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Sif followed the bubbly dark-haired assistant, Darcy Lewis, along with the fifty others who were special guests at this event. It was quite the targetapalooza if she’d knew about any contract on the assorted senators, generals, and scientists gathering in the observation lounge. Sif was one of ten journalists. The others presumably were actual journalists from actual news organizations, unlike her ‘freelance reporter’ that her badge claimed.
"This way," Darcy held the door and they dutifully trooped inside. "Welcome to the Shatterdome." She chuckled and added when nobody got the little joke, "You know, Pacific Rim? Because of the glass window, and the big machines… I thought it looked like that. No?" None of the bigwigs appreciated it, and Darcy rolled her eyes and went on. "Welcome to the very boringly named Control Room."
Sif's eyes went wide as the scale was revealed. The area she stood in was a balcony overlooking some computer terminals, and beyond that was a huge panoramic window high off the floor of a cavernous space the size of an airplane hangar. It was mostly empty concrete, except for the giant apparatus in the middle, rising as high as the observation balcony. It took her a moment to realize Loki was actually on the structure. He looked like a small child climbing a tree as he did something to a mechanism.
Darcy moved to the front of the observation balcony and pointed to the big window. "That window is six-inch thick shatterproof leaded plastic, by the way, not glass. Obviously we don't expect anything to happen, and let me tell you how much these scientists don't want that kind of surprise. Heck, Doctor Foster hates birthday surprises," she said that loudly over the edge of the balcony to the brown-haired woman working at one of the consoles who raised her left arm and waved it around either in acknowledgment of the comment or to tell Darcy to be quiet, but either way, she made Darcy chuckle. "Anyway, the window should protect us from almost anything, and if things get really bad, fall to the floor," she rapped the low wall at the front of the balcony, "It's concrete. And if there's something so big the wall can’t handle, well, you'd probably have to be in Cleveland to avoid it, so don't worry about it." She grinned, and Sif had to bite her lip on a smile as several of the onlookers shifted around uneasily.
"But it's safe, right?" Senator Stern asked. Sif rolled her eyes. Now there was someone she should poison at a discount.
With more patience than Sif would've mustered, Darcy answered him, "They're opening a portal to another dimension, Senator. Now, they have done it before without everyone dying, but I'm not going to sit up here and tell you they know exactly what's going to happen. We're not making a Chevy, right? This is brand new science. Edge stuff. That's why we're all here because this is something new. If that's not why you're here, well, the door's behind you and to the right." No one took her up on her offer. "All right, then we'll get started." She hitched a hip up to sit on the small console at the front and touched a button. "Ground control to Major Tom. How's things going down there?"
Her voice echoed over the speaker in the corner of the room, and apparently in the bigger room, too, as Sif saw Loki and Erik, who was down on the main floor, flinch at the noise.
Erik found an intercom switch on his workstation and reported, "We're on track. Fifteen minutes."
"Erik, I have fifty VIPs up here, and no booze or stuffed mushrooms to give them while we wait. Could you move it up a little? So they don't riot?" she wheedled.
Erik's eye-rolling was visible way up here, and Loki shouted something at him, which Erik passed on dryly, "His princeliness confirms fifteen minutes."
Sif snickered to herself.
"Well, you heard them," Darcy said and smiled brightly at the room. "Who's up for charades?"
Instead of charades, the guests settled into chatting. Sif went to the front of the balcony to watch the action down below.
Another of the guests joined her. He was a tall guy, maybe her age, good looking with an impressive nose. His visitor badge gave his name as Heinz Kruger, with The Times of London. "You're with the Times? I wouldn't have thought they'd be interested enough to send a reporter all this way," she said. "Are you their science reporter?"
"No. I was nearby," he answered shortly. "The window looks strong."
"Yeah, though if they stay in there, I can't imagine they really expect to need it," she pointed out.
"Oh no," Darcy interjected, wandering up. "They can't stay in there. It floods with refrigerated nitrogen. Loki thinks someone can stay safely in like a space suit, but so far Erik is prevailing on him that it's a dumbass idea."
"That does seem risky,” Sif agreed and gestured to the giant machine. “I expected something smaller, to be honest.”
Darcy answered, "Oh, from what I gather-- and I am so not a scientist, I just hang out here-- a lot of that was for the development phase. It'll shrink. Like computers, you know? Started out humongous, and now they can fit in your pocket."
"That makes some people very unhappy," Kruger said.
Sif thought of Arkady stewing over this project, angry enough to hire her, and nodded grim agreement. At least the project was aware of the danger. Everyone had to go through a metal detector and have their bags x-rayed. Of course they hadn't taken her ring, but she wasn't intending to deploy that until the afterparty anyway.
"Cowards," Darcy snapped. "Thugs. Makes me so mad these stupid people would rather ruin the planet than make it a better place."
