Chapter 46
In the far flung reaches of space, the Benatar drifts across an endless sea of debris, kept in a low power state to keep from overtaxing their reserves. The hum of the ship’s engines combines with the sound of the air ventilation to become a deep and low tone that’s almost soothing.
Tony Stark drifts in and out of consciousness, weak and exhausted, burning up from the inside. The fever is reaching dangerous levels, the infection simmering in his side has come back with a vengeance, and the medicine is taking its sweet time to have any effect. He can feel the heat rolling off of his own skin, but he feels like he’s freezing to death. The sweat bubbling up out of his arms and chest feels too cold, too sharp, and he fights off a shiver. Every movement is slow and disjointed, painful in a way that should set off alarm bells. The bunk he’s been using as his bed is a mess of blankets and sweat stained sheets he’s too exhausted to change.
At one point, he hears something in his restless sleep. Voices, drifting in through the haze of pain and sickness. One voice in particular cuts through his half conscious state.
“You’re right,” Peter says, his voice calm and steady. And older, Tony thinks. He sounds older somehow. “I can’t save my world. But I can avenge it.”
He stirs, shifting to look to his right, just in time for his vision to blur into strange blue-black swirls twist and shift in front of him. They fade with a suddenness that seems too real to be febrile delusion, and that nagging thought drags him further out of his half feverish sleep, forcing him to sit up. The movement is slow, painful, and not at all worth it; when he finally manages to pull himself up into a sitting position (done at great pain to the infected stab wound in his side), he finds absolutely nothing in the room with him. Just a strange puff of air that smells vaguely like gasoline and rotting lavender. The smell is strong enough to wake him up fully, kicking his brain into full gear, and he squints around the room.
The fever. Must be the fever.
The door to his room slides open with a hiss, Nebula standing on the other side of it with a weapon in hand. She pauses there, taking in all four corners of the room before holstering her gun and stepping inside with an expression that’s half annoyed, half puzzled.
“The ship reported an air leak in this room,” she says by way of explanation.
“No leaks here,” Tony says, running a hand down his face. It comes away slick with sweat and he makes a vague noise of disgust before wiping it across the nearest blanket. “Unless you decide to count me.”
She eyes the room warily, as if she doesn’t believe his words. Which makes sense; she hasn’t developed the ability to trust someone until recently. Thanos saw to that.
“I haven’t had a chance to fix all of the systems in the ship yet. It might be giving you a false reading, Blue,” Tony says.
Her shoulders lose a tiny bit of tension at the nickname, and she shifts her gaze from his room to him. She frowns. “You’re ill. Again.”
“It’s a phase. I’ll get over it,” he mutters. At her sharper glance, he raises a placating hand. “I took some of the medicine Carol brought us. It just takes awhile to kick in.”
“We are rapidly running out of medicine for your wound. We should fly to your planet immediately.”
Tony fights back a sigh. She isn’t wrong, but he isn’t eager to make that trip for a lot of reasons. He knows Pepper and most of the Avengers are still alive, thanks to Carol, but he isn’t sure if May Parker is still among the living. Fact of the matter is that isn’t ready to face her. The bare thought that she might have survived is enough to make him feel sick to his core with guilt and shame. Facing her directly would destroy him utterly.
But he can’t run away forever. He’s already spent the better part of nine months in space, first to recover from his wounds (an ongoing project, clearly) and then to try and figure out what happened to Carol. He has to face the music eventually, and it’s rapidly coming close to that point.
“Okay, yes, agreed, but only after we figure out what happened to Carol,” Tony says. “We came all this way. We might as well figure out what the hell happened to her. I don’t want to have to explain to Cap how I lost the newest Avenger on top of everything else.”
Nebula eyes him for a moment, clearly debating on whether she should push the issue. She may be frightening and uncanny and probably knows ten different ways to kill him with one hand--but he’s stubborn as hell and can very, very annoying about it.
“One week,” she says. “And then we use all of the fuel to return to Earth. At speed.”
“Thanks, Blue.”
Her expression softens by the faintest margin, and she nods, leaving his room and shutting the door behind her. Tony lays back down, rubbing his eyes.
The faint smell of gasoline and rotting lavender lingers.
