SATURDAY, APRIL 17, 2032 12:35 AM JST GREAT KANTO INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT MEGA TOKYO, JAPAN "Welcome back to Japan, Mr. Stark," said the trimly uniformed Immigration Bureau agent as she stamped Benjamin Stark's passport. "How was your trip?" "Tiring," Stark replied with a weary smile. With a perfectly straight face, the immigration agent replied, "Yes, I understand Switzerland can be an exhausting place to visit this time of year." Stark's smile was a little less weary and a little more conspiratorial as he said, "Surprisingly so." "Well," said the agent briskly, "you're all set." She returned his passport, held onto it for a fraction of a second longer than she needed to so that he'd glance at her again, and added in a much quieter voice as she released it, "Call me." Slightly puzzled, he opened his passport while walking away and saw that, in addition to the usual stamps, she'd included a slip of paper with a telephone number jotted on it, complete with a little heart at the end. I'll never get used to that, he said to himself as he tucked the passport away in the top pocket of his jacket and made his way across the concourse toward baggage pickup. His one suitcase, an 80-year-old amber-colored Samsonite, was already waiting for him, standing out only slightly less than a Victorian steamer trunk would have amid all the modern black ripstop nylon and compact composite luggage that surrounded it. He checked to see that the seals were intact, then picked it up and headed for the exit. It took him a few minutes to remember exactly where in the vastness of the long-term parking garage he'd left his car, and a few minutes more to make his way there. Once he arrived, he put down his suitcase, then stood with folded arms and looked at the contents of the parking space for a few seconds in complete silence. After a while, he reached into the inside pocket of his jacket, pulled out the cardboard stub of his parking ticket, looked from it to the number painted on the tarmac and back a couple of times, and generally satisfied himself that he was, indeed, in the right place. Not visibly perturbed, Stark reached again into his inside pocket, this time retrieving a slim cell phone, which he thumbed open. "Yo. Yeah. Yeah, I'm back. Gonna need a ride home from the airport. What? No, it won't start. No. Nope. You're... just gonna have to see it. Okay. Yeah. Long-term parking, green section, level 5, row 75. Okay. See you." His business concluded, Stark slid the phone shut, put it away, and sat down on the end of his suitcase to wait. Some time later, a black Land Rover bearing the Stark Industries logo on its front doors cruised up and halted nearby. After a moment, the tall, burly figure of MegaZone climbed out. Stark remained sitting on his suitcase, regarding his parking space. Zoner stopped next to him and, hands in trenchcoat pockets, gazed thoughtfully at the same spot. There was a fairly lengthy silence, which Zoner finally broke by observing, "Dude, that's your -car-." The parking space, which had presumably once contained Stark's grey 2019 Camaro, now contained a neatly cube-shaped mass of crushed grey metal about four feet on a side, surrounded by a small halo of safety glass pebbles. Clearly visible on the front face was a slightly scuffed New York license plate. Stark nodded. "Yup." Zoner regarded the cube for a few more seconds. "I have to admit," he said, "it has a certain style." Stark nodded. "Yup. Putting it back in the same parking space, you mean." "Yeah." Stark got up. "It really does." Picking up his suitcase, he turned to get into the Land Rover, then paused and turned back to Zoner. "Of course, you realize, this means war." Stark spent most of the drive back into the city proper sunk deep in thought, or possibly just asleep - Zoner wasn't entirely sure. He roused only when the Rover halted, looking up to see that Zoner had stopped in front of one of the late-night food stops they'd learned about from Priss Asagiri. This particular establishment specialized in a curious handful of foods, available 24 hours a day: doner kebab, tacos, udon, and 1950s American burger-stand fare. "Hungry?" Zoner asked. "I could eat," Stark replied, nodding. "I had a nice dinner on the flight, but that was - " He glanced at his watch. " - five hours ago." Zoner climbed out and walked around to the curb side of the Rover. When he got there, he found Stark standing by the door, looking thoughtfully at a couple of motorcycles angled into the next parking space along. "What?" Zoner asked. "I was just thinking," Stark said, "that I'm going to have to replace my transportation. And I was thinking about how to do that, when it suddenly occurred to me: Now that I've got this Model 74, and we know it's working, I'm in no greater danger than anyone else of just keeling over dead at any moment. Right?" Zoner nodded. "Less danger, if anything," he said. Stark grinned. "That's what I thought." Then he pulled out his phone, thumbed one of the quickdial buttons, and put it to his ear. "Friday?" he said after a moment. "Hey, it's me. Listen, I need you to get someone from Shipping to round up a few things from Storage D and send them over with the next supply run to SI Chiba. Mm- hmm. Yeah. Okay, I need the Jag - the old one - and the Commando. And the other stuff we talked about earlier. Right. I'll send you a complete list of the stuff I need that I can't get from the Chiba plant. Oh, and if you could start looking around for another Camaro. Yeah. A '69 Z/28, if you can find one. Hardtop. Not yellow. You know what I like. Uh-huh. Great. No, that should do it for now. Bye." Flipping the phone shut, he put it away and told Zoner with a grin, "You know, if you had mentioned the motorcycle thing any of the 5,000 times we had the Heart Argument, you might've won sooner." "Tomorrow," he said, stifling a yawn as he and Zoner left the diner, "I want to start looking around for a new home base. Can't stay in a hotel forever, after all." "Mm." Zoner thumbed the remote unlocker for the Rover and went around to the driver's side. He wasn't sure why not - the Imperial Palace was an excellent hotel, and it's not like they were having trouble affording it - but he supposed it was just the nesting impulse at work. With the kind of service they were getting at the Palace, it wasn't quite the same experience as living out of a suitcase at the local Motel 6, but if they were making Mega Tokyo their headquarters for the foreseeable, it made sense, and Stark Tower wouldn't be ready for occupation for a while yet. "There's space in Sylia's building, but we'd probably blow our cover," he added helpfully. Stark gave his friend a sidelong look that almost but not quite contained a smile, but rather than say anything he yawned yet again. "Ah, well. Worry about it about tomorrow," he said. "Right now I just want to go back to the hotel and get some sleep." As he got ready for bed, Stark considered the same question that had occurred to Zoner, and reached the same conclusion. It was always this way when he found himself setting up shop in a new city for an extended period. He always felt more comfortable - more at home - with a place that had his name on the paperwork somewhere. Staying in a hotel, even an opulent one like this, he felt like a tourist. He stood at the window for a moment, looking out at the mile or so of the city that sprawled into Tokyo Bay from where the Imperial Palace Hotel stood, and the dark waters of the bay beyond. On the horizon, he could just make out the faint shape of Aqua City, the abandoned stilt arcology project, as a patch of darker darkness than the night sky. Stark turned away and was just about to black the windows when he caught a faint flickering out of the corner of his eye. He turned back, looking harder, and after a moment, there it was again - a glow in the sky, like distant lightning illuminating the horizon... but there was no storm out there. He'd never seen an aurora this far south that he could remember, but that was what the faint flickering light in the sky reminded him of, as much as it reminded him of anything. "What the hell... ?" he murmured, one hand flattened against the glass, peering more intently outside. And then - Stark recoiled, throwing an arm up to shade his eyes, as an intolerably bright beam of white light suddenly connected sky and surface, simultaneously illuminating and annihilating the center of Aqua City. The afterimage drew a brilliant purplish line in Stark's vision as he squinted, trying to see what was happening. A second later, the thunderous crash of the beam's impact reached the hotel, rattling the windows slightly. The connecting door banged open and Zoner entered. "Holy shit!" he declared. "Did you -see- that?" Stark blinked repeatedly. "I can't see anything -but- that," he replied. "Damn!" "I -have- offered to set you up with some corneal glare filters," Zoner pointed out. "What the hell was that?" "Particle beam satellite discharge," Stark said. "American or Neo-Soviet - impossible to tell just from seeing the beam." He sat down on the bed and pulled his shoes back on. With his central vision beginning to clear, he could see that the whole of Aqua City - what hadn't been destroyed outright or collapsed by the destructive power of the particle beam - was ablaze. Already the faint sounds of sirens were rising up to the Palace's penthouse floor. "You don't have to come along," Stark told Zoner as he pulled on his coat, "but I'm going to need the keys to the Rover." "I'll come. Let me get my shoes." As he slipped on his liveshades and made sure they were linked up to his neuroprocessor, Stark took another look out the window at the flaming wreckage of Aqua City. Yes sir, he said to himself. I knew this city was going to be the place to be this year. Eyrie Productions, Unlimited presents BUBBLEGUM CRISIS: THE IRON AGE Mega Tokyo 2032 Issue #3: This Year's Model by Benjamin D. Hutchins Series devised by Benjamin D. Hutchins MegaZone (c) 2008 Eyrie Productions, Unlimited >>> INFOFEED FROM printecircuits:starkwire.com POSTED: 20320416.2011 (UTC) U.S. SATELLITE DESTROYS AQUA CITY By Benjamin Stark STARKWIRE EXCLUSIVE MEGA TOKYO - The incomplete harbor arcology known as Aqua City was erased from existence today. Though demolition of the abandoned project has been considered before, no one could have expected the manner in which it met its end. A United States Air Force M-729A2 CROSSBOW orbital particle beam satellite fired on the planet's surface at 4:02 AM Japan Standard Time this morning. The beam obliterated the central section of the partially constructed Aqua City complex instantly and set what remained ablaze. Within 30 minutes, almost all of the remaining structure had sunk into Tokyo Harbor. Apart from a canned, anonymous press release declaring that the discharge was a "regrettable accident", United States Space Defense (USSD), the joint U.S. military agency charged with operating the country's space-based weapons systems, has offered neither comment nor explanation, though an official apology to the Japanese government is said to be forthcoming from the White House. CROSSBOW, which is highly classified, is ostensibly intended as a missile defense system. Official USSD documentation asserts that the system is "foolproof and incapable of error," a claim USSD officials have repeated many times in the past when questioned about the potential danger the system poses to persons and property on the ground. In fact, it has long been USSD's position that the CROSSBOW satellites cannot be configured for ground attack and thus could not be used in that capacity deliberately, let alone by accident. Since construction on Aqua City was halted and the incomplete arcology closed off several months ago, initial reports from Mega Tokyo emergency response agencies indicate that no one was harmed in the disaster. Mega Tokyo Advanced Police responded to the scene, but found nothing to examine or investigate. An aircraft registered to GENOM Corporation was seen in the area shortly before the annihilation of Aqua City, but company officials would offer no comment. Matt Mason, administrator of the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration, denounced the incident as an avoidable consequence of the superpowers' race for space-based weapons. "This kind of thing is exactly why NASA has always opposed the militarization of space," said Mason. "Incidents like this, especially coming on the heels of the recent scandal aboard Genaros, shake public confidence in the future of peaceful space exploration." Mason promised to press Congress for a full investigation of the Aqua City incident and the entire CROSSBOW program. >>> END INFOFEED Ben Stark didn't get to sleep until a little past dawn, which wasn't necessarily his favorite thing, but rather to his annoyance, he found himself awake at three in the afternoon, after entirely too few hours of sleep to do more than take the raving edge off his fatigue. Friggin' rocket lag, he grumbled to himself. Emerging from his room half an hour later with damp hair and untied shoes, he was surprised to see Zoner sitting on the couch in the suite's living room, watching television. "What are you doing up?" he asked. "Fatigue editor," Zoner replied, tapping his chipjack. Stark shivered slightly, remembering a deeply unpleasant encounter with a Russian anti-fatigue chip in Severomorsk a few years back. "Those things are dangerous," he said. Knowing exactly what his problem was, Zoner shrugged as he got to his feet. "I wrote this one myself," he said. "It's perfectly safe." "It's still only a temporary fix." "So I'll sleep tomorrow," Zoner replied, unconcerned. "I invited a few people over for dinner to celebrate your triumphant return," he added dryly. "In the meantime, I figured you'd want a ride to go car shopping. Since we're officially setting up shop in town and such." "I have a car on its way here from New York as we -speak-," Stark pointed out. "And a motorcycle." "Yeah, but those are just to give you something to tinker with," Zoner reasoned. "The Jag doesn't even run. You're going to need something new that you won't be tempted to pull all apart right away." Stark eyed him, then smiled and said, "You know me unnervingly well." Zoner shrugged and turned off the TV. "I'm your doctor," he said. "It's my job." Then, keying his phone implant, he said, "Hi, front desk? This is MegaZone. Would you have my car brought around, please? Thanks." Stark and Zoner were crossing the lobby en route to the valet station when Stark noticed a familiar figure entering. Grinning, he caught Nene Romanova's arm, making her yelp momentarily in surprise, and started more or less dragging her back toward the street. "Just the woman I wanted to see," he said. "I'm about to buy a very fast convertible and take it for its first drive, and it's a condition of Tony's will that whenever I do that, I have to have a blonde with me." "What?!" Nene blurted. She yanked her arm free, but didn't stop following him outside. "What happened to the car you -had?