by Stuart Moore
“Maybe. But if not…”
He leaned into the controls, flipping a series of analog switches. A low hum rose up, all through the cabin.
“What are you doing?” Jen asked.
“What I have to do. What only Star-Lord can do.”
He reached over, cued up a song, and smiled. He was in his element now: a hopeless crisis, a plummeting spaceship, dozens of innocent lives hanging in the balance. Peter Quill had never felt happier in his life.
The speakers sang with Deep Purple.
“I’m gonna fire up the Big Butt Beam,” he said.
•••
“F.R.I.D.A.Y.,” Tony said, “give me an update on our heading?”
“Moving inland again,” the voice replied.
He grunted, running his gauntlets across the mangled metal on the underside of the quinjet. He’d barely managed to scurry down here in time when Tasha had fired up the engines. But he was having trouble keeping a decent grip. The Guardians had really done a job on the quinjet – and that battered ship of theirs hung down, just below him, still fused to the Avengers’ ship.
“Well, at least we’re not headed for Connecticut,” Tony gasped. “And Manhattan’s a good fifty miles away–”
“Sixty-three miles,” FRIDAY said.
“Sixty-three. Thank you. How far to the nearest town? From here, I mean?”
“Ah. That would be only four miles.”
Well, that wasn’t good. At this rate, the quivering vessels could cover that distance in less than five minutes. The last thing he needed was for an extraterrestrial junker and an official Avengers quinjet to crash down together onto some Long Island train station.
Cap’s voice crackled in his ear again, asking for a situation report. Sorry, soldier – no time to talk. He toggled that channel to silence, called up a schematic of the two ships, and ran a quick simulation. If he were to twist the quinjet at an angle of… no, no good; the image spun out of control, smashing into the ground. Two more simulations led to similar, disastrous results. He grunted, punched the ship’s hull in frustration, and tried one more time.
“Jackpot,” he said. “Maybe.”
“Maybe,” F.R.I.D.A.Y. agreed. The AI’s voice sounded even less sure than his own.
Calculating the angle, he leaned against the quinjet, aimed his legs carefully, and fired off both boot-jets. The metal bent, pressing hard against his shoulder with a dull groaning noise. He winced, shook off the pain, and boosted his attitude jets to full power.
The quinjet began to twist on its side, veering back toward the pier. The Guardians’ ship let out a metallic whine, but remained lodged in the jet’s underside.
“Come on, guys,” he said through gritted teeth. “Please?”
The pressure increased; the ships continued to turn. The Employee Services building loomed close, with the taller factory off to the left. Ahead lay the pier – and the water. If he could just reach the water…
He checked his power level: fifty-three percent. That was bad; it was dropping fast. The armor hadn’t had time to fully repair itself.
And neither have I, he realized. Like he’d said to Jen, he couldn’t seem to catch his breath. It was all too much: the duties of an Avenger, his responsibilities as head of Stark Enterprises, the sad mess he’d made of his life with Pepper, the problem with the Kree, whatever that was! And now these interstellar morons, playing demolition derby in the sky–
“Tony?”
The voice shocked him out of his self-pity. “Tasha,” he replied. “Give me some good news?”
“I’m back on the quinjet,” she said. “Auxiliary engine stack is at half power. That should be enough for a quick burst – probably wrench us free.”
“Leaving the Guardians’ ship where, exactly…?”
“I guess that’s your job.”
That figured. He checked power: forty-seven percent. “Tasha, I think I’ve got a drain somewhere–”
“I don’t mean to cut you off, boss, but my engine charge is fading fast. If we’re gonna do this, it’s got to be now.”
He hissed in a breath. Up ahead, that low metal building was coming up fast; he could just make out the small figures of Captain America and Ms Marvel, surrounded by a group of Kree workers. The figures were alarmingly close, and the ships’ altitude was still dropping.
“Countdown from five, Tasha.”