* * *
A week later, he’s recovered enough from his fever and exhaustion to pull himself out of his bunk, clean up, and put on his suit. He doesn’t have FRIDAY here, but the suit is smart enough to track his biometrics and alert him when it’s time to take another dose of antibiotics or painkillers. He’s still moving slowly, and he sits in the copilot seat heavily. Nebula doesn’t look up from her piloting, too busy guiding them between massive pieces of stone and metal to pay attention to his arrival.
He hasn’t got the skill for spaceflight down yet; he’s too used to fighting against Earth’s gravity. Even the ship he, Strange, and Peter stole to fly to Titan operated on autopilot more than their combined skills, and that hadn’t exactly ended well. On Earth, he can compensate for gravity and air pressure easily, often on the fly with his suit if it needs to adjust quickly. In space, he has to worry about two much more deadly forces: inertia and velocity. There’s no one specific gravity well you have to worry about in space, and you move more or less frictionlessly. Once you get moving, you move. Between his fever and lack of astrogation skills, Nebula has rightfully declared him useless and delegated him to, more or less, space radar: watching for dangers that she hasn’t seen. It’s such a do-nothing job, but he’s grateful for it. He doesn’t handle doing nothing very well, and even a useless job that’s mostly meant to make him feel better is preferable to sitting somewhere else in the ship alone.
He lets his mind wander, staring at the debris field in front of them as Nebula adeptly flies them around each hazard, piecing together fragments of the past several months. What he remembers is Carol Danvers appearing outside the ship, shining like the sun, an entire cargo container full of food, medicine, and fuel hovering beside her in space, also wreathed in gold. He vaguely remembers talking to her, discussing how to get back to Earth, that she'd wear a tracer for them to use as a guide if they drifted off course.
Then something happened.
She told them to stay here, and that she was going to check something out--a distant disturbance, something she could sense that their instruments couldn't--before flying off in a flash of gold.
And she disappeared.
Now Tony and Nebula are going to find her, after months of waiting and rationing out their supplies for an indeterminate amount of time.
Which is why, of course, the wound in his side decided to become infected halfway through their search. Not a shocking development--gut wounds are almost always prone to infection and he’s not exactly in a top tier hospital--but a poorly timed one. Nebula gave up the chase after Captain Marvel in favor of treating his wound. They’ve been stuck in this strange limbo for so long that he's close to losing his mind.
Not that he’s had a very solid grip on it to begin with. He mulls over the past few months, dreading the nightmares that will chase after him for the rest of his life and the potential horror waiting for him back on Earth, the radar screen growing fuzzier by the second--
“We’ve found something,” a voice says.
It’s cold, vaguely familiar in some way--
“Stark,” the voice says again, this time annoyed. “Did you fall unconscious?”
“No,” Tony says blearily, stirring awake in the copilot’s seat. “No, I am totally--definitely--awake.”
The look Nebula gives him would make most people freeze in fear. Tony, however, has gotten used to her quirks in their months of travel together and therefore knows to ignore her annoyed look. It’s her angry look he can’t afford to ignore, though those have been blessedly rare and often due to his own bullheaded assholery.
He still sits up straight. Might as well not push his luck.
“I might’ve dozed off,” he admits before dismissing the idea with a casual wave of his hand. “You had everything under control. What did you find?”
“My father’s prisons,” Nebula says, bringing up a viewscreen in front of them to show a map of an unfamiliar solar system. “This is supposed to be a staging area for his flagship. It isn’t here anymore. Neither are the prisons he built. Each of them were the size of a planet. They appear to have been destroyed entirely.”
Tony stares at the screen. Utterly massive pieces of debris drift in space, pulled along on gravitational waves. Some pieces are merely the size of a skyscraper, others the size of continents. If Carol got into a fight here, then she took on ships the size of planets and, apparently, came out on top.
“Any sign of Carol?” Tony asks, his interest piqued.
“No.”
Not a surprise; given the amount of debris and just how big everything is in space, it’s a miracle they even found a trace of her leading to this place. Space is mostly just that: empty space. The amount of distance between Earth and the moon is hard to conceptualize for most people, let alone some far off solar system Tony’s never heard of before.
“I doubt this ship can track anything with all of this free floating metal around,” Tony muses. “Let’s switch the sensors to heat instead. That should make her stand out if we manage to look in the right direction.”
