The universe was staggeringly vast. This wasn't some two-planet movie world where you could step outside and trip over the Power Stone.
All she knew was that the Stone was on some abandoned planet. Beyond that, her memories offered nothing useful. The planet names from the films were largely meaningless here anyway, because each civilization had its own naming conventions. Take Earth—humans called it Earth, but out in the cosmos it went by a dozen different labels. Some civilizations filed it under Gaia. Others logged it as Terra. A few strange ones called it Shelter 8.
Untangling useful signal from that noise of conflicting information was going to be a nightmare.
Daisy needed to locate the major empires—the Kree Empire, the Shi'ar Empire—and get herself to their capitals. Those places had breathable atmospheres and excellent intelligence networks. Only there could the real work of tracking down the Power Stone begin in earnest.
…
Daisy hauled herself upright, face drawn with exhaustion, and checked the time. She'd made it to the next morning.
The data volume had been overwhelming. Dark Phoenix had gotten considerably lazier since their last interaction, which meant Daisy had ground through the calculations herself for hours—and decoded a grand total of three percent of the information.
That three percent was heavily padded with "approximately" and "possibly" and "probably in the ballpark." Not exactly inspiring.
Fortunately she had Danger to lean on. Daisy handed the precision work off to the AI—exact figures, no rounding.
Five minutes later, Danger reported: the supercomputer's processing capacity was insufficient.
Director Daisy waved a hand, invoked her administrative access, and quietly siphoned off a portion of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s three institutional supercomputers to supplement Danger's load.
The Tesseract was not a cab. It was not an airplane.
It didn't defer to the intentions of its user. She couldn't just shout "Take me to Hala, the Kree homeworld" and expect a portal to materialize. The Tesseract didn't recognize her, which meant the teleportation function was locked away from her. Attempting to force it would be a disaster.
Loki had held the Tesseract in Infinity War and never used it to save his people—or himself. The Tesseract simply didn't recognize him. All he could do was wave it around as a distraction and try to stab Thanos with a hidden knife.
For precise Tesseract teleportation, you needed to be Thanos—five Stones in hand, Space Stone channeled through the Gauntlet.
The fact that the Tesseract had seen fit to give her a star map, Daisy thought, was already more courtesy than she'd expected.
She was running Earth-based calculations against a stellar universe that had no interest in Earth-based math. The workload was absurd, and she had no better option. And even if she cracked the coordinates, she couldn't teleport across a hundred thousand light-years through sheer ability alone—her powers weren't remotely that strong. The sensible answer was a spaceship.
Did Earth actually have a spaceship at this point in the timeline? That was an open question.
The Inhumans on the far side of the Moon almost certainly had advanced spacecraft. Getting herself to the lunar surface wouldn't be difficult—but they had no prior relationship, her Inhuman genes were too obvious to hide, and walking into their territory uninvited was a gamble more likely to end badly than not. Could she beat Black Bolt in a straight fight? Daisy doubted it. She wasn't ready to bow and pledge fealty either. Best to keep her distance from the Inhumans for now.
Had alien ships been left behind on Earth over the years? Almost certainly yes. Almost certainly wrecked. The vessel at K'un-Lun had fused with the mountain over the centuries. The ship that had brought Fin Fang Foom and the Mandarin's Ten Rings had crashed completely—Fin Fang Foom couldn't fly it home, so Daisy's odds were zero. The Brood invasion before the common era had directly catalyzed the founding of the Brotherhood of the Shield; she figured some ships had been left behind, but five thousand years was a very long time. She wasn't flying anything that old.
There were other candidates: Jack of Hearts' alien mother, Abigail Brand's alien father, even Kang the Conqueror's ship from a future timeline. She'd run the analysis on all of them. Some were untraceable—probably living in quiet anonymity somewhere. Some hadn't arrived yet, or had never reached Earth at all. The whole tangle had given her a headache.
One thing she was certain of: Baldy had at least one spacecraft. Mar-Vell's ship alone made that near-certain. She'd tried to probe him on the Kree angle last time and gotten nothing—but her read was that Fury had one, possibly more.
Two parallel tracks, then. Keep building goodwill with Fury. And build her own self-reliance—self-powered teleportation wasn't out of the question. If she could identify a planet at the right technological tier, stealing a ship was also viable.
To support sustained teleportation and accelerate her Eternal gene evolution, Director Daisy did something genuinely unusual: she started exercising.
In her sportswear with earbuds in, she set off around the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial like any of the ordinary men and women who did the same every morning.
Human form was her most stable configuration—best energy conversion efficiency. Outside of combat, she'd been maintaining it consistently lately. Her footfalls were slow and deliberate; she was using the rhythm to cycle her internal energies toward something close to perfect equilibrium.
She had absolutely no desire to talk to anyone. Some people were simply too straightforward for their own good.
In the November chill, wearing a tight tank top, Captain America came thundering past her like a wild donkey at full sprint. When he registered who she was, he let his pace drop.
"First time I've seen you jogging. Your stride is beautiful—is that S.H.I.E.L.D. specialized training?" Cap's broad pecs stretched the tank top drum-tight. From the side, the effect was considerable.
Daisy could hear him perfectly well, but pulled out an earbud for politeness' sake. "No special technique. Just a workout method I figured out on my own."
Running wasn't exactly a topic with shared enthusiasm between them. She found exercise tedious.
"I heard the NYPD stopped you a few days back," she said, steering elsewhere.
Cap gave a light laugh. "There are a lot of new rules to navigate. I'm working on it. Oh—should I be paying you rent? You could deduct it from my book royalties."
He said it with genuine sincerity. Daisy, who had been quietly planning to arrange exactly that, scratched the back of her head. Pressing him over that bit of money felt petty. She made a show of magnanimity: no need, she said—complimentary lodging for heroes was a S.H.I.E.L.D. perk.
They ran most of another lap together. Cap wasn't pushing his top speed; Daisy was holding back about half her output. Even so, their pace far outstripped anything normal humans could manage.
"You've had some kind of enhancement, haven't you? I've never known a normal woman to move like this." His breathing was still perfectly even. He lengthened his stride.
"Ah, I was just born fast." Her answer had exactly zero sincerity. She picked up her pace to match his.