Lorelei considered the name for a moment with the careful attention of someone running a thorough internal search.
"Guardians of the Galaxy," she repeated. "No. Nothing in Asgard's intelligence archive." She tilted her head slightly. "A newly formed group, most likely. Something that's made a name for itself in only a small region, or hasn't made one at all yet." A pause. "Is someone using the name to run a confidence scheme on Earth?"
Coulson filed that possibility and discarded it — the detector reading above five hundred points was not the profile of a confidence scheme. "Thank you for checking. We'll follow up through other channels."
He led Skye out.
On the embassy steps, Skye looked at him. "So they're nobody."
"They're a group with no institutional backing and no established reputation," Coulson said. "That's different from nobody. The combat readings don't go away just because Asgard hasn't filed a report on them." He started toward Lola. "It does mean there's no major cosmic power running them, which is useful to know."
Skye fell into step beside him. "I thought the Guardians of the Galaxy would at least be famous somewhere."
"They may be, eventually." He opened the car. "Your application came through, by the way. Smith approved it this morning."
Skye stopped walking.
"Already?"
"Our team operates under his direct authority. Recruitment goes through him." Coulson looked at her over Lola's roof. "Welcome to SHIELD, officially."
Skye looked at the sky for a moment, doing something that was not quite keeping her composure.
"Okay," she said. "Okay. Yes. Good." She got in the car.
Coulson got in on his side. He heard her exhale something that might have been a quiet cheer behind her closed teeth, and said nothing about it.
The transport put down on a county airfield outside Star-Lord's hometown — a flat stretch of rural Missouri that looked as if the twentieth century had happened at a slight distance from it and the twenty-first hadn't arrived yet.
Before the boarding stairs were fully down, Fitz came through with a phone and a folded envelope of cash. "Standard burner," he told Star-Lord. "No tracking hardware — I checked before I pulled it out of inventory. Call us when you're done and we'll come back."
Star-Lord took both, nodded, and led the group out into the Missouri afternoon.
The transport lifted off and climbed south. Star-Lord watched it go, then tossed the phone to Rocket.
"Hardware scan. Full sweep."
Rocket caught it one-handed without looking, ran his fingers across the casing in a pattern that bore no resemblance to anything a standard diagnostic would follow, and handed it back. "No passive hardware. Tracking and audio access through signal is technically possible, but that's true of any cellular device — turn it off and the exposure goes to zero." He paused. "Do you want to know what's on their network, or do you want to stand in a field?"
Star-Lord turned the phone off and put it in his jacket. "Talk while we walk. We need to find flowers first."
"Flowers," Rocket repeated.
"For my mother's grave." He was already moving. "Walk."
They found a gas station that had a rack of cellophane-wrapped bouquets by the register. Star-Lord paid with some of the cash Fitz had given him and took the least sad-looking one.
They walked toward the cemetery.
Rocket talked.
"This planet is not what you described," he said. He had the network hijacker out, scrolling. "You said cars on the ground, no interstellar presence, limited military capability."
"I said that twenty-six years ago—"
"The actual situation: several organized teams of enhanced fighters operating under something called the superhero model. Largest group is the Avengers. Below that, the Paragons, the Afterlife group, various independents." He pulled up a video feed and projected it into the air beside them — a compilation of combat footage from the Kree invasion. Kree soldiers engaging organized superhuman teams on multiple fronts. The footage was choppy, drone-sourced and street-camera, but the picture was clear.
Gamora watched it with her arms folded. "The Earth has been busy."
"The remarkable part," Rocket said, and pulled up another clip, "is this man."
A projection of Smith Doyle. The footage was from the Kree fleet engagement — one figure moving through Accusers at speeds that shouldn't have been possible, ki output visible as a golden field, the Dark Aster coming apart. Rocket let it run.
Drax watched the Dark Aster footage with his jaw set. "He destroyed Ronan's ship."
Drax was quiet for a moment. Then: "He avenged the deaths of my family before I could reach Ronan. I owe him a debt."
Star-Lord was watching the footage with an expression that was trying to be strategic and not entirely succeeding. "If he's that capable, we don't go near him directly." He looked at the projection. "Smart approach only. Find the Dragon Balls, don't start a confrontation."
Rocket nodded. "That's what I'd suggest. Especially since the planet also survived a Chitauri invasion — and that was Thanos's army."
Gamora's head came up slightly.
"First the Chitauri," Rocket said, still scrolling. "Then Ronan. Your father has been probing this planet twice in a few years without committing himself. That's unusual for him."
"He wants something here," Gamora said. "Something he hasn't been able to take by force."
"The Dragon Balls." Rocket stopped scrolling. "Here's the interesting part. I couldn't find what they actually do — SHIELD keeps that classification tight. But there's something that happened here that's not tight at all, because it happened to millions of people in the middle of a city." He looked at the group. "During the Chitauri invasion, all the people who died were resurrected. All of them. Not revived — resurrected. After the fact."
