Those few who'd been enthralled by Loki's Scepter were unaffected; they carried Supergiant on their backs and ran for the exit.
Everyone else — every agent, the diehards Crossbones had lured over, and the superheroes alike — was swept up in the psionic storm.
Some saw their own nightmares and cried out; others threw down their weapons and knelt trembling on the floor.
Those of stronger will sank into brooding: Had everything they'd done all these years really been right? Had their sacrifices been worth anything at all?
The Hulk's emotions, which had gradually been settling, flared up all over again — and this time Jessica Drew went berserk right alongside him. Black Widow had no choice but to fall back, leaving the two of them to tear up the ship's hold.
Stark and Thor were caught in it at the same moment. After Loki slipped away, each blamed the other for letting him escape, and the two came to blows again — the fallout of their fight shattering one of the carrier's turbine engines outright, so that the ship tilted at a forty-five-degree angle and plummeted toward the ground.
Only Captain America was affected the least. He hurled his shield at Supergiant's group, but it was batted aside with ease.
"Daisy, how are you holding up?" Amid the surrounding chaos, Nick Fury — kitted out with plenty of anti-mind-control gear — was fine, and he helped up Daisy, who was drenched in sweat with four or five bullet holes in her clothes.
How was she holding up? She still hadn't recovered from her earlier fight with Black Bolt, and by now Daisy was too spent to even find the strength to speak.
Right then she also put her finger on her own weakness: her short-term burst power was decent, but her stamina was comparatively poor. Forget matching Black Bolt, who could fight for half a day and still dig a burrow for his whole family afterward — just look at Thor, who'd finished a battle, flown a full lap around the Earth without pause, taken no rest whatsoever, and then gone straight on to fight both Loki and Iron Man. Against that, she fell far, far short even of Thor.
These guys were like beasts of burden, their stamina all but bottomless, complete strangers to exhaustion.
As future battles grew more and more intense, even if her Eternals genes awakened and sent every facet of her abilities leaping forward, she still couldn't afford to slack on basic conditioning. Daisy resolved to work out more from here on — at least, that was the plan…
"I'm fine. I just never fully recovered." She slowly climbed to her feet.
The psionic storm had looked overwhelming, but in reality it lasted only a short while, and the heroes and agents came back to their senses one after another.
Once Thor and Stark had snapped out of it, Daisy — who'd barely clawed back a bit of her strength — pitched in too, and together the group managed to set the carrier down on the ground to await major repairs.
With Supergiant carried off to safety, the fighting aboard the carrier gradually died down. Crossbones withdrew along with Loki, but old man Pierce ended up their prisoner.
Plenty of S.H.I.E.L.D. agents and Hydra members watched this old Director get hauled off trussed up like a holiday roast, still bellowing for everyone in S.H.I.E.L.D. to surrender to Supergiant as they dragged him away. The whole thing drew no end of sighs — the old man had basically dug his own grave, and then, as if worried he hadn't buried himself thoroughly enough, tossed in a couple more shovelfuls of dirt for good measure.
"Where will Director Pierce be taken?" Daisy's mind kept weighing two options: beating the old man into a vegetable, or silencing him for good. Pierce was no Hawkeye; he was a veteran politician, and counting on him to shake off the Scepter's control through sheer willpower was next to impossible.
Nick Fury's approach was to pump him full of sedatives and let time slowly grind down the mind control, gradually restoring his sanity. In short, it would be a long course of treatment.
With the carrier down on the ground, Daisy still had to organize the agents' evacuation — and evacuate they had to. The turbine engine had been wrecked by Thor and Stark, the ship had more than a dozen breaches large and small, and fires were burning in many places. They'd come down in an open field in Ohio with no water source nearby, so for now all they could do was get people out first and salvage some data only if there was time left over.
Daisy bustled through a whole round of tasks, earning herself a fresh surge of goodwill, and only after the last agent had left the carrier did she walk out herself.
By now the Avengers stood scattered about, some twenty meters (about sixty-five feet) apart from one another, all looking somewhat dejected. Nick Fury stood a little farther off, his one eye lost in thought over who knew what.
"Do you still stand by your view?" Daisy asked Nick Fury. This first battle since the Avengers' founding had been an utter mess. The heroes themselves came away unhurt, but the enemy had broken through in no time at all: nineteen ordinary S.H.I.E.L.D. agents killed, more than fifty wounded. The one point better than in the original timeline was that Coulson was still alive.
"I believe they'll learn from this and prepare for a fresh victory." Nick Fury's words were as full of confidence as ever.
Daisy shrugged and walked over to the other side to comfort Hill.
The agents who'd died were all her people, and the carrier had been like a home to her; seeing it brought down to the ground left the deputy commander heartbroken.
Refitting was one thing, but this was full-scale repair: the carrier was so badly damaged that fixing it amounted to nearly building a new ship from scratch. In the meantime, many agents would have to be reassigned to the various sub-bases and to headquarters, and when the new ship eventually came, they might never get the chance to serve aboard again.
Hill, at least, didn't need to worry about being reassigned. Never mind her long-standing good relationship with Nick Fury — going purely by her ties to Daisy, she plainly had friends in high places, and her new posting wouldn't be a bad one.
Even so, watching the carrier fall to the dust still left her a little sad.
Daisy didn't let her down. She hauled her up by force. "Come on, I've got a new assignment for you."
Towing Hill along, she went to find Nick Fury. Pierce wouldn't be back anytime soon, but the agency's work couldn't simply stop because Pierce was gone; they needed to divide up the responsibilities anew.
Dealing with Washington and the Pentagon had always been Pierce's job, and now that he was gone, that task could only fall to the relatively smooth-tongued Daisy.
Handling external affairs and internal ones both, and every so often having to fight as a key combatant on top of it all — she simply didn't have the energy to manage so much.
They placed Nick Fury's Operations Department under Hill's command, and Nick Fury would also take on part of Daisy's external-liaison duties; he likewise carved off two of his own departments to Hill. The three of them redivided the daily workload along a five-four-one split.
Bringing Hill into the core leadership was a foregone conclusion.
It covered every angle. First and most crucially, she was white, unlike Daisy and Nick Fury, who were both minorities.
After all, S.H.I.E.L.D. was a global organization: its leadership couldn't be all white, but it couldn't have no white members at all either. This was a matter of principle.
Hill was the best fit. In theory Coulson would do as well, but lately Coulson had shown signs of wanting to step back while he was ahead. All things considered, the principled, no-nonsense Hill was the only choice.
"And what about them? Do they count as S.H.I.E.L.D. personnel?" Once she grasped her new authority, Hill showed none of a newcomer's awkwardness and asked at once. To her, this bunch of Avengers felt badly out of place here.
Daisy waved a hand, signaling that this was none of her business. Better ask our big boss over there.
"I'll have Black Widow and Hawkeye join the team, as an independent unit that keeps in contact with S.H.I.E.L.D." Nick Fury's answer came as no surprise — call it connected and it was connected, call it separate and it was separate, deliberately vague and open to whichever reading you liked.