Homeward Bound Part Three, Back to My Roots.
Knowhere spun in space like a spiked volleyball, and as hungover and miserable as he was, Quill suspected that his face was the sand. Then again I woke up twelve seconds ago with an angry raccoon on my chest, and we're heading to a severed head full of criminals, so if bad simile is the worst that happens, then today is going better than planned, he thought.
"Rocket, why the hell are we heading for Knowhere?"
"Was about to ask you as soon as the deck stopped spinin'"
"That's probably your head, and I'm, like, eighty-eight percent sure that this is your fault."
"Hey, bald-body, I'm just the first officer, even if I set the controls this was your call. Your massively, massively drunken call. And that an't my head, the RCS thrusters' just fired and the inertia wheel has kicked in, can't you hear it, dummy?" Rocket stood stock-still for a moment, ears and whiskers twitching as he listened and felt the air currents.
"We're setting our spin to match Knowhere's, the Milano is entering her final approach," he said, before scampering off, a tad unsteadily, to check the control moment gyro. Quill, who would have given anything to feel a little more in control of this particular moment, turned back to Gamora.
Gamora was standing arms folded and foot tapping, something that Quill recognized as male-female relationships' DEFCON 3, a pose almost matched by Drax's surly and hulking posture with arms folded like the Genie in a bad school play, and Quill tried, through the ghosts of drinks long dead haunting his forebrain, to defuse the situation before it reached raised eyebrows and the sarcastic use of the word 'well?', the feminine DEFCON 4, after which the all-out nuking of your relationship was inevitable, unless some teen hackers lead by Matthew Broderick showed up at just the right moment to distract her with Tic-Tac-Toe, he thought. And, even then, that was a remote chance, because Quill was pretty sure you couldn't computer hack women, even ones as cybernetically modified as Gamora. Unless you were Anthony Michael Hall and Ilan Mitchell-Smith.
Yep… I'm still pretty drunk, he realized. Two movie references in one thought is unusual, even for me.
"Look, Gamora, I'm sorry."
She raised an eyebrow, and then threw him a curve ball. "For what?"
Quill's face took on the grimace of someone trying to remember what exactly he might have done the night before.
"A lot of things." he hazarded, playing it safe while he tried to buy time. "Command decisions that were flawed and other failings, personal… and mostly public. Look I… I didn't… I'm gonna come clean here I'm not entirely sure I remember getting back to the ship, and I just wanna say that I got handzy with you… or Drax, or Groot, or the ship, that that's not what I'm like, it's just the whiskey doesn't agree with me, and I'm not entirely myself afterwards and-"
"Quill." Gamora cut in. "What do you remember? Because given you and Rocket set the ships course before me or Drax woke up, any pertinent information you might have about whether or not we're going to dock at Knowhere, sling-shot around, it heading someplace else, or plough into it at an appreciable fraction of c would be helpful."
Quill bit his lip for a moment. "I remember that we decided that we needed a secret lair, and, since we blew up the Collector's base on Knowhere, we decided that we could probably just move in and take over unopposed."
Gamora considered this coolly. "Well, that explains the artwork, then," she said sourly.
Quill followed her gaze and groaned. The refrigerator, usually covered with passive-aggressive accusatory notes pertaining as to whose turn it was to do various on-ship chores and why Rocket hadn't done them, now sported a set of drawings, rendered on the back of the kids menus from Climateladle, a major Xandarian pub chain that doubled as a cheap family friendly restaurant chain in the day and the cheapest and sleaziest of bars at night. With crayon, on the back, was a stick-man representation of the crew standing on a giant smiley face floating in space, with a big caption that said "Batcave" and what looks suspiciously like Quill sitting on the Lincoln Memorial wearing a crown with "Presoident" writern on it. Next to it, in the neat, angular, beer-strained and chicken-scratch annotated drawing style Quill was getting used to as Rocket's, seemed to be a plot dawn out on the back of a menu showing the most efficient route from Xandar to Knowhere, skirting a couple of black-holes and known military hotspots.
"So we are, in fact, heading to Knowhere," said Drax, in a tone that could have been anger at the journey or excitement at the prospect on imminent violent mayhem.
"Pretty much," said Quill, trying to focus out the window past his blinding headache. "Plan was to dock there, and, as always, looks like Rocket's math was spot on. Kilda impressive really, like thowing a dart at a sand grain from a mile away through warped gravity fields and still hitting it, whilst drunk."