He grimaced, braced himself, and let go of the quinjet. For a moment he was in freefall, and then his boot-jets kicked in, angling him toward the Guardians’ vessel. He reached out and grabbed hold of its nearest vertical stabilizer, pulling himself onto the outer hull of the ship.
“I’m in position,” he said. “Fire when–”
Flame burst from the quinjet’s engines, sending it shooting forward. The Guardians’ ship bucked, rocked, and snapped free. Tony almost flew off into the air, but he activated auxiliary magnets and clamped his gloves and knee-joints tight to the hull.
He caught a quick glimpse of the quinjet, arcing toward the water. It was dropping fast, and the fire in its rocket-tubes had faded, replaced by thick black smoke. That doesn’t look good, he thought–
–and then the Guardians’ ship dropped sharply, taking him with it. Employee Services, the low metal building, lay dead ahead. At this rate of descent, they would crash straight into the wall.
Tony clamped both gauntlets around a sensor array, a studded protrusion on the Guardian ship’s roof. He planted his feet, reared back, and pulled. Slowly, agonizingly, the ship began to rise. Below, the faded flag design on the building dropped lower – lower, lower…
He grimaced, straining human muscle and metal servos. Come on, he thought, ignoring a raft of power-level alarms. Come on, Quill! Little help, maybe? What was going on inside that blasted ship?
The lip of the roof came into view. Tony let out a sigh of relief – just as the loudest alarm of all went off inside his helmet:
POWER FAILURE
His jets went dead; his arm-servos locked up. A single, dread word appeared before his eyes:
REBOOTING
And the ship began to fall.
•••
On the ground, Kamala watched in horror. The Guardians’ ship was headed straight for the building, and it didn’t look like it would clear the roof.
She turned to say something to Captain America. But he was staring in a different direction – toward the water, at the fading trail of the quinjet’s engines. “Tasha?” he yelled into his earpiece. “Natasha, come in?”
•••
Natasha Romanoff shook her head, dazed. She’d managed to pull the quinjet free of the Guardians’ ship, but she’d almost lost consciousness from the burst of acceleration.
She checked the readouts on the quinjet’s pilot console: all red. That burst had burned out the auxiliary engine stack, depleting the charge she’d injected from the Guardians’ power core. The quinjet was a dead hulk, gliding down toward a hard landing.
She strapped in and braced herself, hoping she’d make it to the water.
•••
Gamora and Drax stood together on the ground, watching their ship drop. Rocket circled in the air, keeping his distance.
Drax turned to Gamora, a stern look on his face. “In my absence,” he said, “you have allowed our vessel to fall into disrepair.”
She couldn’t argue the point.
•••
Inside the Guardians’ ship, all eyes were glued to the view ahead. The front viewport, which had been blocked for so long, now showed the roof of that metal building looming closer… closer…
“I’ve got a weird feeling,” Jennifer Walters whispered, “that we’re about to enter the discovery phase.”
Quill ignored her. The ship was dropping fast; at this rate they’d slam right into the lip of the roof. T
he engines weren’t responding, which left him no choice.
He reached out and stabbed a button marked “KNOCK THREE TIMES.”
•••
A beam of red light sliced out of the ship, melting the edge of the roof to slag. Tony released his grip on the hull and leaped away, jetting up into the air. Another beam followed, hotter and brighter. The third was almost pure yellow, like the sun itself.
The roof sizzled, rolled up, and melted. In less than thirty seconds, half of it was gone. The ship dipped down, then rose back up as its engines coughed out a final, unexpected burst of power. It bounced off the still-intact back half of the roof, skidded briefly, then wobbled off into the air toward the water.
Good riddance, Tony thought. His armor had rebooted to minimal power, with priority allotted to flight control and air circulation. Weapons, communications, fine servo movement – those would come later.
He wafted over toward the building. It was exposed to the elements now, its insides visible to anyone hovering above. He moved slowly, hesitantly, a deep sense of dread stealing over him.
