Aarflot shooed them back into their room, and this time there was an ominous click after he shut the door. Steve immediately went up to rattle the handle and sure enough, it was locked. He turned to Evans and gestured to the door, inviting him to knock it down. Evans nodded, and approached to give it a kick.
"Hold your horses," said Natasha. She gently moved between the men and the door, and lay down to peek through the gap beneath it.
"He's still there," she said, and then after a moment added, "no, he's leaving now, but there's a couple of others. One has seven toes, the other has dinosaur feet. I can't see the rest of their bodies but I'm guessing they're at least as big as Aarflot."
"Just two?" asked Steve. "We can take two."
"Of course we can," said Nat, "but when we get to the bottom of the stairs there'll probably still be a crowd there. Well-meaning fans who only know we did something cool, and have no ill intentions towards us."
Steve sighed, because she was right – they could beat up bad guys all day, but not innocent bystanders. Those were the sort of people who got hurt by accident while the Avengers were after somebody else, the very people the Sokovia Accords were designed, however misguidedly, to protect. They couldn't fight their way through those, and Aarflot and Nacre were probably counting on it.
"We could ask them to leave us alone," Steve suggested.
"Has that ever worked for human fans?" Nat asked, eyebrows raised.
Sometimes it did. Often it didn't, and the sheer number of people who'd been waiting for them in the street suggested that news traveled very fast on this station. That meant the locals knew not just about them, but about the Leviathan as well. Somebody might already be taking it apart or selling it. They didn't have time to sit here.
"Then we need to search the room and find another way out," Steve decided. "If worst comes to worst I guess we'll have to push our way through, but let's explore other options first."
They began looking around. There were vents up by the ceiling that blew a cool breeze into the room, but they were far too small for anyone to squeeze through, even Natasha. The window had a handle on it with some red writing in an alien script, suggesting that it could be opened in an emergency, but there was nothing outside except vacuum and none of them had a spacesuit. Evans opened a side door and found the washroom, but there was no way out from there, either.
"We could always just bash our way through a wall," said Evans, frustrated.
"I don't think that's a good idea," said Nat. "We don't know what's on the other side. It might just be another room, or it might be something vita to life support. Anyway, if we make a lot of noise the guards will investigate."
"Thor can survive in space in the comics," Johansson offered. "And Loki fell off the Birfrost at the end of the first Thor movie and was apparently okay. Maybe one of you can go outside and let us out." She looked expectantly at Hemsworth and Hiddleston.
They exchanged a glance. "You know, I don't think that's something I want to test," Hemsworth said.
"It may well work," Thor said. "If we breathe deeply first, Asgardians can survive in space for hours."
"Thanks," said Hemsworth firmly, "no."
They continued to brainstorm, but nobody's ideas stuck. Steve's eyes went repeatedly to the last bunk, where the being called Fishlips was sleeping. Her gills were opening and shutting rhythmically and she didn't seem to be hearing their voices. Steve stamped on the floor to see if that woke her, but she didn't react to it – or to the sudden thump from outside a moment later.
Everybody said up and looked towards the door.
"What was that?" asked Evans.
There was another thump, a strangled cry, and the resonant sound of something hard hitting a metal surface.
Natasha got up and went back to the door to peek under it again – the others went with her, silently agreed that if anything came through the door they might all be needed to fight it. She got down on her hands and knees to look, but a moment later rolled backwards out of the way as the door opened.
On the other side, panting and holding an unconscious guard by the collar in each hand, was the banana woman.
"Hi!" she said brightly. She dropped the guards and came in, stepping right over Natasha, and put her arms around Evans again as she closed the door with a kick. "Where were we?"
Evans froze, and for a moment Steve honestly thought he was going to panic – and in that moment, he suddenly recognized a piece of himself in this man. There'd been that blonde who'd come up and kissed him at headquarters one day. Steve had just stood there like a rock because he hadn't known how to react. The idea of a woman forcing herself on him had been hard to comprehend. For most of Steve's life at that point, women had avoided him like a leper. At least out here, they wouldn't have to worry about Peggy walking in.
Then the man rallied. He took a deep breath and said, "well, we'd just exchanged names. You're Musa, and I'm Chri… Steve. What are you doing up here?"
