Chapter Text
Ship’s log: Stardate 5239.281.5
Woke from hypersleep on schedule -- thank you JARVIS.
“You are welcome, sir.”
The Ring of Thorns is about two days on the sublight engines, which should give me plenty of time to make any course corrections. Course corrections. I say that like anyone has any idea where the best entrance is to the Ring. Several thousand cloaked glass arrows, left over from a war three centuries ago.
JARVIS’s records indicate that a single glass arrow has the explosive capacity to knock a good sized hole in the Malibu, which I have to say, is not an ideal solution. Even with crude calculations of where the bombs were originally seeded -- and let me tell you, that particular chart was not easy to procure -- we don’t know how much stellar drift has moved them. Dozens of ships have tried to fly into the Ring.
All have been, thus far, unsuccessful.
Pieces of the wreckage will add to the difficulty of successfully navigating the field.
I want it noted for the record, if I don’t succeed, I want you to tell Captain Amer -- no scratch that. I always know what I’m doing. This plan I’m gonna try and pull off tomorrow, it's got me scratching my head about the survivability of it all. What am I even tripping for? Everything's gonna workout exactly the way it's supposed to.
Stardate 5239.282.9
“Set for separation, J?”
“We are set, sir,” JARVIS said. He was the ship’s AI, navigation, piloting, engineering, physician. He served to take the place several key members of a ship’s crew. He was not, however, supposed to be the only other crewmate on a ship the size of the Malibu.
He was, because no one believed Mr. Stark that they could make it through the ring to whatever treasure planet was tucked away inside it.
JARVIS went because he was an AI and because Mr. Stark was his maker. But even if JARVIS had entire free will and he had some, because he was the one steering the ship, he probably wouldn’t have done anything differently. He could have refused to take Mr. Stark at all. Probably. He’d never really tried directly rebelling, and sometimes when he was feeling philosophical, he wondered if that was because he couldn’t rebel, or because Mr. Stark had not been wrong yet, and thus, rebelling was a waste of time.
Mr. Stark would, after all, prove everyone wrong.
And JARVIS wanted to be there, to record all of it.
Truthfully, JARVIS himself wasn’t at risk; he had two backup units hidden away. But if something happened to this version, well, the story would never be told. And he couldn’t have that, could he?
“Remember, sir, close--”
“But not too close, I got it. We got this. Launch the dummy section.”
“Piloting remotely,” JARVIS said. He separated the dummy section of the ship, broad and ugly with the best forward shields that money could buy. He should know. He’d purchased them. And then Mr. Stark had improved them.
The dummy section looked like, in all honesty, like a flying brick. But that was all right. All it had to do was shield the smaller craft behind it.
“Let’s plow the road, JARVIS,” Mr. Stark said.
“As you say, sir.”
Stardate 5239.282.11
“Well, that could have been worse,” Tony said. He was breathing hard, and his hands were shaking. Sweat dripped down the back of his flight suit. But he was alive.
He landed the smaller, more maneuverable craft inside the docking ring.
“Allow me to inform you, sir, there are four glass arrows affixed to the hull--”
“You just have to ruin my moment,” Tony complained. “Can I get a countdown, or is that too much to ask?” He was already unlocking his piloting harness, grabbed a stim patch on his way past the console -- he’d need to be on his mettle if he was going to disarm bombs without detonating them instead and all the juice from his hectic ride through the Ring had dissipated.
“They are quiescent, at the moment, sir,” JARVIS told him. “But core deterioration suggests they are not supposed to be in an atmosphere with oxygen, and they will explode soon enough.”
“Wait, there’s life support in the hanger?”
“It would appear so, sir.”
“Why?” The Ring of Thorns had been in place for several hundred years at least. There was no reason for life support to still be functional.
“I shan’t hazard a guess at this remove,” JARVIS said.
“Can we vent the docking bay?” Tony had more than enough O2 in his suit, as he hadn’t been expecting any such systems to still be in place.
