THE room was silent after Fury walked away from Loki's cell. Lyra sat near Steve as he watched the screen with interest. "He really grows on you, doesn't he?" Bruce said referring to Fury when the silence became too much.
Steve tapped his fingers against his leg. "Loki's gonna drag this out. So, Thor, what's his play?"
Thor was standing near the end of the table, already having apologized for fighting Lyra since he was not aware who was inside the suit. He was very old-fashioned, so as he spoke, he called her Lady Lyra. "He has an army called the Chitauri. They're not of Asgard or any world known. He means to lead them against your people. They will win him the earth. In return, I suspect, for the Tesseract."
"An army? From outer space?" Lyra asked incredulously.
Bruce nodded. "So he's building another portal. That's what he needs Erik Selvig for."
Thor perked up at the name. "Selvig?"
"He's an astrophysicist."
"He's a friend," Thor amended.
Natasha sighed. "Loki has him under some kind of spell, along with one of ours," she said as she eyed Lyra as the woman looked down in sadness.
"I wanna know why Loki let us take him. He's not leading an army from here," Steve said.
"I don't think we should be focusing on Loki. That guy's brain is a bag full of cats, you could smell crazy on him," Bruce said with a laugh.
"Have care how you speak. Loki is beyond reason, but he is of Asgard, and he's my brother."
"He killed eighty people in two days."
"He's adopted."
Lyra smirked as Bruce eyed him for a moment. "I think it's about the mechanics. Iridium, what did they need the Iridium for?"
Tony walked in with Coulson. He answered Bruce, "It's a stabilizing agent." He looked at Coulson as if he was continuing a conversation, "I'll fly you to Portland. Keep the love alive." He turned back to Bruce. "Means the portal won't collapse on itself like it did at S.H.I.E.L.D." He patted Thor's shoulder as he passed. "No hard feelings, Point Break. You've got a mean swing." He went back to Bruce. "Also, it means the portal can open as wide, and stay open as long, as Loki wants." He then looked around at the agents and crewmembers around him. "Uh, raise the mid-mast, ship the topsails. That man is playing GALAGA! Thought we wouldn't notice. But we did."
He covered his eye as he looked at the computers. "How does Fury do this?"
Agent Hill sighed. "He turns."
Tony turned, hand caressing the table as he placed something underneath it with a wink to Lyra. "Well, that sounds exhausting. The rest of the raw materials, Agent Barton can get his hands on pretty easily. Only major component he still needs is a power source. A high energy density, something to kick start the cube."
"When did you become an expert in thermonuclear astrophysics?" Hill asked.
"Last night. The packet, Selvig's notes, the Extraction Theory papers. Had a good offer waiting if I finished it... Am I the only one who did the reading?"
Steve ignored his comment. "Does Loki need any particular kind of power source?"
Lyra shook her head as she stood. "He's got to heat the cube to a hundred and twenty million Kelvin just to break through the Coulomb barrier."
Tony grinned at her. "Unless Selvig has figured out how to stabilize the quantum tunneling effect."
Bruce nodded. "Well, if he could do that he could achieve Heavy Ion Fusion at any reactor on the planet."
Tony pointed at Bruce. "Finally, someone who speaks English."
"Is that what just happened?" Steve asked, eyeing Lyra as she smiled softly at Tony.
Tony and Bruce shook hands, and Lyra could tell Tony had made a new friend. "It's good to meet you, Dr. Banner. Your work on anti-electron collisions is unparalleled. And I'm a huge fan of the way you lose control and turn into an enormous green rage monster."
Bruce looked down with a slight flush. "Thanks."
Fury walked in with a tablet in hand. "Dr. Banner is only here to track the cube. I was hoping you and Lyra might join him."
"Let's start with that stick of his. It may be magical, but it works an awful lot like a Hydra weapon," Steve said.
"I don't know about that, but it is powered by the cube. And I'd like to know how Loki used it to turn two of the sharpest men I know into his personal flying monkeys," Fury replied.
Thor eyed him curiously. "Monkeys? I do not understand."
Steve looked proud as he shouted, "I do! I understood that reference."
Tony rolled his eyes before glancing at Bruce. "Shall we play, doctor?"
"This way," Bruce agreed.
Tony grabbed Lyra's waist. "You're coming, too." She walked with him, grabbing his hand from lowering, knowing everyone's eyes were on them. "Three geniuses in one room—oh, the horror!"
Later that night, Bruce typed something on the computer as they inspected the scepter. "The gamma readings are definitely consistent with Selvig's reports on the Tesseract. But it's gonna take weeks to process."
"If we bypass their mainframe and direct a reroute to the Homer cluster, we can clock this around six hundred teraflops," Lyra said as she passed Tony, bumping her hips with his.
"All I packed was a toothbrush," Bruce said to her.
Tony smiled. "You know, you should come by Stark Tower sometime. Top ten floors, all R&D. You'd love it, it's candy land."
