"Sixteen hours," Kevin echoed. "Jesus."
Steve wanted to tell her not to take the Lord's name in vain, but he remembered all too clearly the ribbing he'd gotten the last time he'd asked somebody to mind their language. He kept his mouth shut.
"In sixteen hours," she said carefully, "I might be able to draw a pretty picture of it."
"What if you skip all the testing stuff and just go for it?" Bob asked.
Donny cleared his throat. "I was in this movie a while back. The Martian. Did you see it?"
"You gotta understand," Kevin added, "I'm just one person, and I've got other stuff to do. I'm trajectory on Europa Clipper, and there's Mars 2020, and we're still trying to hammer out that ice giant mission… Mike was very clear that it's all gotta stay in the pipeline, just in case we survive this."
"Right, right," said Steve. His brain was starting to recover from the shock of six months, and now he was trying to figure out a way around it. "So instead of snatching the wormhole machine out from under their noses and running, we're actually going to have to neutralize the Chi'Tauri permanently. Then we'll have to be on constant guard, in case the ones back in our universe get tired of waiting and send another group." The Avengers were used to quick victories, but if this would require dealing with a long siege… well, that was what they'd have to do. "So we need to figure out how to capture or kill them."
"I am not flying any nukes anywhere," said Bob. "Just to get that out of the way."
"You killed quite a few of them during the Battle of New York, didn't you?" Hayley asked. "How did you do it then?"
"By hitting them really, really hard," said Natasha.
That didn't work here, as they'd already demonstrated – without Steve's serum, Thor's Asgardian strength, or Natasha's enhancements, they just couldn't hit hard enough. There must be another way. "They all collapsed when the nuke went off," Steve remembered. "Fury and the scientists figured they had some kind of connection with the mother ship that had been cut off when the wormhole closed." If they couldn't get a bomb into space, doing that again was going to be difficult, but there had to be some way.
"They must have a weakness," Hayley said thoughtfully. "Aliens in comic books always do."
Steve's brain, which had been bubbling a moment ago as he tried to think, came to a dead halt. Comic books.
"What?" Hayley asked, seeing his expression change. "Do you know what it is?"
"No," said Steve, "but we know somebody who does!" He reached into one pocket, then the other, and then realized they'd all left their phones back at the hotel in Canada during their hurried escape. "We need a phone," he said. "And we need… does anybody have Stan Lee's number?"
Hayley brought her hands together, a delighted smile on her face. "Of course!" she exclaimed.
"I've got it!" Bob pulled a phone out of his jacket and began scrolling through the contents.
"Use this one." Kevin grabbed a yellowed 90's cordless handset off another table. "It's got a speaker."
Steve picked up the receiver. "Isn't that a new phone?" he asked Bob. "I mean, we left the hotel with nothing… how do you have his number?"
"I saved my contacts in the cloud," Bob said. "Our world might not have all the fancy hologram stuff, but we're not barbarians." He found the entry and turned the phone to show the number to Steve, who started punching it in on the JPL phone. "Although Stan Lee didn't come up with the Chi'Tauri," he added. "I think that might've been Mark Miller."
"Well, if Stan Lee doesn't know, then at least he can give us the number of somebody who does," said Steve. He turned on the speakerphone and set the handset in the middle of the table so that everybody could hear and talk. It rang once, twice, then three times.
"He never answers right away," said Bob, trying to sound encouraging. "And he doesn't have voicemail. He says there's no point because he's not gonna listen to it anyway."
A fifth ring, then a sixth… and then finally, on the tenth, there was the soft sound of a pickup.
"Stan Lee," said the old man's voice. "Marvel Allfather."
"Hello!" said Steve. "This is Steve Rogers!"
"Oh, yes!" said Lee cheerfully. "I told you I'd run into you again. What can I do you for, Cap? No, wait, you gave up Captain America after Civil War, didn't you? I'm still trying to convince Feige to get you into the Nomad costume."
Steve refused to let himself be distracted. "Stan," he said, "we need to know the Chi'Tauri's weakness."
There was a pause. "What, you want me to just tell it to you?" asked Stan. "That's cheating."
"No, it's not!" Steve protested. "We're trying to save the world here!"
