The Conceptual Deck

Natasha seemed to relax for a moment after the second ship broke apart, but I was already moving on to the next issue. A quick check of the view screens showed that, yes, the portal was definitely closed. And while that was a step in the right direction, what really mattered was us recovering the Tesseract. I quickly manipulated one of the shield projectors to wrap around both chunks of the ship, holding them in place.

Then I tapped through the screen on my console, double-checking to make sure the Void Skipper was in alright shape. After confirming that all that was damaged were several shield generators and three forward-facing thrusters, I tapped the ship on autopilot before unbuckling my enhanced safety harness.

"So… We are in space?" Natasha asked, undoing her harness at a much slower pace, her eyes mostly locked onto the view screen.

"Yup. We are who knows how many light years away from Earth," I said, standing and noticing her slow pace. "I don't know how long we have, but we are definitely on some sort of time limit. These guys probably have allies-"

"And someone is going to be checking up on them," Natasha said, nodding her head, suddenly all business. "We need to recover the Tesseract."

"Exactly. C'mon, Let's get you ready for an EVA flight."

By the entrance to the bridge was a small enhanced compartment, filled with compact EVA suits. I grabbed one and passed it to Natasha, who gave it a quick look before pulling on the chest plate. I adjusted it slightly before showing her how to activate it, the suit enveloping her body completely and sealing her in. I spent a moment showing her how to activate her thrusters and lock on boots, before leading her down to the empty hangar bay. From the large open door you could see the bottom corner of the larger chunk of the circular ship. It was considerably larger than the Void Skipper, something that was much more obvious from this angle.

"Alright, you ready?" I asked, looking over at Natasha. "Do you want to guide yourself or do you want me to lead you?"

"I… You clearly have more experience with this," She said, holding out her hand, which I took with a nod.

Silently I stepped forward, the vacuum of the hangar bay meaning that we simply had to step off the lip of the bay to pull free of the ship's gravity manipulation. From there I guided us both along the underside of the Void, eventually reaching the gap. Taking a deep breath and taking a quick look around I flew us both across the gap, eventually reaching the ship. She locked her boots onto the ship's hull, wobbling slightly before giving me a thumbs up.

"We are connected by a communicator, no reason for hand signals," I said, unable to stop a chuckle when she dropped her hand.

"Oh. Right."

We made our way down and around to the extra corner of the circular ship, both Natasha and I agreeing that it was probably the bridge. As Natasha walked I flew nearby, examining the ship. I, of course, had no idea what I was looking at, but it was an interesting design. In the last moments, the interior of the ship's ring had been starting to glow and spin, as if building up a charge. I pushed out my LPM scanner, running the beam over the ring. Instead of just scanning the part, however, it scanned the entire chunk of the ship. The scanner could tell that I only had about forty percent of the ship scanned.

"Natasha, I'll be right back."

I turned and darted off to scan the other chunks of the spaceship. Before long the scan was complete, and I had a full blueprint of the ship. I pulled the card back into the deck, my hand finger stinging from the exposure to vacuum, even if it was only for a few seconds. A quick thought had me taking a few samples of metal from the debris before flying back to Natasha, who had reached the bridge.

"Sorry, I needed a scan of this ship," I explained. "We are probably going to need the parts if traveling doesn't work."

I pulled out a universal scanner, pointing it at the ship and playing the red scanning beam over it. I shook my head and pushed out my door maker, the small brass and rubber tool that opened up gaps in solid walls.

"So there isn't any air inside, but there is one surviving occupant," I explained, putting the brass device on the surface of the ship. "So there shouldn't be any explosive decompression from this, but we need to keep our eyes open."

"Is that a breaching charge?" Natasha asked, taking several generous steps back.

"No, much better," I said, my smirk audible through the communicator.

I activated the door maker and flew to the side. The device opened a hole in the ship slowly. There was no woosh of air, confirming that at least this part of the ship wasn't sealed. I entered the ship first, Natasha following behind. The entire room was dark, its power seemingly completely failed. I quickly activated the lights on my helmet, before explaining to Natasha how to activate hers.

The room we entered was relatively big, with a small walkway leading towards some sort of device. It took a few minutes to decipher, mostly because we had entered sideways, before we realized the walkway led to some sort of control system, probably the cockpit. We also found our first corpse.

It was definitely alien, with its gray, wrinkled skin, a pronounced brow, and no nose. Its eyes were frozen and its lips were drooling blood, which was black and frothy. It looked very different from the invaders we had seen so far. I shook my head, turning away from the corpse to keep looking around, feeling no remorse for anyone who had helped to invade Earth.

