'Loki, the extra equipment you requested has arrived,' Coulson said, interrupting Loki's efforts to make sense of what Loki suspected was SHIELD's attempt at a motivational poster. 'It's all being set up in the back.'

'I'd best make sure it's done right,' Loki responded.

Whatever their faults -- Loki was familiar with SHIELD's arrogance and the tale of the organisation's spectacular fall from grace -- they were efficient. By the time Loki strode into the makeshift laboratory, they had already brought in the newly delivered equipment and were pulling apart the rigid, metallic cases in which it had been packed. Loki hurried to lend a hand, though less out of a desire to be helpful than the need to know exactly what he had to work with.

'How many spectrometers do we have access to?' he asked. 'Or, perhaps, the more pertinent question is -- what's their geographic spread?'

Coulson too had jumped in to help with the set up; he was presently trying to untangle a bundle of cords and fit them to the correct sockets. 'We've secured help from a number of European partners, the Japanese, the Argentines... It's a delicate situation. The Australians got antsy when, as a precaution, we asked whether they could redirect their over horizon radars and such.'

'So you're playing down what happened?.'

'Panic seldom helps.'

'There's a substantial difference between panic and a considered appreciation of the gravity of the situation.' Loki plonked a monitor down onto the plastic fold-out table. 'I've seen what Thanos' men can do; don't make the mistake of thinking this isn't serious.'

Coulson's lips twitched and he seemed to force himself to keep his voice level. 'I assure you, we're taking this very seriously. If I might remind you of one thing? Your people brought the Tesseract to this planet. You made us a target.'

Loki conceded the point with a tilted nod and turned to help a pair of junior agents, who struggled to assemble the test boxes they were unpacking.

After the best part of an hour, the room started to resemble a functional laboratory. But when Loki took a step back and took stock, he had to wonder if he had just wasted everyone's time. Barton had found a place to hide where no spectrometer, radar, satellite or SHIELD spy could track them. How likely was it that Fury couldn't find a similar calibre of hiding hole?

Or what if Thor's right and they left already?

The thought sent Loki's heart racing, but as he considered the logic of such a move, he found himself dubious. Gamora might have been satisfied to claim the Tesseract for Thanos. But she wasn't alone and Loki didn't think she was the one giving the orders. Ebony Maw outranked her. And he was a fundamentalist. He would remain until he brought balance to Midgard - a task he couldn't accomplish unless he had an army under his command.

As for Tyr, his presence made sense the least. Loki had led the attack on Midgard because he had been promised the planet when everything was done and dusted. Tyr had never exhibited any sort of megalomania towards Midgard. In fact, knowing the man, Loki suspected Tyr would consider the Midgardians too far beneath him to be worth the trouble of conquering.

'That was then,' Loki said to himself. 'The Titan can twist a man until even his closest no longer recognise him.'

Coulson's head jerked in Loki's direction. 'Pardon?'

'Just thinking aloud, Agent Coulson,' Loki replied. 'Presuming that Ebony Maw or his accomplices want to use the Tesseract again, they would want to stabilise it. Otherwise they'll just have a repeat of what happened at your research facility. I think there's a way to do it and have a wormhole that remains open for however long you need it to.'

'For however long you need it to?'

'Use your imagination.'

Coulson gave Loki a hard look. 'All right. What would they need?'

'Quite a few bits and pieces, but most of them are easy enough to find. There are two things I'd concentrate on - a good, steady source of power and iridium. Well, in theory, you could get away with osmium. It has a higher density, but taking into account the ambient temperature of this planet, iridium is what an intelligent person would use.'

Coulson glanced around the room. 'Agent Concannon? You have a background in chemistry, don't you? Do you know much about iridium?'

An agent working on a computer at a bench one row away from Coulson and Loki whipped around to face them, nearly dropping the keyboard she held in her hands. 'It's a transitional element in the platinum group.' She frowned, as if trying to remember the contents of a half-forgotten textbook. 'The second densest metal we know of, very hard, but brittle. It's also one of the rarest elements on this planet. The annual worldwide production and consumption rates are only a few tonnes.'

Loki nodded; he had yet to hear of a place where iridium was plentiful. 'If that's so, Agent Coulson, can your people put together a list of every place that produces and stores the element?'

Agent Concannon, or Antoinette as she preferred to be called, might have had a baby face that consigned her to look like a schoolgirl playing dress-up and she blushed whenever she looked in Thor's direction, but she did good work. She soon had a list compiled that broke down the laboratories and other facilities that dealt with iridium. Loki reviewed the list. As he went down the page, he crossed out those that didn't possess the sufficient quantity of the element or the variant containing the ideal number of isotopes. He doubted Ebony Maw wanted to muck about with synthesising iridium - it would be a messy process and the end-products would have a frustratingly short half-life. By the time Loki reached the bottom of the page, only two facilities remained as contenders. One near San Francisco and one in Stuttgart.

