Natasha breathed an audible sigh of relief as Evans vanished back down the ladder, then thought for a moment before going to follow him. "I better make sure he doesn't try to do something dumb," she said. "You still think he doesn't understand you, Steve?" her voice floated up the tunnel as she climbed.
"No comment," Steve said. Leaning on the edge of the console to take the weight off his ankle, he turned to see what Thor was doing.
Now that he knew the tesseract was at stake, Thor had redoubled his efforts to try to get the Leviathan going. He had taken a panel off the far right end of the control surface, and was shining Natasha's flashlight into it, frowning as he sorted through what appeared to be wiring and fiber-optic cable underneath.
"Any progress?" Steve asked him.
"It may be," he said. "Fetch Hemsworth for me, if you would."
Steve hobbled over to one of the tunnels. "Hemsworth!" he shouted. "Can you come up here?"
"I could have done that," said Thor.
"I don't want to do any more climbing on this ankle," Steve told him. Great – now on top of everything else, he was whining about it.
Hemsworth's head appeared in the opening, along with a hand swatting long blond hair out of his face. "I hate the hair," he grumbled. "Next movie, I'm cutting the hair."
"A warrior's hair is a symbol of his strength!" Thor protested, shocked. "It must not be cut!"
"Watch me," said Hemsworth. He gathered it back at the nape of his neck and tucked it under his cape to keep it contained. "What do you need?"
Thor showed him the open panel. "Here," he said, and took Hemsworth's hand to guide it to a place inside. "Do you feel that two-pronged connector? The one I have removed the casing from?"
"Yeah," said Hemsworth.
"Apply a spark just there," Thor told him. "A small spark. Too much will melt and destroy the delicate parts."
"And too little will do nothing, right. Okay," said Hemsworth. He shut his eyes and gritted his teeth, as if about to get a needle at the doctor's office. For a moment, nothing happened.
Then there was a tremendous snap that set Steve's hair standing up all over again. Lightning sizzled over the equipment, screens came on, and controls lit up, all of them fizzing and flickering. The inside of the cockpit was like a pink and purple disco for a moment as static scrolled over all the displays, and the light was much too bright for people who'd been sitting around in the dark for twenty minutes. Steve had to close his eyes, and when he opened them again, there were spots dancing in his vision.
It had worked, though. The Leviathan's systems were on. The big guidance display was up, showing a diagram of how they were docked with the mother ship by a variety of hooks and probes. Steve reached up and tapped one. There was a dull clunk and the pink image flickered blue before coming back, but the probe did not disengage. The Chi'Tauri were not going to let them get away that easily.
Natasha reappeared in one access tunnel, and Evans in the other. "You got it working?" Nat asked.
"Sort of," said Steve. He tried another of the docking probes. Again, it made a noise and the Leviathan rattled, but the machinery did not move. They were still locked in place.
Maybe they could activate the wormhole right here, and take part of the mother ship with them if they had to. Steve found the starfield screen, but the circle icon in the corner was no longer pulsing or spinning. When he touched it, it twitched, but nothing happened. Maybe the wormhole could not be used as long as the vessel was docked.
"All right." Steve gripped the controls. "We'll just have to bust our way out."
"Wait," Thor put out a hand.
From down below came a hissing noise, and a panicked woman's voice – it was impossible to tell if it were Natasha's or Johansson's. "Guys!" she shouted. "Guys, they're cutting the door open!"
Could the actors take another fight? Steve doubted it. "Go help moves Loki and Hiddleston," Steve told Hemsworth. "I don't think there's room for eight of us up here, so find somewhere else to hide them." He hoped there was somewhere else on this vessel. What he'd seen so far made the inside look very sparse and utilitarian.
Hemsworth hurried down the ladder again, cursing as his hair came out of his collar and fell in his face once more. Steve gripped the controls again, then his eyes went to another view on one of the display screens. It showed down the side of the mother ship, and what had drawn Steve's attention was that things were moving. Above the row of docked Leviathans, smaller sets of doors were sliding open and lights were coming on inside them.
"If we bust out, they'll fire on us," Steve realized.
"It is a surprise they have not already blasted their way in," said Thor. "I believe they are reluctant to damage the mother ship in the process."
They would be much less reluctant once the Leviathan was in space. "What do we do?" asked Steve.
