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***
“Am I seeing what I think I’m seeing?”
“Well that depends, did you stop after ten shots last night or finish the whole bottle?”
“Don’t quit your day job, Agent Barton.”
Romanoff cut in, her exasperation clear despite the suit’s uneven audio. “Some time last night the standing stones of Stonehenge transformed into living rock creatures. They appear to be infecting people somehow, and turning them into smaller versions of the same thing.”
Tony dodged a head-sized chunk of bluestone lobbed by one of the bigger beasts. He landed next to Thor, who nodded in wordless greeting and otherwise stayed focused on their latest problem. Some of the living rocks were much larger than the others; Tony assumed these had previously been Stonehenge proper, while the smaller things were the infected people Romanoff had mentioned. The big creatures were riddled with pulsing veins of blue, green, and yellow crystal that seemed analogous to muscle or sinew.
“Well. That’s definitely what it looks like.”
“Infecting?” Rogers asked, his audio crackling and buzzing. He was standing on the other side of the Stonehenge earthworks next to Banner, who was bellowing at the rock creatures and swatting them back if they strayed further than he liked. For the most part the things were just milling around, though Tony didn’t expect the lull in their activity to last much longer.
“According to these readings from Banner’s equipment, yes.” Tony could hear the angry whine of the quinjet’s engine in Barton’s feed. The entire area was wreaking havoc with equipment of all kinds in a manner he would have normally blamed on Mjölnir.
“Stark, can you get us confirmation on what we’re dealing with?”
“I could use a sample from those glowing veins on one of the big ones.”
“I shall retrieve one.”
It was never not impressive when Thor used Mjölnir to pulverize solid stone like it was so much drywall; it was even more awe-inspiring when the stone fought back, wailing on him numerous times, and still he came away with only some dust in his hair and coating his armor.
Tony told himself for about the fifteen hundredth time that he wasn’t jealous. Thor offered him a long, blue, crystalline shard, and winced when Tony had to yank it out of his hand. Thin, glassy tendrils were reaching from the fragment and trying to borrow into Thor’s skin, leaving bloody marks where they tore free. They attempted the same thing with Tony’s suit, and JARVIS did something he almost never did: he forced the suit to act independently, dropping the chunk on the ground before the hairs could take root.
“Apologies, sir, it was apparent they were going to penetrate the armor.”
Tony swallowed against the feeling of his heart in his throat. “No worries. We can examine it there, on the ground.” He crouched down, keeping his distance, and scanned the shard. The hairs prodded at the dirt and grass, but maybe it wasn’t what they needed, because they didn’t dig in. They lengthened almost a hand span, questing, and when they found only more grass and dirt, set to writhing in wait.
Thor’s hand was already healing. Scrutinizing the injury, he said, “I have heard a story of such an affliction.”
“How’d they deal with it?”
“I believe my ancestors destroyed the small moon on which they encountered it.”
Asgardians really didn’t know how to do things by half-measures. Not that Tony could blame them in this case; an Asgardian infected with whatever this was would be a nightmare. He sighed. “And if a piece this small is infectious, destroying all of these might shatter the crystals inside of them and spread it faster.”
Tony saw Rogers speaking to someone whose feed wasn’t audible to the rest of them. Hill, he suspected. Rogers came back onto the channel. “Thor. Did they ever find a way to reverse it?”
Thor eyed the shard. “Not that I have ever been told.” He set Mjölnir against the crystal, and the hairs scrabbled at the metal though were unable to burrow in.
Still not jealous, Tony reminded himself. He said, “If Thor and Banner can handle containment for a few minutes, I can uplink with S.H.I.E.L.D. through the Tower. Maybe somebody knows somebody who knows something.”
Another pause while Rogers spoke to Hill. Then, “Do it.”
Thor took to the air, Banner slammed his fists on the ground, and the two of them set to corralling the living rocks while doing as little damage to the smaller ones as possible while Tony dialed home.
***
Fortunately for everyone, a noted geologist from Taipei who’d been studying the odd phenomena linked to Stonehenge for much of her career had been awake and glued to her TV the whole time. When S.H.I.E.L.D. called and then showed up at her flat, she was only a minute or so in recovering from the shock, and after that able to carry on a useful conversation with Tony and Erik Selvig over a stuttering video feed.
The solution turned out to be Rube Goldbergian in the extreme, and involved the risky prospect of Thor letting the crystals of a larger rock creature try to infect him while Tony used the suit to produce a specific frequency out of the lightning (”Plasma,” Tony kept saying, and they all kept not hearing him) Thor channeled through the burrowing roots. Banner and Rogers prevented any of the creatures from escaping the area of effect, and Barton and Romanoff coordinated it all from the air.
