ANTHONY EDWARD STARK IRONMAN STARK TOWER, MIDTOWN MANHATTAN
Selvig was out cold on the floor and the portal device was still running, and Tony had been staring at the portal’s control architecture for three minutes and forty seconds and was approximately no closer to understanding how to shut it down than he had been at the beginning of those three minutes and forty seconds.
I shouldn’t have knocked him out as soon as I saw him…
“JARVIS,” he said.
“Tell me something useful.”
“The portal mechanism is maintained by a feedback loop between the Tesseract and Dr. Selvig’s modifications to the equipment. To close it from this side, someone needs to interrupt that loop manually. Dr. Selvig appears to have built in a safety measure preventing remote interruption.”
“Of course he did.”
“The barrier also appears to require a specific energy signature to disengage, sir. The Tesseract is self-regulating. Attempting to override externally without matching the emission frequency would likely destabilize the aperture rather than close it.”
“Destabilize meaning?”
“Explosive decompression of the dimensional boundary. The yield would be significant.”
“How significant.”
“I’d rather not calculate it precisely, sir.”
“Yeah,” Tony said.
“Me neither.” He crouched down beside Selvig and tried again, two fingers to the jaw, no response.
“Come on, Erik. I know you’re in there somewhere.”
Nothing…
He straightened up and looked at the device shooting up into the sky, powering the portal and the green wall holding the sky closed outside the window and thought if Glowstick could hold out for however long it was going to take him to figure this out.
“Sir,” JARVIS said.
“It appears someone has breached the encrypted channel.”
Tony turned.
“That’s a level seven encryption. Who the hell could even—”
“Mr. Stark.” The voice that came through was young.
Slightly nervous at edges but layered with an even tone.
“I apologize for the intrusion. My name is Dr. Reed Richards. I’m a researcher currently at—”
“Richards,” he said slowly.
“Reed Richards. You wrote the paper on Dimensional Displacement and Macro-Quantum Super-Strings.”
“I did, yes—”
“The equations proving you could tear open a hole to an alternate dimension using basic Earth-made particle accelerators.”
“The Negative Zone, yes, I can explain the theoretical framework if—”
“I’ve read it three times,” Stark said.
“I’ve also tried to hire you twice.”
A shorter pause this time.
“I know. I turned you down.”
….
“How did you get on this channel, Richards.”
A pause.
“I hacked your communications array during your earlier debrief,” Richards said.
“I needed to understand the situation fully before I reached out, which I apologize for, I didn’t have time to go through official channels.”
Stark stared at the channel display for a moment.
“You hacked a SHIELD encrypted military channel,” he said.
“During an alien invasion.”
“Look, Mr. Stark, I don’t have a lot of time to explain this and I suspect neither do you.” The nervousness had pulled back almost entirely now, replaced by something faster and more focused.
“The barrier your associate has constructed over the portal is going to fail.”
Stark’s jaw tightened.
“How long.”
“That depends on several variables I can only estimate from the outside, but the output decay curve I’m observing suggests we’re looking at minutes rather than tens of minutes.” A brief pause, the sound of something being typed very fast.
“The construct itself is extraordinary, I want to be clear about that, the photonic coherence alone is unlike anything in current applied science, but the fracture propagation pattern I’m tracking tells me something specific about how it’s being maintained.”
“The cracks form under impact and heal almost immediately, which means the power source is actively repairing the construct in real time rather than building it with sufficient integrity to be self-sustaining. That’s an enormous ongoing energy expenditure on top of the baseline output required to hold the barrier against the pressure differential from the other side.” More typing.
“Think of it like this. If you built a dam that could repair its own cracks, you’d assume it was fine indefinitely but if the rate of cracking ever exceeded the rate of repair, even briefly, the whole thing goes catastrophically rather than gradually. What I’m seeing in the fracture intervals suggests the repair rate is already starting to lag behind the damage rate, which means whoever is up there is compensating manually, which means—”
“He’s burning through his power source faster than the construct is showing on the outside,” Stark said.
