Chapter 41
Avengers Tower, New York, United States
May 2011
“Tony!”
Tony rolled over and was on his feet in a second. “Wha- what’d I miss?”
He blinked sleep fugue from his eyes. Clint was standing next to the door, eyes wide. “Get up, man! We got a problem!”
Tony stumbled to the dresser and dragged a pair of pants on over his boxers. “What?”
“Some bank robbers are making a fuss down on Sixth. Got their hands on Chitauri weapons. Police are dropping like flies, their pistols aren’t doing jack shit. Suit up!”
He bolted.
“JARVIS, get me the Mark 7!” Tony said, and scrambled into a long-sleeve shirt as he ran out of the room.
“In your penthouse, sir.”
Tony hurled himself into the stairwell and down one level. He burst through the doors into the penthouse and stepped backward into the Mark 7’s cubicle. The suit enveloped his limbs almost instantly, metal armor falling into place.
By the time Tony’s faceplate locked down and the HUD flickered on, he felt himself again. The grief was held at bay, for now.
Pepper-
No.
He dragged his thoughts away from that rabbit hole and had JARVIS open a line to Clint’s StarkPhone.
“You on the jet?” Tony asked.
“Scrambling now.” There was a roar from the hangar bay eleven floors down, and Tony saw a Quinjet shoot from the building, banking up into the New York dawn. He fired his thrusters and took off. JARVIS barely got the doors open before Tony shattered right through them.
“You said sixth?” Tony asked.
“Yep.”
“Who’s with you?”
“Steve and Maria,” Clint said.
Steve’s voice joined in, but as an indecipherable mumble in the background.
Clint said, “Steve wants me to-”
“Hold up,” Tony said, and overrode the internal PA system of the jet. “Better?”
“Stop taking control of my ship!” Clint protested.
“Save it,” Steve ordered. “This is efficient. Tony, we’ve got Darcy and Jane watching news feeds and satellite imagery from the Tower. They’re looped into my earpiece.”
Tony muted himself briefly, said, “JARVIS, get that audio feed coming into my helmet,” unmuted his microphone, and replied. “Great. What’s the situation?”
Then he swung around the corner onto Sixth, just ahead of the Quinjet, and roared to a halt.
“Damn,” he muttered.
Three armored trucks of the kind used to transport large amounts of cash were tearing down the street. Men in body armor clung to their roofs and hung out the windows, screaming and shooting at nearby windows. There was a bank four blocks up; JARVIS highlighted the shattered walls where the trucks had burst out of its parking garage.
The lead truck slowed, then jogged down a side street.
“Yep, they noticed us,” Clint said, and Tony took off in pursuit.
He dodged four blasts, absorbed one more, and threw himself into the truck in the middle. Tony’s armored body slammed into the side. It veered sideways and into a line of parallel-parked cars, driving straight up and over three other vehicles until Tony fired his thrusters again and the truck flipped and screeched to a halt.
Tony picked himself off the pavement, blasted a suspect who was aiming a Chitauri gun at him, and tackled another before he could flee into an alley. The other two were still stuck in the cab, so Tony took off again.
There was fighting on the third truck. It had dodged the wreckage, but it looked like Steve was on board and handling the four men on the roof benches. The jet had gone ahead and was taking potshots at the frantically dodging truck out in the lead. They were already four blocks ahead.
Tony took off again and slammed through the soldiers fighting Steve, leaving three of them on the pavement, and chased down the truck in front.
It jinked sideways down a narrow street. The Quinjet banked hard, didn’t make it, and screamed into a vertical ascent to avoid crashing into the building. Tony angled around the corner.
Bullets and energy blasts ricocheted around him. Tony had to slow down and fall behind the truck. It was too narrow to dodge effectively.
“JARVIS, I wanna poke it with something,” Tony said.
“Targeting.”
A plate on Tony’s shoulder shifted aside and three tiny guided missiles shrieked out, aiming straight for the truck.
Each one hit somewhere on the truck’s back end. One of them took out a tire, another the rear door, and the third exploded near its top edge. The truck screeched and jolted. The shots stopped coming. Tony caught up, drop-kicked a man off the roof and blasted two others, and then dove feet-first through the windshield.
Screams from the guards played in Tony’s helmet through the audio input. He blasted open the passenger door, shoved one of the thieves out, and wrenched the wheel. He meant to turn the truck and keep it on the road, but the driver pulled the wheel at the same time, and it spun almost all the way around. The front wheels locked and the truck tipped.
