Sand swirled on the flight deck.
"I thought I told you not to do that while I'm driving!" snapped Jazz.
"It's an emergency."
Jazz twisted to look at Tucker. "What, did something go wrong with-?"
"No, that's all fine. This, though?" He pointed at the alien-spewing portal. "This is an emergency. Backup's still got a ways to go before they reach the portal. I came to scout things out."
"How long is 'a ways?'" asked Sam.
"I don't know. You know how distances can get in there. Maybe fifteen minutes? I can pull a couple of people over with me at a time, like with Thor here, but—"
"Thor came with you?" interrupted Jazz.
"Yeah, he's—What the heck, how did he do that? He's huge."
"Never mind that," said Sam. "Are you okay to keep using the staff like that?"
"I'm fine. I've been managing my jerkish urges by being low-key kind of a jerk to Valerie."
"That doesn't sound like managing them at all, actually."
"I'm fine."
He didn't sound fine. But then, who was? Not Jazz.
"How's the shield setup going?" continued Tucker, not giving Jazz a chance to dispute his statement.
"Not great," said Sam. "Romanov got ahold of one of those bikes and we're trying to get the generators set up on nearby buildings, but—" She summarized the rest of the technical problems (explosions, enemy forces, skyscraper roofs being really far apart) with a shrug.
It really was too bad that Loki's portal was so far up, and that they didn't dare bring the Ops Center closer. Then, they could have tried to encircle the portal with the Ops Center shield.
But the blimp was not a match for space whales. Or whatever those things actually were. And they were still unclear on what forces Loki had in the building.
Apart from Danny, who, really, was more than capable of drilling a hole through an unshielded Ops Center.
"How can I—Oh, heck. He isn't."
"Isn't what?" asked Jazz, trying to see what Tucker was so upset about. She leaned forward and flinched as a gust of hot, sandy air scraped along the back of her neck. "I hate that."
"There!" said Sam, pointing.
There was someone new on the roof of Stark Tower. Two someones. Thor, and now Tucker.
"Oh, no, they're both idiots," said Jazz. Her dramatic, tension-filled reunion with a mind-controlled family member could wait. Why couldn't Thor's?
One of the computer banks beeped. "We have incoming," said Sam. "Ten o'clock."
"I see them," said Jazz, spotting the small formation. But the Ops Center didn't have any power to spare. All it had was going into the portal and the shields.
"Should I go out?" asked Sam.
"No way," said Jazz.
"I have a bazooka. And a jetpack."
"That's not—"
Something small and narrow arced upward into the lead glider, then exploded.
"Oh, yeah," said Sam. "I'd forgotten about arrow boy."
.
"Loki! Turn off the Tesseract or I'll destroy it!"
"Brother!" exclaimed Loki. "Come, drink with me! For the dawn of a new and more balanced age!"
Danny did not like that emphasis on balanced. It sounded like something out of someone else's mouth. And Loki had said it, or something like it, before, to Iron Man, hadn't he? But Danny had other concerns at the moment. "Hey," he said, by way of greeting. "So, before we start, is he drunk enough to be actually impaired? He keeps telling me Asgardians are different and all, but I'm not super clear if he's actually an Asgardian, like, species-wise, culturally, obviously, I mean. Is he drunk?"
"What?" asked Thor.
"Look, I haven't slept in… I just haven't. So. Words. Forget them." He pointed at Loki. "Drunk?"
"I'm not drunk," said Loki. "I am merely showing Thor some hospitality."
Thor scowled at them and turned his hammer on the Tesseract. Naturally, it bounced off the shield, and Thor flew backward several meters.
"Should I have warned him?" asked Danny. He was sort of annoyed that Thor hadn't at least answered the question about alcohol.
"It wouldn't have made any difference," said Loki, draining another shot of alcohol. "He never listens to me when I tell him things, anyway."
"That might be because you're sort of unhinged."
"Oh, yes, so unlike SHIELD and Fury, using an infant as a soldier."
A gust of sand blew over the roof, revealing Tucker.
"Oh, hi, Tuck!" said Danny, waving. "Here all by yourself?"
Tucker looked up, red flashing behind his glasses as he wobbled. "A son of Ra never walks alone. Wadjet rests upon my brow, Nekhbet shelters me with her wings."
Oh, that didn't sound good.
"Finally," said Loki. "Someone who can give me a decent fight." He threw the glass aside and walked forward, only to be stopped by Thor.
"No, brother," said Thor. "If you fight, you fight with me."
"Well, sounds like it's just you and me, then," said Danny, pleasantly unsure about his odds against Tucker given their respective current states. Ice crackled under his feet even as the air grew dry and desert-like. To their side, Loki and Thor fought with more traditional means.