“Exactly.” A beat.
“The output is remarkable, genuinely remarkable but it is finite, and based on the emission decay I’m measuring the curve is steepening. He’s running out of whatever fuels that ring and he’s doing it faster than he knows.”
“Given that new information,” Tony said.
” It would be in everyone’s best interest for you to get to the part where you have a solution.”
“The barrier is energy operating on a frequency I’ve never seen before, which is saying something, but the Tesseract has a very specific gamma emission profile that I’ve been tracking since the portal opened. The only way through the barrier is to match that emission frequency exactly. The math on generating that frequency from scratch would take weeks of calibration we obviously don’t have.”
“Obviously,” Stark said, already moving to the computers in the room.
“However.” Richards’ voice shifted, the nerves pulling back behind something that sounded a lot like a person who had just solved a problem and was very pleased about it.
“I’ve identified an object already emitting that exact frequency.”
Tony stopped moving.
“The scepter,” he said.
“Loki’s scepter, yes. The energy signature matches the Tesseract almost perfectly, which suggests they’re related in origin, which is a conversation I would very much like to have at some point when the city isn’t on fire.” A beat.
“If you can get the scepter to the portal emitter it should interface directly. I’m sending you a program now that will finetune your scanners to track the scepter’s emission signature. It should help you locate it.”
Tony’s display populated with an incoming data packet, the code resolving in real time in a way that made him stop and actually look at it, because the architecture of it was not what he expected from a twenty seven year old researcher working out of a mid-tier Manhattan institute.
“This is good work, you know we built something like this already, just not on such a small scale.” he said.
“Thank you, I actually based it off yours and Dr Banners program, it is why I finished it so quickly.” Richards said.
“…Your very casual about hacking into secure government databases huh…”
“Anyways,” Richards said, with a cough, clearly trying to change the subject.
“Please hurry, Mr. Stark. The person holding that barrier can’t hold it indefinitely.”
“Copy that,” Stark said, and opened the team channel.
“Listen up. I’ve got a fix. Loki’s scepter is the key to closing the portal. I’ve got a scanner fix incoming to track it, find a phone or something so I can share the map data, whoever finds Loki finds our way home.” He paused.
“Also a very annoying nerd just hacked our comms so I wouldn’t say anything ‘confidential’ as you suits put it, hurry up people Glowstick can’t hold up the sky forever.”
He flew out of the tower window and dropped into the smoke-filled Midtown sky and pointed his scanners at the city to start looking for a scepter.
THE BISHOP FAMILY
PENTHOUSE, BISHOP SECURITIES BUILDING
MIDTOWN MANHATTAN
The living room was on the forty third floor and the view had always been Eleanor Bishop’s favorite thing about the apartment, which was saying something given that the apartment contained several things that had cost more than most people’s houses.
Right now the view was on fire.
“Get away from the window, Kate.” Derek said, for the fourth time, from the hallway.
“I can see it,” Kate said, using a telescope her father had bought for the aesthetic appeal to look into the sky, from the window.
She was nine years old and she had been watching the battle for the better part of an hour with a focused, unblinking attention that was strange given the danger they were in.
Her mother was on the phone with someone, her voice low and controlled in the way it got when she was frightened and didn’t want anyone to know.
Her father was in the hallway with his jaw tight and his eyes on the elevator that had stopped working twenty minutes ago.
“Kate,” Eleanor said.
“Come away from the window.”
“There’s a green guy,” Kate said.
“He’s flying.”
“Katherine—”
“He’s holding the sky closed,” Kate said.
“Look, you can see it, the green thing above the tower, that’s him, he’s holding it with his hands.”
A pause in the room.
Despite themselves, both of her parents looked.
The green wall above Stark Tower was visible even from forty three floors up and three blocks east, a solid slab of light pressing against the portal’s mouth, its edges bright and its center deep and dark with the effort of what it was doing.