"And the sand-grain is spinning and I pre-programed our spin to match it's at our time of arrival," said Rocket, staggering back from whatever errand he had run in the bowels of the ship, carrying Groot, a jumbo-sized jar of soluble aspirin, and an unhealthy splotchy parlour on what little of his complexion was visible through the fur, looking and smelling like death warmed over, or an badly re-heated microwave meal, which Quill guessed were the same things when you got down to it.
"Don't mind me if I take a rain check on the praise until after you explain why exactly you, and," Gamora ground her teeth at this point, "your first officer decided that this was a necessary step that couldn't wait until you had had a chance to sober up and discuss the matter with us."
Quill stared. "Okay, look, we planned to tell you and have a proper discussion when we were all clean and sober, but then events just got ahead of us."
"Wha?" asked Rocket, stilling down to struggle with the bane of the drinking mammal's life: child-proof tops. Getting a grip on the jar with his hind paws, he begun levering at the top, keeping up a steady chorus of "Quit it" as Groot poked him in the cheek with a tendril, clearly not sure why his friend was behaving like that.
"Whiskey happed," said Quill, translating. "Look, we knew it was a stupid idea and we actually tried to prevent this, like responsible adults."
"Then what happed?" asked Gamora.
"Turns out we suck at it," said Quill. Gamora cursed and put her hands in the air in exasperation.
"And whose bright idea was it to drink until you weren't aware of what was going on?"
"Yours!" said Drax, clearly happy to have been able to contribute "I know that one! Ask again, these questions are becoming interesting."
The crew stared. Well, Gamora and Quill did. Rocket had finally succeeded in clawing the top of the aspirin jar and, pausing only to throw a handful in Quill's general direction, walked over to the faucet and begun to fill the jar. Groot still clung to him, prodding and protesting.
"What?" asked Gamora, angrily, as Rocket popped the cap back on and shook until the aspirin had dissolved.
"You encouraged Quill to take Rocket out and drink heavily with him as an exercise in male bonding in the hope that Rocket would forget that Quill had implied that his relationship with Groot was of a homosexual nature," answered Drax happily.
"I remember it clearly," he said, blissfully unaware of Gamora and Quills attempts to shush him: the last thing they needed was a hung-over raccoon who remembered a grudge they had just got him to put aside. Quill turned suddenly and laughed, unconvincingly.
"Ahahaha, oh Drax, you joker you. Don't listen to him Rocket, " said Quill, taking Drax in a one-armed hug and then punching him playfully in the arm "He's just messn' around! What a tease!"
Drax looked down from Quill, to his arm, and his brow wrinkled and his expression of enthusiastic affability hardened, "Do NOT presume to strike me!"
"You idiots realize that I hadn't forgotten that, right?" asked Rocket, lifting the aspirin-soup to his lips and chugging with the bitter resignation that is the closet you can get to enthusiasm the day after the night before. Quill and Gamora looked dumbstruck, and Groot protested.
"Grooooooooo!"
"Oh I don't care if it's made form murdered willows, I'm hangin' here! 'Sides, it's synthetic, no trees harmed, so unless you're tendrils have developed some dizzying analgesic affect quit pokin' me!"
"You knew?" asked Quill. "You said you'd forgotten why we were fighting!"
"Yeah, well, that was for your benefit. You were out of line, but after four hours of you on the barstool next to me bein' all apologetic and shit, I was willing to cut you some slack." Rocket tapped his forehead, wincing at the contact of his own claws, and chugging more aspirin.
"Augmeticly enhanced prefrontal cortex and hippocampus. I don't forget. Ever. Let's just pretend it didn't happen and focus on the problems at hand, though I would like to point out for the record that while you were chasin' after me an' seen how I felt about this, none of you even seemed to have considered if Groot might have found your comments hurtful," said Rocket, accepting Groot's attempt to drape him in a silver emergency blanket with the stoic resignation of someone who knew that Groot didn't understand hangovers and would just treat him like he was sick.
Both Quill and Gamora shuffled, looking a little guilty. "He's… he's not offended is he?" asked Quill, feeling a heel for not even considering that what he'd said might have hurt Groot. I'm already hung-over, and in the doghouse with Gamora; I don't need to feel like I've kicked a puppy on my way in, too he thought.
