Avengers fic - Another Day Like Today - Chapter 6
Title: Another Day Like Today
Fandom(s): Avengers MCU, Doctor Who
Characters: Steve Rogers, Tony Stark, Eleventh Doctor, Natasha Romanov, Clint Barton, Bruce Banner, Nick Fury
Pairings: None; Steve & Tony friendship
Rating: Teen
Warnings: None that I can think of
Spoilers: Any and all MCU movies through The Avengers (2012) are fair game, as is anything through Series 6 of NuWho (though there isn't much spoilery of the latter)
Chapters: 6 of 9
Series: Part One of Only Time
Word Count: 2180
Summary: The Doctor briefs the team about the alien threat, and they formulate a plan to stop them.
Beta: cygna_hime -- Thank you! <3
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
He heard his teammates approaching before he saw them; Stark's voice tended to carry. He and Banner brought up the rear of the pack, Stark holding a half-eaten donut in one metal gauntlet, and both of them arguing animatedly about something to do with science that Steve didn't follow. He guessed that it was about time travel, though, since Stark didn't seem likely to stop gnawing on that particular bone any time soon.
Barton and Natasha preceded them through the door into the briefing room, the archer licking powdered sugar from his fingers as he dropped into a seat at the conference table. "Hey, Cap," he greeted Steve, "told you I'd round 'em up in no time."
"Thanks, Barton," he replied. The time-out seemed to have done the team some good; even Natasha looked marginally more at ease, though Steve knew that it might simply have been another of her masks. She was looking at him expectantly. "Agent Romanov?"
"Fury is on his way," she informed him. "We saw Agent Hill leave his office on our way back, and if they've finished going over the satellite images, he'll be coming to us for-"
"Avengers." The imposing form of Director Fury stood framed in the doorway. His eye swept the room. "Who can tell me what is wrong with this picture?"
Natasha Romanov never stood with her back to a door, so she wasn't precisely startled by the sudden appearance of the Director, but the relaxed manner evaporated from her posture. "He's here on my authorization," she said evenly, gesturing at the laminated security badge dangling from a cord around the Doctor's neck. "He has information we need about these aliens."
Fury's eyebrows lifted. "Half your team doesn't have clearance to enter this building yet, and you bring in a total stranger. This had better be some very good information, Agent."
"If you're interested in the large spaceship locked in synchronous orbit over the city, I expect you'll be rather pleased with what I can tell you," the Doctor announced.
The gazes of every occupant of the room fell on the man in the bow tie. Even Stark and Banner interrupted their argument about temporal physics to stare at him. "How do you know about that?" Fury demanded. "We only picked up sensor echoes showing an object in orbit ten minutes ago."
The Doctor smiled. "I know the Ketaros," he said simply. "They use the same procedure on all the worlds they select for energy harvesting."
Fury studied the strange man for a long moment, his face unreadable. "Everyone take a seat," he ordered, helping himself to one of the conference chairs. "Start from the beginning, Mr. …?"
"Doctor, actually."
The one-eyed glare told Steve that Fury's patience was wearing thin. "Doctor who?"
"Just 'the Doctor,'" chirped the man in question. "But I'm not what you want to hear about right now, am I? You want to know about the Ketaros."
"That's right," Fury agreed, "and the accuracy and usefulness of the information you give us will determine how pleasant our future conversations will be." He pressed a button on a small panel embedded in the conference table; Steve guessed that it activated some sort of recording or surveillance device. "Whenever you're ready."
Rather than sitting, the Doctor began to pace the conference room. "The Ketaros are a highly technologically-advanced race native to the Pythia Cluster, a part of space that was once rich in energy resources." His tone carried a hint of the smug pedagogy that had colored his discussion with Stark about the time machine. "As the Ketaros civilization expanded throughout the sector, they consumed those resources at a rapid pace, to power the machines on which their society depended. Soon they faced an existential crisis, as the energy that powered their civilization began to dry up."
"And they said my work in clean energy wasn't as important as the defense contracts I was giving up," Stark griped.
"We're all very impressed with your civic-mindedness," Barton drawled. "Now shut up - it's story time."
The Doctor continued on as though he hadn't noticed the interruption. "For the solution to their problem, they looked to their own biology. Just as the sails on their backs absorb heat from the suns to regulate their body temperature, the technology they developed enabled them to absorb a variety of types of energy, which they could then convert to power their cities and ships."
"Like a dimetrodon," Stark observed. "We're being invaded by Dinosaurs from Space?"