Thor found another screen and enlarged it to fill the main viewing area. His hands flew over the controls. "If I understand their system of numerals correctly… our allies in the brig were Ravagers. Let's try one of their frequencies."
There was a response almost immediately. The large screen flickered, and then there was the pearlescent captain, with Miss Alpha-Eleven-Three on one side of him and the giant crocodile-like creature on the other. Miss Alpha was missing an arm and Steve didn't recall the crocodile having an eyepatch before, but it had three eyes so it could probably spare one. The captain saw who was calling, and smiled.
"You made it!" he said.
"Yes, we did!" Steve agreed. "Sort of. Where are you?"
"On board our ship," the pearly captain replied. "We're still in the loading bay but we've hunkered down in fortress mode – should be able to hold out six, maybe seven days until help can arrive."
"Well… we can't do that," said Steve. "We made it back to the stolen Leviathan we came in by, but I don't think we can use our wormhole until we're at least a certain distance from the mother ship."
"The moment we leave, though, every weapon in the fleet will fire upon us," Thor added. "Do you know of anything we might do to distract them?"
The pearly captain cocked his head, thinking about it. Miss Alpha leaned down to whisper something in his ear, and he grinned. "Sounds like fun. All right, folks – Miss Alpha-Eleven-Three's got you covered. Nobody's yet built the system she can't hack."
The screen went dark.
For a couple of minutes, nothing seemed to be happening. Then there was a fait sound from somewhere outside, an electrical whirr like an entire room full of computers starting up at the same moment. The ship began to vibrate. Something moved on the side screen Steve had been watching a moment ago, so he enlarged it for a better look. All down the side of the mother ship, one after another, not one but three rows of docked Leviathans were disengaging and floating out into space. The first few were fired upon, but then the shooting stopped as the Chi'Tauri realized it was a computer error, not a mass escape.
The wave of moving ships got closer and closer, until the one two spaces down floated out, then the one next door… and then there was a series of mechanical noises, Steve's stomach lurched as the gravity turned off, and they were free.
Steve grabbed the control column, both so he could fly the ship and as a way to keep himself from rattling around in the cockpit. The other Leviathans were floating inertly, unpowered and unpiloted, and they made for a dangerous-looking debris field. As Steve watched, two of those further down the line scraped against each other, giving off sparks. He hooked his knees under the console again and very gently turned the nose down, trying to make it look like they were drifting at random while also avoiding a collision with any of the other craft.
Nat rejoined them in the cockpit, and pushed herself off the floor to join Steve. "Where is… there it is." She found the starfield screen. "How do I know when it's ready?"
"The little circle will start to pulse," Steve told her. "That's what it was doing before."
They drifted a little further. It was very difficult to judge the distance in space. Steve tried to keep his eye on the various outside views, and saw that some of the smaller ships in the fleet were starting to launch little delta-winged vessels, looking rather like skates or rays. These would fly out and dock with the mouths of the Leviathans, allowing a couple of crew to board and fly them back to the mother ship. This was clearly a tedious process, and one that would take some time. Steve tried to move their Leviathan down relative to the plane the mother ship was on, to get more distance between them and it without looking like the vessel was under intelligent control.
"Anything yet?" he asked.
"It's not moving." Nat poked the circle. Again, it twitched, but the wormhole didn't activate. "It must have turned off when everything else did. Thor, can you…?"
"I will look." Thor grabbed a handle in the floor to pull himself down, and removed another panel, this one underneath the main console.
"Look fast,' said Steve, as more and more of the little skates flew into view. The Chi'Tauri might have lost track now of which Leviathan was which, but when they tried to dock with this one they would find the mouth welded shut, and they would know. Would they tow it back to throw them in the brig again? Or just blow them to smithereens?
"Aha! I know what the problem is!" Thor announced. He pulled an octahedral object, made of what looked like splinters of crystal in a metal bracket, out from under the console. "There is no power! Like the rune stone itself, this device runs on the tesseract. They filled this storage unit before sending the troops after us, and it must have contained enough power only for two trips, one out and one back."
Steve cursed. Every time they thought they were almost out of this, another problem was added to the pile. "What do we do, then?" They were back in their own universe, it seemed, but not in their own bodies. They could switch back when Loki came to, but then the actors would be trapped here, the Chi'Tauri would still have the tesseract, and they didn't even know where in the universe they were! Earth might be on the other side of the galaxy.
