Chapter 113 - Exotic Research

Chapter 113: Chapter 113 - Exotic Research

The SHIELD agent’s gulp had been amusing. The interruption which caused it had not.

Lucius rose from the rooftop with his hot chocolate and looked toward the Dark Elf vessel hanging over Greenwich. Fury had damaged an otherwise pleasant afternoon by asking for unpaid labour, then compounded the offence by making death and civic responsibility sound like Lucius’s administrative problem. London’s own mayor had turned a blind eye to its decay. Lucius had no intention of doing otherwise.

His gaze settled on the ship.

Malekith had refused to answer the only useful question put to him in Asgard. Lucius had already seen enough male Dark Elves to satisfy every scientific interest and several forms of irritation, but their females remained regrettably theoretical. The point was that he clearly remembered the comic-book illustrations from his first life, and he was not going to leave the issue alone until he got what he wanted. A species with grey or light purple skin, alien physiology, and several thousand years in hibernation should reasonably offer women ranging from delicate A cups to G-cup structural achievements, with matching variation elsewhere.

It was a thorough examination. Any suggestion that he had developed an obsession with exotic bombshells would be both unkind and difficult to prove.

Below him, Dark Elves fired into a police line while civilians discovered that running in a crowd did not make alien weapons less accurate. The chaos had nothing to do with his research.

He dismissed his cup into Inventory and flew toward Malekith’s ship with renewed determination.

-

Malekith stood beneath the turning sky and felt the Nine Realms draw into alignment.

The false Aether moved above his hands like dark-red smoke. It looked as it should. Its pressure carried the ancient signature that had woken him, guided him to Asgard, and promised the restoration of the darkness his people had lost. Every sense he possessed insisted that the weapon had returned, yet it refused to obey.

He pushed dark energy into the mass again. The counterfeit accepted the power, rippled around his fingers, and produced nothing. No darkness spread across Greenwich. No realm dimmed. The Convergence remained open around him, perfect in form and useless in function

The failure could not belong to the Aether. Nor could the fault belong to Malekith, the last king of a people who had waited through extinction itself for this hour. That left the Asgardians.

-

Thor crossed the broken courtyard with Mjolnir in hand while Jane followed behind a portable array of instruments. Darcy and her intern were dragging another metal stake into position under Dr Selvig’s direction. His release from British custody had restored his trousers without improving the professional atmosphere around him.

"The readings are collapsing around the centre," Jane called. "Whatever he took from me isn’t interacting with the Convergence."

Thor did not take his eyes from Malekith.

-

Poor Malekith channelled more power through the false Aether. The red mass shuddered and remained inert, holding his attention until Mjolnir struck him in the chest.

The hammer carried him through the remains of a stone wall and into the street beyond. Malekith hit hard enough to bury his shoulders in brick, but fury returned him to his feet before Mjolnir completed its turn back to Thor.

"You deceived me."

Thor caught the hammer. "You tore that thing from Jane and brought an army to Midgard. Whatever failure you have earned is your own."

"The Aether called to my people." Malekith pulled the counterfeit around one arm, searching for any response beyond its empty imitation. "You corrupted it before surrendering the human."

Jane looked at Thor. "I would like it formally recorded that we surrendered nothing. Assuming there is a record after today."

Malekith drew dark energy and released it in a red-black wave. Thor crossed his forearms before Jane, taking the blast against his body while Mjolnir spun from his hand. The hammer passed through a portal which opened three feet in front of it and vanished.

It returned from another tear above Malekith.

The blow drove him to one knee.

Jane checked the reading on her device. "That was not us."

Above Greenwich, one of the Convergence portals shifted across the sky just as two SHIELD fighters descended toward the Dark Elf vessel. The lead pilot broke away from the impossible view of an ice field. His wingman had less warning. The portal swallowed the aircraft and returned it half a mile away, pointed toward the ground. It vanished behind the rooftops, and the explosion arrived a heartbeat later.

The surviving fighter launched two missiles at the Dark Elf vessel.

Its hull opened beneath the concealment field. A dark-energy pulse destroyed one missile. The other vanished through a portal and struck an empty stretch of frozen ground in another realm.

Malekith attacked while Thor’s attention remained in the sky and portals. His blade cut across Thor’s armour and forced the prince back. Mjolnir stopped the next strike, but Malekith drove dark energy through the locked weapons and hurled both of them across the street.

"I will bury your realms in darkness," Malekith said. "If you have stolen this hour from my people, I will spend what remains of mine taking everything from yours."

Thor rose from the wreckage of a parked car. Blood marked the corner of his mouth.

"You speak of vengeance while your warriors murder innocents."

"Your people exterminated my race, Asgardian."

Thor called Mjolnir. Malekith met him in the centre of the road, and the collision removed the windows from every surviving shop around them.

Jane drove the final stake into its housing and watched three readings align.

"Darcy, left control. Now."

Darcy struck the switch. A portal opened across Malekith’s advancing arm, leaving his clenched fist in a different realm while the rest of him remained in Greenwich. He stopped before the boundary could shear through the armour. Thor hit him in the chest, sending his body backwards while the trapped arm stretched toward a world neither of them could see.

The intern adjusted the second control under Selvig’s shouted directions. Another portal opened behind Malekith and carried him through before the first boundary collapsed. He returned from a tear above the road, struck the roof of a bus, and rolled clear as Mjolnir followed him through.

"It works," Darcy said.

Jane watched two more portals shift away from their stakes.

-

Lucius entered the vessel through a section of hull which had been kind enough to lose its integrity during the landing.