Rocket waved a paw dismissively, and made a noise best described as "pzzzf", spraying Quill with a saturated solution of acetylsalicylic acid and spit. "This dope? Nah, he's not the kind to hold a grudge. Thick skin. Bark. Whatever. Besides, when it comes to the birds and the bees, he's not quite as up to speed on the birds as he is with the bees: hermaphroditic pollinator, remember? He don't exactly understand how it works for us, and the idea that there's some emotional element involved rather than just a biological function never really caught with him. Neither did the concept of 'him', if you get down to it."
"So he's not offended?" asked Quill, relived. Rocket shrugged. "No more so that you are when his pollen sets off your allergies. The way he reproduces is just so different there's no common ground for offence."
"Right. Because when I'm hung-over as fuck I really need reminding that my hay fever is a reaction to airborne Groot-splurge. Thanks a lot, Rocket, Classy as ever."
Rocket grinned, evilly. "No problem, just so long as you know that next time you admire flowers, Groot thinks you're checknin' out someone's junk. Hell, I dunno what his planet is like, but I bet the gardnering channel is pay-per-view and florists need a safe word."
"Ewww. Anyway, dragging the issue back to the matter at hand, can we abort this approach to Knowhere? Loiter safely outside at the very least until we've had a chance to discuss the matter like rational people? Or failing that, whatever you and Quill are when passably sober?" asked Gamora.
Rocket shoot his head. "Nope, we entered its influence as soon as we went sub-light. The FTL dumped us within the gravity well and we don't have enough delta-V to break orbit."
"Wha?" asked Quill, Rocket glared.
"We ain't got enough frickin' gas to go anywhere but Knowhere. We could try an FTL jump from within the gravity well, but given the power required to make a superluminary jump increases exponentially with gravity, we'd only have enough power for either the inertial dampeners or the Geller shielding, presuming we didn't blow a flux capacitor or binary coupling in the core just trying to make the jump. "
Quill regarded this while making a tolerably good impression of a landed guppy. "And that's a bad thing?" he hazarded.
"Well, if you want to reach your destination with your original soul in your body or without being scraped off the back wall of the ship with a sponge, then yeah. You, yanno, at some point in growing up on space ships and owning one, did read up on how they work, right?"
"Meh. I'll do it tomorrow," said Quill, with the natural ease of a born procrastinator. "So what you're saying is, we are defiantly going to have to land at Knowhere for fuel?"
"Unless you've got another eight-thousand litres of Liquid Fuel and oxidiser stashed up your ass that we don't know about, then, pretty much," said Rocket, drawing out a hipflask to take a nip, a firm believer in taking an ablative tile from the shuttle-craft that hit you. He then shook the flask upside-down, disappointed in its emptiness. He knew he should never have lent it to Quill.
"That said, if you have, then you have bigger issues than docking unexpectedly with a giant head. Still, each to his own," added Rocket, wringing every ounce of double-entendre out of that as he could whilst he put the caffeine-engine on, grabbing a mug out of the dishwasher and looking weirdly at the rectal thermometer in there and wondering why the hell it was there. Quill, meanwhile, made a mental note to never make a gay joke at Rocket again, because he was clearly better at it half-cut from the night before than Peter was sober.
"Okay, so, we have to land there," said Quill. "So, damage limitation. Let's get as ready for this as we can be."
"Yes Peter, because turning up with our two senior officers still drunk and our science officer a mute pot-bound plant is the height of forward planning," said Gamora.
"Wait… is this about me appointing Rocket first officer? Okay, firstly, I was drunk. That's not a call a sober person would make."
"Hey!" said Rocket.
"…Secondly, it's a nonsense position. I mean, there are five people here, I'm barely even captain, except for, yanno, you'd all kill each other if I wasn't here. So it's a hollow title as it is."
"Hey, I'm literally four frickin' feet from you! What am I, invisible?"
"… and thirdly, you know that I would never intend giving anyone a position of authority on this ship to be a slight against any of the others! We all got very different skills, and we all need them to actually work as a team and stay not-dead. And I thought you, Gamora, of all people on board wouldn't get jealous even if I appointed a vile furry little alcoholic above you."
"Okay, definitely invisible. But to use this new power for good or for evil…, yeah, stupid question. Where's Quill's secret food stash?"
