Of the people still on board Intrepid, Fury had the most first aid training. He sorted out their supplies, while Bhavana and Salvador described everybody's injuries and tried to figure out how to handle those and in what order. Tony, meanwhile, returned to the lower decks to look and what else was on board and try to figure out how they would dock with Mir.
Steve quickly got tired of waiting. He'd always hated sitting around and waiting for things to happen – he would much rather have made them happen, but right now he didn't have a choice. He floated there listening to Fury and the astronauts talk for a few minutes, then sighed and pushed himself away from the console.
"I'm gonna go check on Tony," he said.
"Good idea," Fury agreed. "He's probably building bombs down there."
When Steve poked his head through the floor hatch, he found the mid-deck full of floating objects. Tony had pulled half a dozen things out of storage and was now flipping through laminated pages on a clipboard, getting a bit frustrated with their refusal to stay flipped in zero gravity. He'd inherited his father's baby face, Steve observed – Howard had always looked younger than he was, even before his plastic surgery. When Tony was angry he looked his age, but when he was sad, or quietly lost in thought as he was now, he looked about twelve or thirteen. It was a sharp reminder to Steve that one member of their party was not a soldier, or a spy, or an astronaut. Tony Stark was brilliant, but he was also a kid who'd just lost his father.
Take care of Tony, Howard had said.
Steve floated through the hatch and turned himself right side up, doing his best to avoid bumping into floating boxes and bags of gear. "How are you doing?" he asked.
"I'm working on it," Tony said. He glanced up for a moment, but then his eyes went back to his clipboard, where he was scribbling notes in the margins with a dry-erase pen. "I figure the biggest problem will be creating a seal between our hatch and the door on Mir. If they don't match up the way they're supposed to, we'll have to line the join with something. The vacuum will tend to suck stuff out, so as long as it's something that doesn't fit through the gap we should be okay. The problem is figuring out what we have that's strong enough to hold up but which we can easily remove when we're ready to go.
"Okay," said Steve, "but how are you doing? You're okay, right?" He could remember too many incidents during the war when he hadn't realized his friends were ill or hurt until hours after it happened. Gabe had once gone through half a firefight with a broken wrist – Steve should have noticed that, but he hadn't. Then there were Bucky's frostbitten fingers, which he'd found out about only after they'd finally made it back to civilization. The commandos had been grown men and soldiers, but that hadn't meant Steve could ignore their problems. With Tony, he had even less excuse.
"I'm fine," said Tony. He looked up at Steve, a bit puzzled by the question, and it occurred to Steve that people probably didn't ask Tony if he were all right very often. "I'll figure it out. Even if I don't, this is the coolest thing I've ever done!" He grinned. "We're in space! We're meeting an alien, even if it's an evil one! If we get back alive, Mom's going to ground me until I'm forty-five and Dad will burn..." he paused, his smile faltering. "I mean, Dad would burn everything he owned to keep me from inheriting it."
There it was. Steve waited.
Tony sighed. "Right," he said. "I'm fine, okay? What do you want me to say? I'm fine."
Steve waited a little more. He wasn't sure whether it was because he didn't want to pressure the kid, or because he simply had no idea what to say, himself, but waiting seemed like the thing to do.
"You know what?" Tony asked. "I'm upset. I'm sad. But I think that's just because I'm supposed to be. Part of me is almost... part of me is almost glad he's gone. That's terrible, isn't it?" he asked. For a moment he met Steve's eyes, but then he turned away, ashamed of himself.
"Well... it kind of is," Steve agreed. He could hardly say otherwise. "We all do it, though. We all think terrible things sometimes."
"You don't," said Tony.
"Of course I..." Steve began, then stopped short as he realized Tony meant that. Tony had grown up with the same image of Captain America as Agent Troy had – the hero who fought for the betterment of all no matter what the consequences. That was the Steve Rogers of the comic books, a paragon without a greedy or selfish or jealous thought in his head. Was that how Peggy and Howard remembered him, though the rosy fog of nostalgia? Was that the man they'd thought they were bringing back? The idea was so absurd, Steve laughed out loud.
Tony stared at him. "What the hell?" he asked.
