"Whether Thanos shows up or not, we've got work to do."
Black Widow glanced sideways at Jordan and said nothing — but her expression was doing something that people who played video games would have recognized immediately.
She was recalibrating.
Any experienced player knew how the game changed when your party picked up a whale who could solo-clear every boss fight on the map. Suddenly the whole session felt different. Lower stakes. You could breathe. If things went sideways, you just sat back and typed GG in chat while the overpowered teammate mopped everything up.
Natasha Romanoff, veteran of more operations than she cared to count, felt something of the same quiet confidence settle over her now.
She clapped her hands, drawing everyone's attention.
"Let's move when we're ready. Morag isn't exactly around the corner."
"Right," Jordan agreed professionally. "You can't get there by taxi."
Natasha rolled her eyes at him with an expression that contained, somewhere inside it, the ghost of a smile. Then she pressed her travel bracelet — Pym Particles cycling through the mechanism — and the miniaturized model of the Benatar in her pocket expanded back to full scale in the space to their left.
Fifteen minutes later.
The Benatar punched through a space node and re-emerged in the void outside Morag — which was, accounting for the ship's startup sequence, ascent out of atmosphere, and two quantum jumps, considerably faster than any ground-level transit option available.
Below them: a planet draped in perpetual grey.
Dense cloud cover wrapped the whole globe from pole to pole. Rain was coming down in sheets somewhere on the surface. The overall effect was of a world that had decided, at some point in the distant past, that it was done being hospitable.
Records indicated Morag had once sustained a sophisticated civilization. It was now abandoned — no population, no economy, no category it fit into except formerly.
The practical upside: breathable atmosphere, survivable gravity, nothing actively toxic about the biosphere. Adequate, in the way that empty buildings are adequate shelter.
Nebula navigated them down into a mountain valley, landing smooth and quiet in a flat clearing between two stone formations. The hatch unsealed.
They stepped out into grey light and wet stone.
Something the size of a large rat bared its teeth at Natasha from a puddle two meters away, hissing — apparently drawing a property boundary across the rock it was sitting on.
Natasha studied it for a half-second. Then, moved by an impulse she didn't bother explaining to anyone, she stepped forward and kicked it.
The creature sailed, squeaking, in a small arc through the damp air.
"What's the plan?" she asked, turning back. "Stand here and wait?"
Nebula hesitated a moment. "The Orb was taken by Star-Lord. The tool he carries can open virtually any lock in this part of the universe." A beat. "He hasn't arrived yet. We could wait for him to do the door."
"Or," Jordan said, "we go get the thing now and figure the door out ourselves."
This proposal was received positively. A ticking clock had a way of making extra variables feel unwelcome.
Nebula led them through the ruins of what had once been a significant building — columns, vaulted ceiling, the remains of something that had mattered — to a sealed stone door at the structure's core.
Scott studied it.
Knocked on it once. Listened.
"Solid," he announced. "But there's a keyhole — which means I can probably go through."
He pressed his belt-mechanism. His body dropped to the size of a speck of dust and vanished into the keyhole.
For a few seconds, nothing happened.
Then: a mechanical whirring from somewhere inside the door mechanism. Gears turning. The heavy stone panels ground apart to each side.
Scott jumped out of the keyhole, restored himself to full height, and looked around at the group with the quietly triumphant expression of a man whose specific skill had just come in very handy.
Natasha: I'm setting up ant traps before every shower from now on.
Rhodes: This man needs to be on a watchlist.
Nebula: ...Yet another Star-Lord.
The open gate revealed the interior.
At the center of the chamber, suspended inside a cage of crackling high-energy laser beams, sat the Orb. About the size of a cantaloupe, sealed in its nondescript metal housing, looking like nothing and containing, as they now had reason to know, a Power Stone.
"I'll grab it—"
Nebula stepped forward.
And then the cranial implants along her forehead crackled — a sharp, involuntary burst of electrical discharge — and she dropped to her knees with a sound that wasn't quite a scream.
Her left eye flickered, went static, resolved into a holographic projection involuntarily playing itself for the room.
The image that came through was fragmented but legible: Thanos, Gamora, and Ebony Maw, all in full military attire, arrayed around a figure hanging in mid-air. Ebony Maw was at a system panel, his long fingers moving across it with the focused precision of a surgeon.
"My lord," he said, in that careful measured voice he used for significant reports. "Her memory files are in a chaotic state. There is a consciousness that appears to be sharing memories with her — memories of events that do not yet exist."
"That's impossible." Thanos's expression didn't change, but his voice had gone very quiet in the particular way it went quiet when something had surprised him. "I personally oversaw her modifications. No one surpasses my engineering."
"It's another Nebula, my lord." Ebony Maw looked up from the panel. "Based on what I'm reading — she's from nine years in the future. And she is, like us, actively searching for the Infinity Stones."
A silence.
"Find her." Thanos's face was stone. "Read everything."
"Yes, my lord — wait." Ebony Maw's fingers paused. "There's a force—"
The projection cut off.
Everyone in the chamber turned to look at Jordan.
His right hand was extended, palm out, fingers slightly spread. Whatever he'd pushed through the air between them and Nebula, it had arrived in time.
Jordan had wrapped her in a biomagnetic field — a clean, targeted deployment, enough to interrupt Ebony Maw's access from the outside in. The pain left Nebula's face as the connection broke. Jordan put an arm under hers and helped her up.
"How are you? Can you hear me?"
Nebula's focus came back slowly. When it landed, it landed on deep, immediate fear.
"It's him," she said. "He found us."
Jordan nodded, and gestured to Natasha, who was already moving — she got her arm around Nebula's shoulders and started walking her toward the entrance and some open air.
Jordan turned back to the room. He spread his hands slightly.
"So. Trouble. As promised."
"Then can we please grab the thing and get out of here?" Rhodes's voice had developed an edge.
"We could," Jordan said, "except that Nebula needs to be steady to sync her time travel. She can't go into the quantum stream in that state, and we're not leaving her here alone."
Rhodes closed his mouth. Opened it. Closed it again.
Then he looked over at Scott, who had at some point drifted over to the laser cage and was crouching to examine it at eye level with the focused interest of someone who had too much experience with exactly this kind of mechanism.
"Scott." Rhodes's voice came out with some weight in it. "That thing looks dangerous. Tell me you're not thinking of crawling in."
"I'm not looking to die." Scott didn't look up. "To fit through those beams without triggering them, you'd need to shrink to the subatomic level — and at the subatomic level you fall straight into the quantum realm, which I have personal opinions about." He stood up and walked the perimeter slowly. "I was checking for gaps in the lattice. But the coverage is complete. No gaps." He looked up at Jordan. "I don't see a way in."
"Alright." Jordan stepped forward. "You did your part. I'll handle the rest."
Scott stepped to the side, made an after-you gesture.
Jordan raised his hand.
F-boy's arm extended through the space between them and the cage, phasing through the laser beams without triggering a single one — the fence built to stop physical intruders, registering nothing from a Stand — and closed around the Orb. Then withdrew.
The Orb sat in Jordan's palm.
The laser cage continued humming, intact, protecting the empty space where the Orb had been.
Rhodes stared at it.
His lips twitched.
"We've been discussing this for the better part of ten minutes," he said, in the measured tone of a man recalibrating several things at once, "and it's just... that simple?"
Jordan looked at the Orb in his hand.
"Well," he said, "it's like getting the elephant out of the refrigerator. Open the door. Take out the elephant." He shrugged. "That's the whole plan."