Ego had watched from the base yard.
Not with concern — the emotion that moved through him as Smith Doyle cleared the atmosphere and went to work on the fleet was closer to recalibration. He had traveled countless worlds. He had encountered warriors, warlords, Celestial remnants, beings that operated outside the standard biological frameworks of the universe. None of them had looked like this.
A body moving freely in vacuum. An energy output that registered on his divine senses as something significantly more than the combat rating SHIELD's instruments had attempted to measure. A gesture, and dozens of ships ceased to be ships.
The last time Ego had come to Earth, Captain America had been a legend — a man the locals described in hushed terms as the pinnacle of human potential. The pinnacle had been achieved by genetic modification and a chemical serum.
Smith Doyle had not required a serum.
Ego adjusted his assessment of the situation and filed the revision. He did not revise his plans. He simply accounted for the new variable.
One jump point out from Earth, Yondu's ship held position.
His crew was watching the jump corridor with the careful attention of people who had just seen a steady stream of vessels come through going one direction and come back going the other, faster, with the engines pushed hard.
A crew member flagged an incoming transmission. Fatos — an independent operator Yondu had worked with twice, neither time particularly pleasantly.
Yondu. Something on Earth destroyed the entire advance group. Flew into space by itself. Took out ships with its hands. I'm not going back. Neither is anyone else with a survival instincts. The bounty's still active but the person holding it can apparently detect ships entering atmosphere from the surface. Good luck with your whistle arrow.
Yondu read it twice. Then he read it once more.
He thought about what it meant to fly into space with nothing but your physical body and destroy ships from the outside.
He thought about his whistle arrow — which could shred a dozen ships in as many seconds, which was one of the more impressive weapons in the outer systems. He thought about what it meant that the whistle arrow required him to be alive to use it, and that surviving in vacuum was not something his physiology supported for more than a few minutes regardless of what he was holding.
Beings who moved freely in the void were a category. Not a category he provoked.
"Where's Star-Lord?" he said.
"Message came in before the fleet got hit," a crew member said. "He landed safe. He's on the ground."
Yondu sat back in his chair.
"Hold position," he said. "We wait for the kid."
The base yard was quiet again. The last re-entry plasma trails had faded. The satellite feeds were showing open orbital space — a handful of drifting hulls, the wreckage field, and nothing else approaching.
Smith came back down through the atmosphere and landed.
"Done," he said. "Let's go back inside."
Skye had not quite assembled her expression into something professional by the time he walked past her. She managed it by looking at the ground for two seconds and then looking back up.
In the conference room, Smith looked at the assembled group.
"I think we can have a more direct conversation now," he said. "You've been here less than two days and we've already had a significant fleet respond to your arrival. I'd like to understand why."
Star-Lord spread his hands. "The Dragon Balls. That's why they came. That's why we came." He glanced at Coulson. "Ronan filed a bounty through the Cosmic Bank before he died — a hundred million Star Coins per ball, seven balls total. The bounty's been sitting active in the Cosmic Bank since then. Eventually enough people decide the number is worth the trip."
Coulson's jaw was doing something controlled. "Ronan."
"His money, his filing, his terms." Star-Lord kept his voice neutral. "The condition for retrieval was destruction of Xandar. Most serious operators weren't going to take that deal — destroying a Nova Empire capital is a significant commitment even for bounty hunters. But the number kept attracting attention."
Coulson looked at the table and said nothing about the Airbus Center, or the people who hadn't been resurrected, or the months he'd spent rebuilding his team after the invasion. He'd learned to compartmentalize these things. He compartmentalized this one.
Drax the Destroyer, who had been quiet, looked across at Smith.
"You killed Ronan," he said. "His fleet. His accusers."
"Earth was under attack," Smith said. "The response was proportional."
"My wife and daughter were killed by Ronan's forces. He owed me a death I couldn't collect." Drax's voice was even, the way things are even when they've been processed many times. "You collected it before I could reach him. That creates a debt."
Smith looked at him. "It doesn't. I wasn't acting on your behalf."
"The reason doesn't change the outcome." Drax held his gaze without blinking. "I owe Drax's debt to Smith Doyle. If there is something Drax can do — I will do it."
Smith considered arguing the point further, read Drax's expression accurately, and nodded instead.