"I wanted to get to know you," she said, arms still around his midsection. "It's not every day you meet a man who can take on a whole Chi'Tauri hive!"
"I didn't do it alone," said Evans. "Teamwork! Teamwork is very important. Speaking of doing things alone, though… how did you deal with those guards?" He glanced at the door. "Weren't they a lot bigger than you?"
"Oh, I'm stronger than I look." Musa gave Evans a squeeze that made him grunt. "They weren't half as tough as the ones at the maintenance hatch anyway. Wanna find out how strong I really am?" She grinned.
Everybody else perked up at the words maintenance hatch, including Evans. "Sure," he said, "but… maybe not here. Tell you what, think you could show us this maintenance hatch so we can sneak back to our ship without the crowd getting in the way? We can go back to my planet and have a little privacy."
Musa giggled. "Why, Christine!" she said. "Run away with you already? We only just met!" She stood on her tiptoes and gave him a quick kiss on the cheek, then opened the door again. "I'm game – follow me!" she said, and dashed back out.
Evans looked back at the others. Johansson gestured for him to go ahead.
"You first, Christine," she said with a snicker.
"Are you gonna tell Bob?" asked Evans.
"No." Johansson's smile was unapologetic.
"Are your fingers crossed?"
"No!" she repeated, hands behind her back.
Steve interrupted. "Are you gonna tell her you're too busy for that kind of relationship right now?" he asked. They could hardly take this woman back to Earth with them. Either Earth.
"Of course I am," said Evans. "After we escape. Preferably when we're very far away and I can do it by text message."
Nat shook her head. "Downey was right," she told Steve. "He's got you down."
"Christine!" Musa called from the hallway. "Are you coming!"
"Right behind you," Evans promised. He stuck his tongue out at Johansson, who just giggled.
Musa was waiting in the hallway, tapping her foot impatiently. When the group emerged, she nodded to them and then dashed up the stairs. The whole party hurried to follow her, as Steve mentally kicked himself for not thinking of going up. How had every single one of them missed that? They were used to building on Earth, where there was usually nowhere to go from the top except down to a very hard landing. Now they realized that the upper storeys of the 'buildings' joined another ring, further in towards the hub of the space station. On the top floor were three unconscious humanoids, all of them huge, muscular individuals with their dropped weapons lying next to them. A cord was dangling from the ceiling.
"Excuse me, pal," said Musa, shoving one of the bodies out of the way. She yanked the cord, and set of folding stairs, similar to the sort that might access the attic in an old house, dropped from the ceiling. The bottom step came to rest just half an inch from one of the aliens' faces.
"This way," she said.
They climbed the stairs to the inner ring. The outer ring of the space station had been hallways with tubes and hoses in the wall. The inner one was a tiny metal walkway in the middle of a monstrous tangle of pipes and wires, some of it clearly very old and in poor repair. Sparks dropped and steam hissed, and in places Steve could see where things had been repaired with what looked for all the world like silver duct tape.
Of course duct tape was a universal thing, he thought. Stark wouldn't have been surprised at all.
There were a few windows here – long, narrow, transparent panels in the ceiling that let in a bit of dim reddish light. Other than that and the showers of sparks, there was no illumination. When Steve paused below one window to look out, he saw that they were now on the damaged side of the planet. The molten core could be seen, glowing white-hot, and the mantle around it a cooler yellow-orange. It was surreal to look at, like something out of a textbook brought suddenly to life, and it made Steve doubly glad they hadn't actually landed. What would the gravity be like on such a world? Was 'down' still towards where the middle of the planet had originally been, or was it towards the current center of mass, halfway through what remained? Did people away from the antipodes have to walk at weird angles?
"Hey, Musa," said Natasha conversationally.
"Yeah?" Musa asked. "Are you two a thing? Because I've done threesomes before. The more, the merrier."
With Evans' back to him, Steve couldn't tell if the other man were blushing. He knew he certainly was, and was grateful for the dim light. Between that and the narrow walkway, which they had to navigate single-file, nobody would be able to see his face.
"That's good to know, but we're not a couple," said Nat. "Anyway, what I wanted to know was whether you can tell us where those Ravagers hang out. We need to ask them something."
"Bad idea," said Musa. "Nacre's planning to sell you."