Thor touched the communications screen again. "Our friends!" he said. "We thank you, but it seems our escape is not yet complete. We cannot activate our wormhole, as it is out of fuel. Have you any more tricks that might assist us?"
The pearly captain of the Ravagers sat back in his seat and stroked his chin, thinking. "Well, now," he said. "I think we've already thanked you for getting us out of those cells, and for knocking down the first wave of rats so we could take their guns. If we're gonna do any more favours for you, we'll want a favour done for us in return."
"I am a prince of Asgard," said Thor. "You will have your reward."
The captain snorted. "You're not Asgardian! You're too short and too ugly. You had a couple of them, though. What were you gonna do with them? Ransom them? Asgard's not big on paying ransoms. They prefer to kick your ass and then make you apologize for them having to go to the trouble."
"They are our allies, not our prisoners," said Thor. "Natasha, since Stephen cannot climb, bring Hemsworth."
Nat went to one of the tunnels. "Hemsworth!" she shouted.
Thor rolled his eyes. "And what is your excuse?" he asked.
Hemsworth scrambled into view a moment later. "Now what?"
"Here!" Thor patted Hemsworth on the shoulder. "Here is your Asgardian prince! He shall see that you are rewarded for assisting us."
"Oh, yes!" Hemsworth nodded, mimicking Thor's accent and mannerisms perfectly. "My, uh, my Midgardian doppelgänger speaks the truth! You shall all be handsomely paid for assisting the son of Odin!"
Thor leaned to catch Steve's eye behind Hemsworth's back. "Do I sound like that?" he whispered. "Truly?"
Steve nodded, and wondered what he might discover if Evans tried to imitate him.
"The son of Odin, eh? You are big people," said the pearly captain. He looked at Miss Alpha, then at the crocodile, and waved for them to lean in. There was a short whispered conversation.
"What's going on?" asked Hemsworth.
"I think we're about to make a very one-sided deal with some pirates," said Steve.
"Very well,' the pearly captain announced. "Sit tight. We're coming to get you."
He apparently meant it quite literally, too. Only seconds later, with the communications channel still open, there was a tremendous explosion. Thor found the screen that showed the view behind and above them, where the mother ship was visible, and enlarged it. Something that must have been the Ravager ship had just burst out of the larger craft's back like an alien larva, and its guns cut a swath through the floating Leviathans. Steve had to make a sudden turn to avoid being next.
"Ah, there you are!" said the pearly captain. He was sitting in his chair as if quite relaxed – it was Miss Alpha and the crocodile whose hands were on the controls. "Get in close to us. We'll tow you out if we can just avoid their tractor beams this time. Miss Alpha-Eleven-Three's promised me an algorithm for that."
"Okay." Steve swallowed. He hoped flying this thing properly was easier than it looked.
He brought the Leviathan around and approached the Ravager ship. As they closed in, this was revealed as a brushed gold vessel, shorter and fatter than the Leviathan, and a proper single solid structure rather than something that looked worryingly organic. The Ravagers darted between drifting Leviathans and zipping skates to meet them, and when they came within a hundred yards, a series of harpoons shot out of the gold ship's belly and locked onto the Leviathan's spine. The whole structure rattled. Alarms blared, and Thor looked for a way to silence them but couldn't find one. Steve gently took his hands off the controls as the Ravagers reeled them in.
"Whoops, here comes a beam," said the pearly captain. The Ravagers swerved to one side, yanking the Leviathan violently behind it. "You got those jump coordinates, Vark? Will they fit in the bubble?"
The crocodile grunted.
All around them, the little skate ships were gathering. These may not have had any weapons, or perhaps had none powerful enough to take on a Leviathan, because they did not fire. Instead they flew circles around them, trying to force them back towards the mother ship. Even worse, the Leviathans that had been retrieved were swimming in to join them – those would have weapons. Huge turrets on the mother ship were rotating, taking aim. As Steve had feared, once they'd moved, they were immediate targets.
"Clench up, friends!" the pearly captain said cheerfully.
