by Alex Irvine
Tony got up and headed for his car. Got it, Dad, he thought.
CHAPTER 31
To get his model of the Stark Expo, he had to go to his office. That meant he had to talk to Pepper, which did not go well. Tony took everything she handed out. He deserved all the anger. Then she left and he hauled the model out of his car and down into the lab. “Jarvis, I need a rendering of this,” he said.
When that was done, Tony flipped it vertical, stripped all the extra stuff out of it, and lo and behold… he was looking at an atom that did not exist in the real world.
“Twenty years later, Dad, and you’re still taking me to school,” he said. But he wasn’t angry anymore. Seeing his father talking to him through the film had affected him in ways it would take a long time to process.
“That element will be an adequate replacement for palladium,” Jarvis said. “However, it is impossible to synthesize here.”
“Then we’re going into remodeling mode,” Tony said.
Three hours later, he was ready.
Manipulating elements and breaking their chemical bonds to each other took a lot of energy, so Tony had rigged up a crazy system to ramp up enough power. The parts included a high-energy laser array; a set of mirrors designed to focus the lasers on a single, specific point in space; a cube of pure glass whose position in space included the specific focal point of the set of mirrors; and, finally, a centrifuge designed to initiate high-energy chemical reactions. The system was complicated, but so was molecular engineering. It was, more or less, a particle accelerator, but the output would be a beam of energy at a certain frequency that would—if his math was right—create the new element.
He ran checks, and everything seemed ready. The only thing left to do was run the experiment and see if he could create a new molecule in his basement.
He had to pause because Agent Coulson came in to give him a mild hard time for leaving… and to notify Tony that he’d been reassigned to New Mexico. “Land of enchantment,” Tony commented, remembering the state motto.
“So they say,” Coulson said. He started to leave and then paused. “We need you.”
“More than you know,” Tony said.
Coulson gave him a tolerant smile and left the lab.
The laser array flared to life, first in a deep red and then modulating in frequency well up into the ultraviolet range.
Time to really see if he could make a new element. “Fingers crossed,” Tony said.
The centrifuge hit its target acceleration. A laser beam burst out of the lens and deflected through a prism. Tony turned the beam slowly, burning away various bits of furniture and parts of the wall, until it targeted the focus plate of raw material he was hoping to transform into the heart of a new Arc Reactor.
When the laser hit it, the whole piece flared to life. Even through his goggles, Tony couldn’t look at it directly. Energy crackled around it like a concentrated local burst of lightning.
Tony held his breath. The lasers had gone cold, the accelerator had spun down to silence, and the circular focus plate had a fiercely glowing triangle at its center.
“That was easy,” he said.
“Congratulations, sir. You’ve created a new element,” Jarvis said.
Tony put it into the existing Arc Reactor. It beeped and flickered. “Sir, the reactor has accepted the new core. I will begin running diagnostics.”
Tony exhaled, long and slow. Well, he thought. I guess I owe Fury a thank-you card.
Hammer called Ivan to tell him he was playing golf with Senator Stern. “I’m going to bring him by. What can you show him?”
“Drones not ready.”
“What do you mean, not ready?”
“Will be ready for Expo. Not for demonstration.”
“What can you do now?”
“No fly, no shoot.”
“Well, what can you make them do?”
“Can salute.”
Hammer hung up. Ivan got back to work. He had lied to Hammer. The drones were fine. But he was working on something he didn’t want Hammer to see… the next generation of his plasma whips. Because he had his own plans for the Stark Expo.
Thirty minutes later Hammer came into the lab with a pair of his goons. They took Ivan’s shoes. They took his pillows. Hammer insulted him.
And they took the bird.
“You feel bad?” Hammer asked. “Good, because I feel bad! But you got lucky, because I got a piece of Stark technology for the Expo. It’s going to make your drones look like paperweights. How does that make you feel?”
Ivan just sat there. His moment would come. He was not afraid of men like Justin Hammer, because they were too stupid to be afraid of men like him.