I don’t want to know, he realized. I don’t want to see what’s inside. But for him, as for Peter Quill, there was no choice. He turned in midair, fired up his coughing boot-jets, and looked down.
“Oh no,” he whispered.
Inside his cold shell of metal, there was no one to hear.
Part Four
After the Fall
Chapter 27
Tony Stark hung in the air like a god, staring down. His movements were dronelike, inhuman. He was in shock.
The building’s roof had been burned halfway off in a surprisingly clean break. Inside those thin metal walls, dozens – no, hundreds of Kree sat, stood, milled around, or slept curled up in crowded, dirty spaces. One side of the building consisted of living quarters, a large area subdivided by temporary metal walls, curtains, and in a few cases chicken wire. Some of the rooms had as many as eight bunks crammed into them. They had doors made of plywood or just curtains, no windows, and most of the bedclothes looked threadbare and unwashed.
In one room, an argument was raging between two men. In another, a woman tried to corral six screaming children. In a third, three young women struggled to move a chunk of the steaming roof that had fallen in on them. A few more Kree stared up at the sky; one of them pointed at Tony and shook his head in disgust.
Tony wafted up a bit; he couldn’t force himself to meet the man’s gaze. He jetted sideways to gain a three-quarters view of the living area, which was actually three stories high, with ladders down the side providing access to the higher levels. Each storey couldn’t have been more than six feet high, from floor to temporary ceiling.
No windows. No privacy. From the look of it, barely any ventilation – until now, at least. It looked like an anthill, a beehive.
How? he thought. How could this happen? Here, in my father’s house?
He wanted to look away, to pretend this horror didn’t exist. But he couldn’t. The lenses built into his helmet spared him no detail.
Ladders led down from the living quarters into a large open area. One corner held a few CRT-screen computers; a ring of young people circled around, waiting their turns. But most of the space served as a sort of communal dining room, with long picnic tables arrayed in rows along the bare floor. Kree of all ages sat hunched over bowls of food, eating rapidly, furtively. Occasionally they glanced briefly up at the now-exposed sky, then turned quickly back to their food.
A small kitchen stood adjacent to the dining room. Rusted gas stoves, a loud whirring freezer. A few men and women rushed around, struggling to prepare food in a space that was clearly inadequate to the demand.
There was more. A room full of screaming children, guarded by a single ancient Kree woman. An infirmary with a mere three beds, all occupied; two more men laid out on mattresses on the floor. A trio of jumpsuited Kree moving from room to room carting away fallen chunks of fallen metal and plaster on a large, wheeled dolly.
Where the roof gap ended, Tony caught a glimpse of a large industrial area with steam leaking up and out. Beyond that, he couldn’t know.
I brought them here, he thought. I offered them work, housing, a new life. And all I brought them was… despair. Filth. Living conditions even worse than those they’d known before, as serfs of the ruthless Kree Empire.
He had to clean this up. He would clean this up. What had he told the Kree woman? Whatever is happening here, I swear it ends today.
But it was so big. So much to deal with. And so terrible. “Look on my Works, ye Mighty,” he whispered, “and despair.”
There was plenty of despair to go around.
•••
“These are my friends,” said Drax the Destroyer. “They saved my life. I have very little, but they have less. I need very little, so I give what I have. Their arms are strong, but mine are stronger. They work hard in the factory, but I can work harder. That makes me no better than them, but it gives me a duty to help them when I can. I am proud of my work. I am proud of my friends.”
Gamora paused on the ladder, halfway between the Kree’s open common area and the exposed sky above. Just below, Rocket and Drax continued climbing downward, chattering away.
“OK, but let me get this straight,” Rocket said. “There’s a freakin’ nuclear accelerator on the other side of this research complex, and these friends of yours live like this?”
“I did not create this situation,” Drax replied.
