Night in the New xico desert carried that dry, cutting chill unique to open badlands.
Above the black wilderness, the Milky Way stretched from horizon to horizon. Far from city light, the stars looked so close that they seed almost within reach.
On a lonely desert highway, an old off-road truck tore across the gravel like it was trying to outrun the night itself. Dust coated the body, and the tires shrieked over the uneven road.
Jane Foster gripped the steering wheel so hard her knuckles had gone white. Her eyes stayed fixed on the sky beyond the windshield, and her foot was pressed nearly flat against the accelerator.
The truck's headlights carved two pale beams through the darkness.
"Jane, slow down! We're almost out of gas!" Dr. Selvig clutched the roof handle with one hand while trying to keep his laptop from sliding off his knees with the other. His old face was full of worry. "We've been chasing that signal all night. The anomaly disappeared hours ago. If you keep driving like this, we'll end up stranded in the middle of nowhere!"
"It didn't disappear!" Jane shot back, her voice trembling with obsession and excitent. "I've spent three months calculating that gravitational anomaly point. It has to be around here. The spatial fluctuation just now, and that column of light that fell from the sky, neither of those were natural. Eric, we're one step away from proving everything!"
The Einstein-Rosen Bridge. The Nine Realms. Interstellar transport. All the theories she had been chasing for years felt terrifyingly close to reality now, all because of that beam of light that had torn through the night sky. There was no way she was giving up now.
In the back seat, Daisy clutched her tablet and looked half dead already. "I really should not have signed up for this just because I needed college credit," she muttered. "Right now, I want a motel, a hot shower, and a cheeseburger. Not this. Not desert madness at ninety miles an hour."
Before she could finish, a staggering figure appeared in the headlights.
"Jane! Person!" Selvig shouted.
Jane's pupils shrank. She slamd on the brakes.
The scream of rubber exploded across the empty desert. White smoke poured from the tires as the truck skidded forward for more than ten ters before finally hitting the figure with a heavy thud.
The man let out a muffled groan and dropped hard onto the road.
"Oh my God!" Jane turned pale. She fumbled with her seatbelt, shoved open the door, and ran outside. "Eric! Daisy! Hurry!"
The three of them stumbled around to the front of the truck. Lying on the gravel was a tall, broad-shouldered blond man in strange armor. The armor was now covered in dust and looked thoroughly battered. His hair was a ss, there were scrapes on his face, and his eyes were shut. He had clearly been knocked unconscious.
Even so, the man still carried an air that felt absurdly out of place in the desert. He looked less like a lost traveler and more like so mythological warrior who had fallen out of a saga.
"Is... is he alive?" Daisy asked, her voice shaking as she pulled out her phone. "We hit sobody. We need an ambulance."
"Wait." Jane knelt down and pressed her fingers gently to the man's neck. A mont later, she let out a breath. "He's got a pulse. He's just unconscious."
She looked at the bizarre armor, then toward the direction where the beam of light had fallen. A wild idea suddenly ford in her head. Could this man be connected to the thing she had seen descend from the sky? Could he be part of the very phenonon she had been chasing?
At that mont, the man groaned and slowly opened his eyes.
They were blue eyes, but filled now with confusion, anger, and disbelief. He pushed himself up from the dirt and tried to stand, but the collision and the loss of his power left him weak. He staggered once and collapsed back down.
He lifted his head, looked at the three strangers around him, then at the alien desert stretching into the darkness. He barked sothing in a harsh, ancient-sounding language, angry and demanding, but Jane could not understand a single word.
Even so, she felt it imdiately. The man her truck had just plowed into was going to change her life forever.
—Deploynt to Hagen-Tal Air Base—
Thousands of miles away, in a Queens apartnt, warm yellow light filled the living room.
Mira had just returned from Tony's mansion. She tossed her backpack near the door and had barely finished changing her shoes when a small white figure ca running out of the bedroom on short little legs and launched herself straight into Mira's arms.
It was Compiler.
She was still wearing the sa white Lolita dress, with soft silver-white hair and bright golden eyes fixed on Mira. Her tone remained flat as always, but there was a trace of excitent hidden in it. "Mira, you're back."
"I'm back, I'm back." Mira smiled, scooped her up, and rubbed her fluffy silver hair before pinching her cheeks with satisfaction. "Honestly, a soft and fragrant white-haired daughter is the most healing thing in the world. Much easier to deal with than Tony Stark, who talks sharp but thinks soft."