The rest of it he could forgive, but not taking the bird. She was innocent.
“I’m gonna leave now and go to the Expo. These guys are going to be your babysitters. They are not to be trifled with. When I get back, we’re going to renegotiate the terms of your contract.”
A few hours’ work produced a functioning new triangular Arc Reactor and a sleeve that would fit the new RT inside the existing socket in Tony’s chest. He was running preliminary tests when Jarvis said, “Call incoming.”
Tony set the new RT down. “What do you want?” he said, not caring who it was on the other end.
Then he heard the voice of Ivan Vanko.
“Tony. Good advice about double cycles,” he said.
“You sound pretty sprightly for a dead man.”
“You too. Today the true history of the Stark name will be written.”
“Jarvis, where is he?” Tony asked quietly.
Vanko didn’t hear. “What your father did to my family forty years ago, I do to you in forty minutes.”
“Sounds good. Let’s get together and hash it out.”
Jarvis pinpointed Vanko’s location.
That could only mean one thing. He was headed for the Expo if they couldn’t cut him off first.
No time for testing. He stood up and put the new RT in. It blazed in his chest and for a moment Tony thought it was killing him. “Whoa,” he said. The power of the new element surged through the connection between the RT and his heart. Was he glowing? It was hard to tell, he couldn’t really see.…
CHAPTER 32
Agent Romanoff was sick of playing Natalie, but Fury had said Pepper Potts was not to know of her undercover infiltration. So here she was, with a headset and a clipboard, waiting around the entrance to the Tent of Tomorrow for Pepper to show up. Hammer’s demonstration was due to start in five minutes.
The Tent of Tomorrow was actually an open auditorium space under a soaring glass roof, with a high-tech stage and an even higher-tech backstage setup. The backstage area swarmed with Hammer Industries tech personnel making last-minute adjustments to their demonstration. The seats were packed except a few chairs reserved for VIPs.
Romanoff scanned the crowd again.
“Ms. Potts!” she called out. Pepper and Happy saw her and started in her direction. “I’ll show you to your seats,” Romanoff said. Her phone rang, and she answered it without looking at the number. “Natalie Rushman.”
“Ivan’s up to something,” Tony said before she finished answering. “He called me from a lab.”
There was the barest of pauses. “Yes, Ms. Potts has just arrived,” Romanoff said briskly. “Okay. I’ll be right there.”
She must already be at the Expo, Tony thought as Natasha hung up. Good. Maybe she could get S.H.I.E.L.D. personnel to slow Whiplash down until Tony could suit up and get there.
CHAPTER 33
Back at the Expo, Pepper watched Justin Hammer take the stage and begin his show. He danced out to a funky intro, then got a little more serious after his first welcoming remarks.
“In a truly perfect world, men and women of the United States military would never have to set foot on the battlefield again.” Music built, and Hammer stepped around to the lip of the stage. “Ladies and gentlemen, today we cross the threshold into�
�� a perfect world.”
Red, white, and blue smoke erupted around the stage as four lines of armored soldiers marched into the Tent of Tomorrow and stopped in formation along the sides of the stage. An announcer boomed out the name of each branch of service as its members appeared in turn: “Army! Navy! Air Force! Marines!”
When they met in their formation, slowly and in unison, the thirty-two soldiers pivoted and raised their right arms in salute.
And that was when Pepper—along with everyone else in the Tent of Tomorrow—realized that these were not armored soldiers.
They were walking, synchronized, remote-controlled drones.
Pepper had never heard a noise as loud as the roar of approval from the crowd. Each group of drones represented a service branch. The air force drones were equipped to fly, with winglike additions to every limb and active control surfaces along their backs. The army drones were squat and loaded with heavy weaponry. The marine contingent looked leaner and faster, ready to storm a beach right then and there. And the navy drones stood streamlined and potent, midnight blue, bristling with missiles.