After the ship sliced off the roof of the metal building, Captain America had run off to help the Black Widow. Drax had led Rocket and Gamora inside the building, through a large hidden door. The Kree had hurried to join them, murmuring fearfully about friends and relatives. Once inside, Drax had offered a tour of this grim place that had weirdly become almost a new home to him.
Drax! Gamora could still hardly believe he was alive. She hadn’t really processed that, she realized. Too much going on.
The ladder led down past levels of living quarters, separated from open air only by a thin curtain of chicken wire. In a room no bigger than a walk-in closet, two men sat on a low bed, their heads slumped. One man reached out and threw a rubber ball to a little girl sitting on the floor. She missed the catch; the ball thumped into the chicken wire, lodging itself in the netting. The little girl ran to retrieve it. then froze as she saw Gamora outside, on the ladder, just inches away.
For a moment, Gamora’s heart caught. Was it her? The girl she’d met back on Praeterus?
No. This girl was older, with a tinge of blue to her complexion. She gave Gamora a blank look, then reached for the ball. She tore it loose, ripping its skin, and tossed it lazily back to her parents.
“…still don’t get it,” Rocket was saying. “How in the name of Xandar did you manage to escape an exploding planet?”
“There was another ship hidden inside the spaceport hangar!” Drax laughed. “Did you see that coming? I did not. I did not see that coming.”
Drax’s friend, the Kree with a Mohawk, called up to them from the floor. “It was a pretty old ship,” he said. “We didn’t think it worked.”
“You guys,” Rocket replied. “You, uh, do a lotta drugs back there on Praeterus?”
Mohawk gave a crooked smile.
Rocket turned back to Drax. “So you just stayed with the Kree?”
“Their struggles were prodigious,” Drax replied, “assuming I understand the meaning of that word. I am stronger than the mightiest among them, and I saw that I could help them. How could I fail to do this?”
“Yeah, yeah, that’s all admirable and stuff. But you never thought to tell us you were alive?”
“I did not.” Drax hesitated. “Would that have been appropriate?”
Gamora found herself smiling. Finding Drax had taken some of the edge off her anger; that was a relief, but also a p
otential danger. There was still a killer here, she reminded herself. The scent of evil underlay this place, like mold that had been sprayed over with perfume.
She had to stay alert; she had to retain her edge. She owed that to the dead of Praeterus, and to the survivors too.
“Don’t take this wrong, Drax,” Rocket said, “but you don’t sound much like a Destroyer no more.”
“Horse…” The Kree man paused. “I mean, Drax kept us together during some pretty tough times. Out in space.”
“I get that,” Rocket said, “but why didn’t you show yourself sooner, buddy?”
“When you attacked this installation,” Drax replied, “the Kree immediately sought shelter. I was the only one who stayed at my post, on the assembly line.”
“Because…?”
Drax stepped down off the ladder, gesturing around. “If this frankly baffling capitalist enterprise must be maintained,” he said, “let it be on my back, rather than those gifted with inferior strength and stamina.”
“OK, that’s the Drax I know,” Rocket said. “Unflinchingly self-sacrificing, yet vaguely insulting to all around him.”
Gamora reached the bottom of the ladder. This area served as the Kree’s dining room and general meeting space; it was vast but busy. Long picnic tables hosted families and other assorted Kree gatherings. Some of the groups talked loudly, with animated gestures, in dialects Gamora didn’t understand. Other Kree slumped low, glaring or staring straight ahead. No one seemed to care about the newcomers.
She gazed back at the three levels of living quarters. Inside, that area was a maze of tight corridors. From the side, it looked like a cage divided up into levels. And from down here, anyone could see into the side rooms. A few of the families had hung curtains, but even those couldn’t cover the chicken wire from floor to ceiling. These people had virtually no privacy.
And now, she thought, they have even less. She craned her neck, peering up past the top level, through the open space that had been the roof. Tony Stark floated high above, bright and imperious in that full-body armor of his.
She looked away. She didn’t want to meet those glowing, all-seeing eyes.