"Thanks, but the last time I was in New York I kind of broke...Harlem," Bruce admitted.
"Well, I promise a stress-free environment. No tension. No surprises," Tony said as he walked over and poked Bruce with an electrical prod.
"OW!"
"Hey!" Steve said, rushing in.
Tony eyed Bruce closely. "Nothing?"
"Tony," Lyra warned.
"Jury's out," Tony said with a sheepish grin.
"Are you nuts?" Steve yelled.
"You really have got a lid on it, haven't you? What's your secret? Mellow jazz? Bongo drums? Huge bag of weed?" Tony said with a grin.
"Is everything a joke to you?"
"Funny things are."
"Threatening the safety of everyone on this ship, including your girl, isn't funny. No offense, Doctor," Steve said with a fierce look in his eye.
Bruce tried to defend Tony. "No, it's alright. I wouldn't have come aboard if I couldn't handle pointy things."
"I can handle myself, Steve," Lyra called.
Tony grinned. "You're tiptoeing, big man. You need to strut."
"And you need to focus on the problem, Mr. Stark," Steve said seriously.
"You think I'm not? Why did Fury call us and why now? Why not before? What isn't he telling us? I can't do the equation unless I have all the variables. Lyra works for him and gets told hardly anything, and I've seen that first hand," he gestured to the pair of them.
"You think Fury's hiding something?" Steve asked.
"He's a spy. Captain, he's the spy. His secrets have secrets." Tony pointed to Bruce and Lyra, "It's bugging them too, isn't it?"
"Yes," Lyra answered immediately as she walked over to another computer.
Bruce stammered, "Uh...I just wanna finish my work here and—"
"Doctor?"
"'A warm light for all mankind,' Loki's jab at Fury about the cube," Bruce said.
"I heard it," Steve said.
Bruce pointed to Tony. "Well, I think that was meant for you. Even if Barton didn't tell Loki, the Stark Tower was all over the news."
"Stark Tower? That big ugly—" Lyra and Tony sent Steve a look "—building in New York?"
"It's powered by Stark Reactors, self-sustaining energy source. That building will run itself for what, a year?" Bruce asked.
"That's just the prototype. He's kind of the only name in clean energy right now," Lyra said with a proud smile.
Bruce nodded. "So, why didn't S.H.I.E.L.D. bring him in on the Tesseract project? I mean, what are they doing in the energy business in the first place?"
Tony shrugged. "I should probably look into that once my decryption programmer finishes breaking into all of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s secure files."
Steve's eyes widened. "I'm sorry, did you say—?"
"Jarvis has been running it since I hit the bridge. In a few hours we'll know every dirty secret S.H.I.E.L.D. has ever tried to hide," he said and offered a bag of fruit he picked up off the counter. "Blueberry?"
"Yet you're confused about why they didn't want you around?"
"An intelligence organization that fears intelligence? Historically, not possible."
"I think Loki's trying to wind us up. This is a man who means to start a war, and if we don't stay focused, he'll succeed. We have orders, we should follow them," Steve said, eyeing Lyra as she turned with her glasses almost falling off of her nose. She smiled softly.
Tony noticed his gaze, and he scowled, throwing a blueberry her way. "Following is not really my style."
Steve smiled. "And you're all about style, aren't you?"
Tony glared. "Of the people in this room, which one is; A. wearing a spangly outfit, and B. not of use?"
"Steve, tell me none of this smells a little funky to you?" Lyra tried, walking over to Tony's side, pinching his side for throwing a blueberry at her.
"Ow," he muttered.
Steve looked thoughtful for a moment before shaking his head. "Just find the cube."
After a moment, he turned to Bruce. "That's the guy my dad never shut up about? Wondering if they shouldn't have kept him on ice."
"The guy's not wrong about Loki. He does have the jump on us."
"What he's got is an ACME dynamite kit. It's gonna blow up in his face, and I'm gonna be there when it does."
"And I'll read all about it," Bruce said as he walked back to a computer.
"Uh-huh. Or you'll be suiting up like the rest of us," Lyra stated with a wiggle of her eyebrows.
"Ah, see. I don't get a suit of armor. I'm exposed, like a nerve. It's a nightmare," Bruce replied.
Tony bit his lip. "You know, I've got a cluster of shrapnel, trying every second to crawl its way into my heart." He pointed to the arc reactor. "This stops it. This little circle of light. It's part of me now, not just armor. It's a—terrible privilege."
"But you can control it."
"Because he learned how," Lyra said softly.
"It's different."
Tony moved a hologram out of the way so he could see Bruce's face.
"Hey, I've read all about your accident. That much gamma exposure should have killed you."
"So you're saying that the Hulk... the other guy... saved my life? That's nice. It's a nice sentiment. Saved it for what?" Bruce said, a bit of emotion leaking out.
Tony tapped the counter. "I guess we'll find out."
It was silent as the trio went back to work. Bruce whispered after a moment, "You might not like that."
Tony did not waste a second. "You just might."