"No, no, no," Stan insisted. "When the narrator pulls something out of nowhere to tie up the plot, that's a deus ex machina and it's been lazy writing ever since the time of the ancient Greeks! How would you feel if you woke up and found out this had all been a dream? You'd be disappointed, right? It's the same thing."
"Actually, I'd be okay with that," said Steve. Waking up in the palace in Wakanda and learning none of this had ever happened? He'd take it.
"Well, I'm not," said Stan. "I've never approved of it, and I'm not going to start now."
"This isn't a story, Stan!" said Bob. "There are actual aliens in Houston and they're gonna kill people."
"It's a story to somebody," Stan insisted. "If the people in our stories actually exist in other universes, which they demonstrably do, then obviously we're a story in somebody else's, and I'd hate to give them a letdown ending."
"Ah!" Hayley leaned forward. "But a deus ex machina is something that hasn't already been established in the story's world, right? Right? So you were pre-established! We met you in the hotel room and you gave us pointers there! It's properly a part of the narrative universe, and you can do it again without cheating!"
There was no immediate reply. Steve waited, drumming his fingers impatiently.
"Stan?" asked Bob.
"I'm still here," said Stan. "You know what? She's right. Well done, Miss Atwell! Very well, then," he decided. "The Chi'Tauri who are after you lot are drones. Remember when the wormhole closed in New York and they all just fell down?"
"Yeah, we were talking about that," said Steve.
"They're a hive-mind," Stan explained, "and the center of their thought and initiative lies in the queen. If they haven't got a queen within range, all they can do is lie there and drool."
"So there are actually five of them here, then," said Nat. "We haven't seen the queen because they're keeping her hidden."
"Exactly," Stan agreed. "Find the queen, and you can bring them all down at once and cart them off to Area 51 for dissection! Does that help?"
"Yeah," said Steve. "That helps a lot."
"Wonderful!" Stan said. "I'll look forward to hearing about it later – bye now!" There was a click as he hung up.
Hayley reached out to turn off the handset. "I… I don't think he really believes us," she observed. "I think he considers this some big game."
"No, he believes it," said Bob. "Stan's been waiting for something like this his entire life."
"I don't care if he believes it," Steve decided. "As long as his advice is good." He sat back and tried to make a list of tasks. "So… distract the Chi'Tauri, kill or incapacitate the queen, steal the wormhole machine and bring it back here so Kevin can figure out how to direct it, and then… deal with maybe six months more of Chi'Tauri incursions as they come after Loki again and again?"
"Optimistically six months," Kevin reminded him. "I have honestly no idea. I've never tried to do anything like this."
"When you put it that way it sounds impossible," said Hayley, chiding.
"Nothing is impossible," Thor assured her. "Some things are merely very difficult."
"We're used to impossible tasks," Nat agreed. She rubbed her hands together. "Okay, where will they be hiding the queen? Loki, when you were working for the Chi'Tauri, did you ever…"
"I wasn't working for them," Loki sniffed. "They were working for me. And I was never on board one of their frightful vessels. Those are for the rabble. I had better ways to get around. But," he added, "they kept their queens on the mother ships that housed the Leviathans, far away from Earth where no threat could be present."
"Okay, I can tell you categorically that there is no Chi'Tauri mothership in orbit of earth," said Kevin. "We monitor earth orbit because it's full of crap that can crash into satellites and make trouble. Besides, anything big enough to be considered a mothership, if it were between us and the moon you'd be able to see it from your backyard."
"And we're already pretty sure that one Leviathan's all they've got," Nat said, "because if they had more they wouldn't hold them back. If they've got the queen with them, then she's on board that."
Loki sighed, and then took his glasses off with a scowl – but one that seemed to be directed at the glasses themselves rather than at anything else – and leaned forward. He obviously didn't like talking about his time with the Chi'Tauri, but he recognized the need. "Considering the esteem in which the queens are held," he said, "they would have had to alter the troop transport to let her live on board. They would not squeeze her into a little sleep pod like a common soldier."
"Perhaps that is why there are a mere four of them," Thor said. "Those we fought in New York seemed to house dozens. We need to know what's inside the vessel." He looked at Bob.
Bob shook his head. "The whole thing was special effects, remember?" he asked. "A bunch of tech people put it all together in a computer while I was busy knocking up Susan. I don't even remember what it was supposed to look like from the outside."
