Steve only got a glance at the newspaper before Nat snatched it from Donny's hands so she could read the article, but the image seemed to burn itself into his brain. The Chi'Tauri invasion did not feature in Steve's nightmares, at least not with the regularity that Bucky's fall or the Insight helicarriers did, but that certainly didn't mean he'd forgotten them.
"When did this happen?" he asked.
"Around four this morning, it said," Bob replied. "It was the first thing on the news when I got up."
"It's the only thing on the news," said the policewoman who'd brought Steve to the room. "That's why we forgot to bring you breakfast," she added sheepishly. "Sorry about that."
That was understandable and it was nice to have an apology, but Steve's first thought was that this probably meant the rest of the people in the police station were still distracted. He looked at Natasha, and she nodded.
In a flash, she vaulted up onto the shoulders of the nearest cop. This was a big, muscular man, but by the time he realized what was happening he was flat on his face on the floor, and Natasha was shackling him to the table using the handcuffs off his own belt. A second cop tried to grab her, but Hayley tackled him from behind and took his gun. Steve felt a moment of genuine pride watching her. Of course she knew how to do that! Hayley Atwell might not actually be Peggy Carter, but she did play her on TV!
The third cop, the woman, turned to run, but Steve swept her feet out from under her with his crutch, and Bob and Donny grabbed her to fasten her to the table with the others. Hayley stuffed a handkerchief in the woman's mouth and used her own stockings to gag the men, while Natasha snatched Bob's hat – a blue snap-back with the name STARK embroidered across the front – and hung it over the lens of the camera.
"That was actually kind of fun!" Bob panted. "I used to fantasize about doing something like that! Of course, at the time I would have needed to, I was way too fried to be capable."
Steve leaned on Donny and Hayley as they all hurried out of the building, looking straight ahead and trying to walk like people on a mission. Nobody challenged them. In fact, nobody even seemed to notice them – everybody in the building was hanging on televisions, on radios, or on their phones, watching the news from Houston.
Bob's van was waiting outside. They climbed in.
"Quick job getting the plates replaced," Natasha observed.
"I know some people," Bob replied. He climbed into the driver's seat.
"So what is happening in Houston?" asked Steve, as Donny helped him into the back. "Other than just that they're there?"
"The Chi'Tauri are holding the Johnson Space Centre hostage," Hayley explained. "Nobody comes in and nobody goes out – anyone who tries gets fried." She leaned to help Steve with his seat belt, but he shooed her away. He may have been forced to admit he needed help walking, but he refused to have his belt done up for him like a child.
"So does anyone who takes potshots at the Leviathan," added Bob, starting the engine. "Lots of guns in Texas. And lots of idiots who don't learn from what happened to the last guy."
"They let the director record a message for the outside world." Donny brought it up on his phone. "Here."
Steve took the phone, and Natasha leaned over his shoulder to watch. The image showed a woman in her sixties, with short brown hair, dressed in a coral-coloured blouse and a necklace of large painted wooden beads. Despite liberal application of concealer around her eyes it was obvious she hadn't slept very much the previous night. Standing behind her was the Chi'Tauri commander, holding the staff-like weapon Steve had clung to at the convention centre.
"I'm Johnson Space Centre Director Ellen Ochoa," she said. "I've been asked to deliver our guests' demands to the planet Earth." Her voice was calm and even, almost robotic, but there were beads of sweat on her forehead, and her hands, folded on the desk in front of her, were clenched to try to keep them from shaking. "They want me to assure you that our world has only one thing their master wants, and that's…" she took a deep breath, cringing at what she was about to say. "That's Loki, the God of Mischief. This message is being recorded just before seven AM central time. As if its release, we have twenty-four hours to deliver Loki to them, or they will begin destroying the centre, one building at a time. Once Loki is in their custody, they will leave with no further damage. They have asked me to remind you that we have no heroes."
The message ended there.