Steve forced himself to stop. "Sorry," he said. "It's just... of course I do. You know what I used to do?" he asked. "I used to deliberately sabotage my best friend's love life. Whenever Bucky had a date, I would make an excuse to tag along because I was afraid he'd run off with some girl and I'd never see him again. I know he hated it, but he didn't have the heart to tell me no, so there I'd be and the girls would show up and look at me as if they were thinking really? You brought Steve again?" He squirmed a little in embarrassment – it was only in hindsight that he'd ever realized how petty and childish this behaviour had been.
Tony looked stunned. "Really?"
"Really," said Steve. "His solution was to start telling the girls to bring a friend so I could have a date, too, but I was five feet tall and could barely breathe, and not a lot of girls wanted to dance with a guy they could step on. So my date would wander off halfway through the evening, and that would just leave me and Bucky and Bucky's poor girl. I think he was relieved when they drafted him, because he thought he'd get the girls in Europe all to himself."
"Really?" Tony repeated. He was trying hard not to smile, and failing.
"The night before I took the serum," Steve said, "Dr. Erskine told me it would magnify everything about me – the good would become better and the bad would become worse. I lay awake that night staring at the ceiling and thinking about how I used to follow Bucky around on his dates, and wondering if all I would become was a jealous monster." He'd never told anybody that before, not even Bucky or Peggy, and having said it now, it took him a moment to remember where he'd been going with it. "So we all think and feel terrible things, Tony," he said. "My mother used to tell me that we can't help what we think, but we can help what we do." That bit of wisdom seemed to have helped Howard when he'd complained he couldn't stop inventing things that blew up... maybe it would help Tony too.
"You can't rub the tarnish from men's souls without taking away a little of the silver," said Tony, and then he grinned. "That's also from It Conquered the World."
"When we get back, I'll have to watch that movie," Steve decided. It sounded much more optimistic than the ones Tony had shown him so far.
"Eh, it's not great. The alien looks kind of like a cucumber with a face." The smile faded again as Tony gave an awkward shrug. "Dad always said I watched too many movies. I wonder what he would have done about the docking problem." He looked at the clipboard in his hands. "He would probably have figured it out by now."
"He's not here, so we'll never know," Steve said, "but Howard told me that you were smarter than he ever was, so if he could have figured it out, you definitely can. You've done some amazing stuff already, Tony, and you're only fifteen. I can't imagine what you'll have done by the time you're thirty."
Tony had probably heard lots of compliments in his life, but this one seemed to surprise him. Maybe he just wasn't used to being compared to his father in a positive way. Before he could say anything in reply, however, Fury called down from the flight deck.
"Hey, Rogers!" he said. "We've got the Russian on the line!"
"Coming!" Steve grabbed the edge of the hatch, then paused and looked at Tony. "Are you gonna be okay?" he asked for a third time.
"Yeah." Tony wiped his nose on his sleeve. "I'm good."
"You should come up and listen to this," Steve told him. "You're the one who'll be handling the docking with Mir. You need to hear what Fyodorova has to say."
"All right." Tony looked around at his mess, then shrugged and stuck the clipboard to a patch of velcro on the wall. He followed Steve through the hatch to the flight deck.
"Fyodorova?" Steve asked, dragging himself back over to the console by holding on to a seat.
"Hello, Captain Rogers," her voice replied on the radio. "I was surprised you asked for me again. You're very trusting." It sounded like a warning.
"No, I'm not trusting," said Steve. Trust was one emotion he'd been very short on the past few weeks. "But I know your information is accurate. You have contacts in the Soviet space program – they sent you those photographs. Can you tell us who we should call to find out whether we can dock with Mir, and how to do it if it's possible?"
"I can tell you that," Fyodorova said immediately. "I've been there."
"You've been there?" Steve repeated, astonished. "When?" Peggy's information said Mir had only been up for a few months, and surely during that time Fyodorova had been undercover at SHIELD.
"Come see me in Sing Sing sometime and I'll tell you about it," she promised. "Get a notebook. I'll tell you how it's supposed to work, but I don't know if it actually will. This will be the first time we've tested it. And I'd better warn you, it's not nearly as nice over there as it is on a shuttle."
"When were you on a space shuttle?" Steve demanded.
"Never," she said, "but I've seen pictures and read reports. It's the Cadillac of space travel to our '74 Mustang. Now pay attention."