Captain America and Black Widow zoomed by the tower on a stolen chitauri glider. Both Danny and Loki noticed at the same time and turned to fire – Danny hoping Tucker would take advantage of the distraction, Loki for who knew what, considering he was still in the middle of a rather nasty sibling brawl, complete with hair pulling on both ends.
Thor tackled Loki and the bolt from the scepter missed. Danny's ectoblast didn't.
.
It was only a slight graze, one that barely made the chitauri bike shudder, but it must have gone through something important, because although they weren't in freefall, Steve and Natasha soon found themselves in a steep spiral.
Steve prepared to grab Natasha and jump. Bleeding off even a little momentum meant a lot in these situations.
But before they got close enough to the ground to do so, sand blasted up, buoying them up with enough force for Natasha to get more control and set them on the street in one piece even as individual grains of sand scored lines in their protective gear and sometimes their skin. The sandstorm died down, revealing a street full of enemies, Stark Tower looming high above them, and other bikes hurtling towards the ground and exploding into fireballs. The sandstorm had, apparently, been too much for them. The street itself was, and there was no good way to say this, brutally shredded. Not a single window on the block still had glass in it. Was that where all the sand had come from?
The portal disgorged another huge creature, flanked by fliers. Steve could spot what looked like hundreds of soldiers on it, made tiny by distance.
"Well, plan A is screwed," said Natasha, as they prepared to fight. "What now?"
Steve touched his communicator – the Fenton Phone – then turned to slam a chitauri soldier into the ground. He tossed the weapon to Natasha. "Fentons," he said, "we've been shot down. Can you make a shield around the portals with the generators we've already dropped?"
"No can do, Cap!" shouted Jack Fenton. "Any shield we could make right now would miss it by a mile! Geometry's all wrong!"
Steve looked up the tower again, casually deflecting an energy blast from one of the Chitauri.
"What're you thinking?" asked Natasha.
"What if we got some of the generators up on top of Stark Tower?"
"That might work," said Maddie Fenton. "We're going to have to do some very fast and dirty math to get everything working, but I think it might work…"
There were screams – civilians – down the street, and Steve's whole body twitched towards them.
"Give me the generators," said Natasha, acquiring another weapon as her first one seemed to run out of charge. "You go."
"Are you sure?"
"Positive. Given how big Stark Tower is, and how many people Loki probably had, sneaking through that place is more my thing, anyway."
"And I can give you some tips!" said Stark, who had, of course, been listening in.
"Alright," said Steve, already planning on how best to organize a civilian retreat. He tossed the pack of shield generators to Natasha, who caught them easily.
"Don't die!" she said.
"Don't plan on it!"
.
Tucker jerked his staff sideways with a gasp, and that was enough of an opening for Danny. He stepped forward, smoothly, winter in his wake, sliding past the not-quite-real vulture and snake that had faded into being around Tucker.
Duulaman had given Danny a lot of trouble the first time around, throwing constructs in his path and warping reality as he saw fit. But there was a lot to be said about experience.
He grabbed Tucker's wrist and squeezed. The snake sunk its teeth into Danny's shoulder. They all hissed. Danny looked into Tucker's red eyes, and wondered if the color of his eyes was just as jarring to Tucker.
Then, the red flared brighter and Tucker—
Tucker dropped the scepter. The red in his eyes vanished immediately.
"No, no, no, I can't do that," said Tucker, whose skin had taken on a clammy, sickly cast. "No, nope, not doing that, oh my gosh—"
Danny grabbed the scepter and tossed it over the edge of the building. Which was… okay, that could have gone better.
"Sorry," said Danny.
"Crap," said Tucker, but he wasn't a threat any longer, so Danny let him go. He had his orders.
Protect Loki.
"Loki!" shouted Thor, even as Danny pushed him away and called up a shield. "Look at this! Look around you! You think this madness will end with your rule?"
"It's too late," said Loki, voice cracking. "It's too late to stop it. Any of it."
"The army isn't ours," reminded Danny, helpfully, looking back. He could see the knife between Loki's fingers.
The sounds of battle seemed to swell. The shadow of one of the huge space whales passed overhead.
"Get me out of here," whispered Loki.
"Got it," said Danny, and he pulled them both off the side of the building.
.
Tucker didn't know how much more of this his heart could take. First, Captain America and Black Widow going down, then the sudden fear that he'd killed them with that glass sandstorm, then Danny getting the scepter from him and tossing it off the roof, and now Danny and Loki were skydiving without parachutes.