After making sure that no one was about to ambush us, I pushed my copy of the infinity stone scanner out, hoping that it would surprise me and function off of Earth, only to find the screen blank.

"What's wrong?" Natasha asked as I carded it again.

"All of my tracking stuff is based on Earth GPS devices and maps. They are all useless off of Earth." I explained, already looking for the door. "We are going to have to do this the old-fashioned way, a door-by-door sweep."

Natasha nodded and we both prepared to clear the ship, stepping out of the bridge and into a hallway. Both of us had our guns out and ready as we scanned for any threats. When none immediately presented themselves, we moved on.

As we explored the ship more we found a few more corpses, all of which looked like the invaders, save for a lack of armor. It was my first close look at them, and they looked… brutal. Their skin was covered in metal plates and ports, with even their faces covered in what appeared to be augmentations. Thankfully none of them had the face masks that their soldier brethren had, because they might have survived the depressurization.

We searched the ship as fast as we could, eventually finding our way to a cargo bay of some sort. The room had an obvious hatch on the opposite side from the entrance, which as far as I could tell led to space. There were two aliens inside the cargo bay, and though they had the same face masks on that the invading soldiers did, both of them were very much dead when we found them, having died when Void Skipper slammed into their ship.

In the center of the cargo bay was a device that did not match the aesthetic of the rest of the ship. It was as tall as me and was spherical in its general shape, with two arms that encompassed a central chamber. On one end, pointed out towards the exterior hatch was some sort of emitter, while the other end seemed to be some sort of field projector, though honestly, I was guessing based on what it looked like.

What I did know was that the Tesseract was floating in the center, energy pulsing softly. The arms on either side seemed to be keeping it suspended as the device around it siphoned off energy. The entire machine hummed, filling the cargo bay with a pale blue glow.

"This is what they used to open the portal?" Natasha asked, standing on the opposite side of the device. "And Loki was trying to build one of these on earth?"

"Seems like it," I agreed with a nod before quickly getting to work."Stand back, we are going to need this whole thing."

I pushed out the trunk of robots, calling for a single battle bot. I instructed him to pull the Tesseract from the projector. It nodded, stepping closer to the device and pushing its hand into the field. Its fingers, hand, and then its arm sizzled and sparked as it reached into the energy field, but its hand survived, grabbing the cube and yanking it free, the entire contraption going dark and silent. The battle bot stood, glowing cube in its hand, waiting for more orders.

I nodded and pulled out my LPM scanner, running the beam over the large contraption. It was an impressive machine, designed to draw the power of the space stone out smoothly and use that power to open a portal. Luckily the scanner did not consider it part of the ship, probably because it was so new and not actually attached, simply held in place by a few clamps. I used my knife to cut through the clamps, as well as several thick wires attaching the device to the ship before exposing my finger to the vacuum and carding the portal projector, the entire thing disappearing.

"Okay, that's our backup plan, now we need to get out of here," I said, Natasha following me as I peek back into the corridor.

"Your backup plan is to use the portal device to open a portal back home?" She asked, the battle bot following behind her.

"Kinda, but with a bit more style," I assured her. "I want to grab a few more samples of metal just in case before we go."

As we stepped into the hall, Natasha reached out and grabbed me by my armor's utility belt, catching my attention.

"Maker, look," She said, pointing down the hall. "You see that light?"

I followed her armored finger and sure enough, there was a faint glow coming from one of the doors further down the hall. It was hidden around the corner from the entrance, but it was bright enough to be noticeable.

"Yeah, I do. How much do you want to bet that's our single survivor?" I said, Natasha, nodding in agreement.

"We should check," She responded. "This entire ordeal has been one unknown after another, a proper interrogation could yield a lot of information."

"Fuck. Yeah, okay, you're right," I agreed, nodding reluctantly. "Alright, let's go grab them. I hope my universal translator works on alien languages."

"You have a- You know what, never mind, of course you have a universal translator," Natasha responded, leading the way to the lit-up room.

As we got closer to the door Natasha deployed her vambrace shield, which I had included in her battle loadout, holding it out in front of her as we stepped in. The room was long, with cells lining the wall opposite the corridor. The first three were empty, while the last one was occupied, though the occupant wasn't moving.

