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Star-Lord Lore

Quantum Slingshot

If you had to crash, thought Peter Quill, might as well do it in the middle of maybe a thousand other spaceships. Makes it easier to find parts, at least.

That's what Rocket was supposed to be doing, and maybe Groot too, but Quill wasn't too sure about Groot. He had kind of wandered off in the direction of the jungle that bordered the ship graveyard. For all Quill knew, he was communing with the local daisies and dahlias.

Quill hoped Groot wasn't anywhere close to the fire spreading through the ship graveyard. The flames weren't coming close to the Milano thankfully, which had churned up a good furrow of earth and scrap metal during its highly controlled and perfectly executed emergency landing. So, since he had pulled off a perfect landing after Rocket had screwed something up, Quill thought he should probably congratulate himself for making sure the Milano wasn't going to be burned by creating an excellent firebreak behind it. Not that Rocket would ever give him credit, nor would Groot ever notice.

"Man," Quill said. "It's not easy being a leader."

He said this while sighting down the barrel of one Element Gun at an approaching symbiote. This was the downside of crashing in a spaceship graveyard on the planet Klyntar. Lots of symbiotes who showed up to the new crash site with an appetite. He was picking them off as fast as he could, but even Star-Lord could only take them down so fast, and more and more of them showed up with each passing second. Quill was starting to resent Rocket for crashing the ship in the first place. On the other hand, what good did that do? Now Rocket was looking for parts, which was the right thing to do if he wanted to make up for his mistake. Accountability, Quill believed, was a big part of successful teamwork.

He picked off a trio of symbiotes crawling over the top of a huge amalgam of Skrull ship parts just to the north of the Milano. He had seen some of these critters on Earth and elsewhere in the galaxy, but not like these. Apparently if they bonded to humans, they became sort of human? But these, hoo boy, they were bonded to all kinds of aliens that even Peter Quill, who had been to more planets than he'd had hot meals, could recognize. And none of them seemed to like humans very much, to judge from how they kept trying to claw or chomp or shred him.

An alert went off inside the Milano around him. Quill dropped into the ship just in time to catch a symbiote coming up through the hatch. He popped it with both Element Guns, but not before it had gotten all the way in and wrapped a barbed tentacle around his leg. Swearing in a every language he knew, he blew the tentacle apart and limped over to slam the hatch shut. His leg hurt like a flerkin's kiss on the way back up to the top of the Milano's hull, but pain had to wait. Quill was going to protect his ship to the end.

A big explosion lit up the far end of the ship graveyard, over by a cluster of ancient buildings that rose up from the edge of the jungle. Looks like the fire's reached a ship with something combustible on board, Quill thought. Bits of flaming wreckage rained down around the buildings and nearer to the edge of the jungle.

Most of the symbiotes abandoned their siege of the Milano and took off toward the fire, which suited Quill just fine. It was a whole lot easier to fix a spaceship when you didn't have a horde of monsters trying to eat you, or whatever they were trying to do. He shot at them a little more while they were running off, then tried to get a hold of Rocket on the comm. Interference responded, which could have been background radiation, or some weird emission from the massive Celestial corpse floating around in near-Klyntar orbit, or anything else, really. Rocket was incommunicado, and Groot, well, Quill never knew how to get in touch with Groot.

Guess I'll keep working until they came back, he thought as he watched the fire for a minute to see whether it was coming his way. When it wasn't, he went below to see what he could do about getting this bucket of bolts back into orbit.

A couple of hours later, he was putting the finishing touches on his work when he heard noises from a nearby wreck. He scrambled up to the top of the Milano's hull and pointed Element Guns in that general direction — but instead of more symbiotes, he saw Rocket scrambling over the wrecked ships, with Groot right behind him.

"Quill!" Rocket shouted. "Give us a hand!?" Groot was carrying a huge armload of scrap tech just behind the raccoon.

"What, you took some time to go scavenging?" Quill asked. "What is all this garbage?"

"It's not garbage, you flarkin' dolt," Rocket said. "We fought like a hundred million of those monsters to get it, and now this scut is gonna get us out of here."

"Oh, I got that figured out already," Quill said. "Everything's all tuned up in the engines, except for —"

Rocket was already looking. "Except you don't have any shielding over the plasma exchangers."

Quill pointed out at the wrecks. "Plenty of shielding out there, genius."

"And how were you going to get enough thrust to get us off-planet if you diverted all the power to the hyperspace drive?" Rocket put one hand over his eyes, dropping some of his various bits he collected. Quill was used to Rocket thinking he was dumb. It was part of their relationship now. But this time, he had an answer. He pointed up.

"What?" Rocket demanded.

Quill stabbed a finger toward the sky.

Rocket looked.

"See that?" Quill prompted him. "The dead Celestial, orbiting in pieces up there?"

"Yeah, I see it," Rocket said. "So what?"

"I am Groot," Groot said.

"That's right," Quill said. "Slingshot. See, the reason I routed all of the power to the hyperspace drive is that we can do a quantum-displaced slingshot with the Celestial's remains. They come down, the Milano goes up, we make the hyperjump out of here, and we never have to come back to this hellhole ever again. Then we can repair the regular thrusters whenever we get around to it."

"You're kidding," Rocket said. "Gravity slingshot with the remains of a Celestial? That won't work, you know how many conditions need to be —."

"Not since we got that Nega-Energy Replicator from that doozy of a deal on Hala. And take a look!" Quill spread his arms. "Rocket, old pal, tell me what else we need that we can't find here."

Rocket was looking at Quill's work again, this time with a more appraising eye. "Uh huh," he said. "Quill, you've had a lot of scuzzy ideas in our time, but this one ain't half bad."

"As compliments go, that's pretty weak, but coming from you, I'll take it. Plus, it has the added benefit of raining Celestial pieces down on these symbiotes, who I have to say are not so good with hospitality."

"I am Groot." His massive companion dropped the junk in his arms and put a kind hand on his shoulder.

Quill nodded at Groot, then shot Rocket a look. "Now that was a real compliment."

"Only problem is," Rocket said, "if you don't have some kind of force dampening matrix powered up when you fire your slingshot, we'll all get to orbit in pieces. But that's totally cool, because I just so happen to have — by which I mean Groot just so happened to have dropped — a piece of equipment that will do the job."

"What?" Incredulous, Quill looked from Rocket to Groot and back. "How did you —?"

"How did I know? I didn't." Rocket guffawed. "I totally got it for another reason, but it will work here."

"I am Groot," Groot said.

"You had help from a friendly vine?" Quill echoed. "Sorry, Groot, but that's the most far-fetched thing I've heard since we got here. Nothing about this planet is friendly."

"I am Groot."

Quill turned to Rocket. "Seriously?"

"I saw it," Rocket said. "The vine helped him. Groot's a diplomat, if you didn't know."

Quill chose not process that idea at this moment, when a horde of symbiotes might show up again at any moment while they were trying to use the orbiting remains of a Celestial as a quantum anchor to slingshot themselves into orbit.

"I...okay," he said. "Groot's a diplomat and you just happened to pick up the one piece of equipment I didn't think of that's going to save all our lives while I was busy holding off a hundred thousand million symbiotes to get our ship ready for its possibly final voyage." Quill waited, hoping he sounded appropriately frustrated.

But either Rocket had missed the sarcasm, or just didn't care, because all he said was, "Lucky, right? Here, let's get it hooked up."

Quill sighed. For the second time that day, he was thinking about how hard it was to be a leader.