We have no heroes. Steve's ankle throbbed. "What time is it?" he asked.
"It's ten-fifty here," said Bob. "That means it's almost one in Houston."
That left them only eighteen hours more. "So where are we going?" Steve asked. Bob was certainly driving like he had a purpose, but not in the right direction for Texas.
"First we're gonna pick up Thor and Loki," he replied. "They're hiding out at my place in Venice."
"Then we're going to see Kevin, like you asked," Donny said.
Steve frowned, and traded a glance with Natasha. "What, we're just going to walk right in?" he asked. Perhaps after seeing Nat get them across the border, and what she'd done in the police station, the actors were counting on her to find a way.
It was Donny who answered – he was sitting in the front, next to Bob, and now he turned to look back at the passengers. "You betcha. The aliens are in Houston, but Kevin doesn't work in Houston. She works at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and that's right here in Pasadena!"
For some reason, that made Steve feel much better. Maybe it was because of all the mistakes they'd made in the past few days, here finally was one that worked in their favour.
What Bob had called 'my place in Venice' turned out to be an even more ridiculous mansion than Scarlett Johansson's. The entrance was located in a tower with a windmill on top. A woman with long brown hair, wearing a floral sundress, was waiting on the step, holding the hand of a little girl about the same age as Marigold Darville. When the van stopped and Bobo got out, this child let go of her mother and ran to give him a hug.
Bob scooped her up and kissed her cheek. "Hi, Princess," he said. "You've been looking after Mommy for me?"
"Yeah!" the girl said.
"Well, let me make sure she's still in one piece." Bob went to give the woman, who must have been Susan Downey, a kiss on the cheek as well. "How are the guys?" he asked.
"Surprisingly well-behaved," Susan replied. "They're in here."
She led them all inside, to a big, open-concept sitting room with large windows and hardwood floors. It was a very bright, comforting space that was somehow both like and unlike Tony Stark's self-consciously futuristic homes. The Downey family clearly shared Stark's love of natural light, but they seemed to favour soft, organic shapes over the harsher lines and curves he surrounded himself with.
Thor was on the sofa, watching television, while Loki entertained a blond boy of about six or seven by telling him a story.
"… and then," Loki was saying, "I re-assumed my own shape! Thor was entirely startled. He hadn't even suspected."
"And then he stabbed me," said Thor.
"Only a little," Loki said, with a dismissive gesture. "And I used a very sharp knife."
"Isn't a sharp knife worse?" asked the boy, eyes wide with worry.
"Not at all!" said Loki. "The sharper the knife, the less it hurts. If you want someone to suffer, you use a dull knife. If you really dislike them, you use a spoon."
"Don't listen to Loki, Essex." Bob put his daughter down and went to claim his son. "He gives terrible advice."
"That depends on what sort of advice you're looking for," said Loki.
Thor got up off the sofa and came to give Steve and Natasha another hug – this one rather gentler than the one at the airport. The situation was clearly wearing on him, too. "I am happy to see you," he said. "I knew the police must release you once the gravity of the situation was clear to them."
"Of course they did," said Natasha, without missing a beat.
Bob ruffled Essex' hair and kissed the top of his head, then grabbed a duffle bag that was sitting next to the glass-topped coffee table. "No stabbing people," he said to his son.
"Unless they deserve it," Loki added.
"How do I tell?" asked Essex.
"You'll know," Loki promised.
Bob headed for the front door again, and Susan followed him. "Are you leaving again right away?" she asked anxiously.
"I'm afraid so," Bob said.
She grabbed his arm. "Do you know when you'll be back?"
"Not offhand," he replied, but then he smiled and reached up to gently tweak her chin. "Don't worry – I'm a cat. I always come back, especially when you don't want me to."
When they got back on the road it was Donny in the driver's seat, heading north to skirt downtown Los Angeles and its traffic on their way to Pasadena. It was a short drive, nothing like the one required to get them to Houston – and that was a deeply worrying fact in itself. Eventually they would have to go to Houston to meet the Chi'Tauri, but Houston was as far from LA as was Calgary in Canada. That would take them way over the twenty-four hour deadline.
