All Hands On Deck (All Chapters Revised)
Peter had always wanted to visit the control room.
Among SI lore, it had reached an almost mythical status as the-Room-To-Rule-All-Rooms, The Skynet Center, Casa de Big Brother. And for good reason.
It was no different from regular control rooms. It had the basic ability to monitor, manage, boot up, or shut down any part of the facility, only instead of controlling football stadiums and college campuses, it had full reign on the high rise apartment of a Norse god.
It was every intern’s dream to be granted access to this sacred space, and if it were any other time (he felt like he was saying that a lot today), Peter’s jaw would’ve hit the floor the moment he stepped foot inside. Dropped, gone, never to be seen again.
Imagine one of those NASA control rooms from movies. Then add StarkTech all around. Then paste holograms everywhere: floor, ceiling, soaring walls that met at the top to form an enormous dome.
It was like standing in a giant, tech-driven egg. A giant, tech-driven egg in the middle of a war-zone.
And Peter had thought Midtown was wild.
The rows of holograms, giant-sized monitors stacked over top of one another. Even the computer keyboards sporting wildly colorful covers, ranging from Hello Kitty to Harry Potter to Donald Trump memes, would’ve been Christmas and Easter and Halloween all smashed together. He would’ve been in nerd heaven.
But all of that was beside the point. Because the Control Room?
Was in complete, irredeemable chaos.
The moment Peter stepped through the door—
” GET OUT OF THE WAY!!”
Bam!
...
“ Radio’s on the fritz! 13, you got anything?”
”Negative!”
...
” Get the translator down here.”
“Forget that. Get Thor down here.”
”This ain’t Spanish, I know that.”
...
”Q-U-I-L-L...Is that what they’re firing?”
“Isn’t that the bad guy from Harry Potter?”
“That’s Quirrell.”
“Oh MY God he’s SHOOTING!”
“No SHIT, dumbass!”
...
Holy.
Hell.
The flashing lights only emphasized the chaos. A pleasant female voice blared over the intercom, echoing around, almost drowning out the din of dozens of people trying to fix ten billion problems.
Where was Tony?
Peter had no clue. Every time a tech rushed by, he was slammed around by someone wearing a headset, holding a clipboard, wielding a pen. He even caught a dude smacking his cellphone against the wall, trying to get it to work.
Not gonna work, buddy.
And neither was Peter’s brain, apparently. He watched the room slide in and out of focus. He rubbed his temples as the pounding in his brain pulsated like dubstep on steroids.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, a small, sane piece of consciousness was screaming, Find one of the Avengers, dumbass! Now’s not the time for a sensory overload! but Sane Peter was quickly losing his battle.
Everything was so loud .
And bright.
His knees buckled underneath him, and wow, the floor was a lot closer than he thought.
A hand on his shoulders caught him before he toppled. ”Kid!”
Mr. Stark, he thought with relief. But it wasn’t. A big woman with bright, dyed-ginger hair had her hands on his shoulders.
”How the hell’d you get in here?” she shouted over the noise. “Where’s your group?”
Whaaat? He looked at her blankly, barely comprehending that she was speaking English.
”Your group?” she repeated, looking closer at him. “Your tour group. Where are they?”
”I’m not—“ He looked down. Damnit. Stupid visitor name tag. “They’re—“
” All right,” she said. Well, shouted, really. “My name’s Sonya, okay, hon? I’m gonna get you with your people. Just give me a quick sec.”
”I’m not with—“ Peter tried again, desperately, but she was already shouting into her walkie-talkie.
In Peter’s time as an intern, the intern’s walkie-talkies weren’t always used appropriately. They were kinda fun to goof around on, to be honest. He and Shuri sometimes used them to prank each other and the rest of the staff, causing mass havoc.
Most recently, they discovered last Tuesday that “Careless Whisper” is the fastest way to kill a makeout session when it’s blaring from your hip pocket. The two IT folks broke up after point oh two seconds.
”—yeah, yeah, yeah. I got a kid here. Name’s—“ she grabbed him and squinted at his cursed name tag. “Pete-uh-Peter Parker? Midtown?”
Pause.
“That’s him. He’s—“ Her eyes grew wide as dinner plates. “You’re kidding me, right? Him? Stark? ”
Sonya rubbed her forehead and mumbled something that sounded like, “Oh, boy, Sonya. Get a grip. First day at Control. Get a grip.”
First day? He felt kinda bad for her, but, though he hated to admit it, the migraine developing behind his eyes was taking a bit of the sympathy away from her and to himself. The alarm blared on and on, boring a veritable hole in Peter’s skull.
He slammed his hands over his ears. It didn’t do much for the noise, but the pressure gave him something else other than noise to focus on. He squeezed his eyes shut against the flood of flashing lights.
“Kid?”