'How long would it take to get to either of these places from here?' Loki asked. 'Can you issue some alert telling them to increase security there? Not that it's likely to make the difference, but it should slow them down.'

Antoinette's face fell. 'I don't have the authorisation for that. I'll need...'

She trailed off as Coulson strode into the room with Rogers in tow. Loki cocked his head. Coulson was almost giddy with excitement, an excitement Rogers didn't share. The man, dressed in non-descript tan slacks and a chequered shirt, looked about as out of place among the stark monochromes SHIELD agents favoured as Loki himself did. He glanced around the room, his gaze lingering longer on the equipment than on the people at work in the room.

'This one's not SHIELD, Agent Coulson, am I right?' Loki said.

Coulson's smile widened. 'You really ought to call me Phil. And yes. This is Captain Steve Rogers.'

Loki put on a welcoming smile and offered his hand. The gesture wasn't much of an effort. Certainly, not nearly as much as having to be civil to Romanoff earlier or to Banner back on Sakaar. Rogers and Loki had found themselves on opposing sides in the past, but he, out of all the Avengers, had treated Loki with a basic amount of cordiality throughout. Besides, the man had chosen to become a fugitive in the last years before Thanos' victory. Loki could respect a fugitive.

Right now, however, that future -- if that future were to eventuate once more -- lay years away. Steve Rogers stood before Loki clean-shaven and with his hair meticulously parted. He shook Loki's hand, his grasp firm, yet just short of uncomfortable. Loki wondered how many hands Rogers had crushed before he learned to adjust for the serum's effects.

'So, you're from space?' Rogers said somewhat awkwardly. At Loki's impassive impression, he blustered. 'Don't take me wrong, it's a pleasure to meet you. Only I thought you'd look... less like us.'

Loki's lips quirked up. 'That's quite an assumption you make, captain.'

He let the concealments around himself drop and laughed as every SHIELD agent in the vicinity staggered back in surprise. Rogers didn't quite have the same reaction, but he seemed to lose control of his lower jaw and didn't recompose himself until Loki restored his Asgardian features.

'The world's become a strange place since I was last around,' Rogers said. He cleared his throat. 'Is that...'

'Oh no, captain,' Coulson responded, 'it's not you. This is all new to pretty much all of us.' He frowned, then seemed to recompose himself. 'Loki, there's no need to hide yourself for our sake if that's what worries you. It's a bit of a shock to see, but one that's soon overcome.'

'Actually, I prefer this face,' Loki replied. 'Captain Rogers, how much has Agent Coulson explained to you about the Tesseract and what happened last night?'

Whatever words Rogers had to meet Loki's question were swallowed by Antoinette's violent string of profanity. Coulson slid past Rogers and Loki in order to get a better view of Antoinette's computer monitor.

'What's amiss, Agent Concannon?' he asked sharply.

Antoinette's eyes widened. She started to apologise for the outburst, then shook her head and pointed to the screen. 'I intercepted a military radio call from the facility of interest near San Francisco. They report they're under attack.'

'Thor!' Loki called out. He had shouted his brother's name half a dozen times already and received no response. His breakthrough came when a surly SHIELD technician pointed towards the kitchen. Rounding the corner, Loki caught his brother struggling with a pack of individually wrapped cheese slices. 'We've a lead on Tyr.'

Thor grinned and shoved the cheese back into the fridge. 'Good. Let's head outside. With Mjolnir -'

'Let's head outside, but you're going to have to suffer local transport, same as me,' Loki interjected. 'It's not like you know where you're going. It'll take just as long to explain as to take you there.'

'How long will it take?'

'Coulson says about an hour.'

Thor gritted his teeth and swept out of the room. There was no need to hurry Thor along any further. In fact, his pace through the bunker's corridors was a challenge for Loki to match and he was glad Thor was likely to see action in the near future. Loki knew well what that tightening of Thor's jaw foreboded.

SHIELD too was eager to expedite the operation. There was no sign of Stark yet or of Romanoff returning, but Coulson and Rogers stood at the base of the loading hatch to a softly rumbling quinjet.

'We thought it'd be a good idea to update the Captain America outfit,' Coulson was saying as he clung onto a familiar vibranium shield, 'but it's not quite ready. We can get you a replica of your old get up.'

