Bruce rubbed at his eyes. He had lost track of the number of hours since he last slept. The last few, in particular, had been exhausting. As it was, those who had lost their livelihoods were always reluctant to relinquish what little they had left. To make things more difficult, while Thor trusted him, to the surviving Asgardians he was a stranger. He didn’t possess the authority that Thor, or even Loki, carried. He was hard-pressed to persuade them to relinquish to a central repository what foodstuffs they still had stuffed in their bags or had scavenged from the ship’s stores.

At least, the survey seemed to be going smoothly. Korg and a group of the more senior Asgardians had drawn up a basic questionnaire. With the aid of Korg’s disarming personality, the answers came quickly.

It seemed cruel to think it and Bruce would never voice his opinion in Thor’s presence, but there was an advantage to the low number of survivors. Once, before the Avengers, he had found himself caught up in the floods in Uttar Pradesh —hundreds of thousands people forced to flee their homes in a single night. For the first week and a half what few aid workers there were struggled to simply count the number of people fleeing the floodplains.

Three thousand were manageable. Maybe. Back in India, the government was inefficient, but assistance was forthcoming and there were international agencies to turn to if the situation escalated. Here, in open Space, they wouldn’t find the UNHCR or the World Food Program or the Red Cross. They had to manage with the scant resources they had.

Air. Shelter. Water. Food. Steve had once explained to him the Rule of Three, the rough guide the army used for the base prerequisites to survival. It didn’t take much to kill a human: three minutes without air, three hours without shelter, three days without water and three weeks without food.

Fortunately, the ship provided them with both air and shelter. If there were to remain on board for a prolonged period of time, there would be problems, but as long as the ship’s engines were working, Bruce thought he could manage the situation. A lack of food and water, on the other hand, could be the end of them all.

On the bed at the back of the room, Brandr shifted his limbs, but didn’t stir. He had run around all day either shadowing Thor or helping Korg. When the bulk of the work had been completed, Thor told the boy to come with them to the crew quarters that Thor and Loki took for themselves. Not a minute after the boy sat down, he had slumped to the side and drifted to sleep.

Thor pulled the blanket off the other bed in the room and draped it over the boy. He stood over Brandr for a long moment, then reached down and pulled a leaf out of the frizzy curls of the boy’s hair.

‘From a walnut tree, isn’t it?’ he said softly, holding the leaf up to the light.

Loki looked up from the screen of his portable datapad. ‘I think so.’

‘Do you remember in the gardens —’

‘Of course I do.’ Loki held out his hand and Thor reverently placed the left into his palm. ‘The leaf’s near dry, it must’ve been in his hair for a while.’

‘He’s an orphan. Who’s going to care if he brushes his hair every day?’ Thor replied.

Loki shook his head and closed his fingers around the leaf.

‘Don’t crush it,’ Bruce called out, clambering out of his chair. ‘The boy might want to keep it.’

‘Don’t come near me, Banner,’ Loki replied in the same terse tone used whenever he had to address Bruce.

Loki opened his hand to reveal the leaf now a healthy green as if it had just been plucked off the tree. He shifted his fingers a little and the leaf rose into the air. For a long moment it sat suspended in mid-air, then Loki whirled his hand around the leaf and encased it in a hollow glass ball about the size of a fist.

He offered it to Thor. ‘Here. I can’t regrow a tree out of a leaf, but he can keep it as a memento if he wants.’

‘That’s kind of you, Loki,’ Thor said, then motioned to the datapad. ‘Are you finished reading?’

‘Unfortunately,’ Loki answered. His voice was as cold as Bruce had ever heard it.

Bruce kneaded his hands, his mood sinking in pace with Loki and Thor’s deepening frowns. This was bad, really bad.

‘There’s barely enough to feed a pair of Bilgesnipes,’ Loki said, as he flicked the screen to the next page of the rudimentary inventory list Bruce and Kong had put together. ‘What there is, needs to be re-hydrated. It’s not safe to eat it in powdered form.’

Thor angled the datapad so he could see the screen too. ‘Re-hydrated or not, there’s simply not enough food. Bruce, are you certain this is everything we have aboard?’

‘Korg and I made sure we scoured every inch of this ship,’ Bruce replied.

Thor closed the inventory list and brought up a map in its place, but after staring at it for a second, he turned his back on the screen and began pacing the length of the room. Bruce glanced over to Loki, who had moved to a different screen and was examining the Statesman’s schematics. For well over a minute neither brother said a word.

Bruce sighed. Was he going to have to pry their thoughts out?

‘How long are we going to be out here?’ he asked. ‘A human can survive without food for three weeks. What about an Asgardian? You are hardier than we are.’