Shut up.
“Kid!” Someone shook him hard, and his eyes flew open.
”Mister Stark.” His knees almost buckled again from relief.
”Whoa, whoa, hey.” The billionaire caught Peter. Man, he was starting to feel like the Disney princesses Shuri talked about, only with Reeboks instead of high-heels. “Can’t have you passing out on me. Here, put these on.”
A headset was shoved into Peter’s hands, all big and clunky, unlike the sleek, in the ear comms that the Avengers wore. He stared at it for a moment, then jammed it on.
The volume went from about a 19 out of 10 to a 3 in two seconds flat.
Looking up, he saw Mr. Stark donning a similar, sci-fi-movie-esque headset. When he saw Peter looking his way, Tony gave a thumbs-up.
”You good?” Tony’s voice blared through the headphones, and Peter saw the little microphone attached to the headband. Embarrassed, Peter pulled his own microphone down to his mouth.
Tony clapped Peter on the shoulder and gave a tight grimace, before darting to one of the side tables computers where a baby faced intern was shakily tapping away.
“Move,” he told the intern, and the poor kid scrambled out the way. Tony plopped down with the air of a man ready to cut a bitch. Several lines of code later and a few deft keystrokes, and Mr. Stark turned back to the intern.
“You. I need your headset.” He pointed, snapping his fingers impatiently while the kid fumbled to pull them off. “Gimme gimme gimme.”
Poor kid was shaking so hard he almost dropped the things. He looked vaguely familiar, Peter thought, before realizing where he knew him from. Ashaank, from Tech Sec. Stark Industries, folks. Where your mad scientists double as hackers in their free time.
Ashaank’s headphones slid neatly over Tony’s ears, and the sound of static feedback replaced the intercom alarm.
And then there was nothing. No alarms, no intercom voice. Just the red flashing lights and the muffled booming outside. Which was somehow way, way worse than before.
“Hello. Hello? Hello. Testing? Cool.” Stark’s voice filled the room. “I’m gonna need a better system for this in the future. Who’s in charge of the damn locks? Shut the place down already.”
“Already done, sir,” someone piped from the back.
“Great, thank god one of you is competent. Look, this has to be done manually, so I need the crews in charge of garages 4, 5, & 6 to sit your asses down and activate Marks XVIII thr—”
“Tony!”
Dr. Banner ran towards them, pushing through the crowd as he went. Not that he needed to all that much; the interns and staff parted around him like the Red Sea.
Stark flipped the microphone up and out of the way. ”Whaddya need, buddy?”
”We got a situation.”
”Yeah, that I know.” Tony waved his hand impatiently. “Feel free to elaborate.”
“No, I mean we’ve got orders from Hill not to fire. Defensive tactics only until we can assess what they're doing here.”
Hill?
“Maria Hill? Like SHIELD director Maria Hill?” Peter croaked out before he could stop himself. Both scientists turned to look at him and he siilently cursed himself. Stupid mouth. But of course it made sense that SHIELD were involved because, HELLO, alien invasion. “Never mind. Forget I asked.
“Since when have we ever listened to SHIELD?”
"Since now. Tony, please." Bruce sounded earnest and more than a little desperate, but his gaze was firm and unyielding. "Put up the shields and shut down the legion."
"And then what? Hide away and let them wreak havoc on New York? Buddy, they're firing at us, and we're just supposed to take it like it's nothing?"
"They're only firing on us because the feds are out there in helicopters."
"Good! And we should be too."
Tony turned back to the monitor, and Banner lost patience. The doctor grabbed the monitor and slammed his hand on the desk between Tony's forearms.
Everybody tensed, including Peter himself. Sometimes, he forgot how much control it took to keep the Hulk at bay, and that was a good thing. If he constantly thought about how close he came on the daily to a typhoon of a rage monster that would kill everything in sight, Peter would never let Dr. Banner within two miles of him.
But the doctor seemed to get. Well. Not angry, because they would definitely know. But very frustrated.
“Tony, listen! I agree with her. We don’t even know what the hell they are, much less what they’ve got in their hip pocket. If we’re even half wrong, it would be a disaster. The last thing we need is you bringing out the Iron Legion and this whole city—hell, this whole planet—could be a nuclear fallout zone by tomorrow."
“You want to try to get through to them.”
Banner’s curls bounced as he nodded, strangely reminding Peter's haggard brain of Raggedy Anne dolls. Man, those things were creepy as all get out. ”We ran an analysis, and we think we might be able to hack their translators and get ahold of them.”
And for the first time, Tony seemed to stop and consider the other man’s words. He twirled a cord around his finger and hummed a little. “And Hill agreed to this.”
“Well, not yet. But the helicarriers probably won’t get here till tomorrow, so.” Banner shrugged noncommittally and fidgeted with his collar, as if disobeying orders from government agencies was just a walk in the park. For him, it probably was.
