If they were going after Loki, Steve knew they would need all hands on deck. He got dressed and headed down to the holding cell where Barton was recovering. At least Steve hoped he was recovering. He knew Natasha was there, and when he stuck his head in the door, he didn’t bother with small talk. “Time to go,” he said.

“Go where?” Natasha asked.

“Tell you on the way,” Steve said. “Can you fly one of those jets?” Then he remembered that she’d been at the controls in Stuttgart. At the same time, he noticed that Barton wasn’t in his bed. But before he had a chance to react, Barton walked into the room.

“I can,” Barton said.

Steve glanced at Natasha, who gave him a subtle nod. Okay then, he thought. Barton’s back with us. He had some questions, but this wasn’t the time to ask them. It could all be sorted out later. If there was a later.

“Okay. Got a suit?” Steve asked.

Barton nodded.

“Then suit up.”

An hour later, they were ready. Captain America, Hawkeye, and the Black Widow strode into a Quinjet, startling the S.H.I.E.L.D. tech doing maintenance. “I’m sorry, you guys aren’t supposed to—”

“Son,” Captain America said, “just don’t.”

Five minutes later, they were in the air.

Maria Hill needed to get something off her chest. She knew Fury had his own way of doing things, and usually that worked. But she didn’t like being kept in the dark about operational planning. “Sir,” she said, approaching him at his command station on the Helicarrier bridge.

“Agent Hill.”

She stood next to him, and both of them looked out through the bridge windows. “Those cards. They were in Coulson’s locker, not his pocket.”

Fury nodded. “They needed the push.”

“We have an unauthorized departure from base,” a voice said over the intercom. At the same time, they saw a Quinjet launch, curving away to the north.

Toward New York City.

“They found it,” Fury commented. “Get our communications back up, whatever you have to do. I want eyes on everything.”

Maria Hill nodded. Fury had given her all the explanation she was going to get. “Yes, sir.”

Tony Stark streaked over New York City, moving as fast as he could with the damage the Iron Man suit had suffered in the turbines. He sure wasn’t at a 100 percent . . . but whatever he had would have to be good enough. “Sir, I’ve turned off the Arc Reactor, but the device is already self-sustaining,” Jarvis said as Tony got close to Stark Tower. His home. His monument.

Now on the top floor stood a machine, perhaps eight feet tall. It was a rough cylinder with a focusing lens on the top and below that, a chamber for containing the energies of the Tesseract. Dr. Erik Selvig stood watching it and also tracking data on a computer screen.

“Shut it down, Dr. Selvig,” Tony said. He hovered near the machine, hoping Selvig wouldn’t notice the way his thrusters were hiccupping. He was having trouble maintaining consistent thrust.

“It’s too late!” Selvig cried. “She can’t be stopped now! She wants to show us something! A new universe.”

“Okay,” Tony said.  Clearly Selvig was beyond reason.

Tony blasted the machine with his repulsors, but it was surrounded by a force field of some kind. The reflected energy knocked him back and also sent Selvig and his computer flying across the rooftop.

“The barrier is pure energy ,” Jarvis said . “It’s  unbreakable.”

“Yeah, I got that,” Tony said. “Plan B.” He saw Loki on the walkway that led from the landing pad into the penthouse.

“Sir, the Mark 7 is not ready for deployment,” Jarvis said.

“Then skip the bells and whistles,” Tony said. “We’re on the clock.” He sure couldn’t take on Loki and the Chitauri, whatever they were, in the suit he was wearing. It was barely hanging together.

He landed and walked down the curving pathway toward Loki as the automated disassembly machinery took off his suit. Loki turned and went inside to meet him. Tony entered on the balcony level of the penthouse. From below, just inside the patio door, Loki greeted him. “Please tell me you’re going to appeal to my humanity.”

Tony came down the stairs and paused. “Uh, actually I’m planning to threaten you.”

“You should have left your armor on for that,” Loki said.