"Peter," said Gamora, studiously ignoring Rocket as he waddled over to Quill's draw and pulled out a squashed Twinkie Quill had happed to have in his rucksack when he was kidnapped in 1988 and bit into it, pulling a shocked and disgusted face as he discovered that it was every bit as good as the day it was made.
"I know," said Quill, scuffing his feet listlessly "Appointing Rocket as First Officer was -"
"Exactly the call I would have made," said Gamora, putting a kindly hand on Quill's cheek. "He's got the most military and tactical experience of any of us, and not as an assassin or a specialist, but a an everyday grunt in a mercenary company. I was trained from childhood to think of the target, the mission. I worked alone and I killed and got out with a detailed extraction plan I made before hand: he got thrown into to cauldrons of war when they didn't want to risk real solders lives so they sent in the merc's. He understands squad tactics like you and I breathe, and while I focus on the mission, he never, ever things about anything as much as how to get out of there with his hide intact, and that's exactly what we need from a first-officer: someone who will temper your unconventional plans and decisive surprise actions with experience and caution. Drax and I can only make your plans more aggressive, he can make them more cautions. He's the best pilot and ship-to-ship combat qualified out of us and the best mechanic. It was exactly the right call you made, because he's the perfect person for the job. " They both looked at Rocket, who had pulled his tongue out to a worrying degree and was trying to use both paws and the tail of Quill's hung-up coat to scrape masticated vintage Twinkie off his tongue. He spotted them both staring.
"Wassh?"
"Did you eat my Twinkle?" asked Quill, genuinely appalled. "That was nearly 30 years old: I was saving it!"
"And it was awful: you got another one to get the taste out of my mouth? That was worse than waking up hungover, and I woke with a tongue like the bottom of a birdcage."
"Dude, my mother gave me that Twinkie! Don't you ever touch any of my old stuff without my permission!"
"But your new stuff ish okay?" asked Rocket, slurring slightly as he continued to chew in the forlorn hope it might get more palatable if he did.
"No, but it's better than my old stuff!" said Quill, making an angry palms-up gesture that was almost Sicilian in its enraged eloquence.
"Oh thank fuck for that," said Rocket, pulling open one of the pockets on Quill's long-coat with a claw and hawking the Zombie-Twinkie into it. "I thought that was going to be stuck in my mouth forever." He noticed them staring.
"What?... got any mouth wash I could borrow?"
Quill watched with a face like a slapped arse. "Oh yea Gamora, I made the right call here. I can see why you're cool with it."
"You did make the right call, it's not his fault he's as bad as you at times. And the idea of a base of operation isn't entirely stupid. And Knowhere isn't an inherently dumb place to set one up."
"Then why are you mad?"
Gamora glared, and Quill mentally re-run the past fifteen minutes.
"Ah… because I made the dissection while drunk and without consulting you and Drax, which shows a considerable disregard for your opinions and devalues you as crewmembers and as people. For which I apologize."
Quill looked at Gamora. Gamora looked at Quill.
"Did I apologise for the right thing?"
"Yep."
"Way too late?"
"Oh, so late."
"Yeah, thought so. Okay, we need to get all the intel we can on the current situation on Knowhere, make sure that the Collector or any of his lackeys aren't still there, or if they are, they ain't breathing, and get any background that could help us."
"How?" asked Drax. Quill shrugged "Call Dey and ask for any intel the Nova Corp. has. He still owes us a favor."
"Yeah, but Quill, I hate to piss on your parade here, but the frickin' point of a secret lair is that the Nova Corp. don't know where it's at."
Quill glanced at Rocket, and then shrugged. "So we tell them were planning on taking a little scouting trip, but don't want to go anywhere too risky and we want some info about how dangerous various places are. We give them a bunch of places, and request some intel on each of them. We just make sure that Knowhere is at top of that list. If we holo-call him and press him via a call, we'll get instant intel rather than waiting for a more detailed reply if we messaged him."
Gamora considered it, and then nodded. "It could work. If we each name one location that clearly we've thought of, it'll look more like a natural decision making proses were undergoing."