-" Stark opened the back door of the Rover and left it open as he climbed into the front. As Nene got in back and Zoner came around to the driver's side, Stark said, "It had a small getting-crushed-to-send- me-a-message problem while I was gone." "-What?!-" "Are we keeping you from something important?" Zoner asked as he tipped the parking valet and got behind the wheel. "Uh... not really. You -invited- me, remember?" "Okay." Zoner shut his door, fired up the engine, and pulled away from the curb. "-He- didn't ask," he added wryly, gesturing at Stark, "and I figured one of us ought to." "It's a damned nuisance, really," Stark said. "I don't -know- many blondes. I haven't been able to buy a new convertible since Dana stopped speaking to me in 2030." Zoner gave a mournful shake of his head. "Not your finest hour," he observed. "No," Stark agreed glumly. "Uh... right," said Nene, eyeing first one, then the other warily. "You do realize it's April, right? It can't be more than 12, 13 degrees out." "Fine," Stark said. "I'll buy you a parka on the way." ONE HOUR LATER Traffic on the Crosstown Expressway was moderately dense but clipping right along, as it usually was on an early Saturday afternoon. Unencumbered by the weekday mob of commuters, the highway was running at about 30 percent of its total capacity, handling the flow of delivery trucks, citizens on private errands, vacationers on their way through the city, and whatnot with ease. # Jean-Joseph Mouret # First Suite in D - 1. Rondeau # _Fanfares for Trumpets, Kettledrums, Violins, and Oboes_ (1729) # perf. U.S. Air Force Concert Band # _Brassworks_ (2007) Benjamin Stark ducked through a narrow space between a couple of automated haulers, shot the gap into the center lane, and, having negotiated that small snarl of traffic, put his foot down. By the time he, his passenger, and the new car they were riding in plunged into the midtown tunnel - the very same tunnel he'd driven through at speed while pursuing Priss and her boomer assailant on his first night in town - they were touching 140 miles per hour. Where the Camaro's "tunnel note" had been a doppler-layered chorus of reflected high-tuned turbine shriek, the new car made practically no sound at all. It produced only a low, faintly eerie whistle and an almost subliminal hum, similar to the sound given off by high-tension power lines, both sounds all but swallowed up by the roar of the vehicle's slipstream. They shot out of the other end of the tunnel doing a flat 170, at which point Stark, spotting another small tangle of traffic ahead, decided that was enough full-on performance testing for the moment and lifted his foot. Immediately the car relented as well, as a proper grand tourer should, coasting placidly back to a decorous cruising speed in the same eerie near-silence. "Yeeeessss," Stark said, mostly to himself, and patted the polished wood steering wheel. "This will do nicely." "You know," Nene remarked now that she was reasonably sure she'd be heard over the wind, "it's not going to do my police career any good if you get arrested doing three times the speed limit and I'm in the car." Stark grinned. "Do you honestly believe the THP has anything that can catch a car like this with me at the wheel?" he asked. Nene considered that for a moment. "No," she acknowledged, "probably not. But the ADP does." "Pff. Bring 'em on. I've got their best officer in the car with me." Now it was Nene's turn to grin. "I'm going to tell Leon you said that." Now that they weren't blistering along at -aircraft speeds-, she eased the hood of her parka back a little and looked around. "Now that you've proven your point, can we maybe, I dunno, put the top up?" Stark looked mildly offended. "My dear girl, there are some things in life that simply aren't done. Such as putting the hood up during one's first drive in a new Rolls-Royce Silver Spectre Drophead Coupe. That's as bad as listening to Razorjack without earmuffs." Then, glancing over to see her making a point of looking as cold and bedraggled as possible, he chuckled and said, "Okay, okay. We're almost there anyway." He indicated and guided the Rolls off the highway. "I have to admit," said Nene when they were down to surface- street speeds and things were quieter, "I wouldn't have expected this." "What, the car?" "Yeah. I wouldn't have figured you for a Rolls-Royce guy. It seems kind of... -stuffy-." "Stuffy?" Stark demanded with raised eyebrows. "I beg your pardon! This is pretty much the least stuffy Rolls ever -made.- I mean, look -around- you!" Nene obediently looked around, taking in the acreage of leather, polished teak, stainless steel, more leather, and a bit more teak. "Well, okay," she said. "Maybe it's not stuffy. But it's certainly... ritzy." "It's comfortable. Tasteful. Distinguished. Like a gentlemen's club or a stately home... that can go 200 miles an hour." Stark smiled slightly, as if remembering something not entirely pleasant, but not without nostalgia value. "You want to talk stuffy, this isn't the first Rolls I've had. I used to have a '23 Silver Shade. Full-dress limo, the kind you have someone else drive for you. It was Tony's pretend-I'm-a-grown-up- executive car. I rode back and forth to court in that damn thing for the better part of eight months. Like a rolling mausoleum." "And then what? You sold it?" He shook his head, the smile becoming a little sharper. "Sent it to Cousin Morgan after the probate hearings were over. Kind of a consolation prize." Nene giggled. "Ohh. -Cold.-" "Yeah, it was a little juvenile, I suppose. Anyway, as far as British cars go, I'm usually more of a Bentley or Aston Martin kind of guy, but... " He shrugged. "What can I say? It was love at first sight. These things don't always make sense." He paused to hand-over- hand around a corner, then added with a small grin, "You'll understand when you're older." Nene shot him a vaguely dirty look, but he was busy easing the car to the curb and didn't see it. Once stopped, he touched a button on the Rolls's discreet, uncluttered instrument panel. With the usual distinctive silent efficiency, the roof unfolded from its compartment behind the passenger cabin and locked neatly into place above them. Stark ran the windows up, then shut off the car and climbed out. The Rolls was parked at the corner of a vacant lot, one of very few remaining in this part of downtown Mega Tokyo. Or it had been vacant three weeks before, anyway. Now, to Nene's surprise, it had what looked like most of a building on it: Stark Tower, just as it was described in the press release in late March. The partly finished structure came complete with granite cladding that looked oddly pink in the afternoon light, reaching about three-quarters of the way up the finished structural steel and beginning to define the edifice's 20th- century Retro Deco streamlining. "Wow," she said, rounding the end of the Rolls to stand next to Stark as he stood, hands in his pockets, looking up at the building. "When you hire a contractor, they don't mess around." Stark smiled. "They're getting a substantial bonus to finish the building fast," he said. "Of course, appearances are deceptive. Most of what you see right now is just an empty shell - the interior will be finished after the structure is complete." Nene nodded, still preoccupied with taking in the job site. The grounds were still at that "mud and equipment tracks" stage, complete with the usual cyclone fence. To the side of the main gate leading onto the site from the side street running behind it, not far from where Stark had parked, was a large sign informing her that she was looking at the future home of Stark Industries Japan, and that the same was being built with pride by Cianbro Corporation of Maine. The sign was also adorned with the distinctive logo of U.S. Robotics - and now that Nene looked more closely, the construction workers she could see moving purposefully around the site weren't construction workers at all. "They're all robots," she observed. "American robots." "Almost all," Stark agreed. "There are a few humans - the project manager, a couple of engineers - but most of the crew is Nestor Series Fives." "That must have cost you a fortune just in import duties," Nene said. "GENOM has a virtual lock on construction robots in this country." Stark grinned. "Yeah, if I had shareholders, they'd probably be pretty pissed off." Then he shrugged and added, "Still, given what I'm planning to get up to in there, I could hardly have the place built by boomers. That'd be like letting Russians build the new U.S. embassy in Moscow. Which happened." "I know," said Nene. "It's kind of one of the watershed moments in electronic intelligence. Sylia did something similar when she had her building put up after the quake. She didn't pay to have robots imported from the States, but it did cost her extra to have it built by an all-human crew. Sort of the same concept." She craned her neck to look all the way to the top of the superstructure, then back down. "Except not as... big." "Well, I'm opening an operation a little bigger than a lingerie shop," said Stark with a smile. Then, turning to her, he held out a small metal and plastic object. "Why don't you take the Spectre back to the hotel? I'll catch up. I have to check in with the project manager and whatnot. No need to make you hang around for the boring part." Nene stared at him. "... You want -me- to drive -that-?" "Sure. Why not? Your driver's license is real, isn't it? Apart from the bit with the date on it." The petite blonde went a little pink across the bridge of her nose. "It's real enough," she said. "I just... I don't know, I mean... it's... " "Oh, go on," Stark said, pushing the key toward her. "It's easy to drive. Hell, turn on the autopilot if you're that concerned about it." He gave her a slight smirk, eyes twinkling. "Let the car do the work." Nene snatched the key from his hand, trying to look mad but failing. "I don't need a computer to drive for me," she said. "That's the spirit," said Stark. "I'll be there in... I dunno, probably half an hour. I think Zoner's planning to have a cookout or something. And try not to dent it, will you?" he added in a slightly raised voice as Nene scampered to the Rolls and started to climb in. "I just got it, after all!" He watched her, grinning like a maniac, start up the Rolls and ease it away from the curb, then turned with a smile on his face and strolled into the building site. NS-5s moved here and there, pausing in their duties to acknowledge him with a smile and a pleasant "Good afternoon, Mr. Stark" as he crossed their paths. He noticed with amusement that they were all wearing the standard blue-lettered white plastic Cianbro hardhats. If Henry Rausch, the project manager, was disconcerted at all by being surrounded by a workforce of nearly a thousand robots, he didn't show it. He welcomed Stark to his little trailer office next to the nascent building with hearty good cheer, offered him coffee (politely declined), and showed him the latest drawings. "We're ahead of schedule," he said. "You should be able to have your people start moving the physical plant into the underground part of the complex in another two weeks." "Great. And the building itself?" "Once we get the structure and the ground floor complete, we'll start finishing the floors from the top down, as you requested," Rausch said. "You'll be able to move into StarkWire Headquarters by mid-May. The rest will take a little longer, but it looks like Stark Industries Japan should be open for business by the end of July." "-Perfect.