The brig did have doors, of course – huge ones, formed of multiple layers of interlocking sections that looked like beetle wings. They'd rumbled shut behind the group as the Chi'Tauri had carried their captives in. Now, to Steve's horror, they began to open again. On the other side he could see the glow of multiple plasma rifles and staves. There were lines and lines of troops out there ready to get the prisoners back out of control.

Thor held out a hand, glanced at it, then looked at Hemsworth. "Where is Mjolnir?" he asked.

Hemsworth shook his head. "That thing weighs a bloody ton! I couldn't budge it!"

Thor had been so proud that none of his comrades could lift the hammer at Stark's party. Now he was desperately disappointed. "You're not worthy?" he asked.

"Of course not!" said Hemsworth.

"I have to do everything myself," grumbled Natasha. She scooped up a weapon from one of the fallen guards and turned on the shield function. Scarlett Johansson crawled over to her and grabbed her leg, like Princess Leia in the very oldest and cheesiest posters for Star Wars. Steve was tempted to do the same, but then there would have been nobody to guard the unconscious Loki.

"What is going on?" demanded Evans.

This was the first time he'd spoken, and it was a bit of a shock to hear his voice. So that was what Steve sounded like to other people, was it? He'd always thought of himself as having a higher-pitched voice, one that would match the skinny little body he'd been born with. The one he heard now was deeper than he expected, and came from a man who was clearly scared to death.

"We're about to be killed by aliens, that's what's going on!" Nat tossed him a plasma rifle. "Shield function in the button on the bottom."

Evans caught it, looked surprised at himself, then turned it over and switched it on. The air shimmered pink around him. "Right," he said. "Nothing I haven't done a hundred times while I was awake." And he turned and charged at the Chi'Tauri.

"Wait!" Steve protested, but it was too late. Evans took off too fast to follow, and knocked the first alien right off its feet. Others fired on him, but he turned around, holding up the plasma rifle in front of him as if it were literally a shield, rather than just the source of one. The man had trained as a gymnast, Steve quickly realized as he watched him fight. He was surprisingly graceful, but did not know his own strength – or rather, the strength of Steve's body. He put all his weight behind a punch when he should have saved it, and leaned into his kicks like a ballerina.

Was this what Steve himself looked like to everybody else, just rushing into battle without a thought for his own safety or anybody else's? No wonder Peggy thought he was a self-sacrificing wanker!

It was soon plain that Evans didn't know Steve's limits, either. He was trying to take on the whole damn Chi'Tauri army at once. The shield function on his plasma rifle soon gave out from absorbing too many blows, fizzing and sparking just as Loki's had on the grass. Evans then started using the metal itself to deflect the incoming bolts. This worked better than Steve would have expected, but began putting holes in the side of the gun. Somebody had to go in there and help, but Steve couldn't do it, Loki and Hiddleston were unconscious, Nat was in no shape to fight and Johansson probably left all that to her stuntwomen…

Hemsworth cracked his knuckles. "Right," he said, and rolled up his sleeves. "I got this."

"How can you got this without Mjolnir?" Thor demanded.

"Taika sent me a preliminary script for feedback," Hemsworth said. "I got this. Evans!" he shouted. "Or Cap or whoever you are! Get out of the way!"

Evans paused with a Chi'Tauri's breastplate in each hand, and watched as Hemsworth planted his feet and made fists. He gritted his teeth – and to Steve's astonishment, whatever he was doing actually worked. His jeans and red sweatshirt transformed into Thor's armor and cape, and electricity crackled over his body.

Evans quickly slammed the two aliens' heads together and dived out of the way. Did he know what Hemsworth was about to do, or only that it was obviously dangerous to be in the way of it?

Hemsworth raised both hands, and made a motion like pitching a baseball. A tremendous bolt of lighting burst out, blowing the Chi'Tauri away. The lights in the room went out in a shower of sparks, and Steve felt his scalp prickle and his muscles involuntarily twitch. He tasted copper.

A moment later, reddish emergency lights came on. At least half the Chi'Tauri troops were unconscious or dead. The rest were fleeing. Everybody's hair was standing up in halos around their heads. Eyes were wide and mouths were open, but nobody's more so than Thor's.

"I… did not know I could do that," he said.

Hemsworth was panting, arcs of electricity still on his fingertips and the edge of his cape on fire. "Okay, that might have been a little extra," he admitted, and took a second look at Thor. "What did you do to my face?"

