It was hard to be certain on this miserable ship, but Loki didn't think they'd left the planet yet. There was no explanation for such a delay if everything was going according to Maw's plans. Being stuck here with no information was almost as bad as the pain and the inability to use seidr. He felt the restless need to do something. Anything.
All that liquid running through the walls intrigued him. It couldn't just be there for decoration—not if it was even in the brig. Should something disrupt the flow—a significant quantity of the liquid freezing solid, for instance—perhaps the ship wouldn't be able to leave Sakaar. At least, not as quickly. Very carefully, not wanting to trigger another bout of dry heaving, he prodded inside himself for that simple knot of seidr that held together his Aesir form. He'd had the thought a few times since waking up in this cell that pulling that knot loose would not actually use any seidr. He would be undoing a spell, not casting one.
The idea became more tempting every time, but still, he hesitated, glancing at Brunnhilde. What good would it really do to freeze the contents of the ship's veins? It wouldn't change the fact that he was shut up in a doorless room with a Valkyrie who might well try to kill him herself. Even if she didn't, she would surely be horrified that she'd wasted her kindness on a monster. Why should that bother him so much at a time like this? She would hardly be the first person to mistrust and dislike him.
Brunnhilde frowned, looking up at the ceiling. "There it is again," she said. "Is that...?"
He shook himself out of his gloomy thoughts and listened too. A grin stole over his face. "Thunder."
Perhaps there was no need for him to reveal his true form after all.
X
The arena had descended into complete chaos, which the Grandmaster had purposely exacerbated by raising the battle floor itself back up until it was level with the lowest row of stands. He was watching the proceedings like it was all a great show, but Maw was waiting for the right moment. He'd sent very specific orders to one of the battalions of Sakaaran soldiers when he called for the ship to come to the arena.
A volley of blaster fire swept across the glass front of the Grandmaster's box. Alone, it wouldn't have been enough to shatter it, but Maw discreetly twisted his fingers, pushing at the points that were struck hard enough to finish the job. Glass flew in every direction. The guards in the box recoiled and shielded their faces, but Maw moved forward. Without the glass to impede it, a beam from the ship fell directly on him. He heard the Grandmaster's cry of indignation and orders to the guards, but they came too late. He was on his way back to the ship.
X
Thor was doing all he could to keep the worst of the battle from falling on the Sakaaran people. He had already lost count of all the soldiers he had felled, but it was well into triple digits. It wasn't enough, even when he kept pausing to aim for the deployment beams.
A new beam appeared, aiming directly for the Grandmaster's box, and he saw Ebony Maw floating up inside it, his eyes on the ship. He wasn't even going to fight along side his bought soldiers? Such a display of rank cowardice filled Thor with rage. He bellowed a war cry and changed the target of his lightning. A blinding blue bolt seared through the beam. He had hit his mark, though not directly. Ebony Maw snarled down at him, his left side covered in burns. He made no move to come after Thor, however, and within a few more seconds he had vanished inside the ship.
Thor wanted nothing but to throw himself into the air after Maw, but he couldn't abandon the people in the arena to a battle he had brought down on them. The nearest three dozen or so soldiers were the first to feel his frustration when another massive pillar of lightning burst from him.
X
Loki listened to the rolls and peals of the distant thunder harder than he had ever listened to anything in his life. A few tremors had gone through the ship, and he knew he hadn't imagined those. Lightning strikes. Not enough to bring down such a large craft, but perhaps Thor was aiming for its weapons? At one point, there was a particularly loud thunderclap that must have come from right outside. Whatever Thor was doing out there, as long as it continued, they had a real chance of getting out of this.
Without warning, the cell door melted into existence, revealing Ebony Maw, flanked by six armed and armored soldiers with ash-gray skin and gaping, four-part mandibles in place of mouths. Maw looked livid, and a good portion of his left side was covered in fresh burns that still sizzled and smoked.
"I see the God of Thunder sends his regards," Loki sneered, delighted.
It wasn't clear whether Maw had even registered the taunt. "If your own suffering isn't enough to loosen your tongue," he said, "then perhaps something else will." He sounded utterly wild with hatred, no trace of his old calm smugness in his tone. The change was a chilling one and did not bode well. Maw raised his right hand—only his right hand—and chains shot forward, wrapped painfully tightly about Loki's and Brunnhilde's hands, and dragged them out of the cell with such force that they fell into the waiting soldiers, four of whom promptly seized them by the upper arms.
The soldiers themselves weren't especially intimidating, but Loki wasn't about to try his luck against the blaster pointed at his face. Brunnhilde offered no resistance either, even though she was in far better condition to fight.
Loki barely managed to keep his feet under him at the pace they were going, but he was more interested in observing his surroundings. As he'd suspected, the veins in the walls, ceiling, and floor weren't limited to the cell. They continued everywhere he looked, and they appeared to increase in size the farther they went up the corridor, which was more round than square. He couldn't imagine how this ship had been created or how many corpses of Maw's kinsmen had gone into it. It was almost like they had been merged together to create a new organism, complete with circulatory system.