“No, sir,” JARVIS said. “I was able to override the security systems to get us inside by claiming emergency repairs. The system will not let us out until the proper codes have been entered. As well as sudden venting often disrupts seemingly stationary objects--”
“Yeah, yeah, no need to turn the room into a pinball machine. All right, I’m on it.”
Tony had removed three of the bombs -- truly elegant, lethal little things. They were no bigger than two fingers wide and about four times as long, concealed by a mirror-shield that bent light around it, showing up as flecks of black and the occasional flash of light in a starfield. No propellant, no heat reading, not even any traceable particles emissions. Old school explosives. Not quite all the way back to pipebombs with horseshoe nails mixed in, but still. Household chemicals.
Ions only knew what the people who made them were thinking when they mixed them up and set them loose in space to guard their station and their planet.
They were all dead, at least.
Theoretically. No one could get close enough to tell.
“Uh, sir,” JARVIS said. “You have company. Turn around very slowly.”
Tony didn’t quite raise his hands, but he was expecting to see someone armed and presumably dangerous.
What he saw instead was-- an animal? With white and tan fur covering its entire body, including a set of very long ears. Red eyes peered at him curiously and the creature took a few hopping steps closer.
“JARVIS,” Tony muttered, keeping his eyes on the creature, “what is it?”
“A Lagomorpha, particularly a subset of Leporidae. Known as oryctolagus cuniculus domesticus, or more commonly, a bunny rabbit.”
“Does it eat-- meat?” Tony was an awfully big meal, but as he watched the-- rabbit-- carefully, he noticed there were more.
A lot more.
“I daresay, sir, unless the species has evolved along another path,” JARVIS said, “they are primarily interested in grasses, fruits, and vegetables. A garden pest, as they were described in older zoology reports. And, to some degree, a pet.”
“People pet them?” Tony wondered, looking around. They were fluffy and sort of cute. Some of them sat up on their hind legs to look closer at Tony.
“Other people raised them for food and fur stock,” JARVIS continued.
Tony took a step forward and the lead rabbit thumped his foot several times against the deck plating. Other rabbits took up the signal and stamped as well, until the entire facility was ringing like being inside a drum.
Tony found himself on the floor, hands clapped over his ears. By the time the noise stopped, three or four of the bunnies were very close to Tony, noses wiggling curiously. One of them hopped all the way up to him, put a soft paw on his knee and poked its face directly at his chin.
“I’m not made of food,” Tony told it, and he went to shoo it away, but he touched it instead.
Oh. Oh, it was so soft. Oh, Ions, so soft. He let himself sit down, let them hop up to him, sniffing curiously.
“It seems they have never seen a human, either, sir,” JARVIS commented.
“Do, uh, we have anything we could feed them? What are they even eating around here?”
“A closer look at the scans, sir,” JARVIS said, “the hydroponics bays seem to have overrun most of the station. They’ve been living in a perfect bunny paradise. All the food they could want, and no predators.”
“Sounds lovely,” Tony said, and one of the bunnies hopped into his lap and proceeded to turn around a few times before flopping over and going to sleep. “Although, gotta say, a cargo bay of rabbits wasn’t what I was hoping to find.”
Riches, technological artifacts, answers. Especially answers. What had happened here, why had the people gone silent, or died? Why did they leave behind such elaborate traps?
“We could set up a fur trade, sir,” JARVIS suggested and Tony could have sworn that every single bunny in the room gave him the stink eye. All at once. It was chilling.
“Yeeaaah, think I’m gonna go with no on that one, JARVIS,” Tony said. “Do you think there’s anyway to explain kaboom to them, because if I don’t get that last glass arrow off the hull, we’re all going to be in the fur trade.”
“You neglected to add lapine language skills to my databanks, sir,” JARVIS said.
“Smart ass AI,” Tony muttered, nudging the black bunny out of his lap. “Shoo. Go fetch. Something. Do you fetch? Yeah, go… go find a-- what to rabbits eat?”
