The ship left Earth's gravity behind without ceremony. Through the forward viewport, the planet became a circle and then a reference point and then one bright thing among many.
Ego was asleep in his seat. Mantis had done it — a light touch to the temple, antennae glowing, and the Celestial's expression had gone from composed to absent in about three seconds. He didn't look diminished in sleep, just paused, like a machine running in standby.
Star-Lord watched him for a moment, then reached into his jacket and pulled out a photograph — old, creased along the fold lines, the image slightly faded. He held it in his lap and looked at it without saying anything.
The rest of them settled in — Gamora near the viewport, Drax with his arms crossed and his eyes tracking the crew compartment with habitual attention, Smith watching the group without appearing to.
Star-Lord put the photograph away and looked at Mantis.
"Can I ask you something personal?"
Mantis looked at him with the slightly formal attention of someone who has learned social conventions from observation rather than participation. "No one has asked me a personal question before."
"Your antennae," Star-Lord said. "What do they do?"
Drax straightened in his seat. "We have a bet."
Star-Lord turned. "Drax."
"He asked; I answered."
Mantis looked at the antennae the way a person looks at something they've stopped consciously thinking about. She repeated the question back to herself quietly, testing it.
Drax, with complete seriousness: "My assessment is that they allow you to sense the height of doorways before entering. To prevent head injury."
Smith looked at the far viewport. He kept his expression neutral by a small margin.
"That's what I win against," Star-Lord said, pointing at Drax. "If they do anything other than prevent concussions, I win."
Mantis looked between them. "They don't sense doorways."
Drax exhaled.
Star-Lord looked at the ceiling for a moment, satisfied.
"They're connected to my ability to empathize," Mantis said. "When I touch someone, I can feel what they feel."
"Is that telepathy?" Gamora asked.
"No. Telepathy is thought. Empathy is emotion." She looked at Star-Lord. "May I show you?"
Star-Lord held out his hand.
Mantis took it. The antennae brightened.
She didn't say anything for a moment. Then: "You're in love."
Star-Lord nodded slowly, in the manner of someone preparing to claim credit for a generous and selfless feeling. "Yes. A broad, universal—"
"Romantic love. Specifically." The antennae were still bright. "For her." She pointed at Gamora.
The cabin went quiet.
Star-Lord pulled his hand back. "No. That's not—"
Drax made a sound that, for Drax, constituted barely contained hilarity. He put one large hand over his mouth and his shoulders shook.
"She revealed it," he said. "Your deepest, most private—"
"Nobody asked you—"
"You must be mortified—"
Drax's composure gave out. He laughed with his full body — the kind of laugh that has no social filter in it, delighted and loud, pointing at Peter Quill with one massive finger.
Star-Lord looked at Gamora, who was studying the viewport with the absorbed attention of someone who has found a distant point in space suddenly fascinating.
"It's completely irrelevant," Star-Lord said.
"Touch me," Drax said to Mantis, still laughing. "I want to know what you find."
Mantis placed her hand on Drax's chest. Her antennae brightened again, and she laughed — a genuine surprised laugh, the kind that comes before you know it's coming.
"I have never felt something so purely funny," she said, and then they were both laughing, and Drax was pointing at Peter Quill again.
Star-Lord looked at Gamora. "I'd like everyone to know I find this completely disgusting."
Gamora said nothing and continued to find the viewport very interesting.
Mantis looked at Smith.
"May I try you?"
"Curious myself," Smith said. He held out his hand.
She took it. The antennae came up to full brightness — and then stayed there, nothing happening. Mantis frowned. She held the contact and pressed slightly, the way you press when a key isn't quite turning.
"I can't feel anything," she said. "It's—" She searched for the description. "Like touching the edge of something very large that goes in all directions. Like the void between stars, but contained."
She let go and looked at her own hand, then at Smith.
"That's unusual," she said.
"My energy can interfere with external perception," Smith said. "It creates an internal field that's difficult to read from outside."
Mantis looked at him with the slightly disoriented expression of someone whose most reliable instrument has just returned a null result. She stood and turned toward Gamora — extending her hand in the tentative way of someone re-checking their equipment on the nearest available surface.
Gamora's hand closed around Mantis's wrist before contact.
"I wouldn't," Gamora said. Her voice was pleasant and completely clear on the matter.
Mantis looked at the hand around her wrist and then at Gamora's face and took a step back.
Smith watched this with mild interest. Gamora's response was fast even by enhanced standards. Whatever was in her emotional register that she didn't want read — whatever feeling she was protecting — the reflex was worth noting.
He thought about the Soul Stone. He thought about what Gamora knew, and what she carried, and what it would mean for someone empathic enough to feel the weight of it.
He looked at the sleeping Ego and moved on.
Mantis described her other capability — the emotional modulation, the ability to ease distress, to induce compliance, to alter the affective state of a person in contact. She described it matter-of-factly, as something she did for her master's insomnia, nothing more.
"He can't sleep," she said. "He thinks about his children. The ones who didn't come back to him."
Star-Lord looked at Ego's sleeping face and felt something complicated move through his chest. A man who wanted a son. Who'd sent someone to find him and been failed. Who thought about the children lost to him.