On the whole it worked, though Banner had to tear the smoking ruins of the Mark 49 Rev 2 off of Tony, and one of Thor’s arms was a blood-soaked mess riddled with splinters of inert crystal in a variety of shapes and sizes. As the quinjet pulled away, he and Romanoff began methodically removing the shrapnel and depositing it into a container for later study in a hideous display that Tony did his best to ignore.
Banner sank into one of the uncomfortable chairs that lined the wall of the cargo area, looking exhausted. He’d reverted shortly after getting the suit off Tony. “So I guess they have to rebuild Stonehenge?”
Through the cockpit windows Tony caught a glimpse of the Thor-sized smoking crater and scorch-marks that radiated out from it in uneven intervals. Most of the lines terminated in enormous piles of rubble. Rescue units were attending to the injured on the perimeter Banner and Rogers had enforced, and beyond that a barrier of S.H.I.E.L.D. agents kept the frantic, hovering news crews at bay.
“Oh yeah,” Barton said. “From scratch.”
“At least the infected people all reverted,” Romanoff said. Thor stiffened while she worked a jagged chunk free, though he managed to nod in agreement.
“Yes. It would have been unfortunate if they had not.” To his credit, the strain that was evident in his posture was nowhere to be found in his voice.
Tony averted his eyes and held his breath long enough to grab a fragment from the container. He cleaned it off and examined it, turning it this way and that against a light. He really wished the helmet had survived the plasma pulse. “You have to wonder if maybe the standing stones weren’t some kind of, petrified egg sac.”
Barton looked back over his shoulder at Tony. “What?”
“No. No, I don’t have to wonder that,” Banner said.
Rogers, on the other hand, looked interested. He set his tablet down across his knees; the makings of a report filled the screen. “How do you figure?”
“Well, think about it.” Tony set the shard aside. “Thor, you said your people came across this thing on a moon?”
“Yes. Desolate and uninhabited, if I have the tale correct.” He shut his eyes briefly, and another piece fell into the container with a bright clink.
“So maybe it wasn’t a moon. Maybe it was something’s nest, or, spore casing.”
Thor tilted his head. “My people have legends of great beasts which travel between the stars. They live in asteroid fields, or swim in nebulae the way fish inhabit oceans and rivers.”
Romanoff’s eyebrows went up. “Like what the Chitauri were using as troop carriers?”
“Just so.”
Banner groaned and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. “Are you saying we have to scan everywhere for more of these things?”
“Couldn’t hurt,” Tony said, addressing Rogers, who nodded in turn.
“Think you have enough, ah,” he glanced at Thor’s arm, “samples to work something up between the two of you?”
“Might need some help from Selvig and Foster, but I’m sure we can have a prototype by tomorrow.”
“Hey,” Banner said around a yawn, “that’s my good night’s sleep you’re giving away.”
“We’ve got the futon if you need a nap.”
“That futon is terrible.”
“Fine, I’ll get a King-sized bed with a memory foam mattress for the lab. Then you and Selvig and Fos--” He caught the look Thor was giving him and corrected himself mid-stride, “--and I can sleep in the lab whenever we want.” Banner blinked at him, and Tony said, “Do you want to wake up to a rock monster pandemic centered on Mount Rushmore? Who knows how many more of these egg sacs are hiding in presumably harmless formations all over the planet.”
Barton said, “I’d like to request that we not call them egg sacs.”
Tony frowned. “Why not?”
“Because it sounds disgusting.”
“You’re a trained assassin and you think ‘egg sacs’ sounds disgusting.”
Romanoff looked up from helping Thor tease a particularly long and spindly piece loose. “What about seeds.”
“Seeds is good,” Barton agreed.
Tony waved at them. “Hey, you two aren’t scientists, you don’t get to name things.”
Banner said, “Seeds sounds better.”
Tony pointed at him. “And you aren’t on the Extraterrestrial Invasive and Infectious Materials Naming Committee.”
“Seeds is perhaps a more accurate description.” Despite the toll the extraction process was taking on him, Tony saw the corners of Thor’s mouth hint at a smile.
Rogers was filling in Fury and Hill via his tablet, but apparently still half-paying attention. “And Thor’s people have encountered them before, making him the resident expert.”
Tony rolled his eyes. “Fine. Rock seed sacs.”
Barton’s exasperated snort was his only response. Romanoff and Thor traded a glance and returned their attention to the pincushion which was his arm, and Rogers went back to his report.
Banner yawned and curled up, dragging a parachute over to use as a pillow. “Wake me up when that bed’s installed in the lab.”