Gamble
A while passes in silence, with Peter sitting beside him on the cold metal floor, picking at the knee of his suit as Tony slowly pulls himself back to sanity.
“It was a stupid idea,” the kid admits, eventually. “Finding another ship out here. Guess we’d need to be pretty lucky for that to happen.”
Tiredly, Tony nods. “I don’t like to rely on luck, anyway. Luck is for when you run out of ideas.”
They both take a deep breath, and release it together. Then Peter leans forward, arms resting across his knees. “So… any other ideas?”
It takes a moment for the concept to hit him, and then it’s like something else has taken charge of his body, bullying him to his feet and pulling him right over to that one panel in the wall—
“This… Longshot Drive,” he blurts, pushing down the part of himself that wants to tear its hair out over the very concept. “What’s the likelihood of it getting us somewhere useful?”
When he glances over, Nebula’s staring at him. “You would steal whatever remnants of luck can be found in this sector, and trust that it’s enough to bring us to a useful location, and have us put ourselves at the mercy of this device?”
The thought does give him pause, and he takes a moment to consider the issues. “You said we wouldn’t even reach an inhabited system before the fuel cells crap out on us. So there’s nobody around here to steal from… right?”
She frowns. “Possibly those on the run, but even that is unlikely. This region is far too barren to be worth scavenging.”
“Then we’re in the clear. And besides, if our aim is to reverse what Thanos has done—or kill him,” he adds when she opens her mouth, “and prevent him from carrying out any other heinous plans on any other innocent worlds—then I’d say our immediate and quantifiable needs outweigh any potential and nebulous benefit from leaving this sector with all its current stores. Right?”
Nebula lifts her chin. “I see your point. The only question is whether the luck in this area is sufficient to create a lucky jump.”
Fighting off an eye twitch, Tony puts on his best devil-may-care grin. “And if it’s not?”
“Then the jump will take us to an unlucky location, instead.”
“Of course it will.”
Peter peeks over his shoulder at the Jump Drive. “How much luck do we have, anyway?”
“There is no way to tell.”
“Wait, so this impossible drive can gather and store luck, which is a quantifiable resource, but it can’t tell you how much is available?” Tony levels her with an even less impressed stare, but Nebula merely shrugs.
“Once it became possible to measure luck, it became apparent that the Longshot was doing more harm than good. This version of the drive appears to have been made decades before that scientific advancement. I assume that Quill scavenged it off some old ship, perhaps not even realizing what it was at the time. It does not appear to have been part of this ship originally.”
Flopping down into one of the seats—and apparently giving Peter license to do so as well—Tony runs a hand through his hair. “Cobbled-together technology. Beautiful.” Any other time, he’d be thrilled to see what others managed to make out of tech that by all rights shouldn’t go together, but not when it’s messing with his entire concept of the physical properties of the universe.
“The other issue,” Nebula adds, “is that we’d be at the mercy of wherever it happened to send us, with no chance for a second jump and only minimal stores left in the fuel cells.”
“Why—” Tony groans. “Right, the luck doesn’t power the drive, it only aims it. But at least we’ve got enough fuel to power a single jump.”
Peter lifts his head from where he’s sitting upside-down. “So it’ll use up most of what we’ve got left?”
Nebula nods soberly. “If luck is with us, we’ll be in range of a place to get more fuel immediately; if not—”
“Then we’ll be even worse off than we are now. But since we’re out of reach of help or resources, I can’t see how it could get any—”
“Don’t say it!” Peter blurts, leaping to his feet.
The brittle bodies floating across a field of wrecked spaceships hint that Tony probably should have kept his mouth shut.
“This is the work of Thanos,” Nebula says dispassionately. “The kind of devastation he leaves wherever he goes.”
“And when that wasn’t enough, he reached out to touch all the places he hasn’t gone,” Tony adds with a scowl. “But this wasn’t a quick clean death.”
“No,” Nebula agrees. “And from the state of the bodies, this happened days ago.” She turns back to the controls.
“Mr. Stark, I don’t wanna be here,” Peter murmurs. “I really don’t want to—I wanna go, can we go now, please, please, can we just get out of here?”
It takes Tony a moment to tear his eyes away from the horror show and find Peter out of his seat, backing away from the viewport as if it were possible to put distance between himself and the danger.
And he’s shaking.
“Hey, whoa, short stop,” Tony blurts, vaulting out of his own seat and taking Peter by the shoulders.
“I wanna leave. Can we leave? Mr. Stark, please—” It’s such a strange, desperate echo of just a few hours ago, of I don’t wanna go, Mr. Stark, please, please, I don’t wanna go—
Tony’s chest is tight, on the edge of panic himself, and he steers Peter away from the cockpit, even as Peter continues to stare over behind him with wide, anxious eyes. “It’s okay. We’re gonna leave. It’s okay. Can we move any faster?? ” he calls over his shoulder.
“We have no power for a second jump,” Nebula says bitingly. “I informed you of this.”
Tony shoots her a glare. “So we coast along by the regular drive!”
“I am attempting to do so,” she says, without looking up, “but it will take a while to safely clear the debris.”
“What if he comes back?” Peter asks, a tinge of desperation to his tone. “What if—”
“He will not return,” Nebula asserts. “He has whatever he came for.”