Nebula flips a few switches, adjusts the screen, switching the view from an image of the metal debris, to one filled with various shades of blue. She idly shifts the ship to and fro, moving among the floating hulks, making the ship sweep over the area in wide arcs. The longer they look, the more Tony’s hope dies away. Whatever happened here took place awhile ago. It’s just dust and silence in this system--
“Stop,” Tony says, interrupting his own thoughts. He saw something. A flash, barely a glint of light, but-- “Go back to that far angle you started from, there was something there.”
Nebula stops and does as he says, moving slower this time. He doesn’t see anything at first, just cold darkness. Eventually, a piece of debris drifts out of the way of their scans and a flash of heat sparks off against the cool blue background on the screen. He tenses, pointing at it.
“There,” he says. He squints at the ship readout--it’s in a language he doesn’t entirely understand, but his suit works as a basic translator. “Twenty kilometers? That’s practically on top of us. How did we miss this the first time?”
“The debris has been caught in the orbit of its own destruction,” Nebula says plainly. “We are traveling through planets’ worth of free floating metal. Being able to see through it at all is an anomaly.”
Well, Tony can’t argue with her there.
They drift through the debris, closing the distance between themselves and the spark of heat until they come across a relatively intact portion of one of the prison installations that used to orbit the sun of this system. This portion is just big enough for them to land the ship on what used to be a massive hallway. It takes them no time at all to move from their ship to the interior of the drifting hulk once they manage the relatively complicated process of landing a ship on top of it.
They step into a room that, shockingly, still has air and power. The lights are dim, the air is struggling, and he doubts that the power source that’s keeping everything going inside the room will last more than another day at most, but it is powered. He opts to keep his suit helmet on and sealed regardless; he’s weak enough from infection as it is, he doesn’t need to accidentally grab some other alien infection on top of that. He flicks his wrist, shifting the palm of his left hand into a floodlight before raising it to light up the room.
Nebula brushes past him in her own suit, moving towards a bank of black steel controls near the entrance. After a few seconds, there’s a distant clunk sound and a few more lights come online, enough increase the dim light from inadequate to something more like an eerily lit horror movie. One out of every six lights actually turns on, leaving pools of harsh white light in the nearly silent room.
The room is grey and black steel, laid out almost like a hospital room. Tools and machines whose uses he can only guess at line the walls, most of them in shambles or scattered across the floor. Two coffin shaped pods rest in the center of the room. One marked with an S inside of a diamond, and another with a lightning bolt inside a circle. Symbols, obviously, though he can’t guess at what they mean, and he’s curious as to why one of the alphabets belonging to humanity is being used here. The other symbol makes a bit more sense, since lightning is--probably--a universal experience. The S though? Weird.
“It appears Captain Marvel destroyed this place,” Nebula says, bringing him out of his wandering thoughts. She’s scrolling through something on a small screen.
After a moment, a holoscreen projects out of the computer banks, broadcasting an image of Carol tearing through the planet sized installation with her bare hands, glowing like the sun. Most of Thanos’ soldiers don’t stand a chance against her.
It’s odd, though. He doesn’t remember her having bright blue eyes like that when they first met. Of course, he also wasn’t trying to kill her.
“Well, that’s one mystery solved,” Tony says as the image disappears. “She went off on a little vacation in the middle of rescuing us.”
“There were several fleets stationed here. She likely saved us from being captured by intervening,” Nebula points out. “But she has left the system.”
“Probably hunting down the ones smart enough to get the hell away from her at the start of the fight,” Tony muses, pacing around the room. He stops near the pods in the certain of the room.
The S pod is sealed tight and reinforced several times over. It’s practically a vault compared to the other one. Tony looks it over carefully, running a hand over the sleek black steel. It’s so thick and heavy that he’d need a lot of time to cut through it to get to whoever’s inside the thing. Assuming they’re alive and worth the effort.
Warnings are scrawled across the metal of the other pod, strange symbols etched above two others. One is a stone--an infinity stone if Tony had to guess but he sure as hell can’t identify the bastards by sight alone, so he has no idea which one it is--and a very human symbol: a golden bolt of lightning within a red circle. It’s larger than the other symbols, and he wonders if a weapon is inside. Possibly something belonging to Thor. He taps it thoughtfully, and then drums his fingers along the surface.