“Yeah, it’s seen a bit of mileage, and you’ve got the Glow Stick of Destiny,” Tony said with a shrug. He opened a decanter of excellent Scotch, his very best stuff, and held it up. “Would you like a drink?”

“Stalling me won’t change anything,” Loki said.

“No, no, no threatening!” Tony reminded him. “No drink? You sure? I’m having one.”

He poured himself a glass and swirled it, smelling the liquor before taking a small sip. Loki watched, cautious and intrigued, trying to see what Tony was planning.

“The Chitauri are coming,” he said. “Nothing will change that. What have I to fear?”

“The Avengers,” Tony said. He kept his tone chatty, casual, like they were talking about baseball scores or the weather. “That’s what we call ourselves; we’re sort of like a team. ‘Earth’s Mightiest Heroes’ type of thing.”

While he stoppered the decanter of Scotch, he also slipped a bracelet over his wrist. Loki was looking the other way. The bracelet was a remote activator for the Mark 7 armor Jarvis was so worried about. Tony hoped he’d have a chance to use it . . . but with Loki, you never knew when things were going to go wrong.

“The Avengers,” Loki said. “Yes, I’ve met them.” His tone of voice left no doubt that he was unimpressed.

“Yeah, takes us a while to get any traction, I’ll give you that one,” Tony said. “But let’s do a head count here. Your brother the demigod, a Super-Soldier, a living legend who kind of lives up to the legend, a man with breathtaking anger-management issues, a couple of master assassins . . . and you, big fella, you’ve managed to piss off every single one of them.”

“That was the plan,” Loki said with a grin.

“Not a great plan,” Tony said. “When they come, and they will—”

Loki interrupted him. “I have an army.”

“We have a Hulk,” Tony said.

“I thought the beast had wandered off,” Loki said, mocking him. And it was true that Tony had no idea where Bruce was. He was going on a wing and a prayer here, trusting that Bruce would show up again when they needed him.

“You’re missing the point!” he said, and his tone got sharper. “There’s no throne, there is no version of this where you come out on top. Maybe your army comes and maybe it’s too much for us . . . but it’s all on you. Because if we can’t protect the Earth, you can be damned well sure we’ll avenge it.”

He had stepped up to Loki, and now Loki closed the distance between them a little more. He had listened to Tony with a smile on his face, humoring him. Now he said, “How will your friends have time for me, when they’re so busy fighting you?”

With those last words, he tapped Tony on the chest with his scepter, just has he had Hawkeye and Dr. Selvig. Nothing happened. The Arc Reactor in Tony’s chest countered the scepter’s effect.

Loki tried it again. “This usually works. . . . ”

“Well,” Tony said, “performance issues, it’s not uncommon.”

Suddenly angry, Loki flung Tony to the floor. “Jarvis,” Tony said. “Anytime now.”

Loki wrapped a hand around Tony’s throat and lifted him to his feet. “You will all fall before me,” he hissed.

“Deploy,” Tony said. “Deploy!”

Lifting Tony into the air, Loki threw him through the window and over the balcony railing. Tony fell, watching the street rush up at him with incredible speed. If Jarvis was right and the Mark 7 wasn’t ready, his part in the fight would be over real soon.

But you could never count Tony Stark out. The bracelet on his wrist chirped, and the Mark 7 armor burst out of a closet, rocketing down after Tony. Keyed to the bracelet’s homing signal, it reached him in midair. The armor opened up and built itself around his body while Tony fell. He engaged its thrusters less than fifty feet above the ground, and with a big grin on his face, Tony rocketed back up to have a little word with Loki.

Nobody threw him off his own balcony.

He got to the balcony and saw a very surprised Loki. “There’s one other person I forgot to mention,” Tony said. “His name is Phil.”

And he blew Loki across the room with a repulsor blast. en/c5NpX/JJAo2S1BlDkZ63bbiyioMQen3uD5gWR/iNWj5SJtmqMuIRFKhbBy2cn