- I'm very pleased." Rausch beamed. "That's our aim." "Oh. By the way, Henry... " "Yes?" "Why are the NS-5s wearing hardhats?" Rausch grinned. "I started that on a bridge job in Delaware a few years ago. It was originally a gag for a buddy of mine who's an OSHA inspector, but it got written up in the company magazine and somebody at Headquarters liked it. Publicity thing. Makes the robots seem more human." He laughed. "'Course, when I did it they were NS-4s. The Fives don't need as much help in that department." "Technology's a marvelous thing," Stark agreed. They went over some more diagrams, with Stark checking and approving a few changes to the building's inner workings that had been prompted by conditions on the site. Then, thanking Rausch again, Stark left the site and started walking uptown. Despite the seasonably cool temperature that had given Nene pause when it came to driving with the top down, it was a pleasant, sunny day, and after spending the last few weeks mostly either in transit or sealed in a space habitat, Benjamin Stark thought Mega Tokyo was a very fine place to be. That lasted until, not far from City Hall, he found himself suddenly seized by the arm and jerked into an alley behind a small grocery store. Well, that was careless of me, he thought as he was thrown up against the alley wall by one of two large men in ill-fitting dark suits. "Look, fellas," he said, "I'm not carrying much cash and the Rolex is fake." Of those two points, one was true and one was not, but in Stark's experience, most muggers weren't very good judges of wristwatch quality. The man who'd thrown him against the wall looked offended. "We're not interested in your money or your watch," he said. "We have a message for you, Mr. Stark." Oh, lovely, though Stark, and then the stomping began. In his career, Benjamin Stark had been worked over by amateurs and professionals alike. Being the kind of journalist who liked to turn over rocks and report on what scuttled for cover meant making the kinds of enemies who liked to send that kind of message. He wasn't a complete slouch at defending himself, but he learned long ago that self-defense generally didn't work the way it seemed to in the movies, especially in jurisdictions where one could not comfortably carry weapons. Generally speaking, if you were one middling-sized man and two or more large men wanted you stomped, you got stomped. These two guys, he noted with a sort of wry detachment, were pros. They did indeed want to send him a message, and one that would be with him for a while, but they were really being quite careful and judicious about the whole thing. Someone less familiar with the ins and outs of getting handed a beating wouldn't have noticed it, but Stark did. These guys wanted to hurt him, and they were getting the job done with admirable efficiency and dispatch, but they did -not- want him making any inconvenient trips to hospital, where official reports would have to be made as a matter of course. He considered protesting sarcastically that he had only recently finished convalescing from major surgery, but decided against it, simply because unclenching his jaw might cost him some teeth, which would be very annoying and would also upset his assailants' careful plans regarding his need for professional medical attention. The irony of the situation - that this would have been hurting him less and his attackers more -before- that surgery, when he would still have been wearing an armored chestplate under his clothes - did not escape him. Stark tried to keep a guard up as best he could, rolling with the blows wherever possible and maintaining a protective posture, and was wondering just how long they were going to go on with this when the sounds of the struggle suddenly took on a new character. There was still obviously someone getting a beating, but, Stark was bemused to realize after a few moments, that someone was no longer him. "What the hell - ?!" said the man who had spoken earlier. Stark rolled carefully onto his back and opened his eyes - and saw a sight that was so magnificent in its absurdity that, he decided, it was worth getting stomped to see. The two men who had attacked him were being beaten back, handled with finely programmed martial skill and preternatural strength, by a superhero. Obeying a deeply ingrained security protocol intended for use in protecting designated points-of-sale and repeat customers, Pepsiman had rushed to his rescue. "Let's get out of here!" the second man said, and Stark noticed with faint amusement that he had a surprisingly squeaky voice for such a big bruiser. "Yeah, let's go," the first man agreed. "We got our message across anyway, I think," he added, glancing at Stark as he backed away from the silver-and-scarlet salesdroid. Then, raising his voice a little, he called to Stark as he and his partner beat a hasty retreat from the alley: "Welcome to Japan!" "Thanks," Stark grumbled as he painfully raised himself to a sitting position against the wall. Pepsiman stood watching for a moment to make sure they wouldn't come back, then turned and held out a hand to Stark, who took it and then, wincing, gingerly used the android's support to help him get to his feet. "And thank you," he added. Pepsiman bowed, then regarded him for a couple of moments with its blank silver face. Then, with a dramatic gesture and a trademarked sound effect, it presented him with an ice-cold can of Pepsi from somewhere within its workings. "Yeah," Stark said, pressing the can to his forehead for a few moments before cracking it open. "Definitely what I need." A grey-haired man wearing a storekeeper's apron came around the corner from the street, looking concerned. "What's going on out - oh my! Mr. Stark!" Stark raised his Pepsi can in a mock toast. "Hello, Mr. Yamada." "What happened?!" Hanzo Yamada blurted. "Pepsiman just saved my ass, that's what happened," said Stark with a slightly painful smile. "You should give him a raise." "I'm back," Stark called as he entered the Imperial Palace's penthouse suite a short time later. "You're late," Zoner called from the kitchen. "I got held up," Stark replied wryly. He took off his trenchcoat - slowly - and tossed it on an armchair rather than hang it up. Then he paused to examine himself for a few moments in the hall mirror before making his way to the end. "You'll be happy to know I didn't dent your - oh my God!" said Nene as he limped into the kitchen. "That's good," Stark replied absently, looking over the array of partially prepared foods on the counter in the middle of the kitchen. "I hate it when my oh my God gets dented." Zoner, who was standing by the counter mixing something, turned around at her exclamation and blinked. "What the hell happened to you?" he asked. "Somebody sent a couple of guys to give me an official welcome to Japan. I'm guessing either SDC or GENOM." Zoner walked over, turned Stark's head first one way and then the other, then gestured for him to open his shirt. After examining the darkening bruises on the reporter's body and satisfying himself that there was no damage to the still-faintly-visible suture lines on his chest, he said, "They worked you over pretty good." "Yeah, they were pros," Stark agreed, buttoning his shirt back up. "Still, I had the last laugh. They got beat up by Pepsiman." Zoner let out a bark of laughter. "Seriously?" "Yeah. What they get for jumping me in the alley behind the Yamadas' store. Not the best operational planning. What's for dinner?" "Burgers," Zoner said. "I set up a hibachi out on the balcony." "Hm. I wonder what the management will make of that," Stark said. "Ah, well." "If they get too uppity, you can always buy the hotel," said Zoner, only half-joking. "True." Stark rotated his left shoulder a couple of times, wincing slightly. "I should send copies of my medical dossier to all my enemies, so they know to have the guys they send to rough me up avoid my bad shoulder." "I damn well fixed that shoulder three years ago," Zoner said. "It's psychosomatic." "Yeah, yeah. Me and my psychosomatic are off to have a nice hot bath before dinner. Hold my calls." He turned to Nene, looked as if he might be about to say something, thought better of it, and sloped off down the hall toward the suite's palatial master bathroom. Nene looked with some puzzlement at Zoner, who shrugged and turned back to his work. Then Stark reappeared in the kitchen doorway and asked, "By the way, where'd you park the car?" "In the VIP garage, where it belongs," Nene replied. "Nobody gave you any trouble?" "Nope." "Good, good." By the time Stark was done with his bath and had made himself presentable again, another of their guests had arrived; he emerged from his room to find Nene chatting about nothing in particular with Priss Asagiri, who raised a hand in greeting but otherwise more or less ignored him. He went into the kitchen and eyed the assortment of burger fixings laid out on the center island: bottled condiments with their weird mirror-universe logos (he still wasn't quite accustomed to living in Japan), lettuce, pickles, tomatoes. The tomatoes were another mirror-universe phenomenon. They were bright red and perfectly spherical, raised with meticulous Japanese care in some hyper-hygienic, fully organic greenhouse complex near Kofu, and they cost some unfeasible sum of money per unit. Stark, who didn't particularly like tomatoes except as a base for sauce, reflected with no small pleasure that those pretentious Western gourmets who made such a fuss about the superior qualities of what they called "J-produce" would surely have had a seizure thinking of these tomatoes casually sliced for use on hamburgers. Next to the burger toppings was a large bowl of freshly tossed salad, and next to that was a crockpot, which, upon closer investigation, proved to contain Boston-style baked beans bubbling merrily away. Stark wondered vaguely how long they'd been on, and why he hadn't noticed the scent before now. It took quite a while to do baked beans right. Of the cook himself, there was no sign, so Stark put his head back into the living room. "Zoner's been busy," he said. "Do you know where he is?" Priss just shrugged, but Nene pointed and said, "He's out on the balcony. Grilling." Stark made for the balcony, but before he arrived, Zoner appeared with a large platter of corn on the cob, still in the husks, the silk curled and blackened at the ends. Stark raised an eyebrow - corn in Japan in April? - but Zoner just smiled and put the platter down on the table in the small but adequate dining area carved out of the suite's open-plan common area between kitchen and living room. Approaching the table, Nene blinked. "Is that... -corn?- REAL corn?" "No, it's textured soy protein in the shape of corn on the cob," Zoner told her; then, at her disappointed look, he went on, "Of COURSE it's real corn. And by the smell, pretty good stuff, too. Fresh off the farm this morning." "Huh," said Priss. "I didn't know anyone grew corn around here." "It's Westralian," Zoner said. "I had it flown in on a suborbital from Perth. Well, dig in. I'm off to get started on the main course." He headed back toward the balcony door. Stark, hands in his pants pockets, leaned against the arch leading into the kitchen and smilingly watched the two women as they eyed the corn. Priss was trying to be cool and nonchalant, as always, but she kept looking back at the platter, clearly a bit stunned by the sight of a big pile of the stuff, hot off the grill. Nene, on the other hand, looked slightly glazed with something not too far from lust. She picked one of the ears up, then instantly dropped it again with a gasp and the universal "that was WAY too hot" hand-shake. "Careful, they're hot," Zoner called back over his shoulder, just before exiting. A moment later the doorbell rang. Stark went to answer it and, not too surprisingly, found Sylia Stingray and Linna Yamazaki. Sylia was dressed as if she expected to go straight from the cookout to a gala charity banquet, or perhaps the Academy Awards, as she had for their dinner meeting at La Vie Riche (though, he noted, this was a different dress, gunmetal blue with steel-grey accents). Unlike the La Vie Riche dinner, Linna hadn't bothered; she was dressed casually, but not sloppily. Sylia's Euroformal look made Stark briefly think that he should greet her by saying something French and not-quite-kissing her on both cheeks, but he suppressed the urge and bowed her in instead. "Dr. Stingray. So nice to see you again," he said. "And Miss Yamazaki. Delighted. Come on in." "Thank you, Mr. Stark," said Sylia. After crossing the threshold, she offered him a bottle of wine, saying, "My contribution to the occasion." Stark took it with an air of mild puzzlement - it was a cookout, after all, not a state dinner - but then nodded graciously. "Thank you," he said. "Come this way. Dinner should be ready shortly." He guided them to the living room, then detoured through the kitchen to put the wine on the counter. When he did, he looked at the label (which would have been gauche when Sylia was standing right there having just given it to him). What little he knew of wines and their provenances he could trace to some hasty tutelage from Pepper Potts, who had learned more than she wanted to know about the subject during her time as Tony Stark's right-hand woman, but it was enough for him to realize that this was no pedestrian bottle of plonk. He managed to keep the astonishment off his face as he emerged from the other end of the kitchen to see Zoner arrive with the