"The dimetrodon wasn't a dinosaur, Tony," Banner interjected. "It was a synapsid - a proto-mammal, and it went extinct several million years before the start of the Mesozoic Era, when-"
"Save the Mister Wizard hour for some time when we're not trying to fight off an alien invasion, kids," Fury snapped. "Go on, Doctor."
The Doctor nodded, straightening his bow tie before continuing. "They began sending out collection ships to other parts of space, homing in on planets where they detected the presence of intense energy production and output. Their collection devices would gather and store the energy they found, holding it until they could return to the Pythia Cluster with the power needed to run their worlds. They can siphon off and store an entire planet's supply of energy in a single ship."
"You're shitting me," Stark declared. "You have got to be shitting me, because otherwise we're being invaded by Con Edison. Half the reason I installed the arc reactor in Stark Tower was to get their damned meter-readers out of my hair, and now I've got to deal with their space-dinosaur doppelgangers?"
"I will make you sit in the hall until this briefing is over, Stark," Fury growled. Stark subsided, grumbling.
"Does that mean we can expect more teams like the one we encountered in the subway?" Natasha asked.
The Doctor shook his head. "Not many. Since the Tesseract is no longer available - which is probably what drew them to Earth in the first place - they were looking for alternate power sources to drain. But it shouldn't take long for their ship-board sensors to pinpoint the largest energy supply in the area..." His eyes went wide, and silence reigned in the conference room for an instant, before he and Stark shouted at once:
"Stark Tower!"
"The TARDIS!"
Both men rushed to the window; Stark yanked on the cord that controlled the Venetian blinds. Steve could see over Stark's shoulder exactly what had the two of them in a near-panic: a narrow thread of blue-white light lanced down from the sky to pinion Stark Tower. No lights showed in the building.
The Doctor tore himself away from the window first. "I have to get over there! The TARDIS was already running low on power - that's why I was heading for Cardiff. Her shielding won't protect her for long!"
Steve caught the Doctor's arm as the smaller man tried to rush past him on his way to the door. "Doctor, wait. We need a plan to deal with that thing." Gently, he added, "We can help."
"All right, yes, a plan," the Doctor agreed. He frowned. "Seems a bit back-to-front, though; usually I don't know what my plan is until I'm halfway through with it."
"You said the ship in orbit has sensors?" Banner asked. At the Doctor's nod, he continued. "Then they'll probably detect any effort we make to interfere with the beam, or to go after the ship itself. If we even had a way of getting up into space." Each of the Avengers glanced pointedly at Fury, who didn't appear to notice.
"Could the Ketaros redirect their collection beam at us, if we tried anything?" Natasha's demeanor had shifted; she was the Black Widow, focused solely on the mission before her. "For that matter, what exactly are the capabilities of that ship up there? Weapons, defenses, crew complement?"
"Without the TARDIS's data banks, I can't offer too many details," the Doctor explained. "Ketaros collection ships are designed to operate from orbit, and so the undersides are heavily shielded from any planet-based attack. Their only vulnerable point is on the top of the ship, where the energy storage capacitor is."
Stark drummed his metal-sheathed fingers against the window pane thoughtfully. "What would happen if we hit them with their own tech?" he asked, nodding at the glowing white needle spearing his skyscraper.
"That would depend entirely on where you targeted them," the Doctor replied, his voice taking on a similarly speculative tone. "From below, the ship's shielding would simply disperse the beam. If you could hit the capacitor, it would completely destabilize the storage matrix, and their accumulated energy would blast the ship apart. I doubt the hand-held energy collectors the scouting team carried would be powerful enough for that, though."
Steve had been listening with half an ear while replaying the subway fight in his head, trying to find some advantage to use against the aliens. His head snapped up, drawing the room's attention to him. "My shield!" he declared. "I was able to reflect their weapon discharge before. I could probably do the same with the beam targeting the Tower."
"It'll still splatter against their shielding," Stark remarked, shaking his head. "We'd need a second reflector, positioned above their ship's orbit. Reflect the beam up at an angle, past the edge of their ship, and then bounce it back down on their heads." He made vague twitchy gestures with his right hand. "Marker," he said to Banner, pointing behind chair where the other man sat. Banner reached back and snatched a blue marker from the white-board tray behind him and tossed it to Stark, who immediately began sketching angles on the window glass.
Glancing from the battle-scuffed disk he carried to the Doctor, Steve asked, "Will anything else be able to redirect the beam? When Howard gave me this, he told me this was all we had of the metal it's made from. Unless we've gotten more since then?" He glanced at Fury, who shook his head.