Please let them not have pancaked on the ground. He knew Danny could tap his flight a little, even in human form, but there was still that fear.
"Call back your staff!" called Thor. "We must go!"
"Wh—I don't know what you can do with your hammer, but I can't just call back that thing," said Tucker. "It's probably broken into a million pieces on the sidewalk by now!" And good riddance, honestly. He could still feel something in the back of his head. Something nasty.
"Have you ever tried? Tools like that tend to return to their rightful owners," said Thor, taking a few steps towards him. "I do not pretend to know what you are going through with this 'past life' of yours, but you can control it. Just as Banner controls his anger, or any mage of my people controls the power that flows through them. And you must. This city depends on us."
"Oh, no pressure, then," said Tucker.
"Good man." Thor patted him on the shoulder and then jumped off the building. Great! Great. It wasn't like there was any other way for him to get off this roof, what with Loki's other forces in the building. He was stuck on the roof alone!
"Ughhhh."
Or maybe not so alone. He pulled his emergency lipstick out of his pocket. Not the best weapon against humans – and he had no idea what it would do to aliens – but it was better than nothing. And how arrogant had the staff made him, that he didn't think to get something more robust from the Ops Center before leaving?
Near the portal device, an old man was sitting up, holding his head. "Ugh, oh, no. Oh, no." He stared up at the portal in awe and horror.
"Hey," said Tucker.
The man jumped. "Who're you?"
"Who're you?"
They stared at each other for a moment.
"… are you pointing a tube of lipstick at me?"
He had pretty good eyesight for such an old guy.
"It's a deadly laser," said Tucker. Well. It was a laser, and it did have an association with death, via ghosts, so. It wasn't like he was lying. "Are you one of Loki's people? Did you help make this?"
"I—Not of my own will." The man got to his feet shakily. "I was—The scepter. You can't—You can't protect against yourself."
"I know the feeling," said Tucker. "You know any way to shut it off?"
The man nodded, slowly. "Yes. Yes, we did."
"You and Danny?"
"All of us. Loki… There's something very wrong with Loki."
"Cool. So. How do we do it?"
"We need Loki's staff."
.
After they'd fallen a few stories, Danny flipped them into the building. Whatever Tucker had done had taken out all the glass, leaving Stark Tower, with its ultra-modern design, missing much of its outer walls. Loki landed easily, which maybe, maybe supported his position that he wasn't drunk.
Maybe.
He also caught Danny by the arm when he stumbled.
"What's wrong with you?" he snapped.
"Uh. Not sleeping in days. What's wrong with you?"
Loki scoffed. "Hide us," he ordered.
Danny turned them invisible.
"So… What now?"
"I should be leading this army," said Loki, looking out into the city, his eyes slightly unfocused even as Thor swooped down from the roof and back out into battle. "I should be directing them—They should be hunting down these heroes, not wasting time with humans that aren't even warriors."
Danny swallowed. Loki was right – right both ways, actually. The way the chitauri were fighting was stupid, but it wasn't stupid enough. Fewer people would get hurt if they were focused on people who could take it. Except… "You do know it isn't your army, right? You do—What happens," Danny tried, a bit desperately, "when your boss comes through that portal?"
Loki froze. His breathing went shallow. "No, no, no," he said. "That was not our bargain. I will deliver the Tesseract and the scepter to him. He has no reason… no reason…"
"What did he do to you?" pushed Danny. If he knew it was something bad, then maybe…
Loki shook his head. "I need to take command." His voice was flat, lifeless.
"Okay," said Danny. "Elevator or stairs?"
Green light flared from above, and they both strode to the edge of the floor to look up.
.
"We've got increased energy influx, kiddos!" said Jack over the Ops Center intercom. "Get ready to adjust for momentum bleed-off, Jazzypants!"
"Right, right, right," said Jazz, making sure she had a good grip on the controls. If this wound up being a thing where they had codenames printed in the newspaper, and hers wound up being Jazzypants, she'd be committing some crimes.
"Wait, what does he mean momentum bleed-off?" asked Sam, who had noticed what controls Jazz had and was now buckling herself in.
"Ever notice that you slow down when you go through a portal?"
"Sped up a few times, too."
"Well, that energy goes somewhere, so—"
The Ops Center lurched, and Jazz steadied it in the air, running the engines just enough to keep them in place. The anchor was all very well and good, but it had limits, too.
A familiar figure, smaller than the space whales but, but still huge, with a weapon held in each of her four hands, emerged from the portal, trailing dozens of smaller glowing dots.
"Yes!" shouted Sam. "They made it!"
And then the shield cut out.
"Uh, we might have underestimated the juice the portal would take when actively transmitting. Just a bit."
