by Alex Irvine
Good advice, Tony thought. He decided not to cancel the party after all.
While the celebrities and other guests started to arrive downstairs, Tony was still up in his room. He had asked Jarvis to run another test on his RT, and the results were not encouraging. Tony stood there stewing until he heard Natalie coming out of one of the walk-in closets with an outrageously bright-colored tie. She looped it around his neck and started tying it. “Voilà,” she said, buttoning his collar and tightening the tie perfectly. “I’ll go downstairs and make sure everything is ready,” she said.
“You’re a gem,” Tony said.
A while later, Pepper walked into the party, taking in the huge crowd and the loud music. She sighed and made her way through the packed house, looking for Tony. She found him swaying by the DJ booth, wearing one of the Iron Man suits with the faceplate up. A cheering crowd rocked out in front of him.
This was too much. She turned right around and headed for the door just as Rhodey was coming from the driveway. “Hey, Pepper,” he said.
They both looked into the house and saw Tony, falling down and lurching back to his feet. “I can’t… I just don’t know what to do, Rhodey,” Pepper said. She bit her lip.
Rhodey was furious. “I’m gonna—”
Before he could go on, Pepper stopped him. “Let me handle it,” she said.
“I just stuck my neck out for this guy. You handle it or I’m going to,” Rhodey said.
Pepper headed for the stage, where Tony was about to give some kind of speech. She took the mike away from him and said, “We all thank you so much for such a wonderful night.” Tony started to talk to her away from the mike. She got him to agree and he took the mike back.
Then he said, “She’s right. The party’s over. The after-party starts in fifteen minutes… and if anybody doesn’t like it, there’s the door!” He pointed at the door and the repulsor in that gauntlet discharged, blasting the glass door into a million shards.
The crowd went wild. Feeding off their energy, Tony started shooting other things with the repulsors. Rhodey watched for another minute. Pepper stood where he had left her, shocked.
Decision time, Rhodey thought. He was about to do something that Tony might never forgive, but for the life of him, Rhodey couldn’t figure out what else to do.
He remembered Tony saying that what people needed was not more suits like his but more guys like him. Right now, Rhodey thought that one Tony Stark was plenty. More than enough, in fact.
But one Iron Man suit was not enough at all. Not nearly.
A few minutes later, Tony was rocking out, shooting fruit out of the air with his unibeam and riding a wave of pure abandon. Now this was a party. Natalie had been right!
Then a voice cut through the cheering. “I’m only gonna say this once.”
Everyone turned to see Colonel James Rhodes in a gleaming steel version of the Iron Man suit. They fell silent.
“Get out,” he said.
Everyone headed for the door, leaving Tony and Rhodey facing each other down. “You don’t deserve to wear one of these,” Rhodey said. “Shut it down.”
Tony turned to the DJ. “Give me a fat beat for when I beat my friend’s head in,” he said.
Then it was on. Rhodey grappled with Tony and with a thrust-assisted spring, Tony drove both of them backward. Their combined weight and momentum was too much for the wall, and they blew through it into the gym. Panicked guests streamed out of the house and gathered in the yard to watch.
They grappled in the boxing ring. Tony uprooted a corner post and swung; Rhodey got one of his own, and the two of them went at it like broadsword-wielding medieval knights until the posts broke. They crashed up through the ceiling, then back down into the living room, exchanging punches like heavyweights late in a match when all the technique was gone and both were running on pure rage. Happy led Pepper out into the back of the house. Natalie ran the other way, reaching for her phone.
Then Tony put Rhodey down with a final combination and a body slam into the base of the living room fountain.
He turned to see everyone watching.
Taking pictures of the complete lunatic he had become. He roared at them, just wanting them out. They ran.
Rhodey got up and leveled Tony from behind. Tony got up and they faced each other, repulsor gauntlets leveled. “You got what it takes to be a war machine?” Tony asked.
“Put it down,” Rhodey said.
“Take your shot, then!” Tony shouted.