Her instructions were worrying. Even when the Americans and Soviets went out of their way to cooperate with each other, they did so with an undercurrent of paranoia. Mir was designed to dock easily with a Soyuz capsule, but to reach Intrepid the station would have to deploy a sealing ring to fit onto the shuttle's slightly curved side, like the accordion folds in the connection between an airplane and a jetbridge. This could only be operated by somebody who was already on board the space station.
"I can talk you through getting in from outside," said Fyodorova, "but it'll involve venting at least part of the atmosphere, and if there's anything on board that wasn't properly secured before evacuation, you might get smacked in the face. There should be enough reserve oxygen on board for a few hours, but it'll be low-pressure and the next mission up will have to bring their own."
"We'll give the Russians a shopping list," said Steve. "Tell them to bring more supplies, too, since we're going to be helping ourselves to whatever's in there."
"You might be better off going hungry. Cosmonaut food is awful," said Fyodorova.
"But we can dock the shuttle and then get if off without having to depressurize the station a second time?" Tony asked.
"As long as the seals work, yeah," said Fyodorova.
"Great! Then I know what we're doing," said Tony. He grabbed the notepad he'd been using to write down his ideas for improving the shuttle, and flipped to a new page. "We'll dock Odyssey first and get everybody off it, along with whatever supplies and equipment we can salvage. Then we disengage Odyssey and dock Intrepid to get everything and everybody on board. If the seal doesn't work properly, I've got an idea how to handle that. Once we're done, we set Odyssey on a re-entry course, and hang around up here until it burns up in the atmosphere to make sure we don't run into it." He looked at Steve and winked.
Steve gave Tony a thumbs up – he'd come up with a plan that did not involve dangerous spacewalks, and a reason for them to wait in space until Salvador answered their questions. "Fury, call Bhavana."
On the other shuttle, Bhavana and Salvador were still cleaning and sewing up the various injuries the unconscious astronauts had received when Van Cleef detonated the engines. Salvador's force field had managed to keep their section intact, but hadn't entirely protected them from being thrown around by the explosion. Despite the alien's insistence that the crew were only bruised, Bhavana had found a broken collarbone and suspected several cracked ribs.
"You could at least have tried to treat them," she said, not bothering to hide how annoyed she was.
"I know very little about human physiology," said Salvador, still quietly serene. "I would probably have caused more harm."
"Well, if you're gonna be borrowing Jay-Jay's body, I suggest you study up fast!" Bhavana snapped.
"Bhavana," said Steve, "we need you guys to head over to Mir. We've got a Russian Agent on the line who's gonna talk you through getting on board the station and helping Odyssey dock."
"I have to be on the space station to do that?" asked Bhavana.
"That's what Fyodorova said," Steve told her, but he could already tell from her voice that it was going to be a problem.
Sure enough: "I don't know how that's going to work," Bhavana said. "We're coasting on fumes over here. It's gonna take a delicate touch to get us docked without running out, and our new friend doesn't have it. He burned almost all the remaining thruster fuel getting here."
"I have no experience piloting this type of craft," Salvador said. He wasn't defensive or apologetic. As before, he merely spoke.
"I can do it," said Tony. "I can get on board Mir and connect the seals."
"No, you won't," said Bhavana.
"I can do it from here!" Tony insisted. "Based on her instructions I can get the door open with the StarkArm. Then we maneuver up really close, and I'll only need a spacesuit on just long enough to climb through the hatch, close it, and repressurize. I won't be outside longer than fifteen or twenty minutes. Then since Intrepid has extra fuel, they back off, you dock Odyssey, and I'll be here to help you and Salvador get people into Mir."
"Not a chance," Bhavana said.
"We don't have a choice," Steve sighed. "Neither Fury nor myself will fit in an EMU – if you and Salvador have to stay on Odyssey, it's gotta be Tony." He looked at the boy. "Are you sure you're gonna be okay?"
Tony smiled broadly. "I have never been more okay in my life!"
Tony buckled himself into the StarkArm operator's seat, while Fury took the pilot's and Steve watched nervously. The task at hand, Steve thought, was to go up to a door, open it, step inside, and shut it behind them. It was literally one of the simplest things in the world, but they were in space. Everything in space was a process. Their first step here was to get close to the space station without bumping into it.