Something gave an unhappy twinge in Sif's insides; a resurgence that felt like guilt at the reminder this wasn't just about Loki. One death wasn't that important in the grand scheme of the world, despite how important people believed themselves to be. But this time she wondered… She frowned at Doctor Foster down in the control pit. "But is killing Doctor Laufeyson really going to stop anything? Clearly both Erik and Doctor Foster know the project, too, so it seems a bit like closing the barn darn after the horse is gone."
Darcy rolled her eyes. "You'd think. But if they were smart they wouldn't be afraid of the project in the first place, right?"
"The prince and Jotunheim have many enemies," Kruger said, "who hated them long before this." He gestured vaguely toward the science.
"Well, they're just going to have to go on hating," Darcy declared staunchly. "Anybody who thinks Loki's going down easy is gonna get served my patented one-two." She raised her fists and looked as threatening as an angry chipmunk. Apparently realizing that, she chuckled and then held out her hand to Sif. "Darcy, and you must be Sif. Since that's what your nametag says. Loki wanted me to make sure you were invited." Her grin widened and she teased, wiggling her eyebrows at Sif. "Very exciting.”
Sif shook her hand and wasn't quite sure what to say. "Uh, it was just a dance."
"Well, whatever you did, keep doing it, because, good God, he's worse than Jane when it comes to being obsessive about work. And I didn't think that was possible." She leaned over the railing and called, "Jane, how's it going?"
"They're coming up," Jane shouted back.
Darcy passed that on to the audience, "So once they run the final checklist, you'll see it. Not to oversell, but it's totally awesome."
A door opened somewhere beneath them, and in a moment, both Loki and Erik emerged. Loki, playing to the crowd, turned around and looked up, with a grin and wave. "Welcome to Project Tesseract." His eyes met Sif's across the intervening dozen feet like a laser, so bright it almost hurt to think of that dimmed.
He turned away to join the others at the console and they bent together to start going through the checklist with a formal list of functions.
Released from intensity of his gaze, she slumped slightly, reminding herself sharply that she was being taken in. She was getting emotionally involved, compromising her mission. She had a job to do.
Loki did, too. He was different as he worked. He didn't smile once, talking tersely to the others as he watched the screens of his station, and once gesturing urgently at Doctor Foster as they fell into a spirited argument over some reading that only Selvig was able to mediate.
But then the three scientists stopped talking and looked at each other. "Are we go or no go?" Loki asked. "Jane?"
She lifted her chin and declared, "Go."
"Erik?"
"Go," he confirmed.
Loki spun around, flailing the long tail of his white coat a bit like a cape, and lifted his face to call up, "Ms Lewis, if you would inform our guests that we are about to begin."
His gaze strayed to Sif, and his lips curled in an eager smile, like he couldn't wait to show her what this mechanical baby of his could do.
"You heard him," Darcy said to the guests. "We are go for launch. If, you know, we were launching anything, which isn't actually what's going to happen. But they're starting. It starts slow, so pay attention to the device."
Each of the scientists took a seat at a console. Blue lights started to flash above all the doors, and a white mist was injected into the hangar that swirled around and a rime of frost formed on the edges of the window and the floor. The scientists conferred and the main lights dimmed, leaving only the small status lights and screens on the consoles. Everything was completely dark past the window. The machine was rumbling quietly, throbbing in the floor like distant bass speakers cranked up.
And into the darkness a blue light formed. It was small and at first Sif didn't think she was seeing anything at all, not until she heard one of the generals complain querously, "is that it? It's so small?"
"Aperture is only nine microns, General," Loki answered, his voice unexpectedly loud in the stillness. "What you're seeing is the waste energy of the portal itself. Jane, when you're ready."
The small blue light - no bigger than the pilot light on her water heater - suddenly flared outward. Someone in the audience cried out, thinking it was exploding, but it seemed to settle again. Though tiny, the light was bright enough to cast shadows, as if they'd captured a star in the heart of that giant machine.
"Holding steady," Erik reported.
"Handoff in three, two, one," Jane said and the main lights returned. "And we're off!"
"Still holding steady. I think we did it," Erik said. "I really think this is it."
"We did it!" Jane exclaimed, and Darcy repeated it excitedly, "We did it!" And threw her arms around Sif, who hugged her back, laughing.
After the celebration in the pit below subsided, Loki's voice rose up again to explain, "What just happened is that we have completely severed the lab from external power sources. It is, right now, completely self-sustaining, with an aperture half the width of a human hair. The device is converting enough energy to power the entire campus, and if the aperture opens a little more this could, in fact, power the entire city."
"Which we're not going to do," Erik added hastily.