There, chained to the wall, splattered in blood, and beaten to an almost pulp was the broken form of Loki. His mouth was blocked by some sort of brutal-looking restraints, his armor was tattered, his nose was clearly broken and his left arm was bent at an odd angle.

Worse than all of that though was his right arm, which had been removed from halfway down his bicep.

"Holy shit," I said, stepping closer to the cell, stopped by a glowing barrier, the source of light Natasha had noticed. "Looks like they didn't appreciate him coming back without the scepter."

"Maker… We need the intel."

"Yeah, and Thor would never forgive me for just leaving him here," I added, my eyes trailing over the walls, specifically at where the energy barrier was coming from. "Okay, we have already wasted enough time. Natasha, droid, grab my belt. I'm going to destroy this barrier, grab Loki, cut him free and travel us all back to the ship."

Natasha nodded, both her and the battle bot grabbing onto my equipment belt. I pushed out my sword and after giving Natasha a nod, sliced into the wall, right next to the barrier…. Only for the barrier to stay up.

"Huh… Kinda expected that to work…"

I kept cutting and slicing and eventually, after four deep slashes, the energy barrier fell. A rush of air battered us for a moment, but it was over quickly. I stepped closer, sliced the chains connecting the adopted Asgardian, and traveled us all back to the Void Skipper.

Loki sort of flopped down to the floor without the prison wall to support him. I stood and rescinded my helmet, pushing out my trunk of soldiers again, this time ordering out three more battle bots and a caduceus bot.

"Caduceus, heal him enough that the rest of you can carry him down to the brig. You can finish fixing him once he is secure… seal off his missing arm." I explained, adding the last thing as an afterthought. "Keep him unconscious and do not take your eyes off of him. If he starts to wake up I want to know."

Only the caduceus bot moved, starting to heal the bastard who was almost responsible for an alien invasion. With a nod Natasha and I stepped back into the bridge, the battle bot carrying the Tesseract still following behind us. I immediately sat down in the pilot's seat, engaged our stealth field, picked a random direction, and pushed the ship to full throttle. A humming permeated the ship before eventually dying down as we blasted away from the two wrecked alien vessels.

It was a solid ten minutes before I could calm my heart down. It had felt for a while there that we were moments from being ambushed, but now, traveling at ridiculous speeds into the empty expanse of space, I felt a bit safer.

"So… Where are we going?" Natasha asked eventually, her eyes not pulling away from the forward viewing screen.

"Nowhere, as fast as possible," I said with a smile. "We just needed to put some distance between the wreckage and us before I felt safe. In a minute we will try to travel back to Earth but…"

"You don't think it will work?"

"No, I don't. I don't think it's powerful enough to reach all the way home," I admitted with a shrug. "But with the Tesseract and what we grabbed from that second wreck, I think I have a solution."

About thirty minutes later, I set the ship to autopilot and looked over at Natasha, who had been napping rather cutely in the copilot's chair. She woke up as I started to stand, looking around for a moment before standing with me.

"What's going on?" She asked, stretching in a way that was extremely distracting. "Are we there yet?"

"Yup, middle of nowhere," I said, gesturing to the view screens. "I want to try to travel home."

She nodded and reached out, taking my hand. I reached out and grabbed the battle bots shoulder, focusing for a moment.

"Travel Helicarrier." I said, waiting a moment before shaking my head. "Travel Home, Travel Texas, Travel Shooting Range. Travel Malibu."

I tried a dozen more locations before finally giving up.

"Okay, plan B then. I need to go down to engineering and start working on a portal projector. Could you stay up here and keep an eye on the sensors for me?" I asked, gesturing to her console. "It's pretty easy and even if it wasn't the chair teaches you the basics when you sit in it."

Natasha frowned, trying to figure out what I meant as she sat down in the pilot's seat. She reached out and tapped a few buttons before her eyes started to widen. She played around with the controls for a moment, nodding her head.

"That… is maybe one of the most bizarre things I have ever experienced," She admitted, sounding fascinated. "I assume you don't want me to take it off autopilot?"

"It's just easier with it on, it's not like we are doing much else but going in a straight line," I said with a shrug.

"Alright, I can hang out here for a while," She said with a nod, relaxing back in the chair. "I'll call you if I need help."

"Thanks. There's a bathroom right outside the bridge and a map at every intersection if you want some food from the cafeteria. Just make sure you check the long-range before you leave."

"Aye aye Captain," She said with a teasing smirk. "Go, figure out how to get us home, I've got this."

"I don't doubt that in the slightest," I said with a smile, before making my way out of the bridge.