This time it was not an illusion: maneuvering really was an achingly slow process, accomplished inch by inch with Tony watching the cameras and Steve looking out the top windows, while Fury steered. They knew they'd made it when Bhavana started yelling at them over the radio to stop.
"You're there! You're there! If you get any closer you'll ram into it and then we're all fudged!" she exclaimed.
"I'm stopping! I'm stopping!" Fury assured her. Without the friction of an atmosphere to stop them, he had to apply gentle thrust in the opposite direction. The earth continued to wheel slowly by below them, but their position relative to Mir stabilized. Everybody breathed a sigh of relief.
"I should never have let you guys talk me into this," Bhavana lamented. "If we don't all blow up and die, I'll drop from a heart attack at any moment."
"All right, my turn!" Tony rubbed his hands together, then took a headset out of a net on the wall and put it on over his eyes. This displayed the two images from the cameras at the base of the StarkArm, one to each eye, to simulate the view somebody would have had from standing at the point where the arm attached. It allowed Tony some depth perception as he guided the arm towards the door of Mir.
"This is one of the first things I came up with for the revamped arm," he said as he worked. "Space is a three-dimensional environment, so you need a three-dimensional view. It's one thing to use the arm from out in the cargo hold where you can see what you're doing – you can do that, too," he added. "It's another to have to work from in here with only video screens to show you what you're doing. So I figured this would be a good compromise."
Under Tony's guidance, the robot claw reached out and delicately gripped a handle mounted next to the space station's airlock. This was designed for cosmonauts to have somewhere to hang on when opening and closing the door, and seeing the fingers close around it made Steve wince. There was no way that little bar could take the weight of the whole shuttle. Surely it would break off, and as fragile as all this technology seemed to be, that might ruin everything.
A moment later, however, he remembered that there was no weight in space. Shuttle and station were orbiting in tandem, and that meant no forces on the bar whatsoever. Tony let go of it again, and then had the arm grasp the emergency lever on the airlock itself. This served the same function as the one on the front hatch of the space shuttle, allowing an unqualified person to free trapped cosmonauts if Mir crashed somewhere, and it was just as easy to use.
"Be gentle, man," said Fury, his knuckles pale as he gripped the arms of the pilot's seat. "If you rip the door off we're starting all over."
"I got this," Tony promised. He shifted the lever, and then pushed. Like the door of the space shuttle, the hatch opened inwards. Tony had explained that this was in case it came unsealed – the pressure inside the station would act to keep it closed, rather than to force it open. Unfortunately, that same pressure, combined with the awkwardness of the robot arm, stymied Tony's every attempt to get it open. All he ended up doing was pushing the shuttle further from the station, making Steve's heart pound and his stomach churn in terror.
"Damn it!" Tony thumped on the console, then had to grab it to keep himself from floating away. "You know what we really need up here? Another arm! If I had that I could hang on with one and open the door with the other. Just one has no leverage." He grabbed the handle next to the airlock again, then took his visor off. "No good. I gotta do this myself."
"Oh, no you don't!" Bhavana said on the radio.
Steve grabbed Tony's arm. "I thought we agreed you weren't going to be out there any longer than necessary," he said. Bhavana hadn't wanted him out there at all, but they were improvising.
"This is necessary!" Tony insisted.
"Are you sure?" Steve said. "There's no other way to do it?" Tony was smart – he could come up with something that didn't involve placing himself in unreasonable danger. Steve was sure of that. He wasn't going to let Tony go get himself killed just because the kid wanted to spacewalk.
"Yes!" said Tony. "What, do you think you're Mom now?"
"No, I don't. I'm just..." Steve paused – what was he trying to do? "Your Dad asked me to take care of you, and I think I already let him down by taking you along at all."
It was only after the words were out of his mouth that Steve remembered how Tony reacted to people talking about his father. He braced himself for anger, but what he saw instead when he looked at the young man's face was even worse – it was betrayal.
"That's the reason you let me hang out?" he asked. "Because Dad asked you to?"
"No," Steve said quickly. "It's part of the reason, but..." What could he follow that with? Tony hated platitudes. If he said I hang out with you because I like you Tony would tell him to shut up, just as he had in the graveyard.
"Gentlemen," said Fury sharply. "We're saving the world, remember?"