The Doctor reached for his shield. "May I?" Steve nodded and passed it to him with only a little reluctance. The Doctor flicked its surface with one finger, putting his ear close to the metal to listen to the result. "Vibranium! Just as I thought." He handed it back to Steve. "No, I'm afraid that's the only thing that will do the job. Most metals either absorb the collectors' energies, or let them pass right through."
"So much for that idea, then," Steve sighed, leaning against the wall. "My shield can't exactly be in two places at once."
The Doctor stared at him, a wide smile breaking across his expressive face. "Of course it can!" he laughed. "I distinctly recall an occasion when I was in five places at once!" He rolled his eyes at the blank stares that greeted that announcement. "I did mention the time machine, didn't I?"
"Are you saying... what I think you're saying?" Barton asked - much to Steve's relief, since it meant Steve didn't have to say it himself.
"No, no, I see what he's saying, this can work!" Stark cut in. He brandished his marker at the window again, before realizing that he'd taken up the entire pane with his diagram. He shrugged and moved to the wall beside it. "Here's you, traveling through time the normal way, one moment after the next." He drew a straight horizontal line across the wall, completely ignoring Director Fury's spluttered protests about defacing SHIELD property. "Then you hop in your time machine," he zig-zagged the line down and backward, "and you travel to a different place, a couple of minutes back in time from when you left." He continued with another horizontal line, parallel to the first. Then he pointed a gauntleted finger at the first line. "This is you on the roof of Stark Tower," he explained, and jabbed the second horizontal line. "And this is you up in space. How do we get him up in space, Doc?"
"The TARDIS is also a spaceship," the Doctor offered casually.
Stark blinked. "Of course it is."
"Then it's just a matter of getting to the roof," Natasha observed, bringing them back on task. "Can the aliens redirect their weapon to take out any transport we send up there?" The question had acquired a barb since the first time she'd asked it without getting a response.
The Doctor nodded. "They could widen the beam, which would amount to the same thing. Right now it looks like they're using the narrowest possible setting, since they've found a nice, tasty energy source and want to drain it as quickly as possible. They could expand the radius of the beam significantly to employ a less efficient collection over a much wider area, which would still be enough to take out most powered vehicles."
"Then I guess we'll have to rely on non-powered transportation," Steve said, heading for the door. "You ready to run, Doctor?"
He received an enormous grin in response. "Always."
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Fandom(s): Avengers MCU, Doctor Who
Characters: Steve Rogers, Tony Stark, Eleventh Doctor, Natasha Romanov, Clint Barton, Bruce Banner, Nick Fury
Pairings: None; Steve & Tony friendship
Rating: Teen
Warnings: None that I can think of
Spoilers: Any and all MCU movies through The Avengers (2012) are fair game, as is anything through Series 6 of NuWho (though there isn't much spoilery of the latter)
Chapters: 6 of 9
Series: Part One of Only Time
Word Count: 2180
Summary: The Doctor briefs the team about the alien threat, and they formulate a plan to stop them.
Beta: cygna_hime -- Thank you! <3
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
He heard his teammates approaching before he saw them; Stark's voice tended to carry. He and Banner brought up the rear of the pack, Stark holding a half-eaten donut in one metal gauntlet, and both of them arguing animatedly about something to do with science that Steve didn't follow. He guessed that it was about time travel, though, since Stark didn't seem likely to stop gnawing on that particular bone any time soon.
Barton and Natasha preceded them through the door into the briefing room, the archer licking powdered sugar from his fingers as he dropped into a seat at the conference table. "Hey, Cap," he greeted Steve, "told you I'd round 'em up in no time."
"Thanks, Barton," he replied. The time-out seemed to have done the team some good; even Natasha looked marginally more at ease, though Steve knew that it might simply have been another of her masks. She was looking at him expectantly. "Agent Romanov?"
"Fury is on his way," she informed him. "We saw Agent Hill leave his office on our way back, and if they've finished going over the satellite images, he'll be coming to us for-"
"Avengers." The imposing form of Director Fury stood framed in the doorway. His eye swept the room. "Who can tell me what is wrong with this picture?"
Natasha Romanov never stood with her back to a door, so she wasn't precisely startled by the sudden appearance of the Director, but the relaxed manner evaporated from her posture. "He's here on my authorization," she said evenly, gesturing at the laminated security badge dangling from a cord around the Doctor's neck. "He has information we need about these aliens."
Fury's eyebrows lifted. "Half your team doesn't have clearance to enter this building yet, and you bring in a total stranger. This had better be some very good information, Agent."