"We're gonna have to buy more time," he said.
"I know," Natasha agreed. "Not sure how we're gonna do that… the Chi'Tauri don't have a history of being reasoned with."
"I kind of had an idea," Bob said, "but it's sort of a partial idea at this point… twelve percent of an idea, if you will. We're gonna have to bluff them, I think, and to do that we're gonna have to make like we are the Avengers. Fortunately," he added, "I know where our costumes are! They were on display at the LACMA as part of their Dressing the Movies exhibit which got flooded out when a pipe broke, so now they're all in storage on an upper floor of the museum. Whatever we end up doing is probably going to involve those."
Steve's hopes rose momentarily, but then he reminded himself that the word costumes was going to mean something different to Bob Downey than it did to Steve Rogers. "They'll just be movie props, though," he said. Steve in his own body could survive being shot but he still didn't like it. As he was, he didn't really want to rush into battle unprotected again. Was that thought cowardly, or just good sense?
"Yeah, but it might help morale if you look the part," said Bob. "Or dampen theirs."
Nat shook her head. "Thanks for the thought, but if I'm in the middle of a fight I'd rather not try to use something only to remember too late that it's fake."
"What of you?" asked Thor. "Do you mean to don an Iron Man suit and join us?"
"Oh, no, not me." Bob shook his head hard. "For one thing, the actual suit only exists in maquettes and computer code – and even if it didn't, you wouldn't be getting my claustrophobic ass into it. As soon as the faceplate closes, it's all stunt doubles and I'm having a cucumber facial in my trailer. If the president decides to nuke Houston, I'm out."
There was another worrying unexplored angle, as if Steve had needed more of those. "What's the president doing about this?" he asked. If somebody decided to do something foolish, they would need warning and a contingency plan.
"Last I heard?" said Bob. "He was golfing."
The Glendale Freeway wound its way between suburbs up into the San Rafael hills, and ended at the security gate outside the JPL campus. Donny brought the van to a stop next to the kiosk there, and rolled down the window.
"Hi," he said to the guard. "We're here to see Dr. Kevin Farinas. She's expecting us."
"I'll call in," said the guard. He frowned, craning his neck out the window of the little hut to better see the other people in the vehicle.
"Friends of mine," said Donny casually. "You might recognize one or two of them."
Natasha waved.
While the security guard made the phone call, Donny explained where he knew Kevin from. "She's one of the people I talked to at JPL while I was doing The Martian," he said. "They're all a little weird up here, but I was really impressed by how Kevin just buried herself in her work. She had this little bed set up in her office so that when she had something big going on she could spend the night there. The idea was that if she got an idea in her sleep she should be able to roll out of bed and work on it immediately. Ridley and I decided that had to be how Rich Pournelle worked."
The guard returned to the window. "All right," he said. "Go ahead in."
The gate rose to let them through, and they entered the JPL campus. This was a cluster of blocky buildings that mostly dated from the 70s and 80s, nestled in a gap between scrubby desert hills. It looked like a university, or even the business core of a small city, but either one of those places would have been busy and right now the JPL looked almost deserted. There were cars in the parking lots, but nobody was outside, and despite the bright sunlight it made the place look a little spooky. For a moment Steve was puzzled, but then he remembered – this universe was learning about the Chi'Tauri for the first time. Like the cops in Los Angeles, the people who worked at the JPL must all be glued to the news, waiting to see what would happen next.
The first person they saw after the guard at the gate was waiting outside one of the buildings for them. This was a very small Filipina woman with straight black hair in a thick braid halfway down her back. She was dressed in denim shorts and a dark green t-shirt with the words stand back – I'm going to try science!, and she bounced on her toes and waved as the van pulled up. Donny undid his seat belt, and barely had time to climb out of the van before she ran up to hug him.