main course. This, in the proper grand-hotel waiter style, he carried on a giant platter complete with silver-dome lid. Placing it on the counter next to the plates and bowls of fixings, he dramatically whipped off the lid to reveal a pyramidal stack of neatly made hamburgers, already in their buns. A cloud of fragrant vapor coiled out as he set the cover aside. "Et voila, dinner is served!" he declared. Stark had been a bit concerned that Sylia's formal dress, her natural reserve, and the fact that she'd brought a quarter-million-yen bottle of Chateau Margaux 2010, would make the gathering a bit stiff, but to his delight, it didn't happen. Instead, as everyone piled their plates with food and converged on the table to eat it, the mood brightened and people began to relax. "This corn is SOOOO GOOD!" Nene declared, practically bouncing in her seat. "I've never -had- corn on the cob. So sweet and crunchy!" "Well, we have plenty, so enjoy," said Zoner, gesturing to the platter. "That's what it's there for." "Are you sure? It must be expensive." Zoner shrugged. "Sure, but that just means it'd be a shame to let it go to waste. Eat it while it's fresh!" Not having needed much convincing in the first place, Nene grinned and grabbed another ear. Priss, meanwhile, was already on her second burger, eating like she'd just gotten out of prison. Between bites of burger and swigs of Heineken, she observed, "You know... I haven't had a burger like this before. What did you put in it?" "Oh, nothing really," Zoner replied. "Just a little bit of kosher salt and some fresh-ground black pepper, mixed in when I ground the meat." Linna raised her eyebrows. "You ground the meat yourself?" "Yeah, we didn't have any ground beef handy, so I ground up some steaks. The kitchen here is really stocked. There's even a KitchenAid mixer with all the attachments in there! It was kind of fun, actually." Stark looked thoughtfully at his burger for a moment, as if trying to remember something. Presently he blinked in realization, then smiled and took another bite. Nene eyed her burger as well. "So... this is steak?" "Sure. I mean, good beef makes good burgers," Zoner said. "I must agree," said Sylia. "The flavor is excellent." "Yeah, must've been some good steaks," Priss chimed in. "I certainly hope so," said Zoner, deadpan. "Kobe beef isn't cheap." Priss nearly choked on the mouthful of burger she was working on, finished off her beer to clear the obstruction, then stared at him. Nene and Linna both paused as well, though neither had quite the same amount of trouble, and started not at Zoner, but at their burgers, not certain whether they should be horrified, delighted, or just plain flabbergasted. And Sylia, with perfect imperturbability and a small smile, said, "Well, it makes a damned fine burger," before taking another bite. "I concur," said Stark, raising his own sandwich in a sort of toast before renewing his negotiations with it. Zoner looked at Sylia, smiled like an idiot, and resumed eating as well. Priss looked from one man to the other to Sylia, shrugged as if to say, "Yeah, as I thought, they're all batshit insane," and popped another beer. Linna finally found her voice. "You ground up -Kobe steaks?-" Zoner, his mouth full, glanced at her and nodded. "Mn-hmn." "But... " Zoner swallowed. "Don't look at me, it was the only beef -he-," jerking a thumb at Stark, "had in the place. I just made do with what I found in the fridge." "It's the only kind this place stocks," Stark protested. "Not -my- fault." "And steaks were too formal," Zoner went on. "Had to be burgers." "That's true," Stark agreed. Nene took a tentative bite, as if concerned that a tax lawyer would appear out of nowhere and demand that she claim the value of the meat as income. "... They really are good burgers," she said in a small voice. "Indeed," Sylia agreed. A silent beat. Everyone but Sylia and Linna broke suddenly into laughter. Linna looked around the table as if convinced that what was about to appear was not a tax lawyer, but a removal crew from the Mega Tokyo Home for the Dangerously Deranged, then resumed eating. "Hey," said Stark after a few moments' silent chewing. "Where's Mackie?" "He stayed behind," Linna told him. "Claimed he had some work to do. I think he's a little afraid of Dr. Strangelove here," she added, gesturing with her salad fork toward Zoner, who frowned. "Well, -that- will never do," he grumped. "Should we be letting Romanova drink?" Priss wondered. "Shut up," Nene replied. "I know what I'm doing." "Well, go easy," Linna admonished her. "That wine's older than you are." "How was your trip, Mr. Stark?" Sylia inquired. "I must say I was surprised to read your statement of intent at StarkWire. It takes a certain level of brass... or foolhardiness... to make a public declaration that you intend to board Space Station Genaros without authorization." Stark smiled. "Getting up there isn't the hard part," he said cryptically. "It's getting -back- that's tricky. I notice things didn't take long to get exciting again here in town after I got back, either. You wouldn't know anything about what happened to Aqua City last night... " "I'm sure I don't know what you mean," Sylia replied with perfect placidity. "If a small group of mercenaries were contracted by the American defense establishment to retrieve a piece of stolen black technology, I would surely be the last person to know." Priss snorted. Linna coughed. Nene just looked around the room, taking an inordinate interest in the cheesy seascape painting on the wall opposite the TV. "I wouldn't expect you to," Stark said, smiling. "Still, when it's all said and done, I bet it'd make a good story. If I could find a source who had confidence in my discretion." "They say all things are possible in the fullness of time, Mr. Stark," said Sylia. Stark inclined his head graciously and left the subject there, not wanting to turn a relaxing afternoon dinner into a debriefing. Eventually, those assembled could eat no more, though Zoner had, in his usual fashion, wildly overestimated how much they would need. "Oi Zoner," said Priss as she stacked dishes in the suite's dishwasher. "What are you gonna do with the leftovers?" "Hadn't planned that far ahead," Zoner replied. "Why?" "I got a rehearsal tonight," she said. "Thought maybe I'd show the boys in my band how the other half lives." With a smirk, she added, "Maybe it'll motivate them to try harder for the big time." Zoner laughed. "A worthy cause," he said. "You've ruined me for life," Nene complained from the couch in the living room. "Not only am I going to gain ten pounds after this, I'll never be able to enjoy a normal hamburger ever again." "Oh, do -not- start with the 'oh no I'm getting fat' stuff again," Linna told her from the loveseat opposite. "I've seen you eat an entire birthday cake and get away with it. Russian genes. Speaking as a fitness instructor who fights a constant battle against cellulite, it -disgusts- me." Nene stuck her tongue out. Priss slumped into an armchair with another beer and snorted. "Yeah, Russian genes," she said. "That means she's a ticking time bomb. The second she hits 35? -Boom.- Beware of Neo-Soviet expansionism." "No way!" Nene protested. Priss gave her young colleague a wicked grin. "Tick. Tick. Tick." "My mom's 42 and she still looks just fine, thank you." "In Soviet Russia, cake eats -you,-" Priss went on remorselessly. "Shut uuuup." There was more conversation, but it became more and more desultory as the food coma, enhanced by the beer and wine, stole over the lot of them. Within an hour, each and every person in the room had closed his or her eyes Just For A Second and crossed into the kind of sleep that can only follow a good meal. An observer entering the room at that point would have found Priss sideways in her armchair, head on one arm, legs hanging over the other, Linna sprawled on the loveseat, and Benjamin Stark asleep more- or-less sitting up at the end of the couch, his head tilted back. Nene lay across the rest of the couch, her head pillowed on his thigh. Even Sylia had fallen asleep, though she'd contrived somehow to do it in a dignified manner, upright in a wingback chair with her head turned to the side. Zoner sat on the floor, propped against the front of the chair, kept from falling over sideways by his shoulder against her elegantly crossed knees. But of course there was no observer to see them, and outside, the city of Mega Tokyo hustled on with its Saturday routine as afternoon fell toward evening. MONDAY, APRIL 19, 2032 Ben Stark took Sunday off, not because of any particular religious conviction, but because staying in bed, sleeping off his hypothalamic control module reset and letting his bruises heal, seemed like about the most prudent thing to do. And, indeed, it seemed to work, for he rose Monday morning feeling refreshed and ready to get stuck in, if still a bit sore. He hadn't spent the -entire- previous day asleep. Part of the afternoon had been devoted to making arrangements, through a series of cutouts, for a place he could call home base while the Stark Tower was going up. Today, almost as soon as Mega Tokyo opened for business, he was off to take possession. That part of the city that was heavily damaged but not entirely devastated by the Second Great Kanto Earthquake was called the Canyons. Those few people who made their homes in the district were used to seeing two kinds of vehicles: old, bodged-up electric citycars making their way gingerly from place to place; and members of Mega Tokyo's various motorcycle gangs tearing through on their way from their camps in the totally wrecked and lawless Barrens, a bit further west, up to what Canyon-dwellers called the New City. The part of the Canyons district closest to the city center did play host to a spattering of small tech companies and startups, drawn by the low rents and availability of large spaces, but in most cases, those hadn't hit it anywhere near big enough yet for anybody involved to have anything better than, perhaps, a slightly newer, less bodged-up electric citycar. It was certainly not the kind of neighborhood where anyone expected to see a Rolls-Royce - especially not a new one. Still, it was down there that Stark guided his gleaming black and silver Spectre Drophead, cruising silently through mostly-empty streets and making his way, with the aid of the onboard navigation system, to his new (temporary) home base. Like the neighborhood, it wasn't much to look at; just a two- story brick building with a nearly flat metal roof, grey metal doors, and barred windows. In addition to the man-sized door on the street side, it had several rolling steel garage doors. The one on the street side was at ground level, while those around to the alley side were up on a loading dock. Stark was pleased to see, as he guided the Rolls toward the street-side garage door, that there were already trucks at three of the loading dock doors. One belonged to a cleanup company; the others bore the familiar livery of Stark Industries. Inside, the cleaners had almost finished their work, clearing away the junk and debris that the warehouse's previous occupants had left behind and leaving a great blank expanse of smooth concrete and empty space. Stark Industries technicians in snappy blue coveralls moved here and there, connecting consoles, calibrating machinery, and generally being industrious. A young man in a pressed white shirt and sharply creased slacks looked up alertly as the Silver Spectre entered the warehouse. He made his way over and, slightly to Stark's surprise, opened the Rolls's backward-hinged driver's door for him when the car came to a halt. "Good morning, Mr. Stark," he said in precise English with a slight British accent, then bowed deeply. "My name is Tezuo Nishimura. I'm an engineer with the Chiba branch. I've been assigned to supervise the setup of your new facility." "Good to meet you, Nishimura-san," Stark replied in Japanese, bowing in return. He took in the details of the young man's appearance as he did so. Nishimura was neatly dressed and carefully combed, not a hair out of place, but his hands were dirty, indicating that he'd been working. How he'd managed to keep his white shirt and blue-and-white- striped tie spotlessly clean, Stark wasn't sure, but he always felt admiration for people who could do that kind of thing. He noticed with faint amusement that though the man's shirt sleeves were rolled up, the folded edges were aligned with laser-like precision, as if they had been prepared by a special sleeve-rolling machine, possibly of German manufacture. "The building has been prepared according to the specifications your AI transmitted to the office yesterday," Nishimura said briskly. "Would you like to examine the modifications?" Stark blinked. "You're done already?" Nishimura nodded. "Building preparations were completed yesterday evening. Since then we've been installing and calibrating the manufacturing equipment and computer systems you requested." "You've been working on this all night?" Nishimura nodded again. "Of course. The project is flagged 'Most Urgent'." "Hrm. I'll have to have a word with Friday about that," Stark mused. "I'm sorry about that, Mr. Nishimura. I mean, not that I don't -appreciate- having the place ready so soon, but there was no need to make people work on the weekend, much less pull an all-nighter." Nishimura shook his