“Huh,” Derek said quietly, “Would you loo—” then the opposite window of the living room came in.
An alien chariot moving at speed took out the entire glass facade in a single impact, the decompression pulling curtains and throw pillows and a very expensive vase toward the open air outside, and the chariot itself spun sideways into the far wall and came apart on impact, and the alien riding it landed on the living room floor and stood up.
Kate did not move.
She was too terrified to even scream, her body having made the decision for her that stillness was the only available option, every instinct locked up.
The soldier raised its weapon, roaring, the sound of it filling the apartment in a way that made the remaining glass in the window frames vibrate.
Then something came through the open wall at an angle that Kate’s eyes couldn’t fully track, moving fast and flat and deliberate, and it hit the soldier in the weapon arm with a thunk that knocked the shot wide.
The blast went sideways.
Into the second soldier that Kate hadn’t seen until that moment and the impact of its own ally’s misfired weapon took it off its feet and into the kitchen island where it hit and stayed.
The first soldier staggered, its weapon arm hanging wrong, and turned toward where the shot had come through.
The man landed on the broken frame.
One hand on the edge, his body already moving to absorb the momentum of whatever he’d done to get up here from wherever he’d been, an empty bow in his right hand.
He took in the alien, the dead second alien and the three members of the Bishop family against the hallway wall.
The bow came apart in his hands in two clean pieces separating at a joint Kate hadn’t noticed, and suddenly he had one in each hand, and the way he held them shifted, the grip changing, and he was already moving before the soldier had fully committed to its turn.
He went inside the weapon arm first, one piece of the bow deflecting the barrel up and away while the other came across in a short tight arc that connected with the side of the soldier’s head with a crack that echoed in the room.
The alien’s legs buckled.
He followed it down, both pieces moving in a continuous overlapping pattern that didn’t have gaps in it, each strike flowing directly into the next.
The alien hit the floor, and he hit it twice more after that, quick and certain, making sure, and then he tore the arrow from it’s shoulder to place it back into his quiver, straightened up and the two pieces of the bow came back together in his hands with a click.
He looked at Kate.
“You okay?” he said.
She looked at the aliens on the floor.
“You shot it with an arrow…” she said.
He looked at the bow in his hand.
Then back at her.
“I did.”
“To save us.”
“That’s generally what they’re for.”
She looked at the city behind him.
At the smoke and the green light above the tower, the distant sounds of things still happening far below.
“Good shot,” she said.
Something moved in his expression that was not quite a smile but was in the same neighborhood.
“Thanks, kid.” He glanced at her parents, at Derek still frozen against the hallway wall and Eleanor with her phone pressed to her chest.
“You got somewhere lower you can be? Basement, interior stairwell, anything below the twentieth floor.”
“The elevator isn’t working,” Derek said.
“Fire escape then, their aren’t any big ones nearby so it should be safe.” He was already moving toward the ruined wall, assessing the exterior, his eyes going to something Kate couldn’t see from where she was standing.
“Stay away from the windows and keep moving down. Don’t stop on any floor with exterior damage.”
“Where are you going?” Kate asked.
He looked at her.
“Back out there,” he said.
“There are people who still need arrows.”
“You don’t have any arrows.”
“I’ll make a plan,” he said.
Then he was gone, dropping back out through the open wall and into the smoke-filled air below, and Kate moved to the edge of what used to be the window and looked down and saw a zipline connected to an arrow planted into the wall.
Her mother’s hand found her shoulder and pulled her back.
“Come on,” Eleanor said, her voice doing the controlled thing it did when she was frightened.
“Stairwell. Now.”
Kate let herself be pulled toward the hallway, but she looked back at the open window one more time, at the city beyond it.
“Mom,” she said.
“Yes Kate?”
“I want to learn archery.”
A pause that contained several things.
“We’ll talk about it later,” Eleanor said, and pushed her toward the fire escape door.