“Put it down!” Rhodey repeated.
They fired simultaneously. The repulsor beams collided and lit off an explosion that blew out the back wall of the house in a huge ball of flame.
When it was over, Tony and Rhodey stood looking at each other. There was nothing else to say. Rhodey fired the boot rockets and lifted away into the night sky.
He flew away from the ruins of Tony’s house in the suit toward Edwards Air Force Base, knowing that his actions would change the nature of their friendship—maybe even end it. Forever.
He had wanted to believe Tony’s spiel about using the suit for the right reasons and protecting it from those who shouldn’t have access to that kind of technology. But Tony had let them all down. Rhodey could be sad and disappointed about it, but he knew his duty.
CHAPTER 29
It was morning. Tony didn’t like mornings, as a general rule. Warnings from Jarvis about palladium poisoning, and knowing Rhodey had betrayed him, made this particular morning worse. The only thing making it bearable was the box of jelly doughnuts he was currently stuffing into his face. While sitting in a much larger doughnut outside a landmark bakery in Los Angeles.
“Sir,” someone called from below. “I’m going to have to ask you to exit the doughnut.”
Tony looked down. The speaker was a stern-looking man with an eye patch and a black leather jacket.
“Oh, brother,” Tony said. “Didn’t I kick you out of my house once already?” This same guy—Nick Fury, that was his name—had showed up wanting to talk about some kind of secret project. Avengers something. Tony had plenty of secret projects of his own going on. He didn’t need anyone else’s.
But he could use a cup of coffee. He dropped down and they went inside to a table.
“I told you I don’t want to join your super secret boy band,” he said.
“Oh, no no no, I remember, you do everything yourself. How’s that working out for you?”
Tony evaded the question. “I’m sorry, I don’t want to get off on the wrong foot. Do I look at the patch or the eye? I’m not sure if you’re real or…”
“I am very real,” Fury said. “I’m the realest person you’re ever gonna meet.”
“Just my luck. Where’s the staff here?” Tony asked.
Fury pulled down Tony’s collar to look at the marks on his neck. “That’s not looking too good,” he said.
“Been worse,” Tony said, even though it wasn’t true.
Then Natalie came walking up. She was wearing a bodysuit in the same design as Fury’s trench coat, with visible S.H.I.E.L.D. emblems on it. “We’ve secured the perimeter. But I don’t think we should hold it for too much longer.”
She’d infiltrated him. Looking at her, Tony said, “You’re… fired.”
“That’s not up to you,” she said, and sat next to Fury across from him in the booth.
“Tony, meet Agent Romanoff,” Fury said.
This was too much. S.H.I.E.L.D. was putting the hard sell on Tony, and he didn’t like it. “What do you want from me?”
“You’ve become a problem for me,” Fury said. He went on, and as Tony tried to ignore him, Natalie—Agent Romanoff—came around the table and stuck a needle in his neck.
“Ow! What did you just do to me?” Tony said.
“What did we just do for you,” Fury corrected. “Lithium dioxide. It’ll take the edge off the palladium poisoning. We’re trying to get you back to work.”
“I’ve tried every conceivable
combination and permutation to replace palladium in the RT. Believe me.”
“Well, I’m here to tell you you haven’t tried them all,” Fury said.
“We were going to have this conversation sometime,” said the bald-headed man. “Now seems like a good time.”
Tony shook his head. “Not interested. I have a lot on my mind.” He turned his attention back to his doughnuts.
After a while, Fury put something on the table while still looking Tony in the eye. Tony glanced down and saw a roll of sixteen-millimeter film and a manila envelope. He opened the envelope. Inside it was a black-and-white photograph of a fortyish man taken sometime in the 1950s or early ’60s, if the surrounding tech was anything to judge by.
“Who’s this?” he asked.
“Anton Vanko,” Fury said. “He worked with your dad.”
Whiplash’s father! This was a curveball. “I didn’t see this in my files, or my dad’s” was all Tony could think of to say.