Rocket nodded too, wincing slightly. "And if we all name places more obscure than Knowhere, we'll get more info on Knowhere without it looking like that's what were after. We name four obvious places and Knowhere, we'll get tons of into on them and just a synopsis on the big head, plus it'll make Knowhere stand out like… well, a giant celestial head floating in space. We name four place we're pretty sure the Nova Corp. don't know much about plus Knowhere, then it'll be less fishy-lookin' and we'll get better intel because they won't want to look piss-ignorant and they'll infogasm on the one they actually know about."
"That may achieve success," said Drax. "If I give them a request for information on Tau Bootis, they would have little information to send back: it is an uninteresting station. I did some architectural work there for the company I used to work for, and it was the scene of a Kree skirmish with the Ravagers a few decades ago, but otherwise unremarkable."
"Speak for yourself: I was in that skirmish, and it was serious brown-pants time, but it's good," said Quill. "I'll ask for info on Proxima Centuri: it's a dead, dull system, but it's close enough to Earth that they'll think that's why I'm asking." He looked to Rocket, who looked up from his caffeine and shrugged.
"I could ask them for Intel on Halfworld: it's almost impossible to get a ship though the Galacian wall into the Keystone Quadrant, and it weren't exactly a tourist hotspot to start with, so it's a safe bet that Nova don't have any intel on my home town."
"Good. Gamora?" asked Quill. She shrugged.
"Well, I can ask them about Sanctuary, or Demeter, two of Thanos's realms. They are hardly likely to have any intel on them, but then, who asks about Knowhere?"
"We can say it was Groot's idea, that ought to throw them," suggested Rocket. "Plus if they don't give us the intel we want, you can stick Groot in front of the Pict-caster to buy time as I very slowly translate what he says, that ought to buy us time to for the worn I'll add to the coms to create a back-door. They hacked our shit, it's only fair if we repay the favor," he said, holding up an info glass and projecting a reasonably good schematic of Nova HQ's computer architecture he'd gleaned from his last visit there. "Swiped a copy of some of their software from a console when I asked if I could use it to check my mail. It's not sensitive intel, just mundane HR database stuff, but it'll give me enough for a key." Quill grinned at the idea.
"Devious, I knew there was a reason I made you first officer, you have the finest tactical mind I've ever met!"
Rocket nodded. "And I make a damn good mailroom clerk." He noticed the weird look Quill gave him at that, and shrugged. "What? It was a slow week for crime and I needed to eat," he said, slurping his caffeine.
"Do we have a plan, or do we have a plan?" asked Quill, enthusiastically. Gamora looked a little more phlegmatic about it, but nodded.
"It'll do. We've only got around an hour, so if we want to get the intel and be able to act on it, we'll have to work fast, and there's one more thing we need to do before we can call them."
"What?" asked Quill. Gamora grabbed both him and Rocket by the ears and shoved them, kicking, snarling and in Quill's case attempting not to scream in a girly manner, towards the particle shower.
"You two need to be respectable looking enough for Dey not to dismiss this as a drunk-call and hang up! You're the ones he feels most responsible for saving his family, so you two need to call him. Besides, you both smell like a brewery!"
"Owwwww! Okay, okay, give me a second…."
"No time, Captain. And besides," she added, as Drax held open the shower door and she shoved them both into a space not quite big enough for both of them, "You drunkenly left the particle shower on last night and used up almost all the cleaning powder, so there's not enough for two runs, but given that last night's male bonding went so well, I'm sure you won't mind sharing," she said, as the two of them gawked at her from the confines of the shower, like a startled drunken totem pole. "Perhaps you should consider it an officer-only team building exercise," she finished, nodding to Drax to slam the door.
The door bucked and heaved briefly, until Rocket and Quill realized that Drax was far stronger than the both of them and with him holding the door shut they were trapped, and so they moved onto banging and yelling.
"Gamora, Gamora this is, like, mutiny. I could have you flogged for this! Marooned on a death-world! Keelhauled! I don't know what exactly that is, but I'll, like, look it up in a time-life book and I'll go out and buy a keel and haul it right over your mutinous ass! Treason! Infamy! You've all got it in for me! Gamora! You listen-"
"Groot! Go to panel 21c, sector seven G, and activate the ninth circuit from the top to blow the explosive bolts on this door … Groot, are you listenin' to me….., Groot , I swear if you're trying to water yourself in the sink again I'll come out there and kick you! You over water and you'll get ethanol build if in your roots and poison yourself, speaking as someone undergoing ethanol poisoning as we speak it ain't fun. Groot…. Who am I kidding, you couldn't reach the panel even if you could walk, ya useless lump of greenery-"
Drax looked to Gamora, who then nodded.
