Before the Storm
The talk with FRIDAY had gone better than expected. His baby girl had been relieved to have an explanation and assurance that he wasn't going to disappear on her again.
A similar discussion with Pepper... not so much. If he'd had doubts about their separation being permanent before.... well, those doubts were gone, now. (They were still friends, but she had put up with so. much. weirdness. in his life already he was not going to admit he feared it might be the last straw...)
Happy had been stoicly freaked out by meeting Queen Hela, but not treating him like he's insane, so... good enough.
Rhodey had made a comment about him being 'mostly dead all day', (FRIDAY did NOT find this amusing) and they'd watched the Princess Bride.
(FRIDAY still does NOT find it amusing.)
Also on the plus side, Ross had finally been completely ousted from the Accords Oversight Committee. The Russian and German ambassadors had teamed up with Brazil and Uganda (much to their surprise, given that neither the Avengers nor Ross had ever invaded their country) to have the former General incarcerated while under formal review. The move had almost completely sidelined the United States' influence on the Committee for the duration (which the President had griped about... oh well. Not Tony's problem, and he was willing to continue to be 'out of commission' a while longer to keep from being dragged into it if need be.)
Which would kinda suck since he'd finally been cleared for *limited* real work. He was restricted to no more than four hours at a time, and at least an hour spent resting between those four hour blocks, but he could work with that. It's not like he hadn't spent weeks researching, planning and designing. Having the fabrication arrays running wasn't physically taxing on him, and he could make efficient use of a four hour window.
(FRIDAY would soon have the best and most secure servers in existence.)
Friday contemplated her revenge. it had taken18 hours to verify Boss lived, every 18 hours she had added a clip of security footage showing the Avengers mistreating Boss to a file as just compiling, sorting and saving information didn't run against any of the restrictions she had been under. Similarly, she was always able to search for relevant information to a project, and as Boss did charge her with tracking and assisting the Avengers, surveillance was well within her purview. Even old footage. (so there)
Now that Boss was definitely going to recover and one of his biggest concerns was eliminated, she felt like it was time to move on to the next step.
The compressed file had been saved on the computer of a former SHIELD data analyst whose daughter, son in law and infant granddaughter died when the Carriers fell. She was burned in the data dump, but with her remaining family already dead, was able to go to ground and disappear. The former Agent was frequently at StarkBucks, using their free wifi to analyze the Avengers and plot their demise. She hadn't found the file, yet, hidden among the OS folders, but it was time.
FRIDAY composed an email, with a link to the folder, suggestions on upgrading firewalls (SHIELD's files were all over the internet; anyone could find out about their security protocols) and an offer to help her make good use of the information to utterly destroy the Rogues.
Ten days after Ross's removal, Tony called T'Challa, asking for a consultation as the young King was making no move to provide any sort of information on the Rogues. Tony knew they were there, and not just from Hela's confirmation. Aside from T'Challa turning Zemo in, FRIDAY had tracked the stolen quinjet's transponder signal to the Wakanda border on a trajectory to continue into Wakanda. She lost the signal at the border. With no one to report it to (Tony being in a coma) FRIDAY had merely logged it as one more piece of evidence.
He'd tried to politely broach the subject, asking for details of Zemo's apprehension and had been brushed off.
An attempt to follow up had been ignored, prompting Tony to begin looking for hard evidence to force the issue if needed.
Once IronMan started crossing international borders in the course of flying missions, Tony had boosted a couple satellites into orbit so he could have connectivity to JARVIS at any point during any of his missions. After the Data Dump, with access codes to everything SHIELD had ever stuck a finger in out in the open, Tony (well, JARVIS) had essentially reformatted the satellites' security software in the process of upgrading it to remove any backdoors, trackers, viruses or bugs that might have crept in. More importantly, the overall image quality was better than the majority of other satellites as they were not only aging, but Tony had put the newest cutting-edge StarkTech he had developed for his suits (that he'd not released to the public) as far as sensors and scanners. (After Ultron, he'd boosted another half dozen, including some updated equipment and variations of algorithms used for tracking the tesseract and scepter, Just In Case they ever have another lost artifact on Earth again.)
Starting in Siberia - a known location and time, he began looking for any sort of information - scans, satellite images - of the stolen quinjet. FRIDAY helped sort, enhance and clean up the images. It took several hours, spread across a few days, but they were able to find verifiable evidence of the quinjet heading toward heart of Wakanda and disappearing at border.
(Tracing T'Challa's arrival in Siberia uncovered evidence of Wakanda having some sort of cloaking tech, bringing up the question of 'what are you hiding?', though they did not - yet - know whether T'Challa had accompanied Rogers to Wakanda before turning Zemo in or not.)
At FRIDAY's urging, Tony had politely suggested to the Committee that the investigation into Ross should include his management of the Raft, given that the only inmates who had been liberated were Rogers' followers. The results had been interesting, to say the least. With implicit permission from the Council, they had hacked the Raft security logs, finding footage of a Wakandan-style jet landing after an untraceable security override had caused the Raft to resurface. Captain America and a figure assumed to be the Winter Soldier exited, caused havoc leaving casualites and structural damage in their wake, and took Cap's buddies with them when they left. Extrapolation of the jet's trajectory showed it headed straight to Wakanda.
Though somewhat circumstancial, as they could not directly track the Wakandan jet, it was proof that Cap was in possession of the jet when it landed, and damning evidence of some degree of collusion as he had access to the Wakandan tech in the first place.
That was twice Rogers had apparently fled to Wakanda after committing violence.
So, with FRIDAY's core memory banks and programming secured in newly upgraded servers (with a wee bit of encryption advice from some ...exotic... inhabitants of Hela's Domain.) Tony started trying to hack Wakanda.
It had taken a few days more for FRIDAY to isolate the signature of several electromagnetic frequency generators at various points along the border of Wakanda. (Some were actually outside the official borders but not far enough into the other counrties' territory to spark an actual war, though it seems no one was aware of their existence.) Accounting for the signal interference, they were able to get moderately clear pictures of Wakanda, and it was nothing like what they claimed to be or have.
Clearly, they were hiding quite a bit.