Chapter 1
Peter sighed.
He was sitting upside down on...well, something. It was dark out, but Peter assumed it was some sort of metal beam. His knees were pulled close to his chest, with his arms holding them in place, and his breathing was slightly accelerated.
Gunshots sounded below him, and one pinged on the bar next to him. He flinched involuntarily, but made no noise.
Of course his suit would malfunction in the middle of a fight. It would be way too easy for it to just function as normal.
The night was eerily silent, other than the gunshots that sometimes pierced the air. No lights were on in the entire town, which made sense-- ghost towns, by definition, were abandoned-- so Peter's vision was tinted green with the night vision goggles in his suit.
He tugged his right leg away from the beam experimentally, but nothing happened. Well, to be precise, there was a sharp shock from the sensors on the foot of his suit, and the beam itself creaked slightly, but his foot did not move.
"Karen?" he whispered for the fifth time. "Karen, you there?"
There was a slight flicker in his goggles, but no response.
He was alone.
He wasn't quite sure what these people had done to him, but it was something, that was for sure. The timing was way too convenient to just be a normal break-down (not that ANY mistakes in his suit could be considered normal, anyway) not to mention that it was two completely different systems that got shut down-- Karen, and the light coating of webfluid on his feet, which had been sent into overdrive and locked his feet into place.
Peter knew that it was almost certainly the product of the tiny cylinder that he now held in his hand. It was clearly some sort of virus, something that just by touching his suit, could hack into it and mess with the systems inside.
Which was worrisome. Peter's suit had the same firewalls as Tony's, meaning that Iron Man was in trouble, too.
There were another three gunshots. Distantly, Peter heard someone say "I'm sure it worked, he should be stuck on a wall somewhere." Which confirmed his theory.
He wasn't sure why these people though shooting randomly would be the best way to find someone stuck in the dark, but he wasn't complaining about fighting idiotic villians.
Peter looked at the disk in his hand, which he'd yanked off his back, with a mixture of terror and anger slowly taking over him. This thing had taken out Spiderman without a fight.
Then he realized something, and slowly smiled.
It had taken out Spiderman.
Peter Parker was alive and kicking.
He flipped over the disk, inspecting it closely. He ran his finger along the device, stopped when he felt something, and zoomed in on the spot (thanking all that was holy that he still had his interface). There were three tiny spikes of metal poking out of the device in a triangle. Clearly, that was how it had gotten in to the system.
He thought he saw a faint outline of a circle around the spikes, covering almost the entire back. He ran his finger there, and indeed, there was a groove. He tapped at it carefully, before attacking it with earnest.
First he tried twisting it, digging his fingernails into the grooves and turning it first one way, then the other. He tried pressing it in, but didn't feel a spring, then carefully rerouted some of the power from his suit into the beam to make an electromagnet. Still, there was no response-- the disk was not ferromagnetic.
Finally, he touched it to the still-buzzing beams, thankful that he'd made his suit a strong insulator.
There was a click.
Excitedly, Peter pulled the disk off of the beam, then quickly shut off the electric flow (wincing as the results of the rerouted power showed themselves, jolting a few of his touch sensors and killing a corner of his vision). He pulled off the now-disconnected back of the disk with ease, setting it down gently on the top of the beam.
The inside of the disk was intricate, yes, but he understood it-- in theory. If he hadn't had the results of the device freezing him in place and taking out his A.I., he'd be nearly lost as to how to fix it, but as it was, he still stared at it blankly before recalling the lessons that Tony had given him in coding.
He started poking around the wires-- not moving them, but seeing where they were connected. Whoever had made the device seemed to have color-coded them.
Hmm, the red one...well, that'll have to go there, and the green is actually fine where it is--
He got to work, carefully. He was thankful that Tony had thought to include a soldering iron and solder in his suit, mostly because Peter was always jumping between patrolling and messing around with tech at Stark Industries without stopping to breathe in between. So he disconnected and reconnected the wires to the tiny computer, before finally connecting it to a wire in his suit.
Lines of code appeared before his eyes and Peter grinned in satisfaction.
A gunshot sounded again, only missing Peter due to the tiny voice that warned him it was coming. Ignoring the gunshot noises the best he could, Peter got to work on the code, switching around the lines carefully.
The work wasn't hard, just time-consuming, and the more that Peter worked, the more worried he became. Whoever had done this knew how the suit worked, knew how it was wired, and knew how it was coded.
This was an inside job.
He finished the code, sent it back to the computer, then pulled up the photo his suit had taken of the original inside of the disk. He pulled it back apart, carefully, then reconnected it. He snapped the disk's two halves back together, then, and stabbed the device's three tiny prongs back into his suit.
The excessive webfluid flow on his feet shut off immediately and his display blinked.
"Hello, Peter," said Karen.
"Oh thank God," Peter replied, grinning. "Ready to kick some butt?"
He pulled his feet out of their restraints with ease, shot out a string of webfluid, and launched into battle.
"Watch ou--" Peter slammed into the speaker, cutting him off, and quickly webbed the man's hands together. The other two villains turned to him, shooting at him in panic, but he dodged easily and kicked them both unconscious.
"Good job," Karen commented.
Peter nodded, but his satisfaction was muted by a growing sense of dread.
Who were these people?
And how did they know so much about his suit?