"If you're interested in the large spaceship locked in synchronous orbit over the city, I expect you'll be rather pleased with what I can tell you," the Doctor announced.
The gazes of every occupant of the room fell on the man in the bow tie. Even Stark and Banner interrupted their argument about temporal physics to stare at him. "How do you know about that?" Fury demanded. "We only picked up sensor echoes showing an object in orbit ten minutes ago."
The Doctor smiled. "I know the Ketaros," he said simply. "They use the same procedure on all the worlds they select for energy harvesting."
Fury studied the strange man for a long moment, his face unreadable. "Everyone take a seat," he ordered, helping himself to one of the conference chairs. "Start from the beginning, Mr. …?"
"Doctor, actually."
The one-eyed glare told Steve that Fury's patience was wearing thin. "Doctor who?"
"Just 'the Doctor,'" chirped the man in question. "But I'm not what you want to hear about right now, am I? You want to know about the Ketaros."
"That's right," Fury agreed, "and the accuracy and usefulness of the information you give us will determine how pleasant our future conversations will be." He pressed a button on a small panel embedded in the conference table; Steve guessed that it activated some sort of recording or surveillance device. "Whenever you're ready."
Rather than sitting, the Doctor began to pace the conference room. "The Ketaros are a highly technologically-advanced race native to the Pythia Cluster, a part of space that was once rich in energy resources." His tone carried a hint of the smug pedagogy that had colored his discussion with Stark about the time machine. "As the Ketaros civilization expanded throughout the sector, they consumed those resources at a rapid pace, to power the machines on which their society depended. Soon they faced an existential crisis, as the energy that powered their civilization began to dry up."
"And they said my work in clean energy wasn't as important as the defense contracts I was giving up," Stark griped.
"We're all very impressed with your civic-mindedness," Barton drawled. "Now shut up - it's story time."
The Doctor continued on as though he hadn't noticed the interruption. "For the solution to their problem, they looked to their own biology. Just as the sails on their backs absorb heat from the suns to regulate their body temperature, the technology they developed enabled them to absorb a variety of types of energy, which they could then convert to power their cities and ships."
"Like a dimetrodon," Stark observed. "We're being invaded by Dinosaurs from Space?"
"The dimetrodon wasn't a dinosaur, Tony," Banner interjected. "It was a synapsid - a proto-mammal, and it went extinct several million years before the start of the Mesozoic Era, when-"
"Save the Mister Wizard hour for some time when we're not trying to fight off an alien invasion, kids," Fury snapped. "Go on, Doctor."
The Doctor nodded, straightening his bow tie before continuing. "They began sending out collection ships to other parts of space, homing in on planets where they detected the presence of intense energy production and output. Their collection devices would gather and store the energy they found, holding it until they could return to the Pythia Cluster with the power needed to run their worlds. They can siphon off and store an entire planet's supply of energy in a single ship."
"You're shitting me," Stark declared. "You have got to be shitting me, because otherwise we're being invaded by Con Edison. Half the reason I installed the arc reactor in Stark Tower was to get their damned meter-readers out of my hair, and now I've got to deal with their space-dinosaur doppelgangers?"
"I will make you sit in the hall until this briefing is over, Stark," Fury growled. Stark subsided, grumbling.
"Does that mean we can expect more teams like the one we encountered in the subway?" Natasha asked.
The Doctor shook his head. "Not many. Since the Tesseract is no longer available - which is probably what drew them to Earth in the first place - they were looking for alternate power sources to drain. But it shouldn't take long for their ship-board sensors to pinpoint the largest energy supply in the area..." His eyes went wide, and silence reigned in the conference room for an instant, before he and Stark shouted at once:
"Stark Tower!"
"The TARDIS!"
Both men rushed to the window; Stark yanked on the cord that controlled the Venetian blinds. Steve could see over Stark's shoulder exactly what had the two of them in a near-panic: a narrow thread of blue-white light lanced down from the sky to pinion Stark Tower. No lights showed in the building.
The Doctor tore himself away from the window first. "I have to get over there! The TARDIS was already running low on power - that's why I was heading for Cardiff. Her shielding won't protect her for long!"
Steve caught the Doctor's arm as the smaller man tried to rush past him on his way to the door. "Doctor, wait. We need a plan to deal with that thing." Gently, he added, "We can help."
"All right, yes, a plan," the Doctor agreed. He frowned. "Seems a bit back-to-front, though; usually I don't know what my plan is until I'm halfway through with it."
"You said the ship in orbit has sensors?" Banner asked. At the Doctor's nod, he continued. "Then they'll probably detect any effort we make to interfere with the beam, or to go after the ship itself. If we even had a way of getting up into space." Each of the Avengers glanced pointedly at Fury, who didn't appear to notice.