"I was so glad to hear you weren't in Texas!" he said.
"Are you kidding?" she asked. "I wish I were! We're all freaking out here!" She had a slight accent, but her English was grammatically flawless. "Real-life aliens! First contact! This is… we are present for what will probably be the defining moment of history from here on!"
"Yeah, that's great," said Donny, without her enthusiasm. He stepped back – he was so much taller than her that ending the embrace almost counted as putting her down – and asked, "has anybody figured out yet what they mean when they say they want Loki?"
"We've got theories," Kevin said. "We figure they've been monitoring our broadcasts and want to appear to us in a form we recognize as fitting our preconceived notions of extraterrestrial life." She gestured emphatically as she spoke, apparently just for something to do with her hands. "That would probably mean that wanting Loki is a misunderstanding of some sort. I think they want to talk to somebody in charge. We're just not sure how to communicate to them that that's not what the movie was saying. You said you had some information?" she asked eagerly.
"Yeah, kinda." Donny looked over his shoulder at the van, and the people inside took it as their cue to start climbing out. Thor came first, then he and Nat helped Steve. Bob climbed out of the passenger's side, and opened the door to force Loki to emerge, as well. It should have been a dramatic reveal of sorts, Steve thought, but instead it was just hopelessly awkward as they all came to stand in a half-circle around Donny and Kevin.
Kevin stared at them for a moment, then grabbed Donny's shirt. "We can't just give them Tom Hiddleston!" she protested. "We have no idea what they'd do to him, and he probably couldn't communicate with them any better than anyone else!"
"It's not… oh, boy." Donny grimaced. "Let's go sit down. It's… it's a hell of a story."
Kevin showed them inside. The outside of the JPL campus may have looked almost deserted, but the interior was crowded and busy, with people running around on phones, flipping through documents, and carrying food and drink. Kevin led them down a long hallway past a series of offices and meeting rooms, and there were people in all of them – Steve caught snatches of conversation as they went by. In one small conference room, a group of technicians were bent over an enormously blown-up photograph of the Leviathan, arguing about how it might propel itself. In a similar room across the hall, a silver-haired man was writing on a whiteboard, his hand moving so fast that the equations he scribbled were almost unreadable. He was muttering about mathematics and atomic structure to an audience of JPL employees, one of whom, a Sikh boy who was probably still in his teens, was tapping the older man on the shoulder trying to get his attention.
"Dr. Shostak," he was saying, "they speak English. Dr. Shostak?"
In another office further up the hall, a woman was on the phone shouting. "What do you mean the president doesn't care? Oh, that's bullshit!" She was still audible as they rounded a corner, and Steve tried to catch the next words – only to be distracted by the sound of a very familiar voice saying, "that man is playing Gallaga!"
Steve stopped and checked to make sure Bob was still with them – he was – then dropped behind the group and found the room the sound had come from. Inside was some kind of small lecture room. Somebody had connected a laptop to a projector, and a dozen people of assorted ages were sitting at the desks, taking notes as they watched what could only be this universe's movie about the Battle of New York. And there on the screen was… there was Steve, fresh out of the ice and dressed in that ridiculous comic book version of his costume, looking like he had no idea where he was or what he was doing here because frankly, he didn't.
So that was Chris Evans as Captain America, was it? At least he looked more like Steve than the guy who'd played him in those awful TV movies from the early 80's.
The temptation to linger there, to keep watching and see what else had made it to the screen, was very powerful indeed, but Steve didn't want to be recognized again or cause any more disasters. He tore himself away and limped along as fast as he could to catch up with the others before they noticed he was missing.
At the end of the hallway was a filing room, full of shelves of bound journals and cabinets full of papers. There were other people in there, searching for material, but they didn't appear interested in Kevin and her guests. She showed them to a corner with a small table where they could sit down and talk in relative privacy, and Steve tried not to show how relieved his was to take the weight off his bad ankle.