Tony pushed the visor into Steve's hands, which shoved both of them backwards. "Somebody's gotta help me with my spacesuit," he snarled on his way to the hatch.
Steve sighed and put the visor back in its net before following him. Tony had worn astronaut Kim's takeoff and flight suits, so now Steve and Fury helped him dress in the same man's EMU. Now that they knew what all the parts were and what order they went on it, this was a much faster process than it had been with Bhavana. Steve would have expected Tony to chatter about the parts as he dressed, but he was silent, sulking. Eventually, Steve resorted to asking him questions in order to break the awkwardness.
"What are the tubes for?" he asked, helping Tony zip up the vest.
"Cooling water," Tony said. "People think space is cold, but it's easy to overheat because there's no air to carry it away. If you're cool, you also sweat less, which keeps you hydrated."
"What about the padding?" Steve wanted to know, as he put the next layer overtop. That was the part he hadn't been able to figure our earlier.
"So you don't touch the metal parts of the suit," said Tony. "You can get sores or bruises from that, or even cut yourself. Blood still clots in space, but if you bleed it floats around and it can get into the wiring and make a mess."
"Bhavana wasn't kidding when she said everything was complicated up here," Fury observed, and Steve nodded – that lesson had been driven home over and over again.
"Humans evolved on Earth," said Tony. "Everything about our bodies works in Earths' gravity and atmosphere. When we go into space, all the adaptations that normally help us survive become useless, or even turn into problems." Even when angry, he couldn't resist sharing knowledge. "Our shoes aren't gonna fit when we get back, for example."
"Our shoes?" Steve helped Tony get his hand into a glove.
"Yeah. Fluid's collecting in our feet," Tony explained. "Usually it gets pumped back out by the action of our leg muscles, but we don't use our legs in space, so it just puddles. On normal missions they have the astronauts exercise to help with that, but we're in kind of a hurry."
As they had with Bhavana, Steve and Fury tested all the connections and hoses, and then despite Tony's impatience Steve insisted on checking some of them again. Bhavana knew what she was doing, and what she was doing was her job that she was trained for. Not only was Tony completely new to this, but he was Steve's responsibility and would have been even without that last request from Howard. Tony was still a kid, and he needed looking after – even if he didn't like that idea.
Everything appeared to be in working order as far as he could tell, but Steve still felt a bit sick as Tony put his helmet on. "Be careful, okay?" he said. "Your Mom's going to break my neck if anything happens to you."
"Don't worry," said Tony. "She couldn't reach your neck."
This joke might have indicated that they were friends again, but Steve couldn't tell. Tony's back was turned to climb into the airlock. Steve shut the door behind him, and then watched through the little window as the outer door opened and Tony climbed outside. The sun was at a different angle now, so that the ocean below could reflect its light directly back up through the open cargo doors. This illumination meant that Tony remained visible, instead of vanishing in shadow as Bhavana had.
"Oh, man!" Steve heard the boy laugh. "This is so amazing! I can see New Zealand, and the clouds are all gathering up between the two islands... this is the greatest view in the world. No, wait, this is the greatest view out of this world!"
"Just get to Mir, Tony," Steve said.
"I'm going, I'm going," Tony said. "I just wanted to look. It's not like I'm ever going to get to see this again." There was a rustle in the microphone as he took a deep breath. "All right, I'm gonna climb up the StarkArm."
Steve pushed himself back up to the flight deck. There, through the outside camera, Steve could see Tony grab the robotic arm and start moving himself hand over hand along it. Again, the arm looked far too slender to take the weight of Tony and the heavy EMU, but there was no weight in space.
"Has he got his tether done up?" Bhavana asked over the radio. She was still working with Salvador on Odyssey, but must have been paying attention to the conversations on Intrepid as well.
"Yes, I have my tether done up." Tony tugged on the nylon cord he'd hooked to a ring beside the shuttle airlock, demonstrating that it was secure. "I'm not an idiot."
"Excuse me for not wanting you to float away and burn up on re-entry," said Bhavana. "Nobody's going to catch you if you fall out of space, you know."
"Gimme a break," said Tony. "I'm almost there."
Steve kept his eyes on the video monitor, hardly daring let himself blink, as Tony climbed. If something were to go horribly wrong, he thought, now would be the time for it to happen.