"There were some people back down the hall who had blueprints or something," Steve said, remembering the rooms they'd passed on the way in.
A quick search found the room in question – JPL employees ranging in age from twenty to seventy had a set of plans and concept art spread out on a table, and were poring over it while a nervous Marvel Studios executive hovered behind them, trying to discourage them from drawing on the original artwork with sharpies. Steve waited in the hall, leaning on the crutch the policewoman had given him, while Natasha marched in.
"Good afternoon, folks," she said, and reached for the blueprint mockup they were examining.
They stared at her – especially the representative of the studio, a woman in a pea-green skirt suit, with gray streaks in her shoulder-length brown hair.
"Scarlett?" the woman asked.
"Natasha." She held out her hands.
The employees looked worried. They started picking up the drawings and diagrams, loathe to part with them. Nat put her hands on her hips.
"Do you want us to beat up your aliens for you?" she asked. "Or should we just let them blow up Houston?"
"Give them to her," the woman in green ordered. "I trust her with them better than I trust you guys."
Word spread quickly, and soon it seemed like half the people at JPL had crowded into one of the big conference rooms, where three Avengers, three actors, and a specialist in orbital mechanics were trying to come up with a slightly more coherent plan. The woman in green, whose name seemed to be Iris, had loaded a 3D model of the Leviathan on a laptop, and Natasha was examining it.
"The single-person craft dock here." She ran a finger down the side of the Leviathan as it rotated past. "So that's where we'll be going in, rather than at the mouth like Stark did."
"The internal structure is relatively weak," Bob noted. He'd found a packet of 'astronaut ice cream' somewhere, and was munching on the chalky-looking pink and white contents. "There's been big arguments about that online – how Tony couldn't scratch it from the outside but blew it up from the inside, and how it crumpled up when the Hulk punched it."
"The vessels are not designed to operate under gravity, only within their own anti-gravity fields," said Loki. "If your weapons or the monster's fist damaged the anti-gravity generator, the whole machine could collapse under its own weight."
"Like a sea serpent suffocating on a beach," Thor agreed.
"So if we can lay some charges inside, we ought to be able to bring it down," said Nat. "Especially if we can find the generator… that's gotta be in the head," she pointed, "if the Hulk managed to punch it."
"Sounds good," said Steve. They were starting to have a plan again, but there was still the matter of time. When he checked his watch again, they were now down to fourteen hours and twenty-six minutes.
Yet more time was required to make travel plans and get to the airport, and there were only eleven hours left when they finally boarded the three-hour flight from Pasadena to Austin. Commercial flights into and out of Texas had been grounded, so they went on a JPL cargo plane that was normally used for transporting satellites or space probes to their launch sites. As such, it didn't really have room for passengers – they had to sit on narrow benches down the insides of the fuselage, like in an old troop transport plane. Bob spent most of the trip on the phone, trying to round up the rest of the cast to meet them in Austin, and from there they would spend another two and a half hours driving to Houston. It all seemed a criminal waste of time.
"In our world, we'd just fly in with the quinjet," he grumbled.
"No, we wouldn't," Nat told him, "because one of the terms of the Accords was that our air, sea, and land craft would have to observe normal regulations and restrictions. They couldn't quite make Stark's suit and Sam's bird costume count as aircraft, because if they did they would also have had to restrict War Machine, but the quinjet would have needed a flight plan and the whole thing, and couldn't land at a closed airport."
"Just to annoy us," Steve grumbled.
"No, not just to annoy you," said Kevin. She was accompanying them because they would need some cooperation from the people who worked at the Johnson Space Center, and one of their own stood a much better chance of convincing everybody that this whole thing was real. "You can't just swoop in, because what if the aliens realize the Avengers are coming and don't want you there? They might start killing hostages in order to keep you away, and that's what you're trying to make them not do."
That was… that was a point. Steve's instinct was to argue that in that case, it was an even worse idea to slow down the Avengers because if they got in fast they'd be able to rescue more hostages… but the hostages wouldn't have been in danger if the Avengers hadn't been there. The real problem was that it left Steve right where he hated being – with his hands tied. "Why is everybody in this universe on Stark's side?" he asked.