head. "Friday didn't mark the project urgent," he said. "That order came from my superiors in Chiba." Smiling very slightly, he added, "They're quite grateful at the steps you and Ms. Potts are taking to increase the status and profile of the Japan division - as are all of us," he added, making a sweeping gesture that took in his crew. Stark laughed. "Well, since you put it that way," he said. "Let's take a look at the building prep, shall we?" "Certainly. We'll start with the security system... " By lunchtime, they were finished and gone, Nishimura and his tech crew sent off with bonus pay and instructions to take Tuesday off. Benjamin Stark stood in the middle of his new domain, did a slow turn to take it all in, and saw that it was good. It still wasn't all that pretty to look at; only four things in the entire space were made with anything other than pure function in mind, and one of those was the Rolls. Still, to an engineer - or even an occasionally inspired tinkerer, which was what Ben still considered himself in the field of technology - the rest had a certain beauty of its own. There were, he would be willing to bet, few better-equipped small machine shops anywhere in the city, and even fewer that had anything like the massive computer console that dominated the far corner. He went to that now, sitting down in one of the other not- completely-utilitarian items (an antique swivel chair, all brown leather and brass upholstery nails), and swung to face the console's central display. He always felt like he was sitting down at the Bat Computer, or maybe getting ready to launch a satellite, when he sat down at this thing. This wasn't the same console he'd had at StarkWire HQ in Boston, in fact, though it was exactly the same model. That one was still there, in fact, since he'd decided not to move it until he moved StarkWire into its permanent base at the top of the Stark Tower. No need to disrupt the site twice in as many months. As such, the familiar "hot librarian" model of Friday's avatar (another of Tony's creations, probably designed that way as a sarcastic reference to his billionaire- playboy-idol-of-supermodels image) did not appear on the screen when he punched the button. Friday was optimized for a different kind of work than he'd be doing here, anyway. She was a personal organization system with a specialization in network operations and the management of a high-demand InfoWeb feedsite. StarkWire was her bailiwick. What was called for here was an engineering system, something to assist in the design and testing of high-tech equipment and manage the room's small army of semiautomated machine tools. Fortunately, Tony had developed one years ago, to run his private workshop back in New York, and it was this system that Ben had ordered transplanted to his new outpost in Mega Tokyo. "Self-test complete," said the console in a mellow male voice with a British accent - based, Ben had been told, on the voice of the Stark family's butler when Tony was a boy. "All systems fully functional. JARVIS online. Good morning, sir." "Good morning, JARVIS," Stark replied. "Status check of communications links, please." "Certainly, sir," said JARVIS, sounding as if no instruction could have pleased him more. "Landline connection to Stark Industries Chiba: okay. Redundancy check positive. Satellite uplink confirmed to Telstarks 11, 15, and 21. System ready." "Excellent. I'll have a major upload for you on Telstark 21 in a little while. In the meantime, I need you to dig into the main archive back in Flushing and pull everything you have on the AR1." "Right away, sir," JARVIS replied promptly. Stark got up from the console and walked toward the Rolls, pulling out his cellphone as he went. "Zoner. You up? Great. Can you meet me at the Stingray Building? Soon as you can. Yeah. Take the Rover around to the loading dock. Discreet as you can. I'll be there... " He paused, then turned to regard the lumpy shape of a white dropcloth the technicians had left covering a couple of items near the loading dock doors, a smile spreading onto his face. "... Actually, I might get there before you." People down in the Canyons might not have been used to the sight of a Rolls-Royce, but they didn't figure there was much new about a man on a motorcycle. They saw too damn many of those, as a general rule. One more wasn't going to make much difference, though at least this guy was wearing a helmet and -wasn't- pausing every couple of blocks to do donuts and fire a pistol randomly into the air, like some of those gang jackasses from down in the Barrens. If any of them had looked more closely, it might have occurred to them that there -was- something unusual about this guy after all. They saw plenty of bikers passing through the Canyons, true, but not many of them rode British bikes from the 1970s. Ben did not, in fact, beat Zoner to the Stingray Building, but that was mostly because he spent an extra half-hour or so larking around before finally resigning himself to his errand. When he did at last arrive, he found Zoner and Mackie Stingray hanging around in the machine shop. Since he happened to arrive in the middle of their conversation, Stark wasn't entirely sure what they were talking about, though he gathered it had something to do with turbochargers. "Gentlemen," he said cheerfully as he entered the shop. "Took you long enough to get over here," Zoner remarked without rancor. Stark grinned. "There are some -deeply excellent- cycling roads in this city," he said. "I begin to understand why there are so many biker gangs." Then, rubbing his hands together briskly, he went on, "Can I get your help for a second, lads? I need to crate up Mr. Clanky." He gestured to the dull grey mass of the original Iron Man armor, which was standing assembled in the corner of the shop like a dressmaker's dummy. Dismantling the suit and packing it in its special case, a big black Anvil job marked PROPERTY OF STARK INDUSTRIES, was the work of a few minutes with three sets of skilled hands and a couple of pneumatic wrenches. While they worked at it, Zoner gave Stark a faintly sardonic eyeing. "'Mr. Clanky'," he said at length. Stark blinked and eyed him back. "... Yes?" Zoner smirked slightly. "That's a Nene name," he declared. "Well... okay, and? I mean, this old thing saved my life. Twice!" Stark said, patting the suit affectionately on the chestplate. "It seems a little cold and impersonal to just call it - " (and here his voice took on a pompous British-television-announcer affect) " - 'The Stark Industries Iron Man Personal Battle Suit, Mark One'." Reverting to his normal voice, he went on, "So... Mr. Clanky." Zoner shrugged, accepting the reasoning, and went back to work. The three of them were nearly done with the job when Mackie's elder sister Sylia, proprietress of the establishment, entered. "Ah, hello," said Stark over the open lid of the case as he fitted the Iron Man helmet into its foam-padded niche. "I'm finally getting my junk out of your spare room," he explained with a grin. Sylia looked slightly taken aback. "You've established your own shop already?" "Most of the stuff I needed I could just cadge from the Stark Industries plant over in Chiba," Stark said. He took a final visual inventory of the Mark I's parts, then shut the case, dogged down the latches, and made sure the security system was armed. "And the rest came in on a suborb from Headquarters yesterday morning. I didn't actually intend to put such a rush on it that the techs worked through last night to set the place up, but somebody got a little too eager." He shrugged, smiling. "I certainly can't complain that the workers at my plant in Japan are slackers." Sylia smiled slightly. "No indeed," she said. "That's quite an achievement." "Speaking of achievements," said Stark as he went to the shop's computer console and sat down at it, "whatever happened with that actuator modification Nene and I thought of while I was in the hospital? Did it work at all?" "It did," Sylia replied. "It isn't practical for field implementation just yet, though." Stark turned in his seat, looking interested. "Oh?" "It uses too much power," Mackie explained. "We fitted up one of Linna's spare hardsuits according to the revised spec, and it chewed through the biggest power cell we had in 180 seconds." "Ah. Well, I was afraid that might happen." Sylia nodded. "The compact energy storage cell technology in the current generation of hardsuits is on its seventh revision," she said. "It's the finest in the world - a full order of magnitude more efficient than its nearest competitor on the open market - but it's just not enough. It's barely sufficient to operate the fourth-generation hardsuits, come to that. Power limitations are why the Mark IV has such limited flight endurance." "Hmm." Stark poked at the console's network interface for a few moments, established a secure connection through a back door onto the Telstark 21 satellite, and started shifting his files to JARVIS. During his hospital stay (and while on his road trip), he and Nene had piled up reams of data gleaned from examinations of the Iron Man suit and their explorations of the Tony Stark ROM construct's records on its construction, and he was going to need all of it for the projects he had in mind for the coming weeks. Once the transfer was running, he turned back to Sylia and said, "I was thinking about that problem a bit while I was in space, and I think I may be onto a solution." Sylia raised an eyebrow. "With no disrespect intended, Mr. Stark, I've been working on the power problem for the last six years. The current energy storage system in the hardsuits is the result of thousands of hours' work. I'll be very surprised if you've come up with something to better it." "Oh, certainly not," Stark said. "I doubt I could top it. In fact, if you'll let me, I intend to make use of it. What I have in mind isn't a system for -storing- energy at all." He smiled slightly. "It's a system for -making- it." "An energy generation system of that magnitude, compact enough and -safe- enough to power a hardsuit? That's... " Sylia shook her head, though she looked intrigued. "Science fiction, Mr. Stark." Stark's little smile became a touch sly. "At Stark Industries, science fiction's what we do. Would you care to put something on it, Dr. Stingray?" Sylia favored him with a little smile of her own. "What did you have in mind? Nothing so vulgar as -money-, I hope." "Not at all. How about... " He thought for a moment, then nodded with satisfaction. "Just the thing. It so happens that I'm in need of a trustworthy software engineer. You give me... 30 days to construct and demonstrate a clean, safe energy source small and powerful enough to supply a hardsuit. If I succeed, you let me have yours." "And if you fail?" Stark considered this for a moment. "I won't," he said, then added breezily, "But if I do, you can have Zoner. If you don't want to keep him for yourself, well, big strong lad like that, with medical and security training, he's worth quite a lot on the open market." Zoner snorted; Mackie stared, not quite sure whether to take the matter seriously. Sylia merely smiled. "Done," she said. "It seems to me you've made a fool's wager, Mr. Stark." Stark shook her hand and grinned. "We shall see, Dr. Stingray. We shall see." TUESDAY, APRIL 20, 2032 Linna Yamazaki didn't have a hard time finding Ben Stark's new workshop. There were plenty of old warehouses in the Canyons, but only one had a big, shiny sign over the street-side garage door emblazoned with the Stark Industries logo. She pulled her CityMax microcar to the curb in front of the building and climbed out, glancing anxiously around at the neighborhood as she did so. "Urgh," Priss Asagiri remarked as she levered herself out of the passenger seat, stretched her back, and turned to give the CityMax a disparaging glance. "I don't know how you can do that to yourself. I mean, if you have to be a cager, that's one thing, but this -clown car- is just ridiculous." Linna gave her a dirty look over the car's roof. "It gets better mileage than your bike and keeps the rain off me." "Yeah, and by the time you're 30 you'll have back problems." Linna snorted. "By the time I'm 30, I'll have a Porsche," she replied. "Come on." "I still don't get why I had to come along," Priss said as they walked toward the door. "This is -your- errand." "Yeah, but it's -your- neighborhood," Linna replied. Then she turned her attention to the metal door. She looked around for some kind of doorbell or security speaker arrangement, but there didn't seem to be anything there; just the dark lens of a one-way peephole in the center of the door. She considered knocking, but the door looked so substantial she thought she'd probably hurt herself before she made any appreciable sound. Tentatively, she tried the knob. To her considerable surprise, what she'd taken for an old- fashioned optical peephole lens suddenly glowed, emitting a grid of calibrated laser light similar to that used by the automatic fitting device in Sylia's armor workshop. It scanned the two women, first vertically, then horizontally, in about a second flat, then went dark. A moment later, a calm British-sounding voice said from nowhere in particular, "Identities confirmed. Welcome." Linna glanced at Priss, who shrugged, pushed the door open, and walked on in. Inside, they found the proprietor sitting at the worktable at the far end, surrounded by unidentifiable scraps, bits of electronics, coils of bright silvery wire, and entirely esoteric odds and ends. He was very carefully winding some of that silver wire onto a circular object. Behind him, an indecipherable diagram rotated slowly in glowing vector rendering on the computer console's giant main display. Old rock music pulsated from hidden speakers, filling the warehouse with sound. # Def Leppard # "Armageddon It" # _Hysteria_ (1987) Stark was so intent on his task (and the music was so loud) that he didn't notice the two women entering the shop at first. Only when they drew even with the other end of the worktable did he look up from his work, and then only because the music dropped somewhat and the calm voice from the door announced over it, "You have guests, sir." "Oh!" said Stark, slightly surprised. He put down the small hand tools he was using to wind the... whatever it was... and pushed the magnifying visor he wore up onto his forehead. "Hi. I wasn't expecting visitors, but that's okay." He gestured vaguely around at the room. "Welcome to the Foundry." Linna looked around. The only thing in the room that was immediately recognizable was the Rolls-Royce, but she hadn't come to talk about cars. Anyway, she'd already heard everything anyone would need to know about the Rolls from Nene, who was somewhat enamored of the thing. Priss, uninterested in both cars and Linna's mission, had wandered over to the other side of the workshop area, where Stark's motorcycle stood next to a tarped shape she took to be some other car. "Huh," she remarked. "Norton Commando. 