The coffee shop was mid-morning quiet — a few laptops, a few cups going cold, the espresso machine doing its thing in the background.
Coulson was at the window table when Skye came through the door. She spotted him immediately, came over, and dropped into the chair across from him with the energy of someone who has been thinking about this conversation the whole way here.
The waiter appeared. She ordered a cappuccino without looking at the menu.
"The secretary position," she said. "You mentioned it on the phone."
Coulson smiled. "I said there may be a need. Nothing's been decided. But there's a window, and you'd have a real shot at it."
Skye's expression did the thing it did when she was trying not to look as interested as she was. She didn't entirely succeed. "What's the path?"
"First step is joining S.H.I.E.L.D. I have an open slot on my team — external recruitment, not a transfer." He kept his voice easy. "You'd work cases. Build a record. Once you've demonstrated what you can do, I can put your name forward."
Skye pointed at him. "You're recruiting me for your own team and using the secretary thing as bait."
"I'm giving you an honest path to proximity," Coulson said, without changing his expression. "The vetting process inside S.H.I.E.L.D. right now is significant — we just came through a major internal security operation and every external hire gets real scrutiny. Having a team lead vouching for you matters." He leaned forward slightly. "And to work directly with Director Smith in any capacity, you'd need to actually understand how the organization functions. You can't walk in without that foundation."
Skye thought about it for about four seconds. Then she put her hand out.
Coulson shook it.
"Welcome aboard. We'll cover the procedural side while we work — we've got a full mission queue and no time to run an orientation program separately." He set money on the table, stood, and picked up his jacket.
Skye took one pull of her cappuccino before following him out.
On the sidewalk, Gordon was leaning against the building wall with the patient stillness of someone who teleports for a living and has made peace with waiting.
Skye went to him. "Tell my mother I'm going with Coulson. I'm fine, I'll be in touch."
Gordon nodded. His expression said he'd expected something like this.
Coulson's car was at the curb — the red 1962 Corvette that several SHIELD agents had quietly looked up the specs on and said nothing about. Skye got in.
She was about to ask something when the sky changed.
Not dramatically — no explosion, no sound initially. Just a moving shape high above the city, trailing a thin line of smoke from its rear section, the profile entirely wrong for anything with FAA certification. It descended at a controlled-but-not-entirely-controlled angle toward the suburbs north of the city.
Skye watched it. "What is that?"
Coulson was already watching it too, his hands on the wheel but his eyes on the sky. "Not local technology," he said. The line of his jaw tightened slightly. "Which means our afternoon just reorganized itself."
He put on his sunglasses, and Lola lifted off the ground.
Aboard the Milano, the reorganization of their afternoon had been ongoing for the past several jump nodes.
Rocket had flagged the walnut-shaped ship the third time it appeared behind them. By the fifth jump node, Gamora had her hand on a weapon housing and wasn't letting go.
"He's tracked us through five consecutive jumps," she said. "This isn't coincidence and it isn't random. Whoever he is, we're the target."
"Could be the Dragon Balls," Peter said from the pilot's seat. "The bounty's public. Anybody with a Cosmic Bank account saw it."
"Could be us specifically," Rocket said.
"Same response either way." Peter reached for the red button on the console. "We lose him in transit."
He hit it.
The Milano jumped. Then jumped again. Then twice more in quick succession, the pressure of each transit stacking against the previous one, the hull groaning in ways that the engineers who'd built it probably hadn't specifically designed for.
When they came out of the last jump, Earth filled the viewport.
Rocket straightened in his seat and let out a slow breath. Then he looked at the sensor display, and his ears went flat.
The walnut ship was behind them again.
"How," Rocket said, quietly, "is that physically possible."
Peter looked at the ship on the display. Then at Earth. Then back at the ship.
"My bloodline isn't simple," he said, mostly to himself. "The Nova Corps mentioned that."
Drax, who had been sitting with his arms crossed in the manner of someone waiting for something he can hit, looked at Peter with genuine assessment. "You seem the same as before."
Groot stretched his arms out and made a sound of encouragement.
"His skin withstood a direct charge-gun impact on Xandar," Gamora said. "That's not a normal baseline."
The ship behind them fired.
The shot caught the Milano's port engine housing and the entire vessel lurched hard to starboard. Earth's gravity, which had been a background consideration up until that moment, immediately became a primary concern.
"Engines!" Rocket was already moving. "Peter — we're in the gravity well—"
"I know we're in the gravity well—"
They fought it for ninety seconds. The Milano's remaining engine could sustain altitude or it could maneuver; it could not do both. Earth's atmosphere came up to meet them faster than either of them wanted.
"Brace!"
In orbit, Ego watched the Milano drop into the atmosphere and smiled to himself.
"I've brought you home," he said, to no one in particular. "You're welcome."
He brought his ship out of visible range and set course for Ohio. The boy would need a day to assess his situation and contact locals. That was fine. Ego had already located the Dairy Queen where he'd once spent an afternoon with a woman who had mattered, briefly, in the way that mortals sometimes did.
His ship slipped into stealth and entered the atmosphere without a ripple.