Smith listened and thought about a cave full of bones, and about what a Celestial who described his offspring as the ones who didn't come back was actually articulating. He said nothing.
Drax, missing the darker current of the moment, looked at Mantis and said: "Put me to sleep."
She placed two fingers on his forehead. "Sleep."
Drax was asleep before he'd finished the exhale.
He was also snoring within about four seconds.
Star-Lord stared at him. Gamora stared at him. They looked at Mantis.
"That works on anything?" Gamora said.
"Almost anything," Mantis said, and looked at Smith with the remembered experience of her null result.
Star-Lord looked at Smith.
"I have to be honest," he said. "Earth caught me completely off-guard. The flying cars, the combat power tech, the capsule technology, the tournament." He paused. "And then there's you. You flew into space and destroyed ships with your hands." A beat. "You're actually from Earth?"
"I am," Smith said.
"There's going to be more people like you?"
"Probably not like me specifically. But beings who can operate in space under their own power — yes. Earth's development has accelerated in ways that weren't predictable."
Star-Lord sat back and looked at the sleeping Drax, whose snoring had settled into a deep and rhythmic pattern.
"I was an Earthling my whole life and I left before any of this was happening," he said. "It's a strange feeling."
Smith looked at him.
"If Ego's divine power passes to you," Smith said, "the strength ceiling goes considerably higher than anything biochemical. You might not always need a ship."
Star-Lord looked at his own hands. Then at Ego.
"Maybe," he said.
On Earth, in the warehouse bay of the New York SHIELD satellite facility, Rocket was doing two things simultaneously with the efficiency of someone who has never seen the point of doing one thing at a time.
On the surface: engine housing panel off, replacement coupling in hand, diagnostic running on the secondary thruster array.
Below the surface: SHIELD's open-tier network, filtered through his hijacking device, finally giving up the information he'd been working toward since Missouri.
He set the coupling down.
"Any wish," he said to himself.
He read it again to make sure he'd read it correctly. He had.
Collect all seven Dragon Balls. Summon the dragon. Make a wish. Any wish.
He thought about Ronan, who had been willing to offer the destruction of a capital world for seven objects that could grant a wish. He thought about the resurrection in New York — which he'd suspected but hadn't confirmed, and which was now confirmed, because a resurrection was exactly the kind of wish that made that trade rational.
He thought about what he would wish for.
Don't, said some quieter part of his mind.
He was thinking about it anyway when the Milano's comm system pinged.
He pressed the accept key.
"Quill," Yondu's voice said, "how's Earth treating you? A batch of space pirates just got erased from the atmosphere. You weren't involved, right?"
"Star-Lord's not here," Rocket said.
A pause. "Who's this?"
"Rocket."
"Little mouse." The voice shifted register. "Where's Quill?"
"His father showed up," Rocket said. "Guy named Ego. Took him and the others to his planet. Left maybe six hours ago."
Silence.
Then: "Say that again."
"Ego. His biological father. Showed up in Missouri, said he'd been looking for him, invited everyone to his home planet." Rocket shrugged, though Yondu couldn't see it. "Star-Lord went. Said he wanted to find out if he inherited some kind of divine power."
The silence this time was different. Rocket recognized the quality of it — the particular quiet of someone running a very fast calculation.
"Something wrong?" Rocket said.
Yondu hung up.
Rocket stared at the comm system for a moment.
"What does 'something's going to happen' mean—"
He was still staring at it when Yondu's ship presumably changed course. He could tell because, about forty seconds after the call ended, another message came through — not to him, to the ship's general channel — which said, in a coding format he recognized as standard Ravager encrypted-comm: heading to Ego's planet, don't follow.
Rocket put the comm down. He picked up the engine coupling. He set it down again.
He thought about the Dragon Balls. He thought about Yondu's voice when Yondu had said something's going to happen. He thought about the fact that Yondu had known Ego's name without being told it and had reacted to it immediately.
He picked up the coupling and started working faster.
The viewport showed Ego's planet from approach distance.
Smith stood at the forward observation point and looked at it — a large world, dense green across most visible landmass, the atmosphere reading as stable and breathable. The energy signature was significant even from here, the kind of deep-field emanation that suggested the energy wasn't generated on the surface but came up through it from somewhere below.
He looked at the planet and thought about Tree of Mights.
He thought about what the planet needed before it could be used as a cultivation site, and what stood in the way of that. He thought about the creature at the planet's core — the brain wrapped in a billion years of accumulated matter, dreaming its Celestial dream of expansion and consumption.
Killing Ego directly risked destabilizing the planet's energy architecture. That was the constraint. A planet-core organism, removed abruptly, might take the ecosystem with it.
Containing it was more interesting. Restricting the core consciousness while leaving the energy infrastructure intact — the biosphere would continue, the planet would remain viable, and whatever served as Ego's will could be compartmentalized rather than terminated.
He looked at the approaching landmass below and thought about how to build a cage for something that was simultaneously a brain and a planet, and decided he had enough time before they landed to work out the basic architecture.
The ship descended.