Gamora leaned forward. "The Dragon Balls. What do they actually do? Ronan was willing to offer the destruction of Xandar for seven objects. What are they worth that makes that a rational trade?"
Smith smiled slightly. "You'll have to find that out for yourselves."
She looked at him.
"Do you want to?" he said.
The question landed in the room like a dropped object. Coulson and Skye both looked at him. The Guardians looked at each other.
Star-Lord said, carefully: "You're saying we have a shot at them."
"Everyone does," Smith said. "The path is simple in principle. Win the next World Martial Arts Tournament. The champion earns the opportunity." He looked around the table. "The tournament is approximately six months out. Preparation is already beginning."
Smith looked at Ego.
"What brought you to Earth, Mr. Ego?"
"My son," Ego said. He gestured toward Peter Quill with a small, unhurried movement. "I heard Peter was in the area. The development on Earth was worth seeing regardless — the last time I came through, the landscape was considerably different." He paused. "The development is impressive. I didn't expect it."
"Thirty years makes a difference here." Smith held Ego's gaze for a moment — the two of them looking at each other with the mutual attention of people running their own assessments. "You mentioned your home planet. You called it well-suited."
"It has its qualities," Ego said.
"I'd be interested to see it," Smith said.
The room was quiet for a moment.
Ego's expression shifted — a small recalibration, the same one he'd shown in the cafe. An opening he hadn't expected. He looked at Smith Doyle and ran the numbers on having the strongest being on Earth traveling to his home territory, and arrived at a conclusion: on his own ground, with his own power accessible rather than the limited divine output available to the clone body, the calculus was different.
"You'd be welcome," Ego said. "Consider yourself invited."
Rocket looked at Star-Lord. "Six months. You could go see your father's planet, come back, train, and still make the tournament."
Star-Lord thought about it. He thought about what the tournament might mean — what a champion's wish meant, what it could do, who he might wish back. He thought about his mother's grave, and a man he'd met that morning who claimed to be able to tell him what he actually was.
"Let's go," he said.
Rocket raised a hand. "I'll stay. Spaceship needs finishing. And I want to dig into the Dragon Ball situation while you're away." He looked at Smith. "Is that going to be a problem? Me being here?"
"Coulson's team will set you up with workspace," Smith said. "Within reason."
"Define reason."
"Don't hack anything classified and don't take apart anything that isn't yours."
Rocket considered those terms. "Fine. Groot stays with me."
Groot, from the windowsill, flexed his arms and said "Groot" in a tone that conveyed complete agreement.
The departures happened in the efficient way they tend to when there's nothing left to argue about.
Smith messaged Coulson's contact protocol for emergencies — the combat capability detector's communication function, which had a range that SHIELD had tested to deep orbit without finding a limit. He sent similar messages to Selene's organization and Bulma: he was traveling off-planet, the channel was open.
Coulson absorbed this with the expression of a man who has come to understand that his director's operational radius is not something that will shrink to normal dimensions.
Ego's ship was already overhead — the walnut-shaped vessel, running silent in stealth mode until Ego deactivated it with a thought and brought it down to the base yard. The hatch opened. A woman stepped out first — slight, unhurried, her antennae catching the afternoon light — and stood to one side without being asked.
Smith had already identified her position before the stealth dropped. He glanced at the hatch and said nothing.
They boarded.
Drax went through the hatch with his shoulders squared, looking around the interior with professional interest. Gamora followed. Star-Lord paused at the top of the boarding ramp and looked back at the base — at Rocket already heading back toward the warehouse with his toolbox, at Coulson standing with Skye and the rest of the team, at the ordinary New York suburb sky above the facility.
He'd left Earth once before without knowing he was going. This time he knew.
He went through the hatch.
Smith was last. He paused at the base of the ramp and looked at Coulson.
"I won't be long," he said.
Coulson nodded. "We'll keep the lights on."
Smith walked up the ramp. The hatch closed.
The ship lifted without ceremony, climbing through the cloud cover and continuing upward until the atmosphere thinned to nothing, and then it was in the dark between worlds, the Earth a blue circle below, already getting smaller.
In the base yard, Skye stood beside Coulson and watched the sky where the ship had gone.
"So," she said. "This is a normal week at SHIELD."
Coulson thought about that for a moment.
"This was a fairly eventful week," he said. "Normally it's just the one alien incident."