"This is harder than you'd think," Tony observed. "How do you guys make hanging out in zero go look so easy all the time?"
"We train for months and months in the neutral buoyancy tanks," Bhavana told him. "Stop talking and concentrate on what you're doing so you don't go hurtling into the void."
"Has anybody ever told you that you're a very worst-case-scenario type of person?" Tony asked. "I'm not an expert but I'm pretty sure that's bad for crew morale." He reached the end of the arm and grabbed the handle it was gripping on Mir. "Oooh, look at me! I'm re-tethering myself to the space station!" he announced, disconnecting and re-connecting the cord.
"I appreciate the update, but not the sarcasm," said Bhavana. "Next time, fasten yourself to the station before you unhook from the shuttle. Make before break. You never, ever want to not be tied to something."
"I was hanging on," Tony protested. "I'm fine." He started pushing at the door of Mir, but it still wouldn't budge. Grabbing the handle in both hands, he braced his feet against it and tried again, using the stronger muscles in his legs.
"You can't trust your hands to keep you anchored when..." Bhavana started to say, but she was cut off by Tony's startled shout. He'd managed to push the door open a crack, and the air inside the space station came flooding out, along with a cloud of loose paper and other small unsecured objects. Tony lost his grip on the handle and went flying, only to jerk to a halt about twenty yards away when his tether went taut. He stopped himself yelling, and floated there upside-down for a moment. Over the radio, Steve could hear him panting for hair.
"What did I just tell you?" Bhavana demanded.
"Bite me," said Tony. He tugged on the tether to float himself back to the door.
The decompression had forced the hatch shut again, but this time Tony knew what to expect. He cracked it open and held on while the rest of the air escaped, and then the door opened easily. Tony crawled inside.
"I'm in!" he announced. He hadn't quite gotten his breath back, but he sounded pleased with himself. "Gonna unhook and close the door."
Steve saw the airlock swing shut again, and the lever moved as Tony locked it from the inside. There was no longer any way to see what he was doing, but they could still hear his voice. "Wow," he said. "Cap, your Soviet contact wasn't kidding... this place is a dump."
"You have to find the recompression switch," Steve reminded him. He knew he was being impatient, but the longer Tony was isolated, the greater the chance he would get hurt, and the more difficult it would be to help him. "It'll say renew atmosphere." He swallowed s he realized something that really ought to have been obvious. "Can you read Russian?"
"No, but atmosphere is a Greek word and the Cyrillic alphabet is based on Greek, so I should be able to recognize it," Tony said. "Geeze, there's places in here where I think they've fixed leaks with duct tape. Not even special space duct tape, either. This is the ordinary matte gray stuff you get at Ace Hardware."
"I'm not surprised," said Bhavana. "My last trip up we repaired part of Discovery's control panel the same way."
"She said there'll be a pressure dial next to it," Steve said, consulting Tony's notebook. He'd written down some of Fyodorova's instructions there.
"I think I found it," said Tony. "Three-ameha atmok-feppy?"
Steve frowned in confusion, then realized Tony was trying to read out the label as if it were written in English: ЗАМЕНА АТМОСФЕРУ. "Zamenit' atmosferu," he corrected, and checked his notes. "It'll take about twenty minutes to repressurize fully."
"I can hear it working already," said Tony. "There's something rattling, too, which doesn't sound very healthy. You guys should start moving back to make room for Odyssey."
"All right," said Steve. He stuck the notebook back to its velcro pad on the wall and rubbed his forehead. He couldn't remember the last time he'd done something this nerve-wracking. At least part of it was the fact that it was taking so long. Steve was used to doing stressful things, but most of the stressful things he did were over quickly – smash and grab, like when they'd stolen the shuttle. This was so drawn-out it was almost leisurely, and yet at the same time there was no chance to breathe. It was exhausting.
Worse was knowing that they were now leaving Tony completely alone. The next people who was in the same room with, if all went well, would be Bhavana and Salvador. Steve was confident that Indira Bhavana could take care of herself in space, but Tony was, as he'd already observed too many times that day, only a teenager, and for all his enthusiasm he barely knew what he was doing. Now he was going to be trapped in a small space with an extraterrestrial being who was almost certainly hostile, and Steve could do nothing to help him.