For one long moment, the world hung precariously upside-down.
Tony grabbed the driver by the arm and blasted out of the shattered cab.
The truck slammed down and rolled with tremendous force.
Tony skidded to a halt on the pavement, holding the driver in the suit’s arms, then shoved the man aside and stood up. The street was quiet. The four men from the lead truck were scattered about the street in various states of consciousness.
Tony felt like the moment when you’ve been suffocating under water and you finally come up for air. Like he hadn’t taken a full breath in the last month and was only just now remembering what it felt like.
“Stark!” Steve’s voice snapped through Tony’s open comms line. “What’s your status?”
“All good here,” Tony said. He flexed his fingers and grinned at the truck. He felt electrified, and not just because of his arc reactor.
“Not quite,” Darcy said. “The news coverage’s already starting. You need to get back to the Tower. There are some people who are really not happy with your guys.”
“What is wrong with these people!” Tony raged.
Across the table, Darcy threw her hands up. “It would help if you would calm down, Tony.”
“This is your fault,” Steve pointed out.
Tony whirled on the other man, furious. All he knew was that he had been doing something good, something helpful, and it had been a dam between him and—and—
But the goddamn talking heads on the news were calling him a reckless fool who endangered lives.
“What was I supposed to do? Pretend it wasn’t happening?” he snapped. “Let them get away?”
“You were reckless. They’re not wrong about that,” Steve said.
Tony glared at Steve and did his best to contain the storm inside his skin. Grief and anger and frustration made a toxic combination and he wanted to either beat his fists bloody on a punching bag or drink himself into oblivion.
“Wait until you’re the one they’re condemning,” Tony snapped. “Then you won’t be so forgiving.”
“Tony-”
“Whatever.” Tony turned to go.
“You’re not leaving the tower.”
He turned around with seriously? written all over his face.
Darcy was standing up and smiling sweetly.
“My tower. I do what I want,” Tony snarled.
Darcy’s smile acquired an edge. How had he ever thought this girl was just Jane’s dumb intern? It had been a short-lived miscalculation, but still. “I’m gonna say no to that one. For your own good. JARVIS, don’t let him leave.”
“Consider it done, Miss Lewis,” JARVIS said.
“Seriously?” Tony shouted at the ceiling. “Traitor.”
“I have a protocol which requires me to ensure your continued health and safety, Mr. Stark. I suspect that should you leave the tower tonight, you might engage in self-endangering behaviors.”
“Go to hell,” Tony muttered. “Fine. I’m getting blind drunk in my penthouse. Don’t worry, Mom, I won’t tie a rope out the window out of my bedsheets,” he added. “If anyone tries to get in, I’ll blast them.”
He stalked out.
He didn’t get drunk.
Well, not very. A couple glasses of Scotch down and Tony felt the wave begin to recede slightly. But he found himself wanting to find another way out. Another way to cope.
Pepper never liked seeing him like this.
Tony reached out for the only other escape he knew.
“JARVIS, lemme have the protocols from the Pentagon in oh-nine,” he said. “Screen four.”
“Yes, sir.”
The file opened, and lines of code began scrolling down the screen. Tony made tweaks and adjustments and alterations, updating for newer firewalls and security defenses. JARVIS applied his considerable processing power to the code and brought it to sentience. This was part of the reason Tony had created JARVIS in the first place: with the AI’s algorithms and neural network, any hack job went from taking months to weeks or days.
Tony worked until his hands hurt and his eyes burned, drinking coffee and alcohol to keep himself awake and buzzed.
“Sir, the program is ready for deployment.”
“Go,” Tony said, and knocked back a shot. He wasn’t sure what number this was. He lost count around four.
“Running. Estimated time remaining: three weeks, four days, and forty-seven minutes.”
“Great,” Tony mumbled. “Will I get some files before then?”
“It is possible that some surface networks will be breached in less than that time.”
“Awesome.” Tony climbed to his feet. The room swayed around him, but his purpose was clear, and he let himself relax for the first time in weeks. The alcohol and caffeine and the goal—hacking into SHIELD’s files—held back everything he didn’t want to feel.
Victorious, Tony staggered into the guest room of his penthouse suite and collapsed face-first into the clean sheets.