“Strictly speaking, their diet is a mix of alfalfa and--”
“Whatever. Go… have a smoothie. Look, if you go into the galley on my ship, DUM-E will make you smoothies, go go.”
They didn’t go go or shoo shoo, but they did back up a little or hopped away as he stood up. He had to watch his feet as he moved back over to the ship, grabbing for the wrench. “Switch it up, JARVIS,” he said, and JARVIS triggered the color changing squares on the outside of the ship, one at a time, until Tony could physically locate the glass arrow, and only because he was looking really closely. The arrow changed colors, too, but at a slightly -- very slightly -- slower rate.
And then Tony was able to find it by touch, sliding his hand over the panel until he encountered a small projection.
Once removed from the ship, the colors swirled again until what Tony held in his hands was flesh and floor and bunny colored. The biologics didn’t blend as easily, they weren’t mathematical or predictable, so once he had it away from the hull, it was a lot easier to look at.
For something called a glass arrow, it was neither. More like a flat, thin package with a few grooves at each end. Not really accurate, but evocative, the imagery, he meant. Twisting the tail end, he slowly removed the detonation packet, wrapped in hyper thin plastics. Once that package was out, the arrow itself was rendered mostly harmless. Except that Tony would feel better getting all of it off the ship.
He found a couple of rolling bins in the docking bay, emptied them of the tools they contained, and then loaded the explosives into them. “Can I space this shit, or is the airlock broken, too?”
“The south side airlock appears fully functional, sir,” JARVIS told him. Tony grabbed a couple of remote-automatics and affixed them to the sides of the bins. Station gravity would eventually grab anything floating in proximity to the station; it had taken quite a few murderers getting caught before they realized you could not, in fact, just junk a body out an airlock.
But you could fire one into the nearest star. Which is what the remote-automatics were for. Small, one shot of fuel, affixable to a trash or discarded object -- or even at some of the largest ring world systems, to move supplies through space -- to propel them away. Once in motion, they’d stay in motion until a larger gravity well swallowed them up.
“Bombs away,” Tony said, setting the bins into the airlock. He sealed the inner door, opened the outer door, and then flew the trash off into space. The nearest star was several weeks away by sub light propulsion. Unless it hit a few of its cousins while out there, in which case, he could expect a pretty pretty boom in a few hours.
“Always so observant, sir,” JARVIS said.
“Yeah, yeah,” Tony said, pushing away from the porthole. “You got anything for me yet?”
“Their mainframe systems are so old as to be little better than hand-cranked automobiles, sir,” JARVIS said. “I’m having difficulty navigating their systems without overwhelming them. That said, the system suggests you might find an interpreter on the eighth deck, C-section.”
“I am not delivering a baby on this station,” Tony swore and chuckled to himself. It wouldn’t take JARVIS that long to find the reference -- it had always been a bit of a challenge with them. Could Tony, in fact, find a historical or cultural reference so old that JARVIS didn’t have access to it.
So far the answer had always been no.
Tony grabbed several tools to help him around the ship; a crowbar for opening unruly doors, as well as more electronic overrides. MagmaTorch, if he had to go through the door.
The vegetation was even thicker in the hallways. “Where are the plants getting food from?” Because really, dirt was a thing, even if Tony didn’t like standing on it. There was a thick coating of moss on the floor in places, and Tony found himself stepping around it. He did squat down long enough to take a sample, and send it off to JARVIS to analyze.
“Sample shows a flourishing, if unusual, ecosystem, sir,” JARVIS told him. “The sample appears to be similar to compost. Organic waste, sir.”
“Rabbit shit?”
“It’s likely the first plants would have started in the hydroponics area; if they outgrew their containers, they would have likely encountered fertilizer and soil samples there. My map of the station shows that system-recycling was only a deck below.”
“Old human shit,” Tony rephrased.
“And bodies that weren’t spaced, food waste, biological waste.” Many places stored that up, condensed into cubes, packed into bags, and then sold to terraforming colonies. Probably the same sort of idea. It was being used for its intended purpose, then, if not necessarily its intended place. “The ship’s lighting system has stayed on, providing material for photosynthesis. Since the late twenty-fifth century all human space-going vehicles utilize solar lamps to prevent crew depression, mood swings, and the inability to digest certain foods.”
