Above All Shadows [Loki Timetravel fic - Completed]

35. Schemes

At least the first step in their assassination plan went off without the hitch. Or, if there had been hitches, Brunnhilde didn't consider it necessary to inform Loki of these. But now that he had the datapad with the back-up of the files Brunnhilde had stolen from the Sanctuary, with every minute that passed, Loki was increasingly certain that the datapad retrieval had been by far the easiest part of this affair.

'Besides all of the above, Valkyrie, your ship was impounded. As if they'd miss something that obvious,' he said as he none-too-gently massaged his temple.

Gamora had no reason to ask about Loki's shape-shifting abilities and thus Brunnhilde hadn't shared any information about Loki's pseudo-Asgardian form with the Children of Thanos. While Brunnhilde had retrieved her datapad, he had dropped the Chitauri form and reverted to the face he had grown up with. It was as much a deception as the Chitauri disguise he had adopted earlier, but this magic was intimately familiar to Loki and asked a lot less of him than any other glamour he could adopt. Once he had stripped off the jacket, which bore the insignia of Thanos' military forces across the shoulders, he was left with a plain, grey shirt. He rubbed some dirt into it and added a few extra scuff-marks to his boots until he thought he no longer stood out from the thousands of labourers at work in Sanctuary City on any normal day.

He had taken the risk and ventured out to the port - no plan was complete without an exit strategy. What he found, however, hadn't left him enthused about their chances.

Brunnhilde tapped her fingers against her thigh, the beat a match to the thumping of the machinery on the factory floor below them. 'Security's tight, I take it.'

'Very. Maybe it'll be all chaos once the Palisade is compromised, but even so, we won't have a pick of ships to choose from. The fuel can't be procured locally so there's always a shortage. They don't refuel right until the ship is about to go and they don't put in a drop more than is necessary.'

'Then it'll be a fight all the way out and we'll just take the best of what we can get,' Brunnhilde replied.

Loki nodded, although this conclusion left him deeply unsatisfied. On the other hand, their departure was the last step in this operation and he had plenty of doubts outstanding about what would precede it. He slid his thumb over the datapad screen in order to zoom in on the Palisade schematics.

'It doesn't have to be his bedroom,' he said. 'While he's on Theta-Three, he scarcely leaves the Palisade, there are other areas of the complex where he regularly spends his time.'

Brunnhilde crossed her arms. 'Such as?'

The ideal scenario was the laboratory. If he and Brunnhilde stacked the enclosed space with enough explosives, they could potentially incinerate not only Thanos, but Ebony Maw and the mind stone too. The problem was, the schematics they had in front of them didn't contain any trace of the said laboratory. Loki supposed he could trace the path there by relying on his memory, but once they got to the lift, Loki didn't have the entry code. Ebony Maw had never permitted Loki to be in the laboratory on his own. The first time around, he had tried to puzzle out the code from watching the Maw's movements but had gotten nowhere. Nor did he have a way to fake the Maw's fingerprints for the scanner.

Where then if not the laboratory or the bedroom? The throne room tempted, mostly because it satisfied Loki's sense of dramatic irony to imagine Thanos' throne blowing up under him. However, the room was used on an ad hoc basis. There was no predicting who might walk in or when.

'He has an office,' Brunnhilde said, motioning towards the datapad screen.

Loki zoomed out a tad; he didn't recount ever hearing about any office. 'This is just a room in his suite. I don't know how often he uses it and if we get that far, we might as well walk a further twenty metres to the bedroom.' He zoomed out and flicked to a file that detailed a different level of the complex. 'Maybe the dining room? No, there are people coming and going all day, plus the staff cleaning up in between. No chance we'll manage to get in, set up and get out without being spotted.'