1974?" "Seventy-three, actually," Stark replied. "First of the 850cc Mark IIs. Well, that's not the -very- first one, but it's from the first production run." Priss nodded. "Nice bike." Stark looked faintly surprised. "I wouldn't have expected 20th- century British bikes to be your cup of tea." Priss chuckled. "My first ride was a '68 BSA Rocket 3," she said. "How it ever ended up in Japan I have no idea, but it was a great bike. Wish I still had it. Turbine bikes are faster, but they just don't have the torque. Or make the noise." "What happened to it?" "I traded it for a guitar." Stark blinked. Seeing his disbelief, Priss shrugged. "I was young and stupid," she said. "In my defense, it was a Mark Knopfler Signature Strat." "Okay, I can see that," Stark agreed. "And at least it wasn't for a microphone," he added, drawing a faint smirk from Priss. She gestured to Linna. "Anyway, don't mind me. Linna has a favor to ask you." Stark turned an arched eyebrow to Linna, who went a little red and grumbled, "Oh, nice lead-in." Priss shrugged. "Just get to the point." Then, tuning them both out altogether, she knelt next to the Commando and started examining the cylinder head. Linna glared at her for a half-second more, then turned to Stark. "Well, uh... look, I have this friend. From the gym where I work. Her name's Irene, and she's... well, she's kind of got a problem." Stark nodded. "Go on... " "Well... See, she used to work for GENOM. And so did her fiance, I never met him, but... anyway, he died a little while ago. They said it was a lab accident, but Irene thinks they had him killed because he found out about something shady going on in his division. She made a fuss about it, so they fired her, and, well, you know this town. If you get fired from GENOM, there aren't many places that'll hire you." "I begin to see the problem. Actually, I see a couple of problems, but keep going." Linna shrugged. "There's not much more to tell," she said. "She's really up against it - no job, no family around here, her fiance's dead and GENOM's blacklisted her... I was wondering if you might be able to give her a job." "Okay... what can she do?" Linna blinked. "Uh... actually, I don't know," she said, sounding faintly surprised. "I think she was an OL at GENOM." Stark rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "Hmm. Well, I don't really need someone to do my typing, and it'll be a month or so before the Tokyo office even begins to staff up, but... eh, why not? Bring her by if you like, and we'll... " He shrugged. "... see how we get on. I expect I can find something for her to do." Over by the Commando, Priss snorted; raising his voice slightly, Stark added, "In a -purely professional capacity.-" WEDNESDAY, APRIL 21, 2032 "I know why you're doing this," said Irene Chang in a low, level tone of voice. She was a well-dressed, pretty young woman, about Linna's own age, and despite her name she was only slightly Chinese- looking. Stark had been faintly surprised to learn that she was, in fact, an American; she'd met her now-deceased fiance in college in the States and come with him when he'd returned to Japan after graduation, though they hadn't gotten formally engaged until quite recently. Now, confronted with that flat announcement, Stark blinked. "Really? Because I'm not sure -I- do." "You don't need to patronize me," she said. "I might have been an OL, but that doesn't make me stupid. You agreed to see me because Linna feels sorry for me." Stark frowned. "Hm. Well, okay, you probably have a point there. But for the record, I wasn't patronizing you. I really -am- not sure I know why we're talking. It's not that I don't have any use for an office lady... it's that I don't really have any burning need for any staff at all. I mean, I own Stark Industries, but I don't really work there in any official capacity. I don't run the company; the only thing under my direct control is a special division. A very small special division. Well... just me and Zoner, really. We don't have clerical work that needs doing and we can make our own coffee." Irene took this in stoically, then said, "In that case, I'm sorry for taking up your time, Mr. Stark." She started to rise, but Stark put up a hand. "Hold on," he said. "That's not necessarily the end of the conversation. I have a couple of important questions." Irene eyed him with a hint of wariness for a moment, thinking over what little she knew about this man. She knew - everyone knew - that he was a wealthy, globetrotting sort of man with a strange, un- billionaire-like passion for looking under rocks and reporting what he found, a captain of industry whose published attitude was almost perversely anticorporate. And she'd -heard-, though not from sources that could be considered entirely reliable, that he was something of a playboy. If his first important question is what I think it is, she thought to herself, I'm going to slap him, I don't care how rich he is. But what he asked was, "Can you weld?" Irene blinked. "Can I what?" "Weld. Or solder? Know anything about integrated circuits or mechanical engineering? Ever handled a computer-aided milling machine?" She couldn't help it; she had to laugh. "Are you joking? I was an office lady. My degree is in media communications. I've never operated anything more complicated than a microwave oven." Stark nodded judiciously and smiled. "Fair enough. Second question... " Here it comes, she thought, but he surprised her again by asking, "... Would you like to learn?" What followed was the strangest time of Irene Chang's young life. She had never once considered that she might have any aptitude for, or interest in, the kind of work Benjamin Stark got up to in his little workshop down in the Canyons. At first, everything about the arrangement seemed intimidating: the unfamiliar machinery, the unusual man, the strange part of town. No trains nor buses ran to the Canyons, so for the first couple of days after she accepted the job, Stark picked her up from her downtown apartment personally - in his Rolls-Royce convertible, no less. Stark was a patient teacher, and a good one. His encouragement, and the fact that he didn't yell or get upset when things went wrong, helped build her confidence as she felt her way into the unusual requirements and picked up the curious skills her strange new job required. What was more, her worries about his billionaire playboy status seemed to have been completely unfounded. He was always a gentleman, never behaving in any way other than perfectly correct - informal, certainly, in a way that was slightly jarring after the paternalistic, protocol-obsessed world of big Japanese business, but correct. Truth to tell, she'd stopped being intimidated by him (if not by the work) by the end of Thursday. He was too affable to intimidate her, and though the work - or, more accurately, the training to ready her for the work - was the hardest she'd ever done, Ben Stark was the easiest employer she'd ever had to work for. She didn't realize until Friday morning that he wasn't joking with her in the patronizing way that her bosses at GENOM sometimes had; he was joking with her because he wanted an assistant he could joke with. She found herself abandoning her put- on office lady primness and getting into the spirit of things almost at once. By the end of the second day, she felt as if her brain would explode with all the information he'd been cramming into it. This was a state she hadn't been in since college - wearied by mental rather than physical effort - and she found herself realizing how dead and wretched her office lady job had really been, how she hadn't even noticed that she missed the intellectual exercise. This was strangely exciting, even as it was exhausting. As Friday afternoon drew on, he could see that she'd about reached her limit. Truth to tell, he was well-pleased; she'd come on faster than he'd been expecting, and after two working days he was fairly sure she was going to work out. He'd have to think of a job title for her, he supposed, smiling to himself. "Well, that's enough for today," he said. "Quitting time." Irene blinked and glanced at her watch. "It's not even four- thirty yet," she said. "I know, but you're looking a little glazed. Don't want to overdo it." He smiled. "If I work you -too- hard, you might decide to go back to the cushy world of office-ladying." She snorted. "At this point, I don't think I -could,-" she admitted. "Even if I hadn't been blacklisted by GENOM, I'd go mad from boredom." She put a hand on her hip and gave him a stern look. "You've ruined me for honest work in two days, Mr. Stark," she said in a clipped tone of mock disapproval. "Quite an accomplishment." Stark's smile became a grin. "Excellent," he said. "Get changed, I'll run you home." She went up the metal stairs to the second floor of the warehouse, where the Stark Industries techs had fitted up a couple of modest but impeccably equipped apartments, and changed out of her grubby work clothes into street clothes. When she returned to the workshop, she found Stark engrossed in a technical diagram on JARVIS's main console, thoughtfully manipulating one of the small parts. "It may be possible to increase efficiency by as much as 45 percent with more precise milling," JARVIS observed. "Mm. We'll need a ten-micron laser lathe for that, though, won't we." He pinched the bridge of his nose. "And I've got to get a holoCAD table in here. Squinting at these tiny parts on a flat screen, I'm going to go blind." "That would never do, sir," JARVIS agreed dryly. "Quite," said Stark. Then he noticed Irene out of the corner of his eye, turned in his chair, and said, "Oh, hey. I hate to ask now, because it looks like I cut you loose early with it in mind, but do you mind coming in for a couple hours tomorrow? I'm going to be putting together some fiddly bits and I could use an extra set of hands. You don't have to if you've got something planned." "Certainly," she said. "No trouble at all." "Great. Thanks. Oh - while I think of it, I forgot to ask you an important question in your interview." Irene cocked her head slightly. "Oh?" "Yeah. Can you drive?" "Of course," she said. "Kenshiro and I never bothered to get a car, since we lived in the city center, but I have a driver's license." Looking faintly mock-offended, she added, "I -am- an -American,- you know." Stark laughed, then tossed her a small object, which she caught more or less by reflex. "In that case, do you mind driving yourself home? I'm a little caught up in working this out, and I'm worried that if I leave it for an hour or so I'll lose the thread of it." Irene looked from his face to the key he'd thrown her and back to his face. "Are you joking?" she asked. Stark shook his head. "Nope." "You want me to take -that- home with me." "Sure, it's easy." "It's a -motor yacht- with -wheels.