“Yeah, we’re made for gravity and sunlight,” Tony said. He paused to force a door to the companionway. The ladders stretched up and down several levels, slightly offset to prevent a bad fall from becoming a fatal flaw. Smart. “So they’re not in any immediate danger of being wiped out?”
“The power banks are currently still at half capacity. With such a slow rate of decay, even without intelligent interference, this colony could continue on without problems for another three or four hundred years.”
“What are they using to power this place?”
JARVIS continued to analyze the station, providing more and more obscure data and facts. Frankly, Tony stopped entirely listening. It wasn’t that he wasn’t interested, but there were also interesting things--
He stopped in a long hallway with doors spaced equally, and pushed one open. Crew quarters, right? Had to be…
The room was empty. Not just of crew, he really was not expecting a skeleton -- or maybe he was -- but also of artifacts. It was just empty. Bed cubby with no mattress, desk with no terminal or ports. Closet with no clothes.
“People did used to live here, didn’t they?”
“Records suggest that this station had a population of approximately twenty-thousand human beings at the time that contact with the greater galaxy ended.”
“What the hell happened to twenty-thousand people? I mean, even if the rabbits ate them--”
“Let me remind you, sir, that rabbits are primarily vegetarian,” JARVIS said.
“Thanks, you might need to keep reminding me of that--”
He wasn’t going to be able to close that door again, since a handful of rabbits had followed him in, and he wasn’t sure how to get them out again. They didn’t really seem like herd creatures to him. And while they’d been surviving perfectly well on their own, he didn’t really want them to starve to death because of him. Right?
It was a working theory, at least. No rabbit murdering.
He made it all the way to 8th-deck, Section C. Finally. Plants. A lot of them, too. And more rabbits.
“What exactly am I looking for here?” Tony wondered. He pushed his way through thicker plants, almost jungle-like in their sheer stubbornness to give way.
“I might say you’ll know it when you see it, sir,” JARVIS said, “which would be quite helpful, since I’m entirely uncertain--”
“Oh.”
That.
Stardate 5239.283.02
“I don’t believe the situation is going to change, no matter how long you keep staring,” JARVIS commented.
“Sarcastic, I like that.”
“I know that, sir.”
“Still. This is not something I want to jump into right away. I mean, when the station AI--”
“It’s not an AI sir, the station’s computer systems are significantly less advanced in all ways--”
“Don’t be petty. It’s beneath you.”
“As I don’t, in fact, have a corporeal body, sir, you might add that everything is beneath me. Or nothing is beneath me. An interesting question for the next time you feel philosophical.”
“Which does not answer any of my current philosophical questions,” Tony said. “Like who is this guy, why is he asleep in that thing, and will he die immediately if we try to wake him up?”
“Probably not immediately,” JARVIS said. “He’s hardly a vampire and going to poof into dust at exposure to sunlight.”
“What?”
“I beg your pardon sir, I was looking up some of the various mythology typical to this station at the time. Did you know they believed the whole place was cursed?”
“Of course they did,” Tony said. “Also, why would I know that? How could I possibly know that-- cursed? What even does cursed mean?”
“A curse is the belief that powerful entities can take an interest in humans,” JARVIS said. “Faeries, witches, demigods and deities, for example. When these humans do something wrong, or offensive, or are in some cases, just being used as scapegoats for a powerful creature, that leads to a curse. A series of misfortunes that cannot be averted, except by a single act. Sometimes it’s ridiculously complicated, like when the moon loses her child if it happens in a week when two Mondays come together. And sometimes, all that takes to break a curse is true love’s first kiss.”
“Like that’s not complicated,” Tony complained. “So you’re saying I should kiss the guy awake to break the curse?”