At the mansion, Tony had spent nearly the whole afternoon studying the NASA anomaly data with her. He had almost dragged her to New xico in person, and only her excuse about having school the next day had let her slip away.
Of course, not going in person did not an she had to miss the show.
Mira curled up in a beanbag chair with Compiler in her lap. With a wave of her hand, a virtual display unfolded in the air before them. It showed a satellite map of the Socorro region in New xico, along with S.H.I.E.L.D.'s newest encrypted operational routes.
"Compiler, I have a fun little errand for you." Mira poked her cheek and grinned. "Sothing interesting fell into the New xico desert. Along with one very blond idiot from outer space. I'll open a portal for you. Go take a look for and send back a live feed. Treat it like a field trip."
"New xico. Socorro region. Target object: unknown atmospheric reentry entity, nineteen kilograms, zero ablation. Coordinates locked." Streams of data flashed through Compiler's golden eyes as she asked in her usual calm voice, "Mira, what is the exact mission objective? Recover the target? Neutralize surrounding surveillance?"
"No, no. Nothing that violent." Mira waved her hand lazily. "Just go look at the hamr and stream everything back to . Think of it as sightseeing."
"Understood. Mission paraters received." Compiler nodded obediently, though a hint of anticipation flashed in her eyes.
Mira snapped her fingers. A pale-blue portal unfolded before them at once. On the other side was the empty desert of Socorro under a sky full of stars, with dry gravel and wasteland stretching endlessly into the dark.
"Spatial channel stable. Coordinates locked. Mira, I am departing."
Compiler gave a small wave, then turned and jumped into the portal. The pale-blue ripples flashed once and vanished. The apartnt fell quiet again.
Mira leaned back into the beanbag, picked up the cola on the side table, and took a long sip. The display in front of her instantly switched to Compiler's first-person perspective. A smile curled at the corner of Mira's mouth as she prepared to enjoy the show.
—You've walked right into a trap—
Deep in the Socorro desert, pale-blue spatial ripples quietly blood in the night. Compiler stepped out of the portal and landed lightly on the gravel.
The cold desert wind swept over her, carrying sand and grit and lifting the hem of her white dress. She looked up at the clear star-filled sky. A trace of curiosity flashed in her golden eyes. Her bare feet touched the rough stones, yet she showed no discomfort at all.
"Target zone reached. Current distance from impact site: 12.7 kiloters. Full-spectrum radar scan active."
Her flat voice echoed directly into Mira's mind as she sent the data back. Then she closed her eyes slightly.
The next second, a massive black chanical phantom unfolded behind her.
It looked like the shadow of so abyssal warship waking in the desert. Cold tal structures extended outward in layers, gleaming beneath the starlight with a chilling brilliance.
A huge hexagonal mirror-shield spread open behind her, deep-blue energy flowing through its fractured grid. The broken lines and flickering arcs of light made it resemble a cracked sky filled with shattered stars.
On either side of the rigging, heavy-caliber naval cannons slowly extended, their muzzles glowing with cold light. Several tentacle-like appendages carrying dark-blue energy clusters unfurled from the structure and swayed gently like jellyfish limbs in deep water. Beneath it all, four sharp chanical support legs anchored into the earth, while yellow streams of energy ran along the black fra. The entire construct radiated the eerie, inhuman science-fantasy of Siren machinery.
Compiler's tiny body sat at the center of it all. Her white Lolita dress fluttered in the energy currents, and her bare feet dangled in midair. The contrast between the soft little girl and the world-ending machine behind her made her look less like a child and more like the absolute ruler of the battlefield.
"Rigging fully deployed. Siren signal-shielding field activated. All surrounding radar and optical monitoring systems are jamd. S.H.I.E.L.D. cannot detect our presence."
Back in the apartnt, Mira watched the live feed and gave a low whistle.
As expected, Siren rigging had the strongest intimidation factor. A cute, soft, white-haired daughter paired with a giant apocalyptic war machine. The contrast was just too good.
"Advancing toward the target area."
Compiler's chanical legs touched down lightly. The giant rigging rose from the desert floor and began to skim silently across the ground, gliding toward Mjolnir's impact site like a ghost over gravel. Its speed was astonishing, yet it made almost no sound at all.
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