In the Triskelion's Insight Project Emergency Intelligence Center, the Helicarrier sensor network flagged the atmospheric intrusion approximately four seconds after it crossed the detection threshold.
Hand looked at the display and keyed her comm for Smith.
Smith arrived, looked at the screen, and recognized the Milano's silhouette immediately. The heat signature on the tail section confirmed engine damage.
He stood there for a moment and ran the math on the timeline. The Guardians of the Galaxy should have been substantially occupied elsewhere at this point in the sequence of events — Xandar, the Orb, the Collector, the confrontation with Ronan. The Dragon Ball bounty, filed through the Cosmic Bank by Ronan before his death, appeared to have functioned as a very effective attractor.
"Landing trajectory?"
"Suburban New York. Eastern perimeter of the metro area." Hand marked the projected zone on the map. "Wooded terrain. Low population density at the target coordinates."
"Send contact agents. Their job is to make first contact and assess intent. No escalation protocol unless they initiate." He looked at the screen. "Coulson's in the area?"
"He self-assigned en route, sir. His team will arrive first."
Smith watched the smoke trail on the display for another second. "Tell him to report in directly. Any change in situation, I want to know immediately."
He left the Intelligence Center at a walk.
He thought briefly about going himself and dismissed it without much deliberation. He ran the Inspectorate, S.H.I.E.L.D., the Fraternity, and held board positions in three corporations. Going personally to stand in a forest and explain Earth to Peter Quill was a task that Coulson was entirely capable of handling. That was, in fact, the reason Coulson existed.
Howard Stark was due at the Triskelion within the hour to discuss the super-soldier serum expansion program. That conversation was worth Smith's time. The Guardians could wait until Coulson had a report.
He did make a small mental note about Groot, which he then set aside.
The Milano came to rest in a stand of oak and maple trees north of the city, having taken out approximately forty meters of forest on the way in. The landing was inelegant. The trees would not recover. The ship itself had fared better — Rocket had done something with the emergency braking system in the last three seconds that he refused to explain afterward because it made him look like he'd been improvising, which he had been.
Peter stepped out through the hatch and looked at the trees.
"This is not how I planned to arrive."
Rocket came out after him, carrying Groot in both arms. Groot appeared unbothered. "The ship that kept following us did this on purpose," Rocket said. "It wasn't random mechanical failure — someone shot us into your planet deliberately."
"I know."
"So whoever that was, they wanted us here specifically."
"I know."
"That's worrying."
"I know." Peter looked around at the trees, the overcast sky, the distant sound of what might have been a highway. "This is New York. Somewhere. Big city, lots of people, very complicated." He looked at the group. "I'm going to go find someone to ask. You all wait here."
Drax had emerged and was scanning the tree line with the focused attention of someone who has learned that new environments usually contain something that needs hitting. Finding nothing immediately threatening, he relaxed to about seventy percent alert.
Gamora stepped out last and looked at the sky.
Rocket had already pulled his network interception device from his pack and was connecting it to a relay he'd built from components during the jump sequence. "New York metro area," he said, already pulling data. "Population eight million plus. High-density urban infrastructure." He scrolled through the feed. "Multiple news alerts in the last six minutes. Something about an unidentified aircraft."
"That's us," Peter said.
"Obviously."
"How long before someone shows up?"
Rocket looked at the signal density on his display. "You have maybe ten minutes before whatever passes for military response gets organized and starts moving." He looked up at Peter. "Go find your local contact or don't. Either way, we're already on their radar."
Gamora's head came up. Her eyes — which had a range that left standard human vision well behind — moved to a point in the sky at roughly two o'clock, high and holding position.
"We've already been found," she said.
She nodded toward the sky.
Coulson's Corvette was hovering at altitude, sunlight catching its red finish, holding station at a distance that said observing rather than approaching. Inside, a passenger in the right seat had something pressed to her eye.
"Three o'clock, at the crash site," Coulson said. "Use the detector first, then the binoculars."
Skye had the combat detector mounted and was already scanning. She moved it across the group by the ship and started reading off numbers.
"Five life signs total." A pause. "One of them looks like a plant. One looks like — a raccoon?"
"Combat readings."
"Right. Plant: eight points. Raccoon: thirteen points." She tracked across. "Humanoid one: eighty points. Humanoid two—" A pause. "A hundred and fifty." Another pause, longer this time. "Humanoid three, he's—"
The combat detector made a sound like a small electrical component deciding it had had enough, and detonated against her face.
Skye pulled it off and looked at the smoking device in her hand.
Coulson was quiet for a moment. "Above five hundred?"
"It just — blew up."
"Above five hundred," Coulson said, with the tone of a man filing a piece of information in a cabinet labeled problems for later. "All right."
Skye looked at the wreckage of the detector. "Which one was it?"
Coulson looked at the figures below through his own binoculars. The one in the red jacket, standing slightly apart from the others. Relaxed posture. Looking around at the trees like a tourist.
"The one who look like he grew up here," he said.
Below, Gamora's eyes found the car. Her hand went to Drax's arm.
"We've been spotted."