While Daisy was internally ranking the women she'd met, the maid gave her a discreet nudge with her elbow. Daisy caught herself, shook Susan's hand, and made her own introduction. The two were officially acquainted.
Susan was easy to talk to, and Daisy had spent enough time absorbing Obama's speeches and public presence that she could now hold a conversation with a complete stranger for half an hour without effort. It helped that Daisy knew Susan's father—Franklin Storm lived out on Long Island, not far from Daisy's villa. Susan herself had been born there. Common ground made the conversation easy, and the distance between them closed quickly.
Susan had apparently found the synthetic suit slightly constricting. The zipper at her collar wasn't quite closed to regulation height, leaving one-third of the curve of her chest exposed, along with her whole neck.
With Daisy's height advantage, not noticing was almost harder than noticing.
"Wait—you?" A broad-shouldered young man walked past, started to say something to Susan, then did a double take at Daisy.
Once the story of their previous acquaintance came out, Susan smoothly made the introductions: "This is my brother, Johnny Stone. And this is Miss Daisy Johnson."
With Susan as the common denominator, the awkwardness between Daisy and Johnny dissolved quickly. They were talking within minutes.
You had to admire whatever hand genetics had dealt the Storm siblings. The sister was stunning—the kind of woman men idealized. The brother was bright-eyed, athletic, and effortlessly charming—the kind of man who drew the same reaction from women. Both of them were, offensively, blessed.
"Daisy, honestly—you should work on your fitness a little. You're a bit frail." Johnny had already graduated to first names, the familiarity coming naturally. He delivered the line in the knowing tone of a personal trainer offering professional advice, having apparently taken the "frail constitution" excuse at face value.
The maid bit back a laugh—she'd sized up Johnny's build and found it genuinely impressive, but he had no idea that the "fragile" woman he was gently coaching could lift ten tons with her bare hands.
Susan, to her credit, wasted no time. A few sharp words sent Johnny packing, after which she smiled pleasantly and resumed walking Daisy through the launch preparations.
It was Daisy's first time at Kennedy Space Center. Everything here felt fresh. She knew NASA had its share of HYDRA operatives—their objective was recovering the ancient Inhuman leader, a parasite hive entity called Hive. By her estimate, the HYDRA cell here operated at roughly the same level of independence as Alexander Pierce's faction: well-resourced, locally autonomous, its own power base.
She tracked Reed down again. He confirmed he'd be carrying the two suits bearing their names—the full spacesuits were too bulky for personal luggage, but the synthetic fiber suits he could manage.
He mentioned, as a point of clarification, that as a scientific observation mission they'd be working inside the station, not doing spacewalks. The spacesuits were on board as a precaution; the actual working attire would be the synthetic suits. He held up the two he'd been given to carry—identical to the ones he and Susan were wearing now, each tagged with their names: Daisy and Maki.
He also showed her the pack he'd use to carry them, promising it would go into space with him.
Susan, after understanding Daisy's intention, openly approved of the idea—and offered to carry the bag herself—Reed's schedule during the mission would be packed, and lugging extra gear would only slow him down.
As long as the fabric was the same composition, it didn't matter whether they were spacesuits or the working suits. Either would absorb the radiation Daisy was after.
With nothing left to do there, the two of them excused themselves rather than continue disrupting Reed, who was already being pulled in six directions at once.
Susan said her goodbyes too—there was still a great deal of pre-launch preparation ahead.
"Should we head back?" the maid asked quietly, glancing around.
Daisy considered it. Standing around here now served no purpose.
"Let's go." They slipped out through an unobserved exit and jumped back to New York.
"Time to enter the market," she told the maid once they'd returned.
You didn't need to be a genius to see the math: the moment that station failed, Doom Industries' stock would be worthless. Daisy put her position clearly. "There's a high chance something happens to them—today, if I had to call it. Entering now costs us something, but earlier is better than later. The outcome is worth the friction."
The maid agreed without hesitation. In her mind, Daisy had almost certainly done something to the supercomputer—created a technical edge that made this a manufactured opportunity. She had no objections to that. She simply smiled with quiet understanding and walked off in her heels to set it all in motion.
Daisy made her way back to the S.H.I.E.L.D. facility. The technical teams and equipment there would give her far better access to real-time data from space than sitting around at Kennedy ever would.
Then it happened.
At 3:00 PM that same afternoon—forty-five minutes after Reed's team entered the space station—the cosmic rays entered Earth's orbit seven hours ahead of schedule.
"Oh god—"
Fitz. Simmons. Half the technical division. They'd all been following the mission, and when the storm swept through the station, the whole room went silent.
"Can someone calculate where the station will come down?" Daisy's relationship with the technical division was different from Victoria Hand's—she understood the work, and the young scientists here responded to that. They didn't need a rank order to listen to her.
A station destroyed by a cosmic storm, falling toward Earth—S.H.I.E.L.D. needed to know the impact zone.
Fitz and the others scrambled to connect to the S.H.I.E.L.D. supercomputer, each taking a section of the calculation, working at speed.
When the station was half-destroyed, completely off its original trajectory, and streaking toward Earth like a meteor, the calculations resolved.
"It'll come down in the South Pacific."
The room went quiet for a different reason now. Billions of dollars of hardware—and Reed Richards, the closest thing the modern world had to a scientific renaissance man—almost certainly lost. Turned to cosmic dust. That was the prevailing opinion among S.H.I.E.L.D. agents. More than a few murmured something along those lines.
Daisy offered a quiet expression of regret. Just long enough. Then she walked out of the science division, turned a corner, and jumped directly back to her New York villa.
She pulled out a spacesuit. Whatever radiation still clung to the station debris was an unknown quantity—better careful. Then she took out the specialized containment case—a metal-alloy box that would block the radiation from the two suits she needed. A precaution.
A sequence of jumps brought her to the section of the South Pacific that Fitz's team had calculated. It didn't take long to find the wreckage.
The station's hull had been scoured by the storm, then partially incinerated on reentry. The exterior was charred to black. There was no hatch. There was nothing that could reasonably be called a door.
Not a serious obstacle. She'd seen the station's internal schematics. She did the calculations and jumped directly inside.