- You've seen where I live. Where would I park?" "Your building has a garage." "I don't have a parking space, though - much less the three that car would take up," she added with an ironic gesture at the Rolls. "I'll clear it with your building's management. If they give me too much crap, I'll buy the building." He put his hands together in front of his chest. "Please? I really don't want to lose this idea." She had to laugh - the stock Japanese gesture was so utterly corny from such a completely un-Japanese man. "All right," she said, "but if I bend it, it's not coming out of -my- salary." "Well, if you tell it your address, it -does- have autodrive. Be here at 10?" "Ten o'clock it is. Will that be all, Mr. Stark?" Stark smiled wryly. "That will be all, Miss Chang," he replied. He watched her get into the Spectre, adjust the seat and controls, open the door, back out, and pull away, noting with approval that she handled the big car pretty well, given her lack of recent experience. With a JARVIS subprocess keeping a discreet watch via the onboard computer, she should do fine. "JARVIS, get me a connection to Friday, please," he said, turning back to the console as the door trundled shut. "One moment, sir." A moment later, the small holoemitter in the corner of the console lit up and resolved Friday's avatar above it - a classic cardigan-wearing 1950s cartoon secretary in perfect miniature. "You rang, chief?" she said. "Mm. I need a few things." "That's what I'm here for," she replied, pulling a notepad and pencil from nowhere in particular. "Shoot." "First, I need you to get in touch with ARCOM Property Management here in Tokyo and associate VIP parking clearance with their tenant account for Irene Chang in 47E. We'll cover the increase in rent out of the discretionary account." "Got it. Next?" "Next I need some more stuff for the Foundry. We're going to need a ten-micron laser lathe, one of those holoCAD systems they use over in Robotics, and... " Two hours later, he was fooling with still more little components on the master display with one hand and drinking a Pepsi with the other when the door opened and Zoner sloped in, followed by Nene. "Yo," Zoner called. Stark swiveled. "Oh hey," he said. "What's up?" "Dinner?" "Yeah, I think it's safe to leave this now," Stark replied. He nudged one final virtual component into place, gave it a minute adjustment, and then said, "Okay. Save and archive, please." "Right away, sir," JARVIS replied. "Hey!" Nene said. "Where's the Rolls?" "Irene has it," Stark replied. "What?!" He shrugged. "She had to get home, I wanted to keep working, it seemed like the most efficient thing to do. She's coming back tomorrow to help me with the frammistats, anyway." Nene folded her arms. "You'll let -anybody- drive that car," she said, pouting. "I thought I was -special-." Stark grinned. "Officer Romanova," he said, "you have no idea how special you are, not just to me, but to the project I have planned after I finish this one." Zoner snorted. Stark shot him a look, then grinned again and said, "That -did- sound pretty cheesy, didn't it." SATURDAY, APRIL 24, 2032 Irene arrived back at the Foundry promptly at 9:45 the next morning, feeling - just as she had on the way home the previous afternoon - horribly conspicuous. This was not necessarily an entirely -bad- thing, but the Rolls's comfort and style were somewhat overshadowed by the uncomfortable feeling that everyone she passed was staring. As she approached the building, she noticed another, unfamiliar car parked by the curb in front of the man door, just past the curb cut that gave access to the driveway and the Foundry's main garage door. It was a four-door sedan with oddly aggressive lines for such a car, like a middle-management salaryman's car with anger issues - all angles and corners, with a wing on the trunk lid and aerodynamic ground surfaces at nose and sides. It was biggish by Mega Tokyo standards, though so much smaller than the Rolls that Irene briefly entertained the fanciful notion of the bigger car carrying the smaller in the trunk, as a normal car would carry a spare tire. She guided the Rolls carefully through the garage door into the place that had become its parking spot more or less by default. Ben Stark was over in the workshop area, supervising while a couple of jumpsuited Stark Industries techs fitted some more equipment. He left them to it and walked over to the Spectre as it glided to a halt, so that he was on hand to open the door for Irene when she made to get out. "Morning," he said. "I see you didn't bend it." "No I didn't," she replied firmly. "Though it gave me a bit of a turn when I saw where you'd arranged for me to park it. I can't imagine what that must have cost." She handed him back the key to the Rolls. Stark grinned and exchanged it for another one. "I told you the job came with perks," he said. Irene looked at the key. "What's this?" Stark gestured through the open garage door at the car parked by the curb. "Your company car," he said. Irene blinked and walked back outside to take a better look at the car. "-This?-" she said. "Sure," said Stark from a pace or two behind her. "What's wrong with it? Don't like the color? It's Stark Industries blue. They don't sell it to anyone else." "It looks like a -racing car.-" Stark made a dismissive gesture. "Styling. You know how car designers are these days. It's a Mitsubishi Lancer. A nice, sensible sedan. All the best inventors' assistants are driving them." Irene regarded the discreet, body-colored badge on the back of the car. "What does 'Evolution XXV' mean?" "Options package," Stark replied, a trifle vaguely. "Shall we? The guys from Chiba are almost done fitting the new toys, and the sooner we get done, the sooner you'll be able to try it out." The next three weeks were like a slightly less concentrated version of the whirlwind the first two days had been. For a man with a reputation (so far as Irene could tell, undeserved) as a playboy dilettante, Stark worked hard when he had his teeth in a project, and his intensity was infectious. It took her most of the first full week to realize just what he was working on, but it soon became apparent - even to someone with Irene's lack of technical background - that, if it worked, it would be revolutionary. FRIDAY, MAY 14, 2032 9:30 PM JST The workshop looked slightly like a tornado had hit it, with tools, pieces of scrap, and unidentifiable technological detritus scattered on most of the horizontal or near-horizontal surfaces. The only exception to this was the middle of the main worktable, next to the holoCAD unit. Here, in the center of a roughly circular clear area, surrounded by a series of sensors and whatnot that vaguely resembled a model of Stonehenge built from old computer parts, sat the just- completed fruit of the last three weeks' intensive labors. Standing by the end of the table looking at it, Zoner had to admit it didn't look like much. In fact, to him it resembled nothing so much as a slightly oversized, modernized version of one of those Art Deco glass doorknobs from the 1920s, or maybe a stereotypical cartoon Huge Diamond, partially enclosed in a techno-styled housing of meticulously crafted black metal struts and flanges, sitting in a little mechanized cradle like some kind of scrap metal sculptor's take on a jeweler's display case. "Right. Now comes the tricky part," Stark observed. He handed a pair of welder's goggles across the table to Zoner. "You might want to put those on. Just in case." "Just in case what?" "Well... I'm effectively certain that nothing will happen. But if my calculations are out, there -is- a very small but nonzero chance this will explode when I activate it." He slipped his own goggles down over his eyes. "In which case it's liable to get a bit bright in here." Zoner stared at him for a moment, then shrugged and put on the goggles. "Well," he observed, "it wouldn't do to be blinded three milliseconds before being vaporized." "Exactly." "Is this why you sent Irene home?" Stark nodded. "Linna already thinks I've done terrible things to the poor girl's mind," he said. "She'd never forgive me if I blew her up. Ready?" Zoner nodded. "Hit it." Stark reached to the cobbled-together control box next to the little cradle, adjusted a couple of dials, flicked the red plastic cover off a toggle switch next to them, and threw the switch. For half a second, the lights dimmed slightly. Everywhere on Honshu. Then they brightened again, became slightly -too- bright for roughly the same length of time, and stabilized. Working late in his office on an upper floor of GENOM Tower, an executive named Brian J. Mason glanced up from his terminal, slightly surprised by the very first electrical disruption he had ever experienced in the Tower proper. Since the building contained, among rather a lot else, the generators that powered most of metropolitan Mega Tokyo, it was generally GENOM's department to -cause- energy fluctuations, not suffer them. At AD Police Headquarters downtown, Inspector Leon McNichol cursed as his antiquated desktop computer failed to cope with the brownout and rebooted, erasing a nearly-completed report at which he'd been hunting and pecking diligently for the better part of an hour. In an underground nightclub in Harajuku, nobody took any notice. The lights always flickered when Priss and the Replicants were doing their sound check. Only their engineer registered any issue at all, and he just shrugged, grumbled something about outlaw clubs' dodgy pirated power service, and adjusted the gain on the Pultecs. At the Stingray Building, the effect was entirely imperceptible. Sylia Stingray hadn't paid as much as she had for her building just to leave it dependent on mains power. Back at the Foundry, Zoner and Stark pushed their goggles up onto their foreheads almost as one, their faces taking on parallel expressions of delight, as the device in the center of the technological Stonehenge on the worktable began, in complete silence, to glow with a beautiful pure white light. Stark's expression quickly changed from delight to something not too distant from rapture as he gazed into its bright, but not blinding, light. Presently he seemed to snap out of his reverie; he turned to the bank of instruments on the opposite side from the controls and busied himself for a few seconds checking gauges and indicators. Then, with a broad grin, he turned to Zoner and said in a tone of mild disbelief, "It's working." "How well?" Zoner asked. "Um... " Stark rechecked the gauges. "Perfectly. I think. I mean, it's not being asked to -do- anything in the startup rig, but all the readouts are stable. Right where I expected. JARVIS, backstop me here." "Your readings are confirmed, sir," JARVIS said after a moment's pause. "I believe congratulations are in order." "Yes!" "Nice work, Gryph," said Zoner, grabbing his hand briefly in an armwrestler's grip. "This is... it's incredible. This is going to turn the world upside DOWN." Stark was grinning from ear to ear as he had his hand shaken. Then, sobering just slightly, he said, "Well, let's not get ahead of ourselves. We haven't tested it yet. For -that-, we'll need... " He thought for a second, and then the grin spread back onto his face. "Well, for starters we'll need to borrow a blonde again." SATURDAY, MAY 15, 2032 5:37 PM JST Priss Asagiri glanced at her watch, then at MegaZone. "If he's not here in ten minutes, I'm leaving," she said. "I've got a gig tonight." "He knows," Zoner replied. "We're planning to go to it." They, along with Linna and the Stingrays, were on the garage level of Knight Sabers headquarters, where Zoner had gathered them all together a few minutes before. They all stood in a little group near the front of the mobile bay van, facing the tunnel that led to a network of subchannels connecting the base to a number of cunningly concealed exits scattered around the metropolitan area. A couple of minutes went by in silent anticipation. Priss was just about to threaten once again to leave when something glinted at the far end of the main tunnel, and a moment later the sound reached her - the sound not of an engine, but of rock and roll. # Stevie Ray Vaughan & Double Trouble # "The House Is Rockin'" # _In Step_ (1989) A moment later, the car halted in front of them, artfully turned at the very last moment so that it presented a flattering 3/4 forward view, with just a chirp of tires on deck plating. Apart from that and the music, there was no sound, not even the whine of a turbine. Ben Stark shut off the sound system and, grinning broadly, climbed out from behind the wheel as Nene Romanova got out of the passenger side. For a moment, nobody spoke; they all just stood there, taking in the sight of the low-slung, bright-red sports car the two had arrived in. Priss was the first to speak, deadpanning: "Oh look, a Mark V." Stark grinned. "Good eye," he said, and then, in an appreciative sort of voice, "You continue to surprise me, Miss Asagiri. Well done!" Priss rolled her eyes. "So you bought an old Tesla roadster. Big deal. Call a -press conference,- why don't you." "Yeah, I admit, not that big a deal on the face of it," Stark replied, his good cheer undented. "I mean, even if this -is- the most powerful all-electric car ever produced, with direct stator drive on all four wheels, a zero-to-sixty time - that's zero to 100 for you metric types - of three point three seconds and a top speed of 155 miles per hour." "Uh-huh, great. So you've got -Mackie- interested, anyway. Now, about impressing the rest of us." Stark laughed. "Man, tough crowd. Okay. Naturally, I wouldn't be showing off like this if it was just a regular Mark V. Even I'm not -that- impressed with my toy collection. What I came to show you is under the hood." He reached down into the cockpit, popped the release mechanism, then went around and opened the hood, propping it on its lift rod. "Voila!" he declared, gesturing at what lay beneath. Inside the underhood compartment, where about half of the Mark V's massive collection of 20,000 high-density dynamic energy storage cells - batteries, to normal people - should have been, there laired instead... something unlike any of the Knight Sabers had ever seen. It looked a bit like an old-fashioned piston engine, in fact, a substantial-looking piece of arcane equipment surrounded by a