Loki chuckled. "No, we're not. Not at this moment, certainly. We have tests to run. But, since it's stable - even more stable than I expected actually, I can deliver my quote that all you journalists should write down," he said, looking directly at Sif, "The tesseract is not a weapon, as some fear. It's the future, a future without battles over energy resources, of making devil's choices of risk versus need. This technology will not be clutched in the hands of a few, but spread to the hands of the many. It is a warm light for all humankind."
At his side, both of the other scientists nodded in somber agreement, and Sif's heart stirred that she was here, at this moment, and she wished she were a real journalist because this moment deserved more attention.
In the gallery, Darcy applauded and whistled, and the audience as well, some more vigorously than others. Sif noticed that Kruger, who'd wandered away several paces, was reaching under his coat for his cellphone instead of applauding, like he was afraid to show approval. Well, Sif wasn't actually a journalist, so she could be as enthusiastic as she wanted.
No, not a phone. Gun. Kruger had a gun. How the hell did he have a gun?
He pulled it and Sif was already moving, hurling herself at him.
He was leaning over to get the best angle to shoot at Loki, and Sif came at him hard, slamming him into the low concrete wall as the gun went off. They both flipped over the barrier, and she clawed to catch herself on the edge, but her momentum was too great. She fell.
She was going to hit the console right beneath them. She slammed on something hard, but not as hard as she expected, landing on top of Kruger's body. They both grunted with the impact, as she heard Loki and Erik both yell her name. But Kruger was still struggling, trying to get the gun out from under him and shoot Loki. Sif grabbed at his arm and his wrist, "No, stop it, let go! I won't let you, I won't, I--"
The gun fired again and both she and Kruger jerked reflexively as the force smacked them both. She waited tensely for the pain, but Kruger let out a moan and she knew who the bullet had hit. After that, she slammed an elbow into his side and it was easy to pull the gun away from his limp fingers and let it fall to the floor.
She should probably lift her hand, now dangling off the side, but the thought seemed distant and not worth the effort. Maybe she should stay still for a little longer. Beyond her somewhere there was an alarm and anxious shouting, but she ignored it.
Until she was jolted back to alertness by Loki's face coming too close to hers. "Sif!" His eyes looked huge and frightened, and he slipped into asking her something urgently in his native language, even though she couldn't understand a word. His hand hovered over her face as if he wanted to touch her but wasn't sure if he should. He was pretty cute all babbling and worried, she thought. She smiled at him until she started to chuckle, and he fell quiet. After recovering himself with a wry twist of his lips, he asked, "You are all right?"
"I'm okay," she reassured him, still smiling. She took the hand he offered to help her climb off Kruger's body and find her feet. She winced at the twinge in her shoulder - she'd feel these bruises more tomorrow, but nothing seemed to be broken. "It hit him, not me. Are you alright? That first bullet--"
"It went into the window," he said dismissively and leaned toward her, frown knotting those rather regal brows with worry. He was still clasping her hand in his. "You saved my life. And not the first time, I think." She wanted to deny that, but he shook his head once. "You were at the party when the archer tried to kill me. I saw you on the video."
Video? He'd seen video. Wait, that meant-- "You knew in Stuttgart?" Jesus, he had played her utterly; she had never guessed that he had recognized her.
His smile grew. "You stopped him, didn't you? There was no one else it could have been. That was why I trusted you enough to dance," he answered. "And I was right."
But no, he still didn't understand. He didn't know what she was. He shouldn't have trusted her then, or now.
She looked into his eyes and the protest died in her throat. He was right. She had been protecting him all along. She didn't want him to die. Now that she recognized that, there was not enough money in the world to kill him. And she needed no money at all to try to protect him. It was a strange feeling, but good to want to protect. It felt good.
"I did," she admitted. "I stopped him."
His fingers found the lock of hair at the side of her face hanging down and feathered across her cheek, making her shiver. "You saved me.”
“I’ll always be there to save you,” she promised, whispering.
“My guardian angel."
"I'm no angel, not at all. But I want that future." She pointed her chin in the direction of his shining device humming quietly in the other room and met his eyes again. "I want a future."
"With me in it?"
He asked the question jokingly, but she was utterly serious. "With both of us in it." She reached for his hand with her own still bearing the poison-tipped needle inside the silver ring. She should have put it into Kruger, but he was dead, and who knew if she might need to deploy it against some other assassin.
She wrapped her fingers around Loki's more tightly. "I want to dance again," she whispered.
His smile grew to a bit of a smirk. "I can arrange that."
"I bet." She grinned and tugged on their entwined hands to pull him into her. "Are you gonna kiss me or what?"
Before she finished the question, his lips melded with hers. His other hand combed through her hair to hold the back of her head.
All around them, she heard more applause and whistling from Darcy, but Sif didn't care. They were both alive. A better future was still safe. They'd won.
And his mouth was so much better than any money ever could be.