'A spare SHIELD uniform will suffice, if one can be found,' Rogers replied. One of the junior agents mustn't have shared Coulson's adoration of Captain America memorabilia; he already had a pack ready for Rogers, who accepted it graciously. After a hesitation, he took up the shield as well.

Rogers was the first up the ramp of the loading hatch, but Coulson, Loki and Thor were only a step behind and two heavily armed SHIELD agents soon brought up the rear. The pilot didn't wait for them to be comfortably seated. He took off the moment the loading hatch was secured, setting the quinjet on a steep climb upwards.

'How likely is it that they'll be gone by the time we arrive?' Thor asked. He rested Mjolnir across his lap and watched Rogers pull out the various pieces that made up a SHIELD uniform from the bag he had been given.

'It's a military research facility with armed soldiers positioned in watchtowers all around the perimeter.' Coulson replied from the co-pilot's chair. 'I called in for reinforcements from a nearby SHIELD facility as well. My laptop is in the back. There's a feed we tapped into earlier... Travers, you've got this, don't you?'

'Yes, sir,' the pilot responded.

The quinjet had already reached cruising altitude. While Coulson shuffled through the narrow space between the pilot's and the co-pilot's chair, Travers levelled out the aircraft. Loki glanced out the window. There was nothing to see save a soft layer of clouds that the setting sun painted in gold and orange. There was a deceptive serenity to that view. The quinjet sped over the continental United States at three thousand kilometres an hour. Somewhere below them there had to be a flurry of phone calls happening to ensure the airspace was clear for them and that any jets scrambled after them were ordered to stand down. And somewhere at the end of their journey, the future of Midgard was at stake.

'Here,' Coulson said as crunching and hissing started emanating from his laptop.

He turned it around so that the rest of the quinjet's passengers could see the screen. Loki leaned in to get a better look. As best as he could tell, the camera was positioned a level above the front doors to the research facility, overlooking the footpath up to the doors and the sliding metal gate at the facility's perimeter. The metal doors were mangled and the watchtower to the left of the gate had collapsed. It was hard to be sure from the grainy footage and the twisted metal the camera did manage to capture, but Loki suspected something heavy had been rammed through the gate.

'There's something approaching. Top right-hand side, do you see it?' Rogers said. He motioned to the band of sky visible above the remaining watchtower. There was a dark spot there. It moved rapidly and grew in size by the second. 'Is that a plane?'

'I think there's more than one,' Loki replied. While Rogers unbuttoned his shirt and pulled it off, the others watched the screen and followed the approach of the mysterious objects. 'There are two smaller shapes behind the first one.'

Coulson smiled. 'Those aren't planes. Those are SHIELD helicopters.'

A boom maxed out the laptop's speakers. The camera shook and debris showered down. The image cleared just in time to catch the leading helicopter send a volley into the walls of the facility.

'Travers, you need to coax more speed out of these engines,' Coulson called out.

Travers laughed in response and Loki wasn't sure if he actually made an effort to follow Coulson's order. The engines didn't hum any differently, but then they were barely audible beneath the burst of exchanged volleys coming from the camera feed. There was little to see now - mostly grey and brown-hued debris flying, punctuated with bursts of bright reds from laser-guided weaponry. The sound, however, was quite clear.

'A good half of that racket is coming from our helicopters,' said the SHIELD agent seated next to Thor. He had to raise his voice to the verge of a shout to be heard. 'Those are definitely ours. I was crew on one for two years; I know what fire from those helicopters sounds like. There's a distinctive rattle from the gun mount.'

'Why the fuck - ' The other SHIELD grunt accompanying them paused halfway through a curse as Rogers shook his head and began unbuckling the belt on his trousers. 'What are you doing, captain?'

Rogers glanced around, his fingers hooked around the trouser waistband. 'I don't think there'll be time for a costume change once we arrive.'

As if to punctuate the good captain's point, something whizzed past the camera and came to its end with a spectacular bang. The screen went blank. The rumble of battle turned into a lingering, high-pitched beep that made the Midgardians cringe.

Thor lifted Mjolnir off his lap and climbed out of his seat. 'Pilot, is our destination straight ahead?'

'Aah, yes.' Travers replied.

'Good.'

Before Loki could react, let alone any of the Midgardians, Thor opened the loading hatch at the back of the quinjet and dove out. Loki ignored the Midgardians' startled yells and glanced out the quinjet's left-hand side window. The clouds below them brewed, their colour deepening with every passing second. Lightning flashed and thunder sent the quinjet quivering.

'Bloody typical,' Loki said, turning back to the Midgardians. 'I'm sorry about my brother. He likes to put on a show.'