A grin broke out over Tony’s face. “Brucey, I knew I liked you for some ungodly reason.” Tony turned to Peter, and his heart lifted. “Pete, go help the Good Doctor. I’ll deal with rebooting FRI.”
"O-Okay.”
Dr. Banner led him through the crowd to a massive display screen with buttons and dials and all sorts of tempting gadgets that could probably blow up the whole world.
”Tony ever show you the BETA G program?” Banner asked. Peter nodded. “Okay. That’s what we’ll be using. You sure you’re up for this?”
No. But there was no way he wasn’t going to do this
Peter sat down.
Okay, Pete. Get it together.
Cracking a code. Just like cracking an egg. Only less messy and more nuclear.
Yeah. He could get used to this.
***
Peter was right about one thing: nobody was at all prepared for this. This was not in the brochure or in the terms of employment agreement.
But SI employees were nothing if not innovative, and Peter ended up recruiting more than a few people to help him with the project: Ashaank, Shuri, Mimi, Javier, Big Al, Sridha.
Once or twice, he caught the eye of Shuri, who waved him over for help with some programming glitch or another, but most of the time he was running around, trying to find momentum with one of the world’s most elite/stressed tech team ever.
It was weird, but also awesome in a terrifying way.
The headphones turned out to be way more high tech than Peter had originally given them credit for. They were actually pretty sweet.
For starters, it had about a billion different frequencies, each holding separate conversations. So, if someone from Communications wanted to contact somone all the way across the room without bothering the other sixty-something people connected, they could send a signal to only that specific person, getting them on an unoccupied frequency.
Peter first found this out as he sprinted through the sea of employees. Slamming on random buttons, he managed to page Shuri through.
“I’ve almost got it,” he gasped out. “But I got stuck. Where are you?”
“The real question is where are you? ” she crackled back through. “I am right where you left me.
The signals put out by the alien ship were stupidly complicated, and Peter’s brain twisted into Annie’s pretzels trying to make heads or tails of it. None of it matched anything Peter had ever encountered before..
Luckily for him, Shuri activated her hidden super-powers and solved the problem in about five seconds flat. Typical.
She hit a keystroke.
Crackle.
BEEEEEEEEEEEEP—
Half the staff winced at the shrill scream. Peter clawed at his headphones, about to tear them off, when, out of the static, came a voice.
He froze, along with the rest of the room. It was eerie, all that action reduced to nothing. Like everyone had been turned to stone.
“..... ya big turd-blossoms! Hold your frickin’ fire! We’re not hostiles! This is the Milano, and we come in peace, and — THE HELL, DUDE?! I said, HOLD YOUR FIRE!”
“We got it!!” Shuri shreaked and squeezed Peter tight enough to choke. Elation washed through him, before being replaced by fear, cold like an ice water bucket.
Crash!
That was the sound of Peter’s brain giving up. No, wait. That was Iron Man himself tripping ass over kettle on a stray monitor in his haste to get over to them, but he was back on his feet in seconds.
“Show me,” he said.
The whole dome went into an uproar.
Out of nowhere, somebody grabbed his arm and started dragging him to the exit. When he looked, he saw Bruce Banner, mouth set in a grim line.
”Doc, what’s going on?”
”We’re trying to stop an interplanetary catastrophe, Peter,” the good doctor responded. “And we’re meeting upstairs before we do.”
”Upstairs as in the Avengers Meeting Room Upstairs, or another-control-room-I-didn’t-know-about Upstairs?”
”The Meeting Room, Peter.”
”How—“ Peter stumbled over a jut in the floor, trying to keep pace with Banner. “Me? Wh—wait, what? I can’t just walk in there.”
Bruce paused for a second. A look of confusion flitted across his face. “Peter, what the hell are you talking about?”
“I’m me. Peter Parker. With friends locked in the basement who probably think I’m some sort of pity hire, but that’s beside the point.” He took a deep breath. “I can’t go in the suit because half the class already thinks I’m Spider-Man ‘cause of DC, and the other half will figure it out in about two seconds.”
Banner reached out placating hands, effectively cutting Peter’s spiral off. “Pete, I’m not asking you to suit up. Just to meet with us upstairs to figure out what the hell we’re going to do.”
“And your field trip is screwed over anyways,” said Shuri. Both of them promptly had a near-heart-attack, and Banner’s eyes flashed one shade greener for a second before he recomposed himself.
“Shuri,” Dr. Banner said in a long-suffering kind of way, and she smirked smugly at his distress. Plain old evil. “This is a private, disaster-level conversation.”
“I see nothing private about it,” she sniffed. “We both want the same thing. Now, get yourself moving there, Parker. We do not have any more time to waste.”