"All right," she said to Donny. "What's your story, and why does it involve half of the MCU?"
Donny looked at the others, who were more qualified to tell it than he, and Steve wondered whether he'd actually heard the whole story yet. Steve and Nat had only had time in the trailer to tell him an extremely truncated version – if he'd learned more it would have to have been from Bob and Hayley, or perhaps from Loki and Thor. Steve kind of hoped it was from Thor. Thor's telling would probably make them look the least like idiots.
It was Thor who now nodded once and stood. "I think I ought to begin," he said. "Lady Kevin, I am not Chris Hemsworth, although from what I have learned of him, I think him a worthy representative for me. I am Thor, son of Odin, and this is the tale of how I came to your world."
Thor told Kevin how he'd learned about Loki's escape and how, upon learning his brother was on Earth, he'd come to the Avengers for help recapturing him. Natasha picked up there and described how Thor had approached her and how she'd told him to keep it quiet for fear of invoking the Accords. Finally, Steve told Kevin – and Donny, who was listening raptly – about how they'd arrived in this universe and some of what had happened since. Kevin sat upright in her chair and paid attention, and her expression changed several times. At first there was skepticism and annoyance, then dawning surprise, and then finally real interest as she realized that here, after all, were the answers to her questions about their visitors from space.
"So that's what Ochoa meant when she said we had no heroes!" she exclaimed. "Except we do, because here you all are! So what are you gonna do?"
Steve looked around at his companions. "We were kind of hoping somebody here could give us some ideas."
"We are but ordinary mortals here," said Thor.
"We need to get Loki back to our universe," Steve explained, "because yours isn't capable of facing the Chi'Tauri. He can't do it himself because there's no magic here, so we need to find another way."
"What? Like wh… oh." Kevin held up her hands. "Oh, no. I may have graduated from Berkeley at fourteen but my thesis was on orbital mechanics! I have worked on possible applications of multiverse theory but that's entirely theoretical and I can't even touch this body-switching stuff! That would need… I don't know, probably a whole faculty of neurologists! We don't begin to understand the brain or consciousness that well."
Steve's heart started to sink again. Could they really have come here for nothing? Could it be that the science they needed didn't exist in this universe, either? Or… what if only part of it did? "Then don't worry about that," he said to Kevin. "What we need most is a way back to our own universe. Once we're there, Wanda can probably switch our bodies back, and we can find a way to send your actors home." That was a little more roundabout, but it would still work.
Loki sniffed. "If we're in our own universe, I can switch our bodies back, and I'll make less of a mess doing it. No need to burn down a forest to boil your tea," he said.
Steve didn't think he'd trust Loki to do it. Having said that, would Loki allow himself to be held to it? They would have to keep Wanda in mind as a backup, although Loki's disparaging attitude did make Steve wonder what sorts of things might go wrong. "And if we go back," he added to Kevin, "the Chi'Tauri will follow us. Like your director said in her broadcast, we have nothing else they want."
"She's not our director, Mike's our director," said Kevin, frazzled. "Ellen's only director at Johnson."
"I wouldn't have brought them here if I didn't think you could help them," Donny said. "What about that lecture you gave at the SETI institute last year? About ways to control wormhole travel?"
"The one inspired by Scalzi's skip drive?" Kevin shook her head. "That was about how to control a wormhole between universes, not how to make one. Everything I said assumed that somebody else got the wormhole started and I just had to aim it. So unless one of you has a wormhole-maker in your pocket, that won't help."
That sounded pretty final to Steve, but apparently not to Bob Downey. He looked thoughtful and said, "they must know how to make one."
"They?" asked Steve, and then realized. "You don't mean the Chi'Tauri, do you?"
"Remember when I picked you guys up at the police station and you thought I was Tony?" asked Bob. "You said that since I was here, I must have a way to get back. The aliens must be planning on going home once they have Loki so they can turn him over to Purple Josh Brolin for torture or whatever. Ergo, they've got a wormhole-maker."