Nobody said anything.
"Mass resurrection," Rocket said. "I know how that sounds. I couldn't believe it either. But it's in every civilian record I can access — hospital intake logs, police reports, personal accounts. Thousands of sources independently describing the same event."
"That's not possible," Gamora said.
"It happened," Rocket said. "I'm just telling you what the data shows."
They had reached the cemetery. Star-Lord was already moving through the rows, reading names, and then he stopped.
Meredith Quill.
The stone was simple — name, dates, a small engraved bird underneath. In front of it, a bouquet of flowers that hadn't been there long. Fresh. Bright-colored. Someone had been here recently.
Star-Lord crouched and set his own bouquet beside it. He touched the edge of the stone with two fingers.
"Hey, Mom," he said quietly. He didn't say anything else for a moment.
The group stood back without being told to. Even Rocket stopped talking.
After a while, Star-Lord sat down on the grass.
"So," he said. "Mass resurrection."
"I think it's connected to the Dragon Balls," Rocket said. "Ronan offered to destroy the Nova Empire capital in exchange for them. That's not a rational trade for any bounty that just involves money. But if these things can bring back the dead—" He spread his hands. "Then Ronan offering to destroy Xandar makes sense. He wanted his people back. The Kree soldiers who died fighting. He wanted to undo it."
Gamora looked at the stone for a moment. Then at Drax. Then at the flowers Star-Lord had placed.
The same thought was running through all three of them and nobody said it out loud.
"We need to find the Dragon Balls before anyone else arrives," Gamora said finally. "If word of this capability reaches the wider universe in precise terms then this planet will not survive what comes next."
"I'd like more information before we try anything," Star-Lord said. "And I think going back to SHIELD for the ship repairs is our best shot at getting it." He picked up the Coulson business card from his jacket and looked at it. "Their director knows what the Dragon Balls do. I'd put money on it."
Rocket tucked the network hijacker back in his bag. "Agreed. We go back, we fix the ship, we make ourselves useful enough that they want to keep talking to us."
Star-Lord stood up and brushed the grass off his jacket. He looked at the stone one more time.
"Okay," he said. "Let's go find my grandfather."
They walked for forty minutes through quiet streets to an address Fitz had included in Star-Lord's information packet.
The house was a small single-story with a porch — the kind of house that hadn't changed much since it was built and didn't intend to. Star-Lord knocked.
The door opened.
The man who answered was in his seventies, white-haired, with the alert eyes of someone who has not slowed down as much as his age suggested he should have. He looked at Star-Lord, then at Gamora — who had pulled on a jacket that covered most of her green arms but left the face unaddressed — then at Drax, then at Rocket, who was holding Groot's pot.
"Halloween isn't for weeks," he said. "I'm not buying anything."
Star-Lord smiled, a little awkwardly. "Grandpa. It's Peter. Peter Quill."
Something moved through Jason's face — not surprise exactly, more like confirmation of something he'd been wondering about. He looked at Peter steadily for a moment, reading him, and Peter felt it in a way he couldn't quite explain — something in that look that was checking for something specific.
"I can see your mother in your eyes," Jason said. He stepped back from the door. "Bring your friends in. Pets too."
Rocket, from the level of approximately Jason's knee, pointed upward. "Not a pet."
Jason looked down at him. "You want a Coke or not?"
Rocket considered this. "Yes."
"Then come inside."
He turned and walked back into the house. Star-Lord held the door. Rocket went in. Groot went in still in his pot. Drax had to turn sideways for the frame.
" Grandpa," Star-Lord said, following, "Rocket is my crew. Not my pet."
Jason handed Rocket a Coke from the refrigerator without ceremony and said, "Mmm," in the way of a man who has heard the distinction and filed it under pending.
Rocket popped the can, took a pull, and gave Jason a look of pure assessment. The old man had opened the door on a green-skinned woman, a heavily tattooed shirtless giant, a talking raccoon holding a potted tree, and a man who'd been missing for twenty-six years, and had treated it as a mild inconvenience. That was either composure or something else.
Rocket couldn't decide which, and that bothered him.
In space, the conversation on Yondu's ship had been building for the better part of an hour.
Three crew members had brought it up in sequence, each one more direct than the last: Star-Lord had reached Earth, the Dragon Ball bounty was still active, several other parties were already moving toward the system to assess the situation, and the Ravagers' window for claiming any position in this operation was narrowing.
Yondu listened to all of it with the unhurried patience of someone who had already decided.
"Since everyone's so eager," he said, "we set course for Earth." He looked around the bridge. "Try to keep up."
The ship turned onto its new heading.
Yondu leaned back in his chair and thought about seven hundred million Star Coins and the kid he'd raised who was currently standing in Missouri talking to an old man, completely unaware that the universe was about to pay him a visit.
He smiled.