“Because it was in our files.” Fury paused to let that sink in. “Your father saw the future. Which is why he came and worked for us.”
“What do you mean?” Tony asked.
“Sometimes people are born before the world is ready for them,” Fury replied. “Leonardo da Vinci invented the helicopter before anyone had even predicted flight. Howard Stark made a few predictions, too. He was just born way too early to execute them. The world had to play catch-up.”
Tony knew his father was a genius. But to hear Howard Stark mentioned in the same breath as Leonardo da Vinci… Tony wasn’t sure how to react, and he also wasn’t sure what Fury meant the comparison to convey.
Fury tapped a finger on the film canister and said, “And now the world has just caught up.” Fury stood. “That’s where you come in. And if you don’t, someone else will.”
CHAPTER 30
Justin Hammer installed Ivan in a secret laboratory in California. He could hardly believe his good luck. One week earlier, he had been working in two rooms with illegally tapped power and a computer he’d scrounged from someone else’s trash. Now he was looking at an entire floor of top-quality computers and tools. He had everything he needed for smelting, machining, welding, wiring, plating, microwave circuit manufacture.… If my father had been given the use of a lab like this, Ivan thought, he would have changed the world.
Stark had taken away that glory. Ivan Vanko would reclaim it.
Much of the lab’s floor space was taken up by long rows of gleaming metal drones, humanoid in shape and visibly armed. His task was to outfit each of them with an RT. But before he could do that, he had needed to know how they were put together. So he’d taken one apart, down to each circuit, and he had realized that they would work better with one thing removed: the pilot.
So since Hammer had left him to work a few days before, Ivan had reconfigured each of the armored suits into drones that could be operated remotely and independently without a pilot. Now they were much more efficient, much more deadly. The drones were his soldiers. They still needed some work, but they would do nicely.
Hammer, however, didn’t agree. When he stopped into the lab to see how Ivan was doing, Hammer threw a fit when he saw that there was no longer space for a human operator. “This isn’t a helmet,” he said, holding one of the drones’ heads. “It’s a head. What are you doing, Ivan?”
“Drone better,” Ivan said.
“Why is drone better?”
“People make problem,” Ivan said.
Hammer didn’t like this. “I need suits. The government wants suits. That’s what the people want. That’s what’s going to make ’em happy.”
Ivan just looked at him. Hammer handed the drone head back to him. “These drones better steal the show, Ivan,” he said. “They better rock my world.”
Ivan said nothing, and Hammer left him alone again, which was what he had wanted all along. Hammer still thought he was in charge, but now this was Ivan Vanko’s lab and he would do things his way.
One of these drones, Ivan thought, will be the last thing Tony Stark ever sees.
Unless—and this was the only more desirable possibility—the last thing Stark saw was the apparatus Ivan Vanko was building for himself.
Sitting outside his ruined house, Tony talked with Fury because Fury wouldn’t leave him alone. Also, the shot had done him some good, and Tony wondered what other tricks Fury might have up his sleeve.
“That thing in your chest is based on an unfinished technology,” Fury was saying. “Howard was onto something big, so big that it was going to make the nuclear reactor look like a triple-A battery.”
“Just him, or was Anton Vanko part of it?”
“Anton was the other side of that coin. Anton saw it as a way to get rich. When your father found out he was trying to sell the tech to other parties, he had him deported. Vanko spent the next twenty years in a vodka-fueled rage. Not the best environment for a kid… but you met him already.”
Tony remembered Ivan slashing at him with the plasma whips. No wonder he was so angry. “So what do you want me to do?”
“Your father always said you were the one who could create the future,” Fury said. “That means you can solve the riddle of your heart.”
Tony did not believe this for a single moment. “Listen, I don’t know what you heard, but my dad wasn’t my biggest fan. The happiest day of his life was when he shipped me off to boarding school.”
“That’s not true,” Fury said.
“Oh really? Then you must have known him better than I did.”