"Sell us?" asked Steve. "You mean sell our ship, right?"
"That, too," Musa said, "but he's definitely going to sell you. Anybody who can do what you do will be worth a fortune on the gladiatorial circuit, or as indentured mercenaries. Especially the Asgardians. We don't see a lot of them."
"I wonder why," said Thor flatly.
"You have slaves out here?" Steve asked. He would have hoped that any civilization that could build things like space stations would be beyond that. For an insane moment he pictured himself leading a Spartacus-style revolt to free them… but that was clearly a task for another time. If Steve got started on something like that, he would never find his way back to Earth.
"We've got everything you can think of out here," said Musa. "It's a big galaxy."
"We definitely need to have a word with them about that, then," Nat said. "And a few other things, too… as part of the whole 'escape plan' thing we have going on."
"Ohhh, I see," said Musa. Whether she did or not Steve couldn't tell… but he'd noticed there were suddenly a lot more syllables in her vocabulary. "They're probably at the pubs. Captain Nacre's favourite is the Gigax Galactica, but they go all over."
"I don't think we want to meet the captain again," said Steve.
"No, you don't," said Musa. "He's got a reputation. Even the other Ravagers don't trust him."
"We don't really want to see Miss Alpha, either," Nat agreed. "Or that scaly creature… I think he called it Vark."
"Then you definitely don't want the Gigax. It's too close to Aarflot's anyway," Musa said. "People there will already have heard the gossip. "We'll try the Blue Giant. It's further along this way. I know some of the staff there."
Loki hesitated, leading Hiddleston to bump into him from behind. "The Blue Giant?" he asked cautiously. "What sorts of people go there?"
"All sorts," said Musa. "Why?"
"The name probably refers to the type of planet," Thor reassured his brother.
"I know that," said Loki, annoyed. "I only wanted to be sure."
A couple hundred more yards around the inner ring brought them to another attic door, which Musa identified as the one that led to the Blue Giant – Steve wasn't sure how she could tell, since it looked exactly like all the others, but they had to take her word for it. When they dropped the ladder to climb down, Steve found they were being watched. Not by guards this time, but by half a dozen women of various sizes and colours but all in their underwear, who were passing around what looked like a vape. They watched the intruders enter, but none commented or came closer.
There were more women wandering around on the lower levels as they made their way down. Steve decided to believe that the upstairs of the Blue Giant was some kind of women-only hotel or shelter. Definitely not a brothel, no matter how many of the inhabitants waved and winked at the party as they went by.
By the time they reached the third floor, they could hear thumping music. Musa opened a door that led onto a balcony over the dance floor, and the music was suddenly loud enough to rattle Steve's teeth as he stepped through to take in what was below them. It didn't look all that unlike a pub on Earth, he thought… there were people talking, drinking, dancing, and conducting shady-looking business deals, all under the light of a set of drifting holographic orbs that did indeed look much like planets such as Neptune or Uranus. It was nice of reassuring, he thought, that human nature apparently applied to all roughly human-shaped sentient creatures. It gave them all some common ground. On the other hand, when he considered some of the things human nature included, it was also terrifying.
"Let me see," said Musa, scanning the crowd for familiar faces or approximations thereof. Steve looked too, not expecting to recognize anybody – but then out of nowhere, he did. In one corner, surrounded by women and petting some kind of animal, was a very familiar face indeed. Steve had noticed it in the brig on the Chi'Tauri mothership, but he remembered it from before that, too. It was the man who looked like Stan Lee.
"There." He pointed. "We know that guy."
Musa cocked her head, frowning. "You do? That's funny… I've never seen him before."
"Trust me, we do," said Steve, and started down the steps to the main level. Natasha went with him, and Steve figured she'd come to the same conclusion he had. This must be what Stan Lee on Earth had meant when he'd told them they would see him again. He'd been surprised when they phoned him from JPL, so he hadn't been thinking of that when he'd spoken to them in the hotel. Instead, he had somehow known that they would end up here and run into what must be his alternate self. How he'd known was not important. Maybe it was because he was the guy writing the story. Steve wasn't going to think about it too hard.