“Much in the case of a week with two Mondays, sir,” JARVIS said, “you might want to take into consideration that your blood and cells are filled with--”
“Aesculapian nanintes,” Tony breathed. Which repaired injuries, protected him from disease and posion, and vastly extended his life span. Most infants born on Tony’s planet inherited some of them from their parents, but often required a booster injection every twenty years. And, in emergencies, you could share your nanintes with someone else, to heal their wounds.
Tony had gotten a booster shot last year, on his fortieth birthday, which meant his system was currently in top form.
“The fastest way to share nanites--”
“Is fluid transfer.”
“A kiss,” Tony corrected, directing a smug smile in no particular direction. JARVIS could see him.
“Indeed, sir, I’m so glad you thought of it.”
“What would I do without you?”
“Flounder,” JARVIS responded. “Badly.”
“Wow, you didn’t even hesitate with that one.”
Tony studied the casing a little while longer. The man was dressed entirely in white, except for a black cap where his left arm had been, he had long hair and just a hint of a beard. If Tony had to guess, he’d say the man had gone into some sort of healing tube while a replacement limb was vat-grown for him. Nanites could mend split skin and broken bones, but it wasn’t much good at regrowing parts entirely.
But Tony didn’t see any sort of vat system at all. Maybe they kept that somewhere else.
Theoretically, Tony’s nanites would keep the man alive, long enough to ask some questions, to find the bioregen chambers, or their historical equivalent. Get some answers, provide some aid. Something.
And, also, very quietly, to himself, where even JARVIS couldn’t hear him.
Tony might actually want to kiss the man.
He was stunningly, almost shockingly beautiful. His cheeks were just perfect, and the chin, with the hint of a cleft. Full, kissable lips, parted just a little. Long lashes. Tony didn’t know what color his eyes were, but he liked to think they were blue. Tony felt like he could see… everything.
“Sir?”
“Yeah?”
“Your brain is producing an increased amount of vasopressin, adrenaline, dopamine, and oxytocin.”
“Yeah?”
“And I believe you are experiencing mydriasis-- it’s a nerve reaction that causes your pupils to dilate,” JARVIS went on.
“Which means what?”
“Quite honestly, sir,” JARVIS said. “I think you are, as the poets would say, falling in love.”
“Yeah?” Tony found he didn’t quite care. It was almost like being drunk, a warm, fuzzy sort of feeling that just, made him generally happy. He wanted to share that with someone. A very specific someone.
He wasn’t sure how he knew which button to push, but the top of the tube slid away, and the man inside took a slow, stuttering breath.
“It’s all right,” Tony told him. “I’m here to rescue you.”
He leaned in, mouth open slightly, and kissed the man he hadn’t even really met. It was more than love at first meeting, it was--
A very nice kiss, warm, soothing, soft, with just a little heat in it.
The man pulled away, licked his lips as if tasting Tony on them and gazed up at him. “Uh… aren’t you a little short to be a stormtrooper?”
“What?” Tony blinked, then blinked again. “How-- how do you know Star Wars? That is Star Wars you’re quoting, right, late 20th century cinema? I-- I’m a--”
The man struggled to sit, and Tony helped him until he could swing his legs over the side. “So, uh, question-- who are you, and why is there a rabbit on top of my stasis tube?”
“Um, my name is Tony Stark,” Tony said.
“Bucky Barnes,” the man said. “Uh, nice to meet you. Great kiss by the way, hell of a wake up call. Is my unit waiting for me--”
“Uh, no, no, probably not.”
Bucky stared around the room, from the bunny to the greenery to the bunny, and then back to Tony. “How long? How long was I asleep?”
“I can’t say exactly, but-- it’s been at least three hundred years since we last had contact with this station.”
“Oh.” Bucky took a deep breath, and then another one, and a third. “Oh. I guess… I guess she won.”
“Who? Who did this to you? What happened here?”
“Hydra did this to me. Mother of serpents and dragons. A witch. It’s a long story.”
“I-- don’t think there’s any such thing as witches,” Tony said, hesitantly.
“Oh, there are,” Bucky said. “Believe me. There are.”