"Actually, I was one of the girls in the Team Cap t-shirts," said Kevin. "In the real world, though, just because we don't have superheroes doesn't mean we don't have supervillains of a sort, and they get really mean when things don't go their way. Nobody wants to end up dead because the bad guys want to piss the heroes off. There's meaningful ways to go, but that's not one of them."
Steve could understand that, he really could, but the idea of being told where and when to do things and who he was allowed to save still stuck in his throat. Even if some kind of oversight were necessary, there had to be a better way than the Accords to get it done. Some kind of… it was a word Steve normally didn't like much, but some kind of compromise.
With a mere eight hours left to act, they landed in Austin, Texas, at eleven PM central time. A white van with the red and blue NASA logo on the side was waiting there to meet them. The back cargo doors of the plane rumbled open, and Kevin undid her seat belt, grabbed her backpack, and ran down to meet the driver – a woman in her forties, with a bottle-blonde pixie cut and multiple ear and eyebrow rings.
"Colleen!" Kevin said delightedly.
"Kevin!" The older woman held out her arms to hug her.
"Let me guess," Kevin said. "You got out through the tunnels, right?"
"Close, but not quite," Colleen said. "I was late to work this morning, and what I saw when I got there made me turn right around. The tunnels are open, though, because people have been trickling out of them all day. Ochoa and Bridenstein have been organizing it, just two or three at a time so the ETs don't get suspicious. They've got some sort of way to scramble signals so we can't call in or out, but the escapees have been bringing messages and it seems like so far the only people they've hurt are those who've tried to attack them first."
"They said all they want is Loki," said Kevin. "They must've meant it." She turned and waved to the others as they came down the ramp. "Everybody, this is Dr. Colleen Hobb. I was her intern when I started at NASA."
"When Kevin told me she would never bother me about her Martian Moons Mission idea again if I did her a favour, I knew it was something serious," Colleen said. "We're really doing this, huh? They think they want the Avengers, so we're giving them the Avengers?"
"Pretty much," said Kevin. "Colleen and I are gonna show you how to get in. The JSC was built during the cold war, so there's bunkers and tunnels all over the place, and they connect to the main pedestrian tunnels in the city. Colleen knows them better than anybody."
"I used to give tours when I was in college," said Colleen.
Steve hobbled up to shake the woman's hand. "Nice to meet you, Dr. Hobb," he said.
"You too, Mr. Evans," she replied. She looked him over rather skeptically, and he supposed that between what had started off as an intentional disguise and now the injured ankle, he probably looked distinctly un-Captain-America-like. That couldn't be the only reason she'd called him Mr. Evans, though – he caught Kevin's eye, and she just shrugged. Maybe she'd thought Colleen wouldn't believe it, or simply didn't need to know.
Colleen opened the door of the van. "Pile in, everybody," she said. "You're meeting the rest of your group at Pennzoil Place?"
"That's right," said Bob, patting the phone in his pocket. "I got almost everybody."
"All right." Colleen did up her seat belt. "So what's the plan, exactly?"
The plan had gotten a little more complicated since their first iteration, but the basics remained the same: Steve, Natasha, Loki, and Thor would sneak into the Johnson Space Center through the underground tunnels, dressed to blend in with the staff. They would locate the Chi'Tauri landing craft and then, since the aliens had scrambled all outgoing signals, launch a flare to indicate they were ready. Bob would then broadcast a challenge to the Chi'Tauri from the Avengers. While the aliens attempted to deal with that, the four dimensionally-displaced heroes would fly up to the Leviathan and dock with it. Steve, as the injured one, got the job of finding the wormhole machine. He had no idea what it would look like, but that wasn't a handicap because the rest of them wouldn't, either. Meanwhile, Natasha, Thor, and Loki would have to find and incapacitate the Chi'Tauri queen.
"You were gonna get us something to help with that," Nat reminded Kevin.
"Yeah," said Kevin. "We've got just the thing. Right, Colleen?" She smiled.
"Absolutely," Colleen said. "Although you're gonna have to go get it yourself, because it's already inside the facility."