That was the only warning they got before space turned inside out. One moment, the Chi'Tauri ships were all around them, and then the stars suddenly stretched and snapped back into different places. The screens flickered all around them, and Steve felt as if gravity came back, pulled him in several directions at once, and then vanished again. After a stomach-churning few seconds, the displays settled down again, and they were able to see what was outside.
There was a bit of debris floating around them, perhaps from skates that had strayed inside what, for want of a better word, Steve was going to have to call the 'warp bubble,' but otherwise they were clear of threat. The Ravager ship was hanging above them with the harpoon lines connecting them to its belly. It reminded Steve of a photograph he'd once seen in a magazine, of a hawk carrying a fish nearly as big as it was.
Below them was a planet with one hemisphere in shadow – or at least, it looked that way at first. As they drew nearer Steve realized it was only, at best, two thirds of a planet. Almost half of it had been sheared away along a straight line by some unknown cataclysm. Yet, incredibly, the remaining part seemed to still have an atmosphere. Steve could see city lights, and on the edge the sun was glinting off an ocean. He might not have had Stark's or Banner's grounding in physics, but Steve's gut told him what he was seeing was impossible.
Something in the back of his head observed that this was what awe at the blue vista felt like. Steve tried to commit the sensation to memory – just in case.
"Where are we?" he asked.
"Haven," said the pearly captain. "Don't go too near the back side, they've got it propped up with a time dilation field but it's still doing its damnedest to collapse back into a sphere."
When Steve looked closer, he could see that the edges of the crack around the planet were glowing and molten. What was keeping the oceans in?
"Hang tight," the captain went on. "I'm calling a friend of mine. He'll find us a place to dock."
Hemsworth evidently felt that something was expected of him. "You have earned the gratitude of Thor," he said gravely. "We will sing of your deed in Asgard."
"As long as I'm singing of my paycheque," the pearly captain said.
Their escape from the mother ship had been hurried, but finding a place to stop on Haven was much slower, and the pearly captain was apparently not interested in keeping them informed of his progress. He got the two ships into orbit, then shut down the communications link so he could call his friend. With the Leviathan still tethered, all those on board could do was sit and twiddle their thumbs.
For that reason, Steve, Thor, and Hemsworth headed back down the tunnels to check on the others. They'd found themselves places to hide in the tubes that led down to the small scooters. Hemsworth rapped on the edge of one.
"You can come out now!" he said.
One by one, they reappeared – Johansson and Evans hiding in one tube, and Natasha and Hiddleston in another. Hemsworth went to a third and pulled out Loki, who groaned at being handled. He appeared to be recovering, although he was still very pale. His eyes fluttered open, and Thor drifted over to give him a squeeze on the shoulder.
"Brother," he said. "Do you feel better?"
Loki mumbled something incomprehensible.
"Excellent," said Thor, and moved on to Hiddleston, who didn't look very well, either. "And how are…" Thor began, then paused and reached to touch Hiddleston's shirt. For the first time, Steve realized there was a brown stain on it, and also on his green scarf. Was that blood? Hiddleston was fully conscious now but still looked sicker than Loki, despite inhabiting a far more durable body. What had happened to him?
"Was that always there?" Steve asked, as Thor touched the bloodstain.
"Probably," said Hiddleston hoarsely.
"It was," Johansson said. "I saw it when we were back on the big ship."
"Where did it come from?" Thor asked.
"My mouth, I think," Hiddleston rasped. "While they were questioning me."
The word questioning made everybody stiffen. They could all tell it was a euphemism, and knew immediately what must have really happened.
"Questioning you?" asked Hemsworth, moving closer. He was much more gentle than Thor had been with Loki, and it made Steve realize that Chris Hemsworth and Tom Hiddleston were probably good friends. At least, they would have a solid co-worker relationship. Neither of them had ever tried to kill the other. The complicated and violent history between Loki and Thor was, to them, nothing but a fiction.
Hiddleston squinted at Hemsworth. "Which one are you?"
"I'm Chris," Hemsworth assured him.
Hiddleston looked from him to Thor and back again. "They didn't question you?"
Steve, Thor, and Nat glanced around at the actors, at Evans and Hemsworth and Johansson. They were shaking their heads.
"Shit," said Evans. "Tom, what did they do to you?"