He found three warriors in the first passage and stopped their hearts before any could raise a weapon. Killing them at a distance hardly qualified as heroism, but he was on private property and had not yet decided whose.

The ship’s internal paths were already familiar. He had studied the larger warship during the attack on Asgard, tracing its protected controls, dark-energy distribution, concealment logic, and maintenance access. This vessel used the same engineering language with fewer redundancies. He reached a control junction, placed one gauntleted hand against it, and let Technopathy meet a system designed to survive thousands of years without a living engineer.

The ship resisted him, and Lucius smiled behind the skull faceplate.

"Good. I would have been insulted if Malekith protected his last warship with a password."

Dark energy withdrew from the junction and tried to isolate the touched section. Lucius followed it through branching control paths, held three mechanical relays in place with telekinesis, and fed Cosmic Energy into the dead line before the ship could close it. The network accepted the substitute long enough for his mind to pass the barrier.

The vessel continued answering its crew while Lucius quietly placed himself between every answer and the machine.

Once he took absolute control, the archives opened, although the crew manifest was disappointing.

Every surviving Dark Elf was attached to this vessel or one of the craft deployed from it. The hibernation registry listed no hidden colony, reserve ship, or second refuge. More importantly, every surviving woman of the species had died before the present crew entered its long sleep.

Lucius searched twice, including records the ship had sealed behind medical authority.

Nothing.

He sighed.

"Bor, you genocidal cockblock."

The oldest historical archive named Bor of Asgard as the king who had completed the destruction of the Dark Elves. Malekith and the warriors gathered here were not an invasion force drawn from a surviving civilisation. They were its final armed remnant.

Lucius’s disappointment lasted until he opened the medical archive.

The ship held thousands of years of physiological records because hibernation required exact knowledge of every organ it preserved. Genetic lineages had been maintained to identify inherited failures among a population too small to waste. Separate ritual archives recorded how the Dark Elves shaped sacred dark energy, bound it into machines, and prevented their bodies from rejecting prolonged exposure. None of it gave Lucius a living female specimen, but the combined material had a full genetic map of over five thousand female Elves.

He copied the complete archive.

The ship also contained weapon designs, concealment refinements, maintenance histories, navigational records, and enough failed experiments to save him several years of repeating dead men’s mistakes. Lucius had no intention of leaving any of it for SHIELD, Damage Control, HYDRA, or whichever committee would eventually claim that alien warship ownership fell under emergency procurement.

Humanity could turn a kettle into a surveillance device and a kitchen knife into a political crisis. Given dark-energy weapons and a ship capable of crossing realms, governments would massacre half the planet before producing anything useful, and Lucius already ranked among the top five targets of several legal and illegal agencies.

The vessel, its archives, and the remaining Dark Elves would therefore become his exclusive problem.

Ownership was the safest form of containment.

Lucius closed his hand around the control junction, and the ship began to rise.

-

Thor and Malekith separated when the shadow over Greenwich moved.

The Dark Elf vessel lifted above the buildings, its lower hull drawing smoke and loose debris upward. Malekith turned from Thor with disbelief replacing fury for the first time since the false Aether failed.

No recall order had been given.

Across Greenwich, surviving Dark Elf pilots saw their command ship climb and reached the same conclusion. Small craft broke away from police positions, SHIELD fighters, and scattered infantry groups. They rose toward the opening hangars while warriors on the streets abandoned attacks and ran for retrieval points.

"They are retreating," Jane informed her team.

Malekith raised one hand toward the vessel and transmitted a command. The ship ignored him.

Thor understood before he did.

"Lucius."

Malekith’s head snapped toward him. "The pervert."

"Watch your mouth, Elf! He is a champion of Asgard," Thor corrected, unable to keep the satisfaction from his voice. "My shield-brother has taken your vessel."

Jane stared at him. "Your shield-brother is stealing the alien warship during the battle?"

"He has an unusual method of helping."

"That was not criticism. If it leaves, the largest gun leaves with it."

The hangars remained open long enough for most of the returning craft to enter. Dark Elves crowded the final retrieval platforms and pulled aboard while the vessel continued climbing. Malekith sent another command. For one breath, every light along the hull went dark.

Then the concealment field activated, and the ship disappeared.

Malekith stood beneath an empty sky with the false Aether coiled around his arm.

Thor smiled. "You were saying something about taking everything from me."

Malekith attacked before the smile had faded.

-

Every useful screen available to SHIELD, Damage Control, the Royal Air Force, and several agencies whose involvement would be denied by morning showed the same empty patch of sky.

The warship had entered Greenwich in sight of thousands of witnesses. It had risen with most of its surviving craft aboard, turned invisible, and escaped every sensor watching it. The most advanced object within reach of Earth’s governments had become unavailable before anyone finished deciding who possessed the legal authority to seize it.

After the Chitauri invasion, the institutions involved had divided warped plating, burned fragments, and biological residue that could not power a lamp. Noctis had taken the bodies, weapons, and functioning machinery before the leftovers were divided. Now the Dark Elves had arrived with technology which made the Chitauri remnants look generous, and a complete ship had slipped away.

Earth’s best technology remained dangerous by human standards. Besides civilisations already capable of invading it, the achievement was becoming cute.

Nick Fury watched the final distorted outline vanish from a SHIELD feed. He regretted losing the vessel before anyone on Earth had touched it, and anger tightened his grip around the edge of the console until a technician noticed and found another screen to study.

He picked up his phone and called the only man on Earth he trusted to build an answer before the next invasion demonstrated a new category of helplessness.

"Stark."