheless. "Yes, sir," he said resignedly. He tapped a quick series of buttons and pulled up a box that illuminated the screen in a blur of rainbow colors.

Fury stared at the screen, his whole body freezing as he took in the image on-screen. "Son of a bitch," he said under his breath. In the middle of the screen, right in the midst of the vivid rainbow of temperatures that made up the Bifrost was a dark space, an area of purple so dark it almost appeared black, an area with arms and feet and a head. Fury's eye blazed. "Someone stop Dr. Selvig before he leaves. Tell him to bring military personnel to the crash site. And call Coulson. This is his area of expertise."

"Sir?"

"Somebody's coming in to land from Asgard, and it sure as hell ain't Thor."