He looks over to the S pod and raps a knuckle against that one, too. It sounds solid, but the echo is off somehow, as if there isn’t any liquid at all. Red light lines the edges of the pod, a dim, sinister glow that leaks from the edges of the pod, casting a sullen pool on the steel floor. The light matches the quality of a red sun, and he has the ridiculous thought that the bolted shut pod is something like a tanning bed.
“Are these weapons?” he asks Nebula.
She tilts her head, frowning at the pods for a moment before moving to stand beside him at the pod marked with the lightning bolt. She taps three keys in quick succession. The metallic cover of the pod with the lightning bolt etched into it slides back, revealing a glass tube full of glittering green liquid. And a body suspended inside of it, floating listlessly in what looks to be thick oil.
No, not a body, Tony realizes. A man. The guy is a bit on the younger side, with a marathoner's build, wearing a red suit and mask. He’s suspended in the green liquid and almost seems to vibrate in place, eyes open, staring blankly. His expression is one of frustration and terror. Something is off, though.
After a moment, it comes to Tony. The guy isn’t floating--he's utterly still, as if being restrained by some force. The color of the liquid is bright and vaguely sick looking. The green surrounding the man himself is deeper, slightly off, and could match the color of the Time stone.
“Is he alive?” he asks, disturbed to find someone like this.
Nebula scans the readout on the pod. “Yes. He’s in stasis. I believe the liquid is sustaining him.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know, but it is gradually becoming less effective,” Nebula replies. She pauses and adds, “Our food supplies cannot handle an added strain if we choose to free him. One of us will starve.”
She’s not wrong, and that puts a damper on his mood. The guy is barely alive inside that fishbowl. Moving the pod onto the Benatar is going to be tricky business, but the other choice is leaving him to die in this place or letting him starve. And Tony just can’t bring himself to leave the guy behind.
Besides, it’s not like he’ll be a drain on their supplies inside that pod thing. Speaking of which--
“Kind of a moot point, Blue,” Tony says, squinting down at the pod. “This is all one solid piece. We couldn’t open even if we wanted to. Look.”
The pod is absolutely solid, top to bottom, steel and glass melded into one solid piece, each thick enough to withstand the strongest blast from his repulsor. Not that his suit is able to produce anything close to that strength these days. It’ll take days or weeks of work to chip away at the glass prison. Days and weeks they don’t have.
“Blue, we’ve gotta get him onto the ship,” Tony says, idly tapping a knuckle against the thick glass. “We can’t leave him here.”
She watches him for a moment before nodding and silently walking towards the consoles on the other side of the room. At least she doesn’t seem upset by the idea of bringing along someone else. Maybe she knows all too well what it’s like to be one of Thanos’ prisoners.
You’re a mystery to solve another time, Tony thinks.
“There might be another person in this one. The information is distorted. Half of it is human, the other is...something else,” Nebula says, standing at the pod rimmed in red light. “They appear alive, but suspended. Comatose.”
He wonders what exactly could cause Thanos to trap people inside something so strong, and if it would be dangerous to bring them along at all. Not every enemy of Thanos is guaranteed to be a friend, after all.
He rubs his eyes, discarding the thought as soon as it appears. His mind is already made up, really. The alternative would be too cruel. If he can’t figure out how to get these guys out of the pods, he can least keep them somewhere safe. Safer, at least.
“Okay,” Tony says. “We get them both on the ship and take them home. We’ll figure out what to do once we get there.”
“There is a leak in this pod,” Nebula says, indicating the one with the man in the red suit. “We’ll be forced to drain the liquid from it before we move it.”
“Works for me. That stuff looks nasty,” Tony says, turning away from the floating man’s pod and moving Nebula’s side. “We don’t need it springing a leak in our ship. Will the extra weight make a difference on the ride home? Slow us down?”
“It won’t,” Nebula replies. “Plot our course for us while I arrange to put these two on board.”
Tony gives her a jaunty salute as the liquid begins to drain away from the body of the man in the red suit. Tony brings up a small holoscreen on his suit, marking out their course back home and calculating how much food they’ll need while musing how much time it’ll take. A countdown to his own personal reckoning.
Tony is so absorbed in his work that he does not notice the eyes of the man move slightly from within the pod.
To be continued once the next fic is completed.