It was a long, dark ride to Houston, and when they got there they found the city had turned off most of its lights. Instead of the glittering urban landscape Steve had expected, there was just block upon block of dark suburbs, some with lights on in the buildings but no streetlights or advertising signs or anything of that sort. It reminded him uncomfortably of the blackouts in Europe during the war. As they entered downtown dark skyscrapers rose up around them like weird, alien spires of rock… and between them to the southeast, Steve could see a strange effect in the air, like a cone of shimmering pink light almost too faint to be seen. Some kind of field the Chi'Tauri were projecting, maybe, to mess with the communications or to detect people trying to sneak in or out. There was a quality about it that Steve couldn't quite define, as if its flickering were somehow out of step with the rest of the world. It did not belong in this universe, and somehow, it looked it.
"If you guys can get your hands on whatever's causing that," Kevin said, "I know at least six people who'd give their right arms to be able to take it apart."
"I'm one of them," Colleen agreed.
"I'll see what I can do, but it's not a priority," said Steve.
Steve had seen pictures of modern skylines in both the US and abroad in the past few years, with their fanciful skyscrapers that sometimes looked more like sculptures than practical buildings. He'd even gotten a chance to visit a few of them, and hadn't always left them in ruins. Pennzoil Place in Houston was new to him. It was a pair of oddly-shaped towers in black glass, with a pyramidal atrium connecting them. With most of the lights off, the stars and moon were fiercely bright, reflecting in the rippling glass very like what a portal to another dimension might look like.
They parked on the street. There was nobody around, but Colleen still put change in the meter before buzzing at the front doors for a security guard to let them in. Inside the atrium there were potted plants growing, and entrances to a variety of shops and restaurants. Because of the late hour these were all closed – but there were lights on in the Starbucks, and a group of people were sitting at the tables having drinks and talking. Bob grinned and hurried ahead to meet them.
"Hey, guys!" he said cheerfully.
There was a man in street clothes behind the counter, making the coffees. He looked up and waved, and Steve recognized him at once – it was Hawkeye, or the actor who played him. Jeremy Renner was a little older than Steve thought Clint Barton was, and not in quite such good shape, but it couldn't have been anybody else.
"That for me?" Bob asked, pointing to the coffee.
Jeremy handed it to him. "Are we really doing this?" he asked.
"I'm the one who organized it and even I don't know," Bob replied. He turned to face the others who were approaching – Steve, Natasha, Thor, Loki, Donny, and the two women from NASA. "Okay, folks, this is Jeremy Renner. Ruffalo bowed out but that's probably okay, because it's not like he can hulk out if they call our bluff. That's Lizzie Olsen," he pointed to a blonde woman in a loose gray sweater. The hair colour may have been wrong, but the face was Wanda's. "Where's Aaron?"
"He says he's on his way," Lizzie promised, without even a trace of Wanda's accent.
"Chadwick couldn't make it but Cheadle said he wouldn't miss it," Bob went on, as Colonel Rhodes waved to them from another table. "We've got Sebastian, of course, and here are the stunt people…"
Steve probably should have paid attention as the introductions continued. The stunt people were going to be taking the same big risk as the actors, and Steve knew from his own time making movies that the contributions of stunt performers to that industry were often overlooked. At that moment, however, his ears simply shut down and suddenly the whole world was a million miles away. Natasha's distressing prediction had just come true – he was face-to-face with this world's Bucky.
The man Bob had called Sebastian must have been working on some other film, because he didn't look much like Bucky at the moment. His hair was cut short, and he had a mustache that made him look rather startlingly like Howard Stark. If he'd tried that during the war, Steve would have teased him about it mercilessly. But there was no mistaking Bucky's dimpled chin and blue eyes, nor the expression on his face – it was intrigued and yet skeptical, not sure what was going on but game for it anyway. Steve had gotten similar looks from Bucky a thousand times in the past.
And Steve knew he shouldn't, but just as Natasha had predicted, he desperately wanted to talk to this man. He felt like he needed to at least hear his voice. Would he be British, like Howard had disconcertingly been? Or American like Wanda?. God, he hoped Bucky would be American. Of course this was all an illusion, because Loki would find them a world in which their entire lives were illusions, but hearing Bucky speak and the voice not being Bucky's would have been a kick in the gut Steve didn't think he could take.
Then Bucky spoke first. He was American, although his accent was slightly different from the one Steve remembered. Steve wasn't sure if that helped or not.
"Take a picture," he said. "It'll last longer."