Hill lowered her radio and turned to the agent beside her. "Stand down the alert."
She walked forward through the cordon and stopped in front of Smith, straight-backed and professionally neutral. "Welcome back, Inspector General. Fox told us you were in seclusion." She glanced at the spacecraft and the crater it had created in Broadway's asphalt. "The direction of that seclusion was somewhat unexpected."
Before Smith could respond, Tony stepped in. "R&D is absolutely a form of seclusion. You run experiments, you lose track of time, you emerge with results." He gestured at the ship. "This is a single-occupant spacecraft, Hill. It's beyond your clearance to fully appreciate."
"Banner?" Tony looked sideways.
Bruce was already circling the ship slowly, examining the hull with the absorbed attention of someone who had forgotten there were other people present. "Scientific isolation is completely legitimate seclusion." He crouched to look at the undercarriage. "I've gone four days without eating because of a protein-folding problem." He straightened. "More importantly — how is this built? What's the life support architecture for a vessel this size? What are you running for propulsion at interstellar range?"
"This isn't the place for that conversation," Smith said. He looked around — agents still holding the perimeter, civilians pressed against building windows and hanging off fire escapes with phones raised, the Quinjet hovering overhead. "We've had this street blocked long enough."
Tony nodded. "Agreed. People on the sixth floor over there have been photographing us for the last ten minutes." He looked at the ship. "Do you need a tow? I know someone."
"No."
Smith reached into his pocket and pressed the remote.
The hatch sealed itself. The ship's underside vents opened with a low hiss, and the craft lifted cleanly off the crater lip, rose to a couple hundred feet, oriented itself, and accelerated away over the rooftops in the direction of the Fraternity compound.
The assembled Avengers and agents watched it go.
"That," Tony said, "is convenient."
"Where did it go?" Steve asked.
"Back to the his base." Smith was already pulling out his phone. He called Bulma, told her a spherical single-occupant ship was inbound and to have someone receive it, and hung up. He looked at the Quinjet. "Shall we?"
On a rooftop one block east, Skye lowered her binoculars.
She'd arrived in New York a week ago and had not once regretted the decision. The Asgardian embassy announcement had been the first thing — she'd watched Lorelei's UN press conference from a coffee shop on Forty-Second Street and spent the subsequent forty-eight hours cataloguing everything she could find about it. Then this morning the alert had gone out, the street cordon had gone up, and she'd climbed the nearest accessible rooftop with her equipment bag.
Smith Doyle stepping out of an alien spacecraft.
She lowered the binoculars and wrote the note: Not aliens. Smith Doyle. UCC product test, single-occupant. No prior SHIELD notification — caused full Avengers mobilization. Intentional or careless? Unknown. Fascinating either way.
She looked at the crater in the road, now surrounded by agents measuring and photographing. The ship was already gone.
Coming to New York was absolutely the right call.
The Asgardian embassy. Smith's spacecraft. And two nights ago she'd found something on a dark web forum that had kept her awake until four in the morning — listings for perfectly spherical polished stones, multiple sellers, prices climbing toward a million dollars each, buyers apparently concentrated in the tri-state area. Separately, she'd noticed three different organizations in the city running what appeared to be systematic natural stone collection operations. The pattern was there if you looked for it.
She didn't know what Dragon Balls were yet. But she knew something was happening, and she knew she was in exactly the right city to find out what.
Avengers compound.
Steve Rogers found Smith the moment he came through the door.
"Thank you," he said. Simple and direct, the way Steve said everything that actually mattered to him. "For what you did for the people who died in New York. A lot of families got someone back."
The room noticed. Fury, who had driven in from the Triskelion, raised an eyebrow.
"I thought that was Tony's wish," Fury said.
"My wish hasn't changed," Tony said, settling into a chair. "My parents are back. The New York resurrection was Smith." He looked around the room. "I have been incorrectly credited for this for ten days and I want that on record."
Bruce, Natasha, and several others turned toward Smith with a different weight to their attention now.
Smith waved it off.
Jessica Jones watched this happen and then looked at Fury. "Didn't you make a bet with Secretary Pierce about which parent Tony was going to wish back first?"
Fury's expression did not change in any detectable way.
"Looks like you both lost," Tony said pleasantly. "My parents. Plural. Both of them. Back. I would love to know what the terms were."
"I would like to smash his bald head in a little bit," Tony added, to no one in particular.
The room laughed — the genuine, unstaged kind that comes from accumulated tension releasing all at once.
Jessica looked at Hill, who had been standing near the door wearing her standard expression of professional composure. "Commander Hill. You're not laughing. Is that a constitutional condition?"
Hill allowed a slight smile. "I'm just imagining the Secretary's face when the bet settled. It's a satisfying mental image."
The room went again.
When it settled, Tony dropped an arm over Smith's shoulders. "Okay. Genuinely — I was worried. You left without a word, the signal went dark, Fox and Bulma were doing their best impression of people who definitely know where you are." He looked at him sideways. "I'm glad you're back. Now tell me about the ship. Life support. Oxygen. How long were you in there and how are you not dead?"
"The interior runs on a hibernation system. Similar architecture to a medical pod — nutrition, oxygen, waste management are all handled passively while the system is active." Smith paused. "You go in, you sleep, you arrive."
Tony processed this. The medical pods were already in his reference frame — he'd seen what they could do to a human body, the complete metabolic management, the cellular reconstruction capacity. Strip out the medical functions, add a navigation system and a propulsion plant, and you had exactly what had just landed on Broadway.
"Sleeping between star systems," Tony said. "That's either the best or worst road trip concept I've ever heard."
Hill had been waiting for an opening. "What's the operational range? Theoretically — could it make the trip to Asgard?"
Smith looked at her. "Why Asgard specifically?"
Jessica leaned in. "Earth and Asgard signed a diplomatic agreement while you were gone. There's an embassy in Manhattan now. Lorelei is the ambassador." She paused. "Earth technically has reciprocal rights, but no way to exercise them."
Smith was quiet for a moment, recalibrating. Ten days. Diplomatic relations between Earth and Asgard — formalized, public, with a physical embassy and a Rainbow Bridge guard detail. The timeline was moving faster than he'd expected in some places.
"Theoretically the range covers it," he said. "The trip would take time. And that particular ship isn't for sale."
Hill nodded. "Understood. When does Universal Capsule plan to announce a commercial version?"
"When there's something to announce. Watch the product launch schedule."
Natasha stood up. "Alright. The alert's been cleared, everyone's already here, and nobody's eaten yet." She looked around the room. "Party. Now."
Tony was already reaching for his phone to call the catering arrangements. "Obviously yes. Smith, you're the guest of honor whether you want to be or not."
Smith didn't object.