He opened the door, and Quill and Rocket stopped yelling and banging, and while Rocket glared, Quill gave her a look of naked relief, but while fully clothed, because he wasn't in any mood to entertained the idea of showering with another crewmate to save cleaning powder.
Well not Rocket Groot or Drax, he thought. What he said was a far more gentlemanly "Oh thank god, I knew you wouldn't go through with that-"
"You'll need these," said Gamora in a business-like manner. "And I'd get out of those clothes quickly or the powder will shred them." Quill and Rocket had just enough time to register the loofa and long-handled scrubbing brush thrust into their hands and for Quill to declare "Why do we even have these?" before the door slammed again and the typhoon of exfoliating sodium lauroyl sarcosinate derivatives and cursing begun.
Gamora and Drax looked to each-other and nodded. You really had to make the best of the situations you found yourselves in.
Eight minutes later, Denarian Dey was interrupted from pruning his house-plants by the pinging of his coms unit. Glancing over at it, her saw the call was coming from Peter Quill, and he carefully put down the secateurs, trying to fight the twisting anxiety in his gut. The last time Quill had called him at his home; Ronan the accuser had attacked Xandar. He just hoped this time it was nothing too bad.
"Dey here," he answered, and instantly looked shocked. Quill and the Cyborg both had the dead-stating eyes one someone who has just seen awful, awful things, and he begun to mentally prepare himself for bad news. After a second a green-hand reached into shot and nudged Quill's shoulder, and he begun to speak.
"Oh, hey Dey, we were just wondering if you could give us a hand."
"Umm, sure, sure thing Quill, glad to help… is everything okay?" asked Dey, mentally running through the horrible, horrible things it could be. In my experience the only time people look that bad is if the bottom has fallen out of their world. Of if they accidentally see a close freind's dick and they're not at a place in their friendship where they know how to process that. Seems unlikely tho'. "You left in quite a hurry yesterday, we were a touch worried."
"Yeah, peachy. No, we, we just decided we'd not waste any time, go and look around, investigate a few possible leads on Thanos and his activity in the quadrant until you give us our next job. Figured it could be a while before Nova Prime calms down enough to forgive us."
"Yeah, we'll you know, you kinda upset her, and you know how women can hold grudges, " said Dey. "How can I help?"
"Tell me about it," said Quill. The holo was giving a bad signal, so Dey couldn't be sure but it looked like some shoved him again, but Quill continued causally enough. "We were just wondering if you could give us any basic info on the possible locations of Thanos activity we wanted to check-out, make sure we went wondering into any war-zones, treading on the toes of any of your other assets, that sort of thing."
"Umm, sure, sure, you just give us the locations you were thinking of heading to, and we'll let you know. I can get someone to send you a report, tomorrow, day after at the latest."
Quill looked distinctly nonplussed by this, but continued with such a huge bout of casualness that as a police officer of over twenty years Dey was instantly worried it was forced.
"I'll talk to Denarian Garthan Saal about getting you that intel." he said with equal casualness, bringing up a menu on his coms: it listed the safe-words for covert assets: Quill's was 'Udonta' for safe and 'infinity' for team compromised, both picked because they were unlikely to come up in natural conversation, but could be easily worked in by Quill without a hostage taker out of sight finding it suspicious.
Quill looked puzzled for a moment, and then grinned "Udonta isn't involved, this is a genuine request, I'm just a little… tired and emotional after that hearing."
Right, hungover then. Thought Dey, but there was no reason not to be polite. "Okay, I'll get you that info soon as we can."
"Yeah, but we're, we're going to pass close to a pulsar soon, might lose coms for a bit. It would handy if you could give us, yanno, unofficially any info that you, yanno, just happened to know off the top of your head about our locations."
Well that's weird. Thought Dey, but he said "Sure, where were you thinking of heading?"
Quill shrugged, far more casually than anyone did in real life "I dunno. Proxima Centuri maybe."
"Tau Bootis." Said Drax, of screen but audible.
"Demeter." Said Gamora, leaning in from the left.
"Halfworld." Said Rocket, with his usual surliness, before holding up Groot, who to Dey's surprise let out a high and squeaking but perfectly understandable
"Groooooooo…..t."