“Better than some cheerleaders, let me tell you. But today I am proud to present to you the Variable Threat Response Battle Suit, and its pilot, James Rhodes!”
From under the stage, a platform rose to reveal War Machine, shining silver in the spotlights. Pepper caught her breath. A million flashbulbs went off. The appearance of War Machine took the crowd’s collective breath away.
Then, with timing so precise that Pepper later would wonder whether he had planned his arrival this way, Iron Man rocketed down through the hole in the roof in his new Mark VI suit, complete with a new triangular RT.
Whatever Hammer felt at seeing Tony crash his big party, he was a showman, and he rolled with it. “And that’s not all!” Hammer said. “Here, ladies and gentlemen, is our very special surprise guest: Iron Man!”
Tony waved to the crowd while he popped open a communications channel from his heads-up display to Rhodey’s heads-up display inside the War Machine suit. “There are civilians present,” Rhodey said. “Let’s not do this right now.”
“All these people are in danger,” Tony said. “We’ve got to get them out of here. I think Hammer’s working with Vanko.”
“Vanko’s alive?” Rhodey said incredulously.
Tony turned to Hammer. “Where’s Vanko?”
“What are you doing here, man?” Hammer snapped. He looked like a guy whose girlfriend’s ex had just crashed his party.
Then Rhodey said, “Whoa, whoa,” and as Tony looked back at him, the War Machine armor’s shoulder Gatling cannon locked into firing position. Aimed at Tony.
“Get out of here! Go! This whole system’s been compromised!” Rhodey shouted.
Vanko, thought Tony. The drones, all thirty-two of them, also went into battle-ready postures.
“Let’s take it outside,” Tony said, and shot off into the air.
A fusillade of drone fire followed him. A moment later, so did War Machine and the air force drones. “Tony, I have target lock,” Rhodey said.
“On what?”
“On you!” Cannon fire raked Tony’s armor as he jerked and wove over the Expo.
Pepper and Natalie went looking for Justin Hammer. He was going to give Pepper some answers. She was determined about that. She hadn’t heard what passed between Hammer and Tony onstage, but clearly things were out of Hammer’s control.
“Go away,” he said when he saw them. “I can handle this.”
“Can you really?” she asked. “Doesn’t look like it.”
“I can handle this. If your guy hadn’t showed up, none of this would have—”
He never got to finish because quicker than Pepper could follow, Natalie had Hammer in an armlock and had slammed him down onto the closest desk. “Who’s behind this?” she shouted in his ear. “Who?”
“Ivan,” Hammer said when she gave his arm a little extra twist. “Ivan Vanko.”
“Where is he?”
“He’s at my facility.”
Natalie went to find Happy.
Tony led Rhodey and the air force drones on a chase over the Expo grounds. The army, marine, and navy drones marched out through the Tent of Tomorrow’s front entrance and started firing at anything they judged to be a target. Tony ducked low and destroyed an army drone, then said, “Let’s get this off the Expo grounds.”
The marine drones launched into the air, doubling the pursuit. “Rhodey, you still locked on?”
“Yeah,” Rhodey said.
“Okay, pull up your socks,” Tony said. “This one’s about to get wet.”
They blasted low over the reflecting pools, kicking up huge rooster tails with the army and marine drones tight on them. He peeled into a high loop, trying to keep the air force drones close and keep their fields of fire angled away from the crowds. He hoped to spring a little surprise when the time was right.
Tony wasn’t sure which feature of the Expo was his favorite: the two-hundred-foot-tall steel globe called the Unisphere, reconstructed from the original built for the first Stark Expo, or the reflecting pool. A massive Stark logo stood out above the Unisphere’s continents, angling from south to north across its equator.
He flew in a high arc over the lake, War Machine hot on his trail. They’d already seen the reflecting pool, he thought. So why not the Unisphere?
Rhodey broke in. “What’s going on up there, man?”
The Unisphere loomed in his sights, and the drones were closing in on his tail again.