"Could the Ketaros redirect their collection beam at us, if we tried anything?" Natasha's demeanor had shifted; she was the Black Widow, focused solely on the mission before her. "For that matter, what exactly are the capabilities of that ship up there? Weapons, defenses, crew complement?"
"Without the TARDIS's data banks, I can't offer too many details," the Doctor explained. "Ketaros collection ships are designed to operate from orbit, and so the undersides are heavily shielded from any planet-based attack. Their only vulnerable point is on the top of the ship, where the energy storage capacitor is."
Stark drummed his metal-sheathed fingers against the window pane thoughtfully. "What would happen if we hit them with their own tech?" he asked, nodding at the glowing white needle spearing his skyscraper.
"That would depend entirely on where you targeted them," the Doctor replied, his voice taking on a similarly speculative tone. "From below, the ship's shielding would simply disperse the beam. If you could hit the capacitor, it would completely destabilize the storage matrix, and their accumulated energy would blast the ship apart. I doubt the hand-held energy collectors the scouting team carried would be powerful enough for that, though."
Steve had been listening with half an ear while replaying the subway fight in his head, trying to find some advantage to use against the aliens. His head snapped up, drawing the room's attention to him. "My shield!" he declared. "I was able to reflect their weapon discharge before. I could probably do the same with the beam targeting the Tower."
"It'll still splatter against their shielding," Stark remarked, shaking his head. "We'd need a second reflector, positioned above their ship's orbit. Reflect the beam up at an angle, past the edge of their ship, and then bounce it back down on their heads." He made vague twitchy gestures with his right hand. "Marker," he said to Banner, pointing behind chair where the other man sat. Banner reached back and snatched a blue marker from the white-board tray behind him and tossed it to Stark, who immediately began sketching angles on the window glass.
Glancing from the battle-scuffed disk he carried to the Doctor, Steve asked, "Will anything else be able to redirect the beam? When Howard gave me this, he told me this was all we had of the metal it's made from. Unless we've gotten more since then?" He glanced at Fury, who shook his head.
The Doctor reached for his shield. "May I?" Steve nodded and passed it to him with only a little reluctance. The Doctor flicked its surface with one finger, putting his ear close to the metal to listen to the result. "Vibranium! Just as I thought." He handed it back to Steve. "No, I'm afraid that's the only thing that will do the job. Most metals either absorb the collectors' energies, or let them pass right through."
"So much for that idea, then," Steve sighed, leaning against the wall. "My shield can't exactly be in two places at once."
The Doctor stared at him, a wide smile breaking across his expressive face. "Of course it can!" he laughed. "I distinctly recall an occasion when I was in five places at once!" He rolled his eyes at the blank stares that greeted that announcement. "I did mention the time machine, didn't I?"
"Are you saying... what I think you're saying?" Barton asked - much to Steve's relief, since it meant Steve didn't have to say it himself.
"No, no, I see what he's saying, this can work!" Stark cut in. He brandished his marker at the window again, before realizing that he'd taken up the entire pane with his diagram. He shrugged and moved to the wall beside it. "Here's you, traveling through time the normal way, one moment after the next." He drew a straight horizontal line across the wall, completely ignoring Director Fury's spluttered protests about defacing SHIELD property. "Then you hop in your time machine," he zig-zagged the line down and backward, "and you travel to a different place, a couple of minutes back in time from when you left." He continued with another horizontal line, parallel to the first. Then he pointed a gauntleted finger at the first line. "This is you on the roof of Stark Tower," he explained, and jabbed the second horizontal line. "And this is you up in space. How do we get him up in space, Doc?"
"The TARDIS is also a spaceship," the Doctor offered casually.
Stark blinked. "Of course it is."
"Then it's just a matter of getting to the roof," Natasha observed, bringing them back on task. "Can the aliens redirect their weapon to take out any transport we send up there?" The question had acquired a barb since the first time she'd asked it without getting a response.
The Doctor nodded. "They could widen the beam, which would amount to the same thing. Right now it looks like they're using the narrowest possible setting, since they've found a nice, tasty energy source and want to drain it as quickly as possible. They could expand the radius of the beam significantly to employ a less efficient collection over a much wider area, which would still be enough to take out most powered vehicles."
"Then I guess we'll have to rely on non-powered transportation," Steve said, heading for the door. "You ready to run, Doctor?"
He received an enormous grin in response. "Always."
Chapter 7
Chapter 8