"He said Knowhere," translated Rocket, noticing Dey's shocked expression.
Dey composed himself with some difficulty, clearly a little shocked, and said "Wow… couple of hard ones there, not even heard of Demeter, I'll get some interns to dredge up any info for you, but not sure I know any stuff off the top of my head about any of them."
"Any?" asked Quill, seeming disappointed.
Dey shrugged. "None, except Knowhere."
"Oh, Pity. Still, better than nothing. So Knowhere, pretty quiet since we were last there, I'd guess?"
Dey snorted. "Not as such. Taneleer Tivan's not been seen there since you blew up his collection-"
"Technically that wasn't us!" pointed out Rocket. "We just provided him with the rock that blew up his shit: his maid did the rest."
"-but it's not known if he'd dead or just moved to one of his other collections around the galaxy," added Dey, ignoring the interruption. "The Tivan group pulled out with all the surviving artifacts and creatures, as far as we know, and the lack of a buyer for the black-market bone-an'-brain caused the local economy to collapse."
"Ah." said Quill, sounding worried. "So pretty unstable?"
Dey nodded. "Without a doubt. In fact, we heard that a criminal overlord we've never heard of before named 'Mr. Knife' had sent some of his goons there to try and take over where Tivan left off, under the control of one of his lieutenants, calls himself Count Bligh." Rocket burst into incoherent swearing at that, so severe that Dey was amazed it didn't wilt his house plants through the coms.
"Friend of yours?" he asked the raccoon. Rocket glared.
"Associate, perhaps. We didn't part on good terms."
"Really? No, you don't say. You seem like such a friendly guy. Out of interest, did they ever work out who it was that decided it would be a good idea to rob the bank that Bligh and a bunch of other mobsters laundered their cash through?"
"I dunno Dey, did you guys find any clues?"
Dey shrugged. "Kinda hard to, not enough of a building left to dust for prints after someone pulled the roof off with what looks like tree-branches and shot out all their cameras. Strange, as there shouldn't have been a blind spot to shoot those out from, unless the shooter was under four feet tall and an expert shot."
"Huh. Kids now-a-days. They start down bad paths younger and younger. I blame the parents. So, who did Bligh send? It wasn't Viki was it? She owes me four-hundred and I make it a point never to kill people if it's gonna make me poorer."
Dey looked up the file on his com, and shrugged. "Some goons named Wade and Belamy Watts."
Rocket shrugged, "Never heard of them."
"Oh god." Said Quill. "Wild Wade and Black Belamy, and what's the other brother called, the slow one…. "
"Hue," said Dey, helpfully. Quill nodded.
"The Watts Brothers. Joined the Ravagers same year I did, kicked out four years later. Yondu couldn't stomach them. Thieves and murders, but also bullies, liars, pilfers who take from their own crew, and Wade… rumor was he's done some pretty bad stuff to women over the years. Never proved, but…" Quill let that sentence hang, like it was in a gibbet.
"Any-who, I'll get the rest of the intel to you as soon as I can" said Dey, looking strangely at Quill, who seemed to have seized up "You guys need anything else?"
"Huh, no, were fine, thanks Dey," said Quill, as the landing proximity warning begun to flare up. Dey looked startled
"Must have gotten pretty close to that pulsar of yours if it's setting off landing sensors… and there are no pulsars near any of those five destinations you read off. Where are you guys headed, anyway?"
"What? What's that Dey… I can't Ksssssst…. Potato head… Static… you're breaking up it must Krrrrsssshhht! Must be the pulsar… krsssst…" said Quill, as the image begun to jump and distort.
Dey glared, unsure if to get mad or laugh. "Hey, Starlord, I can see your lips moving when you make the static noise and see your boot when you kick the imager." Quill held his hand to his ear, theatrically, and said "What's that? You're breaking up I can't…" and then Starlord leaned in to hit the off switch, the screen went dead.
The crew sat staring at the screen for a long time.
"Were going to need a ton of weapons, aren't we?" asked Gamora.
"Yep," replied Quill regarding the bulk of Knowhere as it got closer, and, eventually, the Milano became nothing more than a mote in that God's eye.
"Well," said Rocket after a while. "Look on the bright side, we're going to a place that has nearly killed us before, to meet incredibly nasty people Quill hates, working for someone worse, who hates me even more. It's practically a homecoming."