The man was sitting at a corner table. A robotic woman, like a much newer and cleaner version of Miss Alpha-Eleven-Three, was pouring him a drink. Another being, this one resembling a cross between a woman weightlifter and a blue gorilla, was massaging his shoulders. A third, chalk-white with glittering blue scales and spines protruding from her cheeks and forehead, was sitting next to him hanging on every word he was saying. In his lap a furry creature that looked kind of like a very small leopard and kind of like a six-legged armadillo was curled up, enjoying being petted.
As Steve and Natasha approached, the man lowered his head so he could peer over his tinted visor at them. "Do I owe you people money?" he guessed.
"No. We need your help," said Steve.
"I don't do help," the man replied. He accepted a glass of something fizzy and electric pink from the robot woman. "Thank you, darling," he said, and offered it to the scaly one. "If you would."
She touched the edge, and frost appeared on it. Her flesh was apparently icy cold.
"You helped us before, in another universe," Steve reminded him.
The man downed his drink and then grimaced, pinching the bridge of his nose as the cold gave him a headache. "Couldn't have been me," he said, shaking his head. "I don't interfere, I just watch. Right, ladies?" He smiled at his companions.
"We like it when you watch," the blue gorilla purred.
Steve was a little surprised. For some reason he'd assumed that this man would remember meeting them before, as if Stan Lee were a creature that existed across all realities at the same time. Evidently this was not the case, and that left Steve a little unsure how to proceed. He glanced up at the balcony where the others were watching. Musa was clinging to Evans from behind, and whispered something in his ear that made his eyes go huge.
No help there, then. He next looked at Natasha, and she interpreted it as a cue to take charge. "You owe us a favour for saving your life," she said.
"Captain Nacre said we did you enough favours in return for that," the man said.
Nat grabbed him by a set of bandoliers he was wearing across his shoulder. The women and the armadillo-kitty got out of the way as she dragged him across the table.
"I'm about to save your life again," Steve said.
"From what?" the man asked, startled.
"From her," said Steve, nodding towards Natasha. "Come with us."
They escorted him back towards the stairs, holding on to his arms just tight enough to show him they meant it, but not enough to hurt him. The others came down to meet them, and formed a ring around the captive. If he tried to bolt, he had nowhere to go.
The three women and the cat thing, however, had followed them.
"Hey, you can't just carry him off!" the scaly one protested. "He's the best tipper in the place!" She reached out and grabbed Hiddleston's right wrist.
Steve saw Hiddleston suck in a breath as ice crystals formed on the cuff of his sleeve. He looked at it a moment, then shut his eyes and concentrated. His hand turned ice-blue and the scaly woman gasped, let go, and staggered backwards, as if touching him had burned her. For a moment Hiddleston's eyes flashed red, then he shook his head hard and returned to normal.
The scaly woman tapped her hand against the railing, and it made a thunk noise. She was cold, but Loki's Jotun-derived body was colder, and had frozen her stiff.
"That's not what the club's name means," she said, shrinking back. The others retreated with her.
Loki fixed Hiddleston with a glare. "Never do that in public again," he hissed. "In fact, never do it at all."
"Give me my own body back and I won't," said Hiddleston, giving his own hand a shake. "That was weird."
"Where do we go now?" Steve asked Musa. "Back up, or back out to the street? Where's the harbour entrance?" he asked. There must be multiple entrances all around the outer ring, but he had no idea where the nearest one was, or where they were in relation to the Leviathan.
"Not far," Musa assured him. "We passed your ship and we'll have to double back. It'll be easier to do it from the outer ring, although if Aarflot's noticed you're gone he'll have people looking for you."
"Then let's go by the street," said Steve.
They rounded the dance floor, giving a wide berth to a man with six arms, arranged radially around his torso, who was dancing with four women and two other men at the same time. The entrance, with its promise of peace, quiet, and personal space beyond, was just a few feet away when another bizarre alien creature stepped into their way. This one was seven feet tall and almost as wide, with a bronze carapace covered in stiff hairs, and several sets of mandibles that clicked ominously as it loomed over them. The whole party stopped short, unsure of what to do, especially when this threatening beast was wearing a tropical-print shirt and a pair of sunglasses.
"Did you pay the cover charge?" it asked.
Musa ducked under Steve's arm and popped up again in front of him. "Nukk!" She reached up to pat the creature on the face. "Don't worry, they're with me – I snuck them away from Nacre and Aarflot!"