Thor reached up to touch his bruises. "The welts are from the jelly-fish," he said. "The rest is fighting with the Chi'Tauri since. How did you…"

"Guys!" said Natasha.

Steve looked around, and realized that the situation had just gotten either much better or much worse, because the momentary power outage had turned off all the stasis cells. All around them, creatures were staggering out, ranging from a ten-foot-tall reptilian beast with curving ram's horns to a waist-high creature that resembled nothing so much as a duck in a leisure suit. One bald being was wearing sunglasses and had a droopy mustache, and looked rather like Stan Lee.

The being that approached them was human-sized and roughly human-shaped and wore a long coat, and its entire body appeared to be made of a lumpy pearlescent substance. "Who are you?" it demanded of them.

Evans came back to re-join the others. Hemsworth's lightning had scorched his hair, and he was panting and going to have a black eye, but he was alive. "I, uh, I think we're the Avengers," he said. "Earth's mightiest heroes?"

Stark called them that, mostly sarcastically. Evans spoke the phrase as if he wasn't sure he believed it, but was prepared to try to live up to it. There was something both awful and comforting about that.

The pearl creature grinned, showing off shiny black teeth that appeared to be made of glass, and shook Evan's hand. "These here space rats have had me and my crew locked up for the better part of a month! He said. "Shall we show 'em what they get, boys, for messing with the Ravagers?"

"Yeah!" a chorus went up from the others.

Steve felt a smile spread across his face as he realized that finally, things were starting to go right. "Okay," he said. "Okay, here's what we're gonna do."

The pearly Ravager leader looked from Evans to Steve and back again. "There supposed to be two of all of you?" he asked.

"I'm not sure," said Evans.

"Yes," said Steve. "It's a long story." He held out a hand, and Hemsworth helped him to his feet. "All right, we have to get back to the ship we came in on. I'm guessing you guys do, too. Ours is docked down with the Leviathans."

"They got ours in a cargo bay, up top," said the pearly being.

"Great," said Steve. "You go that way, we'll go down, and we'll keep them busy on two fronts at once." Dividing the enemy's forces was almost always a good idea.

"Sounds like a plan," the pearly being agreed. "All right, boys…"

From somewhere among the crowd came a sound like a throat being cleared, with a tinny undertone as if it were being broadcast over a speaker. When the source stepped forward, it proved to be either a cyborg or just a robot, built originally to look like a beautiful woman but having taken quite a bit of damage since that point. She'd been patched with scrap metal in several places, and half her head was bald, with only a clear plastic shell to cover the circuitry beneath.

"Sorry!" said the pearly being. "Boys and Miss Alpha-Eleven-Three! Let's give 'em the hell they asked for!"

The Ravagers got to work stripping the weapons from the fallen Chi'Tauri. There were others among the prisoners who had not been part of the pirate crew, but the pearly being cheerfully swore them in. They were all here because they were enemies of the Chi'Tauri, so they would probably get along just fine, at least for the time being. When a second, better-armed wave of soldiers arrived, they were just in time to be confronted by two dozen furious pirates opening fire. The one who looked like Stan Lee gave a weird, yodeling battle cry.

The Chi'Tauri returned fire, and while everybody else was distracted by the fighting, the Avengers made their way through the middle of the fray. Hemsworth went first, trying to control the lightning powers Thor had been unaware of, and not always succeeding. Weapons on both sides sparked and smoked as he went by, and Miss Alpha-Eleven-Three made a horrible electronic screeching noise. Behind Hemsworth was Thor, carrying Loki, and Evans, helping Hiddleston walk. Last were Natasha and Johansson, supporting Steve between them.

"Excuse us!" said Evans, as they ducked around and between fighting Ravagers and Chi'Tauri. "Pardon me! Coming through! Can we just… thank you!"

"Is he Canadian?" Steve asked. That would be an amusing irony.

"Only in spirit," said Johansson.

They made it to the doors of the brig, and piled back into the elevator. Steve reached out and pulled the handle, and they started moving – in the wrong direction, going up. He muttered a curse and turned the handle around to pull it again. The elevator stopped, and then went down. Much better. He counted the rings of light as they passed.

"Seven…" he murmured. "Eight… nine! Here!" Another yank on the handle brought the elevator to a stop. The doors opened on the Leviathan dockage.