‘Asgardians also have to consume more calories per day than Midgardians,’ Loki replied. ‘From the food we have, we can feed everyone properly for a little over a week. Starvation rations would stretch things out, of course, but it hardly matters. The real problem is the water supply is simply insufficient.’

Bruce swore, took a deep breath, then went on, ‘Where are we at the moment? Can we stop and purchase more supplies?’

‘What would we pay with?’ Loki replied.

‘There’s no one to pay,’ Thor said darkly. He must have noticed how people when they saw him and had found himself a makeshift eyepatch to hide his disfigurement, but the patch also made him seem even more grim and menacing. ‘This sector of the universe is not a hospitable place; largely why Asgard relied on portals over spaceships. We are about to reach the Trelaxi System — four uninhabited gas giants and an asteroid belt formed from the collision of Trelaxi’s two rocky planets. Beyond that is Kroeri territory. They are a confederation of traders, but people are the only currency they value.’

Bruce walked over to the room’s porthole of a window and peered out into the boundless distance. He saw neither Trelaxi nor its remaining planets, only what looked like small boulders hurling past the Statesman. The force of Asgard’s destruction had sent debris spewing in every direction, travelling far faster than the Statesman was at present — Thor and Brunnhilde didn’t dare to push the engines to their full capacity.

How far would that debris travel, Bruce wondered, before it finally collided with something solid? Despite all that he had seen in the past few years, he was still unaccustomed to the true scale of the universe.

‘You didn’t answer my question,’ Bruce said. ‘How long until we reach a save planet? Where is this ship heading? We can’t plan how to ration what we have without knowing how long the supplies need to stretch.’

‘If we make it past Kroeri space, we will reach Alfheim. There are no wormholes or portals we can exploit, so about ten days,’ Thor answered.

Loki cleared his throat. ‘Alfheim is a bad idea. Last news we heard from them said Ljosalfheim was besieged and every tree in the Vale is cinders.’

‘Last I heard, the elves were about to sign a peace treaty to end the civil war,’ Thor replied.

‘They nearly did. In the final hours before the signing, the Lord Palatine was found murdered and that set off the chaos again.’ Loki folded his arms and leaned back into his chair, then jerked his head towards the wide desk in the centre of the room. ‘Shall we try the food? I haven’t eaten a thing since Sakaar.’

About half an hour before the engines had given in, Bruce had found a packet of bright purple chips that tasted like beef jerky and had scoffed them down. That had been more than twelve hours ago and he had a feeling Thor too had not eaten a thing all day. He lifted up the three lean packets that lay on the table. Silver packaging with an unfamiliar script was scrawled across both sides. There could be just about anything inside.

Korg had also brought up three metal bowls and a pitcher of water for them before disappearing back into the throng. Thor now lined up the bowls, ripped open the packets and tipped the powder inside in the bowls, then poured the water over the powder. The powder began to hiss and bubbled up.

‘So we will be ill-received on Alfheim,’ Thor said, prodding the bubbling mess in the bowls, which had turned an unappetizing light grey colour.

The prod must have satisfied his inquiry. He offered a bowl each to Loki and Bruce, then scooped a handful of grey mush out of the remaining one on the table. Bruce followed his lead and had to struggle not to gag. He had eaten some unpleasant things in his life, but this had to rank among the very worst. It was tepid, the same temperature as the water had been. Neither the texture nor the taste were palatable either. If he had to guess what it was, Bruce would have said it was shredded newspaper someone had attempted to froth up into a thin porridge and seasoned with fermented cat guts.

‘Ill-received is not how I’d describe it. The elves have become so paranoid, they will shoot down the ship the moment they spot us,’ Loki said.

After two mouthfuls, Thor pushed his bowl away and said. ‘If Alfheim is not the answer, we ought to head for Midgard.’

‘Earth?’ Bruce coughed. ‘How close are we to the Solar System?’

‘The wrong arm of the galaxy,’ Loki replied.

‘Four weeks at the current speed, although we should be able to coax some more power out of the engines.’ Thor brought up the bowl to his face and smelled its contents. ‘That’s truly foul.’

Loki’s face twisted with displeasure, but he ate his portion nevertheless. ‘We don’t have enough water,’ he said between mouthfuls. ‘And if the engines —’

‘It’s a cold death for everyone on this ship if the engines give out for good, I understand that,’ Thor cut him off.

‘I am not suggesting you don’t. Hear me out, Thor.’

Thor waved his hand in a gesture of acquiescence.

‘Have a look at the charts.’ Loki motioned towards the datapad and flicked the screen to display the map again. ‘The asteroid belt around Trelaxi. The planets might have crumbled, but the stuff they were composed of remains. We don’t need to buy water, we can mine it.’

‘Does this show the composition of the asteroids?’ Bruce asked. He temporarily abandoned his bowl and leaned over Loki’s shoulder to get a better vantage point.