They watched Knowhere for a moment longer.
"Did Groot really pull the roof of a bank with his branches?" asked Drax, after a while. Rocket snorted. "Dey was exaggerating: it was just the vault. And he used his roots, got them in the gaps in the concrete."
"A pity- that could have been useful," he said, sharpening his knives.
"Well, said Quill, "We're all stronger if we use our roots, in a way."
The team stared. "That sounded like a really, really dumb Hallmark card, didn't it?" said Quill, after a moment.
"It sounded dumb, sure enough," replied Gamora.
Quill groaned, and let himself flop backwards onto the deck "I am far too hungover for this!"
* the Milano glides elegantly in to the funky beat of * Awesome Mix tape Vol 2: Richie Havens-Going Back To My Roots
Meanwhile:
Dey stared at the dead screen for a moment, before dialing in the access code for a secure line to Nova Prime Rael. It took a moment to connect, and when it did, it was to her office at her home, not at Nova HQ. She seemed surprised to get the call.
"Denarian Dey, I wasn't expecting your latest report until-"
"It's the Guardians," he said, without preamble. "They called me a moment ago, asking for intel on various locations they might want to visit to gather intel on Thanos."
"And?" said Rael, shutting the door to her garden and sealing it. It wouldn't do for the grandkids to hear this. It was the Guardians after all: if it wasn't highly classified it would be smutty. Possibly both, she thought.
"And they asked for five locations. Four were clearly decoys, meant to conceal their real objective, but one of them was clearly far more interesting, and pertinent to our investigations. They strongly tried to hint that they were heading for Knowhere, and we both know that they're not that stupid."
"What were the other four locations?" she asked, all business.
"Proxima Centuri, Tau Bootis, some realm of Thaos we've never even heard of called Demeter… and Halfworld."
"Mother's of god…. You don't think?"
Dey shrugged. "The cyborg clearly asked for any intel we had on Halfworld, it was all I could do not to freeze up then and there. He knows."
"He doesn't know, Denarian."
"Then he suspects."
"Oh come on Dey, you read his psyche profile… if he suspected, he'd have tried to kill us already. He's fishing, to see if we know anything, and unfortunately, we don't. My predecessor was good at what he did, I have no records of Project Alcyone beyond its official termination, just as my predicator will have no records of us using the Guardians for black-ops. The point of it being off the books is that it's off the books. We know nothing. We suspect everything. Suspect the worst…."
Dey looked, sadly. "Do you really think that Nova Prime Valt would be part of that?" Rael paused, and ran her fingers through her hair.
"I hope not, but he stopped us acting to destroy the early research records when we pulled the plug. If the work continued, it's because we didn't destroy the earlier data, and that was Valt's call. That cyborg has the stink of one of Joseph's toys all over it. We had a war to fight, and we had to win. People made bad calls." She held out her hand, and noticed how steady it was. She turned back to the screen. "The cyborg doesn't know. I'm sure of it."
"He doesn't know," agreed Dey, not sounding as sure.
"And he must never know," said Rael, killing the transmission. After a moment, she played the recording again.
A distress beacon from a civilian survey ship, the message attenuated and warped by trying to transmit through the bulk of the Galacian wall, that dense debris field that cut off the Keystone Quadrant from the wider galaxy. It had breached the Nova Quarantine on Keystone a little over two months previously, when the Nova Ships enforcing it had pulled back to meet the un-expected threat posed by Ronan. A stupid call, breaching a quarantined quadrant, but the crew must have imagined the riches to be found in un-explored space.
72 crew. 21 of them children or other dependents.
You couldn't make out much, but the shouts of "they're cutting thought the bulkheads!" was clear enough, as was the panic, coming off in waves so thick you could practically smell it, and then the clang as the bulkhead fell, and the harsh bark of weapons fire, and screams, and snarls, and distressingly meaty sounds as the screams got louder, and then finally, after breaking into whimpers that eventually stopped, silence. And at the height of the screaming, a single pair of discernible words. She reset the timer, and played it again.
"They're cutting thought the bulkheads! Fall back, fall back! Set charges and…. No, the flank, the flank! Oh gods! Oh gods quick…. I…. no! no! Arhhh!" The static almost drowned it out at this point.
Almost.
"HALFWORLD! Jaegers! Jaegers! "