There was a welcoming committee waiting to greet them. The elevators were surrounded by Chi'Tauri, at least fifty of them with rifles and staves – and Steve had only just digested the fact that they were going to have to go through that when the roof of the hallway began to move. It separated into plates that rotated and folded like bizarre alien origami, until there was an opening big enough to admit one of the giant queens. She stepped down into it. Soldiers moved aside to make room for her.

They did have one advantage, Steve realized. The opening to admit the Queen was on their left, opposite to the direction they needed to go. "On the right!" he ordered. "Our Leviathan is the one with the blue panel!" What that actually meant was no longer relevant. What mattered was that it would be easy to find, and the queen couldn't go that way because the ceiling was too low.

That was why she had the troops, though, and they clustered on the right, seeking to drive the escapees towards their mistress. Steve couldn't fight them any more than he could have on the way in, but now he had somebody who could.

"Evans," he said, "get one of their weapons again, but don't et the ones with the staves shoot at you, because they're more powerful than the rifle's force field can handle."

"Got it," Evans nodded.

"Knock their legs out from under them," Steve added, "and don't get killed, because Hayley Atwell will kill me for letting you!"

"Got that, too." Evans looked at the nearest soldier, then somersaulted forward and used himself as a bowling ball to knock the alien over.

"I'll get the big one!" Hemsworth said. He fired himself up with lightning again, and took a flying leap towards the Queen, delivering a punch straight to her solar plexus. She staggered backwards, but the electricity was dispersed by the metallic cloth draped around her body. This clearly caused her some pain, and she tore it away, snarling, but she was not disabled. She brought two of her four fists down on the floor, trying to squash Hemsworth like a bug. He leaped aside just in time.

"Get at the seams in her armor!" Thor shouted, cupping his hands around his mouth. "That's how Loki took one's arm off before!"

This was like playing a video game, Steve thought. They had all their abilities and powers now, but they could only use them at arm's length.

Evans had gotten a rifle, but a Chi'Tauri with a staff overloaded its shield, and he threw it aside to bounce off another alien's head. "I am Captain America," he said out loud, grabbing a Chi'Tauri by the back of its helmet and slamming its face into the floor. "I am fighting a million aliens." He drove his knee into another one's crotch. The soldiers had no genitalia, but it was still obviously painful. "While a guy who looks exactly like me fucking coaches me!" He kicked a third in the gut, and it staggered backwards to knock over two others.

Hemsworth let loose another bolt of lightning at the giant Queen, but it was no good. Even without the metallic cloth, her armor dispersed the electricity. On her head she wore a helmet with a netted veil and a great deal of jewelry – the lightning was conducted over the surface of this, and absorbed into the structure of the ship.

"You'll have to find an opening!" Thor ordered. "A chink in the armor!"

"Where?" Hemsworth asked, as he dodged the Chi'Tauri queen's fists and feet.

"Evans!" said Steve. "Make one!"

"One what?" asked Evans, grabbing a soldier's arm to re-direct its fist into the face of a fellow.

"A chink in the armor!" Steve repeated.

"Coming!" Evans leapfrogged over another Soldier and grabbed a prong on the Queen's armor. He dragged himself up as if he were on a climbing wall at the gym, while she swatted at him like a mosquito, her gauntlets clanging against her greaves and breastplate. Steve could only watch, wincing and trying to will Evans to swing out of the way in time. How could watching this be ten times more terrifying than doing it himself?"

Evans made it to the Queen's shoulder and braced himself to wrench on her pauldron. He gritted his teeth and his muscles bulged under his shirt as he strained, while the metal made a horrible groaning sound.

He'd also shut his eyes. "Evans!" Steve shouted.

Evans looked, but too late – the Queen grabbed him by the leg and slammed him against the wall. The soldiers ran to take advantage of the moment.

"Hold this," Natasha said, shoving Steve's entire weight onto Johansson. She scooped up a dropped plasma rifle and ran to defend Evans. Thor propped Hiddleston against the wall next to Loki and did likewise.

Hemsworth leaped to the edge of the open rooftop and pointed to the Queen's bent armor. "Is that enough a chink?" he asked.

Thor didn't answer. He was busy shooting at Chi'Tauri, trying to keep them away from the fallen Evans.

"Is that enough of a chink?" Hemsworth repeated. The Queen heard him and turned to see where he was, and he stumbled back a couple of steps as he realized she was on eye level with him. Her giant hand reached to grab him.

"Yes!" said Steve, since Thor obviously wasn't going to reply. "Yes! Zap her!"