“As a matter of fact, I did,” Fury said. “He was one of the founding members of S.H.I.E.L.D.”
“What?”
But Fury was done talking. Two of his men brought Tony a metal crate. “I’m leaving Natasha here with her cover intact,” he said. Pointing to another S.H.I.E.L.D. agent, he added, “And you know Agent Coulson. Remember: I got my eye on you,” Fury said. Then he left Tony to work. Agent Romanoff informed him he was cut off from the outside world.
“If you attempt to leave, I will Tase you and watch TV while you drool into the carpet,” Coulson said.
“I think I got it,” Tony said. After that, there was nothing to do but open the crate.
At Edwards Air Force Base, a staff sergeant gathered a select group of the air force’s best and brightest combat engineers around the Mark II armor. Rhodey, with Major Allen at his left, stood next to it.
“What you will be weaponizing,” Rhodey told the assembled team, “is a flying prototype of the Iron Man Mark II, for the purposes of an offensive footing.”
“Yes, sir,” the engineers said, more or less in unison. They approached it, wrenches and screwdrivers in hand. One of them picked up the helmet.
As the engineers got to work, Justin Hammer slammed in through the machine shop door. “You have got to be kidding me!” he exclaimed. “I got here as quickly as I could.”
Rhodey shook hands with Hammer and said, “You think you can hook it up?”
Hammer’s men were bringing in an array of crates and setting them near the Mark II. He winked and popped the lid off the closest crate while his men opened the rest. They contained a huge array of weapons.
Rhodey looked it all over: Gatling cannons, mini-rockets, even what looked like a miniature cruise missile. “I think I’ll take it,” he said, after a brief—and calculated—pause.
“Which one?” Hammer asked.
“All of ’em,” Rhodey said on his way out of the hangar. He didn’t like what was happening. His commanders wanted to display the new suit at the Stark Expo, and Rhodey thought it should be kept as a last resort. It wasn’t something to make theater out of. But that wasn’t up to him. He was a soldier, and he would follow orders.
The crate Fury left was full of Howard Stark’s records and personal items. There were newspaper clippings, blueprints, sketches, all kinds of stuff… including a roll of sixteen-millimeter film. As it happened, Tony was a collector of outdated technologies—including a
n old sixteen-millimeter film projector. Tony spooled the film and started it up. It was an outtake from a promotional film for the Expo, the same one Tony had shown a couple of weeks before.
“Everything is achievable through technology,” Tony’s father began again. “I’m Howard Stark, and everything you’ll need for the future can be found right here.…” He trailed off and started over again, repeating that line. In the background, a six-year-old version of Tony appeared, fooling around with a scale model of the Stark Expo. “Tony, what are you doing there?” Howard chased him away and started over again, repeating his first line. Howard kept forgetting his lines and ad-libbing.
Tony started to ignore the film as he leafed through some of his father’s notebooks, dense with mathematical formulas and lab notations. Then, from the screen, his father said, “Tony. You’re too young to understand some of this, so I thought I’d put it on film for you.”
That got his attention.
“I built this for you,” his father went on. “And someday you’ll realize it represents a lot more than just people’s inventions. This is the key to the future. I’m limited by the technology of my time, but one day you’ll figure this out, and then you’ll change the world. What is and always will be my greatest creation… is you.”
Tony looked harder now. He played the film back, his father’s words ringing in his mind.…
And there it was!
Tony jammed a pen into one of the projector’s spindles, stopping the film. Focusing on the puzzle his father had sent him, Tony wound the filmstrip back manually, frame by frame, until he saw it again.
The key was in the Expo model. Something about the arrangement of the buildings… it went with what his father was saying. Tony wound the film slowly enough that he could see each of the still frames and check the tiny differences between them.
There. Tony leaned forward, tracing his finger along the edge of the frame.
At the moment Howard Stark was saying “the future,” the Expo’s structures looked as though they were arranged in a way that almost might be… elemental.