The farther they went, the more it felt like being inside an ancient behemoth, no longer truly alive but perversely forced to continue imitating life through machinery and Maw's twisted brand of magic. The corridor they were in abruptly opened wide onto a cavernous chamber. They entered it near the top, at a network of catwalks that imitated a spinal column, with wide, sweeping arches stretching around the belly and down to the distant floor. The whole thing was swarming with armed soldiers who jostled amongst each other for access to deployment platforms. Loki noticed that several platforms were dark. Destroyed by Thor's assault, he hoped.
Maw led the way to a small outcrop on the nearest catwalk and onto a lift shaped like an oversized chariot, and then they were hurtling across the vast hold at break-neck speeds along the spinal column. The sight of that writhing army below was horrifying.
The farther they went, the more intense the pulsing lights became, until they strained the eyes and washed everything out in alternating blue and orange. Loki's nausea worsened proportionately with it and a headache throbbed in time with it. Even Brunnhilde was growing pale and sweaty and beginning to sag a little in her captors' grip. She probably didn't have much aptitude for using seidr, but regardless of aptitude, seidr was a part of every member of the major races of Yggdrasil, mortals excluded. It wasn't especially comforting to know that the ship affected them both this way. What would it do to Thor if he came aboard?
By the time the lift reached the far platform, Loki was straining involuntarily against the soldiers holding him, desperate to get farther away from the source of that grotesque energy. His struggle accomplished nothing except to earn him a few blows to the head from the butts of their blasters.
X
Topaz's strategy for subduing and recapturing the escaped fighters was a good one. Or, it would have been, had she not been operating under faulty assumptions. She had assumed that their detour to the hangar had been so they could board a ship and get off-world before anyone could stop them. She had assumed that the revolution was the primary goal of the day. She had no idea that the instigators were much more interested in Ebony Maw, Cull Obsidian, and the army they had purchased than the political situation of Sakaar—or that they had bought a few illicit items with the explosive capability to ground a large ship.
She had also assumed they would only be armed with spears and blasters.
The disorganized mob of sparsely armed fighters she was expecting never came. Just at the point when she was considering sending out a couple teams to scout for the fighters and make sure they were still heading the way she expected, an arrow came flying from somewhere high above any of the entry points she had prepared for and struck one of the guards at the front directly in the eye. Before he could even hit the ground, another arrow found its mark in another eye socket.
All the guards who saw went into a panic, trying to find the source of the projectiles. Arrows three and four didn't hit anyone, but they weren't meant to. They flashed with red lights where they landed, then burst in clouds of thick gray smoke that blocked their view of nearly the entire south corridor, making it impossible to search for the archer.
Topaz coughed and shouted for order. She never regained it. The next objects to fall on the floor amid more than a hundred guards were small and round. She had a split second to realize what they were, and then they exploded.
X
The bridge of Maw's ship was like the interior of an enormous brain. The entire floor pulsed with the brightest light yet, and growing out of it, in place of any of the usual types of control banks or consoles Loki had seen, there were only towering, irregular structures with spindly nodes spreading from them like branches. They interlocked with each other overhead and merged seamlessly into the ceiling and walls. The glowing veins ran through them as well.
All but one of these neuron-like structures was presently being manned by other members of Ebony Maw's species. They had each sunk their arms to the elbows into the two lowest nodes of their respective stations. At Maw's arrival with his two prisoners, they glanced away from their screens and looked around. Loki noticed that their eyes gleamed with what appeared to be starry blue cataracts. They returned to their work with mechanical efficiency, no trace of Maw's passion to further his master's will in their movements.
"Why have you brought us here?" said Brunnhilde, lightly shoving the soldier on her right. The one with a blaster trained on her tightened his grip on it. "Aren't you going to tell us the point of dragging us all the way across the ship?"
Maw's eyes flashed in their direction. "I would have thought that was clear." He sunk his undamaged right arm into a node of the unoccupied station. An enormous viewscreen appeared in the open space behind it. It displayed a chaotic battle taking place inside an arena. Loki spotted Thor at once. It looked like he was the only competent warrior on his side of the fighting, though a young Kronan near him certainly seemed to be doing his best.
"Your father may have defeated my master millennia ago, mage, but the position has changed. You will now bear witness to what happens to those who oppose Thanos."
X
Thor was now fighting back-to-back with Korg. This younger version of his Kronan friend, while as enthusiastic about revolution as his older self, had clearly seen very few battles before now and was only having so much success against the soldiers because their weapons could do little more than leave scorch marks on solid stone. Thor was still grateful for his help. With Korg at his back, he didn't need to worry about guarding it, but they were still only two fighters in a sea of soldiers that continued to grow. His left arm was starting to feel stiff from the deep cut Cull had given him and he doubted his lightning would last against the rest of the soldiers who still hadn't reached the arena.