The Queen yanked Hemsworth off his feet. He pointed at her bent pauldron, and fired his lightning. The bolt leaped from his hand to her flesh, and she shrieked in pain as she felt to the floor, taking part of the ceiling with her. She twitched and writhed and some – although not all – of the soldiers were apparently overwhelmed by her pain and joined her in a collective seizure. Nat and Thor dragged Evans out of the crowd of disoriented aliens, all three of them looking rather battered.

"Let's go! Let's go!" Nat urged.

The hallway was now utter chaos. For each person who could walk there was another who couldn't, or who could only barely do so, and that meant that even with most of their enemies down, they moved at a snail's pace. Evans took an elbow to the face as they slipped past a Chi'Tauri trying to hold down a convulsing crewmate, and spat out a mouthful of blood. Steve tripped over a fallen plasma rifle and went sprawling, taking Natasha and Johansson with him, and as he tried to get up another alien stepped on his back. It was all he could do to keep from howling, and he was sure he felt something inside him go crunch. The women helped him up again.

Once they were clear of the crowd, a few Chi'Tauri who were still standing had the presence of mind to realize that their prisoners were fleeing, and tried to go after them. For a second time, Nat left Johansson to support Steve and turned around to shoot down the pursuers. They continued moving a few steps at a time in between one or another member of the party fighting for their lives, but at last Steve spotted the blue panel next to the Leviathan with the wormhole generator. They climbed over the row of sharp teeth and into the mouth, and Hemsworth and Evans together forced it closed.

"Hemsworth," said Thor, "use your lightning to seal it."

Hemsworth put a hand on the metal and let current arc through it. Sparks flew up as the mouth welded itself shut, along with a choking smell, like burning hair, from the organic components. Both dispersed quickly, though, leaving the group sitting in the dark. Steve could hear the others breathing hard all around him, and was almost surprised he couldn't hear their hearts pounding as well. His own was kettledrum loud.

It was only as his heart and breathing began to slow that Steve realized there were Chi'Tauri just outside, chittering to each other in an alien language. He heard scratching sounds, and a few ringing thumps as one of them knocked on the hull. This was followed by the whistle of a weapon firing, but it couldn't get through the Leviathan's armor any more than Stark's lasers had been able to in New York.

They probably had something that could, though. It was time to get up and figure out how to fly home. "Natasha," said Steve. "You had a flashlight at some point?"

"Yeah. It's here," she replied. It came on, the white LEDs impossibly bright in the dark space. The light cast deep shadows on everybody's faces and on the walls around them, and Steve realized for the first time that the Leviathan had a second row of teeth in the roof of its mouth, like a python.

"Great," said Steve. "Follow me. You guys," he pointed at Evans, Hemsworth, and Johansson, who had gathered around Loki and Hiddleston and were huddled there as if forming a ball to shut out the hostile outside world. They looked up when Steve addressed them with worried faces, expecting him to demand something impossible of them. He smiled in an attempt to reassure. "Good work," he said. "Let us know if Loki comes to, okay?"

"Okay," said Johansson.

There wasn't really any way for anyone to help Steve climb up to the cockpit. He just had to hang on and try not to put too much weight on his bad ankle. Worse, he now had the additional problem of bruised ribs. They'd only just been healing from being thrown into the pile of metal chairs at the convention centre, and now the Soldier stepping on him had damaged them again. Steve was sure he could feel torn muscles and cracked bones.

Nat followed him up with the flashlight, while Thor brought up the rear. Earlier, the cockpit had been lit by the glow from all the holographic displays, but now it was pitch dark. Nat shone the beam around, and it fell across the knobs and grooves on the control panel. Some of these had been glowing before but now they, too, were inactive.

"There's got to be a way to turn it on," Steve said firmly. "Thor, you got any ideas?" Of course, there wasn't any particular reason why Thor should know better than himself or Nat. All of them had met the Chi'Tauri for the firsts time at the Battle of New York, and hadn't seen them since until now.

"I have some familiarity with the vessels of the elves and the dwarves," said Thor, studying the panel. "I have never been inside one of these before today, but I shall see what I can do." He started at one end of the panel and began working his way down, examining the controls and touching things experimentally. Steve could tell that his actions were not random, that he was being methodical and thorough in whatever he was doing, but had no idea whether he were finding anything.

"How's it going?" asked Evans.