Natasha nodded. "If they've got a wormhole-maker," she said to Kevin, "can you build a wormhole-aimer?"
"Ye… maybe," Kevin said. "Thing is, how do I know what to aim it at? I can select properties of the target universe – at least, assuming that Chopra-Gopal-Dawson theory is correct – but I can't put a big dial on it that you can turn to Earth-19999, because I don't know what that universe is like on a subatomic level."
"I can do it," said Loki. "If I know what the controls represent. It sounds clumsy," he admitted, "but if your theory is anything akin to the weave of the cosmic tapestries as I understand it, it should work."
"Let's make sure we're all on the same page," said Steve, who was a little worried by the direction this conversation was taking. "Are we talking about somehow getting to the Chi'Tauri mothership and stealing their wormhole-maker?"
"I don't think they have a mothership," said Nat. "You suggested there were only the four of them and we haven't yet seen any evidence that you were wrong. There's only one Leviathan over Houston. If they could bring more, they would. That may be why they needed the tesseract in New York – because the technology they had without it could only let in one small vessel at a time."
"All right, so we get on board the Leviathan to steal their wormhole-maker," said Steve. "Can we do that?"
"Um," said Kevin, raising a hand.
"If there's only four of them I don't see why not," Nat said, though her optimism didn't ring very true to Steve. Only four Chi'Tauri had already nearly killed them a couple of times. "We'll just have to keep them distracted." She turned to Bob. "You mentioned the costumes… I know Paul Bettany already bowed out, but do you think you cans scrounge up Jeremy Renner and Mark Ruffalo?"
Bob was already nodding. "Like, they think we have no heroes, and we say, surprise, bitches, yes we do?" he asked.
"Exactly!" Nat nodded. "And find our stunt doubles, too – mine, Steve's and Thor's. They'll fit those costumes you mentioned, too."
"You do realize the aliens will shoot at us if we do that," Bob cautioned her. "And also that there's still no way I'm getting into anything even approximating a real-life Iron Man suit. I've seen the cosplayers in the cardboard and foam ones and I feel like I'm suffocating just looking at them. Gwyneth makes fun of me but I stand firm."
"Can I say something else here?" asked Kevin.
"We'll figure something out," Nat promised. "Maybe we'll just show you on TV and keep them looking for you. As for getting to the Leviathan, there was at least one Chi'Tauri on the ground at Johnson, because it was standing guard behind Ochoa while she gave her speech. It'll have had to take one of those scooter vehicles to the ground, and I've driven one of those before."
Steve's heart was beating faster again – after the emotional ups and downs of the past few days it was a wonder it could maintain a steady pace anymore. There were a lot of details that would still have to be ironed out, but it was starting to look like Bob's twelve percent was becoming an actual plan. "So the fake Avengers keep them distracted, while me, Nat, and Thor steal the wormhole-maker. Then we bring it back to Loki, we all go home using Kevin's wormhole-aimer, and Loki switches our bodies back." There might be some intervening steps if their alternates had scattered – say if Tom Hiddleston was a prisoner of the Chi'Tauri while the others were on the Raft or something. It was, however, workable. "How long will it take to build this thing?" he asked Kevin.
She heaved a frustrated sigh. "That's what I've been trying to tell you! Super-scientists who can build anything you want in an hour and a half only exist in comic books and on Star Trek. Tony Stark might be able to build a fusion reactor in a cave using a box of junk, but I can't! I never planned on actually building anything like this. With the testing and everything, god, it would probably take six months, and that's very optimistic!"
Six months was such a ridiculous number that it took Steve a moment to accept that she'd really said it. That was totally unacceptable, and when Steve looked around the table he could see that the others were as shocked and disappointed as he was. He checked his watch.
"Uh, okay," he said. "What can you do in sixteen hours?"