Hiddleston reached for the wall to steady himself, but that didn't work in zero gravity. Instead, Hemsworth put an arm around his friend's middle and braced both of them so they could stay upright and face the others. Steve observed that this was something he'd never expected to see – Thor in full armor, cradling Loki against himself. It wasn't the weirdest thing that had happened this week, but it was close.
"I figured they must think I was Loki," Hiddleston said. He coughed a little and cleared his throat before going on. "I thought I was dreaming, or that it was something like… what's that movie again? The one with the aliens who like Star Trek?"
"Galaxy Quest," said Evans and Johansson at the same time.
"That one," said Hiddleston. "But then they showed me to… to… to Thanos. Somehow just by looking he could tell I wasn't right, I wasn't the real one. He was angry, and the aliens were terrified of him." He sounded as if this puzzled him, and Steve had to admit, the idea of terrified Chi'Tauri was an odd one. "He told them not to come back without the real Loki. So they figured I must know, and they put me in some kind of…" a shudder ran through Hiddleston's body, and he gritted his teeth and clenched his fists just thinking about it.
Johansson grabbed Hiddleston's hand. "We're right here, Tom," she said. "You're okay."
He took a deep breath. "I don't know what it did. I just shouted over and over that I wasn't Loki and I didn't know where he was. I tried to make myself wake up, but I couldn't. Pretty sure I threw up a couple of times." Hiddleston touched the stain on his shirt. "They let me out for a while and then I could think, and I realized that if I was where Loki had been, then he must be either in the Rockies filming, or else at that Convention in Calgary."
"Right where they first showed up," said Nat. "Of course."
"I wonder how they found the right universe," said Steve.
"It matters not," Thor decided. "Only that they did."
They hadn't felt the need to torture and interrogate any of the others, because none of them knew anything useful. Thanos had only wanted Loki – or at least, he had at the beginning. "Did they say anything about the tesseract?" Steve asked.
Johansson was horrified. "This man is suffering!" she told Steve. "Don't go throwing more questions at him."
"We need it." Natasha put her hand on her double's arm. "If we're going to get you guys back to your world, we need the wormhole to work, and it needs the tesseract."
Steve shook his head, though. Johansson was right – he'd been premature. "We can let him rest a little while," he said. "We'll have to wait until Loki comes to, at least, so he can switch our bodies back like he promised." Steve still wasn't sure he trusted Loki to do that, even after Loki had saved his life twice. "Otherwise we'll have to find our way back to Earth and have Wanda do it, but we've gotta get you guys back to your Earth eventually."
"Right." Johansson sighed. "I wonder if they'll let me quit. The Marvel universe is a nice place to visit but I definitely don't want to live here."
"If it helps, we feel the same about your world," said Natasha.
"I like the bit where you have multiple options available for body-switching," said Hemsworth.
"It's always good to have a Plan B," Steve agreed.
"That's fun to hear from the guy who doesn't even have a Plan A most of the time," Natasha observed.
"I did see the tesseract," said Hiddleston.
The banter had been on the verge of making everybody feel a little better. Hiddleston's statement deflated that at once. All eyes turned to him.
"You did?" asked Steve, leaning closer.
"Yeah," said Hiddleston. "When they…" he cut himself off, and gave a high-pitched giggle that descended into a few seconds of coughing before he could finally explain what was funny. "They abducted us! We were abducted by aliens!"
"Oh, no," groaned Evans. "He's never going to stop talking about that."
"You saw the tesseract," Steve prompted.
Hiddleston cleared his throat again, and nodded. "When they separated us. They took the others… I guess to that brig… but they took me and the tesseract to the big Queen's room so they could show us to some kind of hologram of Thanos. He said they would have to use it to get to the real Loki, so the Queen said she would keep it safe for him personally."
"Did you see what they did with it after that?"
"No. Sorry."
That meant the tesseract was probably still in some kind of Queen's chamber on the mother ship. They would somehow have to get back there to retrieve it. Steve had no idea how they were going to do that, but he hoped he could at least do it in his own body this time.
A sound reverberated through the Leviathan's structure – a clunk, followed by a bang of something striking the outer hull. Steve pushed himself back up towards the cockpit, and drifted up the access tunnel to find the large front view screen showing the Ravager ship pulling its harpoons back in.
In the lower right corner was the communications screen. "Oh, good, there you are," said the pearly captain, as Steve drifted into view. "I got us permission to dock. Follow me."