Steve jumped a little, and turned to see that the actor had climbed up after them – and he wasn't having any trouble with it, despite having taken quite a beating from his encounter with the Chi'Tauri Queen. He reached the deck level and stood up to see what Thor was doing. This was the first time Steve had been standing up more or less straight right next to him, and he was startled by how big his was. Chris Evans' body was above normal height and in great shape, but still only human in a way Steve Rogers no longer was. Being outside the super-soldier, looking in, was downright intimidating and Steve wasn't sure he was comfortable with that. He didn't think of himself as a scary person. He didn't want to be a scary person.

Evans had asked a question, though, and presumably he wanted an answer. "Thor's trying to figure it out," Steve said. "I think we're all just gonna go back to Earth and have a good sleep before we figure out what to do next."

"How's everybody down below," Nat asked.

"Okay, I guess," said Evans with a shrug. "It's hard to tell." He reached up and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, then inspected the skin. Nat's flashlight provided just enough illumination for Steve to make out the smear of blood. "Shit," Evans muttered. "I'm not dreaming, am I?"

"'Fraid not," said Nat.

"We were disappointed, too," Steve added.

"What's the last thing you remember?" Natasha wanted to know.

Evans thought about it. "We were filming that stunt," he said. "I was trying very hard not to brace for it because Donny kept telling me to relax, but the last few times I've had to pretend I was in an explosion it was an explosion I was supposed to be able to see coming. Then something blew up for real, and I got thrown into all this concrete rubble. By the time I dug my way out of it there were these aliens standing there and they just grabbed me." He looked at Nat. "What's the last thing you remember?"

"We haven't spent the last week in stasis cells," she reminded him, "but I assume you're asking what we experienced at the moment of transfer. We were confronting Loki in the museum where he was trying to use some kind of Asgardian technology, but Thor hit it with his hammer before he…"

That was the moment when Steve stood up straight and said, "shit! The tesseract!"

Natasha's eyes went wide. Thor stopped studying the control panel and turned to look at Steve in horror. Up until that moment, none of them had stopped to think about the fact that the tesseract would have been sitting in the ruins of the Oslo museum along with four actors very confused at finding themselves in a world they thought was fiction. It hadn't come with them, though, and Evans' story sounded as if no humans had made it there in time to take it away… so it must now be in the hands of the Chi'Tauri.

"We must retrieve it," said Thor.

Steve agreed with him – there could be no argument about that. And yet… how were they supposed to do it? They were exhausted. Four of them had no powers and the other four had powers they could barely use or control. They were vastly outnumbered and outgunned, and had survived so far only by being clever and lucky. There was absolutely no way they could just march back out there into the mothership and go get it. The tesseract would be the best-guarded thing on the entire ship, and they didn't have the faintest idea where it would be kept. The vessel was the size of a city.

Even so, Steve spent a few seconds wrestling with the idea, trying to figure it out. There had to be a way. There was always a way, and Steve had never yet given up on anything in his life. Against aliens, conspiracies, armies of robots, or people he'd thought were his friends, he'd always kept going, always found a solution. Right now, however… he hadn't the faintest idea. The thought of trying honestly made him feel ill.

Then he realized he was looking at Evans. Steve's eyes re-focused on his double's face, and he saw that Evans was shaking his head – just slightly, and probably subconsciously. After a moment, however, he swallowed hard, then straightened up a little.

"Well," he said. "I… uh… I guess that's a job for Captain America."

He thought Steve was going to make him do it. Steve quickly put out a hand to say no, and Natasha took Evans' arm and shook her head.

"You can't do it alone," she said. "That's suicide."

"She's right," said Steve. "We'll have to come back for it. Later. When we've all switched back and can get some more help. Maybe from Asgard." He looked at Thor.

"Yes, our warriors will certainly help," Thor said.

"We can even get more of the Avengers," Natasha added. "If it's not on Earth, the Accords don't apply. You can't possibly do it alone. Anyway, Hemsworth welded the door shut."

Evans was so relieved Steve half-expected him to fall over. "Right," he said, rubbing his brow. "Okay. Good. I mean, not good, but… okay. I'll check on the others." He climbed back into the shaft and vanished down it.

Steve leaned back against the control console, also relieved. If Evans had run off to do the task despite everybody's objections, they wouldn't have been able to stop him – but at the same time, Steve was oddly proud of the man. The terror on his face said that he'd known exactly how dangerous it would be, and yet he'd stepped up anyway. Maybe this guy understood Captain America after all.