He was seriously considering flying to the ship—his absence, however brief, would be devastating to the people on the ground, but maybe he could stop the flood of soldiers raining down on them and it would be better in the long run. He hadn't fully made up his mind when two things happened at almost the same time.
The gates where fighters normally entered the arena exploded outward, and a flood of armored aliens of every description poured out, Barton and Romanoff leading the charge and yelling at the top of their lungs. Across the arena, directly beneath the hovering ship, there was a sudden burst of fiery blue light that stretched across several yards. When it faded, Sif, Fandral, Hogun, and Volstagg were there, standing around the second transporter along with Bruce Banner.
It took the first four about a second to take in the madness into which they'd arrived and identify the enemy force. They drew their weapons and plunged into the fray, only Hogun remaining to guard the device that brought them there. Banner stood frozen in bewilderment beside him for about two seconds more, until blaster fire struck him on the shoulder. The soldier responsible was crushed by enormous green fists before he could do so much as get off another shot.
With the arrival of such excellent reinforcements on both sides of the field, Thor redoubled his own attacks. He could feel the joy of battle that always came from fighting alongside his friends. Together, they were more than a match for one army of Sakaarans.
"We expected a battle, but we never thought you'd find us one so quickly!" Volstagg cried merrily, cutting down soldiers left and right with the great battle axe Brandrheid Undrsigr. "Well done, my friend!"
"Tonight we feast in Asgard or in Valhalla!" Sif shouted, her face full of the same fierce joy now coursing through Thor.
"Oh, surely Asgard," said Fandral. "It is a fine battle indeed, but you give our foes too much credit."
"I see your mortals there," said Volstagg, nodding towards Barton and Romanoff, "but where is Loki? Working on some clever scheme somewhere out of sight, is he?" He spoke with perfect confidence, not at all worried; as good as Loki was at getting himself into trouble, he was usually even better at getting back out of it.
"If only he were," said Thor. He jerked his head up at the ship. "He has been a prisoner on Maw's ship for the better part of three days." Their faces all twisted in alarm. "Now that you're here, I finally have a path to reach him."
"Of course!" said Sif. "We will clear your way."
"Certainly!" said Volstagg. Then, confused, he added, "Three days?"
X
A blinking red circle closed around Prince Thor on the viewscreen and symbols raced across the bottom with readouts of the (short) time the ship's weapons would take before they could fire. The target could only be Thor; even if Brunnhilde didn't vaguely remember what he looked like as an adult from her brief glimpse at the bar, no one else would be fighting with that hammer and in that armor.
Her heart dropped. She had watched Loki stupidly fight against the effects of a drug to protect her, she'd watched him withstand torture twice without losing his sense of humor, and she'd watched him go from fastidiously put together to bedraggled and wan while he tried to wait patiently for his brother to come for him.
She did not want to watch him watch his brother die, yet she couldn't see how it would be avoided. They were well and truly trapped, bound by Maw's telekinetically controlled chains, surrounded by armed soldiers, and aboard a ship that made them sicker the longer they were on it. Why did she have to be sober for this? Being drunk wouldn't make their situation better, but it would be easier not to care.
It wasn't until she saw her breath come out in a puff of sparkling condensation that she realized the temperature on the bridge was dropping.
I had to rewrite a good chunk of this chapter because I hadn't planned out enough of the inside of Maw's ship when I started and I kept getting stuck. So I took a step back and looked up lists of classic sci-fi spaceships and scrolled through artwork of all kinds of sea monsters. The spaceship that caught my attention was Moya from Farscape. I've never seen the show, but the ship is sort of half creature, half machine. That was pretty much exactly what I was going for, except that the organic components of Maw's ship are a horrific amalgamation of tens of thousands of corpses instead of one majestic creature.
Maw's crew! I figured a ship like that couldn't be piloted by just one person, but I've had a hard time thinking of who would be the grunt workers in Thanos's army. Who are the cooks? The janitors? He wouldn't waste capable fighters on those roles, and I can't imagine a lot of people being excited to do it, particularly if they're from planets Thanos has "saved." That's why the crew members on the bridge have weird eyes. Where have we seen eyes like that in canon?
Sif+W3 (and Bruce) have finally caught up to the Sakaar timestream! Whee! This is the first time I've written any of them in a battle situation (unless you count their ill-fated struggle with the Hulk when the mortals first came to Asgard), and they're kind of adorable. I'd planned from the start for their arrival to turn the tables on the ground battle, but I wasn't expecting it to make Thor so happy. It made me smile writing it.
The updates have been coming so fast lately because the next chapter contains the scene that I've played in my head about a thousand times over the last few months. The end of this chapter should give you a hint about what it might be. I'm so freaking excited.