But War Machine was closer. Tony ran a targeting projection on the Unisphere, calculating an approach that would get him through it as it rotated without colliding with its longitudinal I beams.
“This might hurt,” he said to Rhodey.
“What? No, you are not—”
The way Tony had it figured, War Machine was tight enough on his burners that if Tony got through, so would Rhodey. The Unisphere rotated slowly.
The Mark VI Iron Man suit flew through a gap in the rotating sphere, with War Machine close behind. Tony’s calculations were correct: He and Rhodey got through safely. The air force drones, however, didn’t.
CHAPTER 34
The Expo was in chaos. Tony thundered overhead, low enough that Pepper felt the wind of his passage. Firing wildly, the air force drones came close behind, with Rhodey an unwilling passenger in their midst. Around Pepper, the world dissolved into explosions. She dropped to her knees. When everything had passed, she looked around again, amazed to still be alive. She’d stayed to make sure Justin Hammer left in handcuffs. Now that was done and she decided she needed to stay until the park was clear. That’s what she told the police officers doing crowd control.
But what she really wanted was to call Tony. She’d been trying to coordinate Jarvis’s efforts to break Vanko’s control over the drones, and Rhodey, but so far nothing had worked.
Coming in low and hot back over the lake, Tony was shocked when he was jerked downward as War Machine caught up with him and wrenched him off course. They both scraped along the side of a building, peeling off a floor’s worth of windows and a long line of steel framing.
They shot clear of the building, out toward the edge of the Expo grounds. Tony braked hard, pivoting him and War Machine around their collective center of gravity. War Machine’s grip on him loosened, and Tony took the opportunity to fling War Machine—with the unfortunate Rhodey inside, yelling all kinds of things—into the reflecting pool.
But Agent Romanoff was saying something he couldn’t hear, and the War Machine armor suddenly went inert. Uh-oh, Tony thought. He landed next to Rhodey and heard Romanoff saying, “Reboot complete. You got your best friend back.”
“Thank you very much, Agent Romanoff,” he said. That was one more thing he hadn’t known about her. She was apparently a hacker with serious chops, if she could do that faster than Jarvis.
“Well done with the new chest piece,” she added. “I’m reading significantl
y higher output, and your vitals all look promising.”
“Yes, for the moment, I’m not dying. Thank you.”
Pepper had apparently been listening in, because her face appeared in Tony’s heads-up display practically as soon as he said the word dying. “What do you mean, you’re not dying? Did you just say you were dying?”
“That you? Uh, no, I’m not. Not anymore.”
“What’s going on?” she demanded.
“I was going to tell you. I didn’t want to alarm you,” Tony said.
Her voice started to pitch higher. “You were going to tell me? You really were dying?”
“You didn’t let me,” Tony protested. “I was gonna make you an omelette and tell you!”
Agent Romanoff broke back in. “Hey, hey, save it for the honeymoon. You got incoming, Tony. Looks like the fight’s coming to you.”
“Great,” Tony said. “Pepper?”
“Are you okay now?”
“I am fine,” Tony said. “Don’t be mad. I will formally apologize—”
“I am mad.”
“—when I’m not fending off a Hammeroid attack,” Tony finished.
“Fine,” she said in a voice that told him it was definitely not fine.
“We could have been in Venice,” he said, remembering their conversation on the plane. That had been the first time he’d meant to tell her about the palladium poisoning.
She rolled her eyes. “Oh, please.”
A moment later, War Machine’s faceplate flipped up. “Man, you can have your suit back,” Rhodey said.
Tony couldn’t help but laugh. But they didn’t laugh for long. There were more drones to handle, and they were closing in.
CHAPTER 35
They heard a rumble, and blossoms began to shake loose from the trees. The rumble grew louder, its vibrations coming up through the soles of their boots. The remaining drones had arrived. They landed in a precise pattern, creating crossfire but keeping each other out of the planned field of fire. A missile rack opened out of an army drone’s shoulders and snapped into position.