The beast's posture immediately softened. "Musa!" it said. "All right then, sorry folks. Have a nice evening!" It moved aside, and they ere able to descend the steps to the street.
"Who are you?" Evans asked Musa.
"Nobody in particular," she replied cheerfully, "but Nukk and I go way back and we both have a beef with Nacre."
"Is that why you're helping us?" Evans wanted to know.
"Partly, but it's mostly because you're cute."
Steve half-expected to be mobbed again as soon as they reached the street, but in this part of the station people seemed to be keeping their heads down, not wanting to be noticed and pretending not to notice anything themselves. Beings hung around in corners and under eaves, and more than once a pair – or more – of glowing eyes blinked at them before vanishing into the shadows again. The Blue Giant was in the seediest part of a very seedy town.
"Where are you taking me?" asked the man who looked like Stan Lee.
"Back to our ship," Steve replied. He and Natasha were in the lead now, with their prisoner between them and Musa just behind, clinging to Evan's arm. Hopefully having the aliens in front would help the group, now ten strong, blend into this weird place.
"To the Leviathan?" the man squeaked. "Why? Are you gonna use me as a hostage to make Nacre leave it alone, because I can tell you now that's not gonna work."
"No," said Steve. "We want you to send a message to the Chi'Tauri telling them where we are, and saying you've captured us and want to sell your prisoners back to them."
"Are you insane?" the man asked. He stopped walking, forcing the whole party to stop with him. "They'll come here and blast the whole station out of the sky!"
"And you'll have to fight them," Steve agreed, "so while they're distracted doing that, we can get back on board their ship." As Natasha had said, it was a terrible idea, but it was the best they could do with the resources they had.
"You know that won't help you! There'll only be one or two queens per ship, but there are thousands more spread across the galaxy," the man said. "You won't even make a dent in their dominions. Are you going to let us all die for that?"
For a moment he did seem to have a point… then Steve reminded himself that the people on this planet and orbiting station were hardly innocent bystanders. "You're a bunch of pirates and slavers," he pointed out.
"Not all of us!" said the man. "Even if we were, who are you to be judge, jury, and executioner for the lot of us?"
Good question – and one that left Steve hearing the voice of Colonel Rhodes: that is dangerously arrogant. Certainly it was a situation the Accords would never have tolerated, but there were no Accords out here… not that the lack of them gave Steve the right to blow people up willy-nilly.
Musa held up a hand, as if she were a child in school. "I would like to say that this is the first I've heard of this plan. Did you know about this, Christine?" she asked Evans.
"Yeah," he said awkwardly. "It's sort of…"
"It's the only idea we've got right now," said Natasha. "We need to get our friends back to their own reality, and the only way we know of to do that is to get the tesseract back."
The man who looked like Stan Lee froze, and for a moment something odd happened to his face, as if he were about to change into something else but stopped himself just in time. "Excuse me?" he asked. "The tesseract? The Chi'Tauri have an infinity stone?"
"Yeah," said Steve. "That's kind of our fault." He looked at Loki, wondering if he should say that it was specifically his fault. Loki, in turn, looked at Thor, still blaming him for breaking the rune stone.
Their captive licked his lips. "Okay, look," he said. "I'm not supposed to intervene, really. I'm only supposed to observe while destiny takes its course."
"You?" Thor pushed between Steve and Musa to stare at the man. "You are… of course you are!" He laughed. "You are one of the Watchers!"
"Yeah," the man said, as if admitting something shameful. "Nobody's supposed to know, but I've been watching you. Each and every one of you."
"Then our destinies must be great indeed," Thor said. "The Watchers take an interest in those who have some role to play on the grandest scales of the cosmos."
This pronouncement was terrifying on multiple levels, but the worst of all was that when Steve looked at his companions, he saw that the actors were nodding. Evans and Hemsworth, Johansson and Hiddleston, all looked as if they thought this made perfect sense. They knew the future, sort of, he reminded himself. Downey had talked about spoilers. They were about to get a big one, weren't they?
"I'll be your messenger, then," said the Watcher, and cracked a bit of a smile. "You're forcing me to do it, after all – wouldn't want Black Widow to break my neck! The inevitable will happen one way or another, but maybe we can put it off a little longer."