maze of pipes, hoses, and cables. Unlike any piston engine in history, though, this was covered in faintly glowing traces and lines, with several wider, deeper channels shining with a bright white light. It all converged on a round opening at the very center of the thing's convoluted top surface, out of which the light shone like a beacon, or at least an upturned headlight. "... What -is- it?" Mackie asked. "That," Stark replied with an inventor's pride, "is the power source I promised your sister. Here it is, a working prototype - and ahead of schedule, I might add. Well, technically it's the -second- prototype. The first one's back at Stark Industries in New York, but it's the size of a small airliner. Not really ideal for our purposes." He flipped a hand. "And I -suppose,- if you want to get all specific, -I- didn't invent the central principle it works on, Howard Stark did. But he didn't even try to build one - didn't think it would work in the real world - and Tony never got around to refining the technology at all. He built the big one just to see if he could." Sylia stepped around her brother, walked to the front of the Tesla, and stood looking down at the enginelike object. "You've removed all the batteries," she observed. Stark nodded. "Don't need 'em. This device can produce a smooth, continuous stream of power well in excess of anything even this Mark V can demand of it. It's much more powerful than the original battery system. We hit 170 - which is, what, 275 kph or thereabouts? - up on the Ring Road during the test run on the way over here - didn't we, Nene?" Nene nodded, her face looking like it couldn't decide whether to flush slightly or go slightly pale at the memory of it. "And I think we could've gone faster," she added, a little breathlessly. "Not much, actually," said Stark with a hint of slightly embarrassed modesty. "This car's suspension was never intended to go much beyond the rated top speed of 155. Much faster than we were going and either the car or I would have run out of talent in a hurry." "What's its maximum output?" Sylia asked. "I haven't quite finished testing it yet, but I think this prototype will be able to manage about three megawatts. Once I've refined the design and the manufacturing process a little more, I'll be able to go higher." Sylia raised an eyebrow. "Three megawatts. Impressive. But for how long?" Stark shrugged. "Again, I haven't fully thrashed out the prototype, but my best estimate right now? About ten years." Sylia raised the other eyebrow to join its mate. "... You're joking." "I'm not." "That is... Well." She regained her composure, not that most people would ever be able to tell she'd lost it, and turned to face him more fully. "You're to be congratulated, Mr. Stark. That is a truly astonishing achivement." Stark inclined his head graciously. "Thank you." A hint of a smile touched her face. "However," she went on, "I think you will agree that this device is much too cumbersome to be used to power a hardsuit. As such, it appears that you -do- lose the bet." Stark wore the expression of a man trying very hard not to smirk as he replied with forced nonchalance, "Oh! Sorry. All this clobber?" He made a gesture taking in all the pipes and channels and glowing bits of housing. "This is just the retention system." With a few quick, deft movements, he adjusted a couple of knurled knobs at the corners of the device, pressed some concealed flanges, and entered a code into a keypad that had been hidden under one of the glowing panels. For a moment, nothing happened; then the whole assemblage whirred softly and spread apart, opening up like some kind of freakish metal flower, and a metal-trimmed crystalline object about the size of a clenched fist rose up out of the opening in the center on a small pedestal, revealing itself to be the source of the white glow. This Stark reached out, took hold of, and gave a smart counterclockwise quarter-turn. When he did, the glowing traces and channels in the housing assembly went dark, and he lifted the glowing part free from the car, then turned to present it to Sylia. "-That- is the device itself," he said. "It's called an arc reactor." For several seconds, Sylia didn't reply. She held the object in the palm of one hand, feeling its heft - it weighed about the same as a good orange of that size, slightly heavier than it looked like it ought to be - and gazing into its clean white glow with something akin to awe. Quiet, restrained, dignified awe, to be sure, but awe nonetheless. Then she looked up, her dark eyes glittering with reflected light as she looked across the top of the arc reactor and into the eyes of its creator. "I stand corrected," she said quietly. "It seems you've won after all... and you have my -heartiest- congratulations. If this does what you say it does, then your achievement goes well beyond the astonishing. An invention like this - it will change the world." Stark smiled. "Thank you," he said. "I hope so... but it has a long way to go before it's ready for prime time. It'll need a vigorous, long-term testing program. I'll need a few hardy souls to take this technology into the field and give it a -damn good thrashing- before I'll feel ready go public with it." He gestured to the Tesla. "But don't take my word for it. Take the car apart, make absolutely certain that there's no other power source hidden in it anywhere. I want you to have total confidence in the system - and in me." Sylia nodded. "You may rest assured, I'll do just that." She looked into the glow of the arc reactor again, then back at Stark. "And this?" "I'm going to need the reactor itself back for the moment," Stark admitted. "It's the only one in the world, though now that I've made that one, it shouldn't take me nearly as long to build the next generation." Sylia took one last look into the depths of the arc reactor, then handed it back. Stark walked around the Tesla and fished a small hardshell case, like the kind used to carry expensive cameras, from behind the passenger seat. He carefully tucked the reactor away inside the case, locked it, and shouldered it by its carrying strap. Linna put up a hand. "Um, for those of us who don't speak fluent geek," she said, "would you like to explain what that was all about in normal words?" "Sure." Stark indicated the case. "This little device produces about as much energy per second as a bullet train locomotive, and it will do, pretty much constantly, until at least 2042. That's about... correct me if I'm wrong here, Dr. Stingray... five times as much power as the current model of your hardsuit demands?" "Roughly," Sylia confirmed. Stark nodded. "And... well, it can keep it up for quite a few orders of magnitude longer." Seeing that Linna still looked a bit puzzled, one of her colleagues put her oar in. "It means," Priss retranslated, "that once he's perfected the arc gizmo and Sylia's retooled our hardsuits to take advantage of it, we'll be able to kick five times as much boomer ass." "Pretty much forever," Nene threw in. Linna blinked. "Oh," she said. Then, grinning, she added, "That's -awesome-." "It'll -be- awesome," Priss corrected her, "if it -works.-" "Why do you have to be so negative all the time?" Nene asked. "No, she's right," Stark said. "There are still a lot of unanswered questions. But right now, it looks very, very promising. Now, to take matters to the -next- level, I'll need some help. And that's where you come in." Nene looked startled. "Me?!" Stark grinned. "I -did- win the bet," he said, studiously ignoring Zoner's theatrical show of dejection. Sylia nodded agreement. "You did. Provisionally," she added, glancing at the Tesla's open hood, "but I don't doubt that your claims will be verified, so there's no reason to delay the next stage of your project." With another of her very faint smiles, she gestured to Nene, bowed slightly to Stark, and said, "She's all yours, Mr. Stark." "What?!" Nene blurted. Stark's grin widened as he put an arm around the young blonde's shoulders and squired her, halfheartedly protesting, toward the black Rover that Zoner had arrived in. "Don't worry about a thing," he said. "Ask anybody. Working for me comes with good perks. What have you wanted most of all since you were old enough to know it existed?" Nene blinked and reddened across the bridge of her nose. "Ummmm," she said dubiously. "Besides that," Stark said dryly. Giving her shoulders a little shake with his arm, he chided her, "Focus, girl! We have -work- to do." "Oi!" Priss called after him. "Thought you were coming to my show." "After Priss's show," he added without missing a beat. SUNDAY, MAY 26, 2032 10:27 AM JST The ringing of his bedside telephone dragged Benjamin Stark by force out of the depths of a pleasant but instantly-forgotten dream. He blinked into the darkness, found the phone by the light of its keypad (which flashed an electroluminescent blue in time with the bleat of the ringtone), and lunged toward it. In the darkness, he misjudged the distance somewhat and ended up on the floor, then reached up without comment and retrieved the receiver, content to take his call from the floor. "... hello." "Mr. Stark?" came the voice of Henry Rausch. "Sorry, did I wake you?" "No, no," Stark replied, rubbing his face. "Gravity took care of that." "Pardon?" "Nothing, never mind. Had a late night last night. Finished a major project, celebrated by taking in a local band at a club in Harajuku... and judging by the state of my head, held up the Stark family honor in the process... what's up?" "Thought you'd like to be informed soonest - the rest of the tower interior still needs a month or so of work, but StarkWire HQ is ready for you to move in." Stark grinned, the news (and a couple of neuroprocessor-aided adjustments to his endocrine system) making a good start on banishing his hangover. "Henry, your timing couldn't be better. Bonuses for everybody. For God's sake don't tell Chiba, though. They'll have poor Nishimura and his crew over here moving all my stuff on Sunday again." Stark completed the call, fumbled at the endtable until he'd put the phone more or less away again, then got a hand on the edge of the bed and dragged himself up to sit down. He knew there were things he ought to get up and do, but he also knew that what he most -wanted- to do was take a couple of Advil and go back to sleep. At length, he sighed and got to his feet. No time like the present, after all, and besides, he did have a lot to get done. Finding the room control next to the phone in the dark, he switched the room's windows from full black to 3/4, letting in just enough light to find his way to the bathroom. "nngh, god damn. bright," a voice croaked from the other side of the bed. Stark glanced over to see a fold of covers dragged into position to ward off the dim glow, leaving only a smudge of dark hair visible between comforter and pillow. "Sorry," Stark said quietly, smiling. He paused at the bathroom door to re-black the windows from the control panel there. "Go back to sleep." "damn right." After those two Advil he'd been promising himself, a shower, and a bottle of water, Stark felt more or less human again. He spent the next couple of hours sorting out the workshop. By lunchtime he'd thrown out or stashed the unused scraps from the arc reactor prototype project, put away all the tools, and was in the process of securing the JARVIS console for transport when he heard the door at the north end of the upper level open and close again, followed by footsteps on the metal stairs. A moment later Priss rounded the corner by the end of the laser lathe, pulling on her riding gloves. "Yo," she said. "I'm taking off." "Sure you're okay to ride?" Stark asked. Priss shrugged. "You'd know better than me," she said with a slight smirk. Stark snorted. "You know what I mean." "Yeah, I'm fine. You're out of OJ, though," she added offhandedly. Then she threw a leg over her bike, pulled on her helmet, started up the machine, and glanced back over her shoulder. "See ya," she said, winking casually before reaching up and snapping down her mirrored visor. Stark grinned, thumbed the button to open the garage door, and waved as she gunned the bike's turbine and sped off. "Right. Where was I?" Stark mused to himself. "Preparing me for transport, sir," JARVIS replied imperturbably. "Ah. Of course. And then I have a couple of calls to make." Irene Chang got home from the gym that evening to find one recording on her apartment's videophone - a short message from a slightly disheveled but beaming Benjamin Stark, who declared, "Irene, hi. Good news! My part of Stark Tower is ready, so I'm shifting operations there starting tomorrow. You might as well take the day off - everything's going to be torn all apart and I won't actually have anything for you to do until Tuesday anyway. I just pushed an update to the major satnav providers, so the one in your Evo should know the way when you tell it you want to go to Stark Tower. See you Tuesday!" MONDAY, MAY 17, 2032 9:15 AM JST Tezuo Nishimura wondered why he felt faintly nervous. After all, he'd met Mr. Stark twice before, and both times he'd been very pleasant - almost like a regular guy. And he was certain that this wasn't any kind of disciplinary action. Still, being summoned to the half-completed new regional headquarters to see the company's owner was the sort of thing that could make anybody nervous, especially a highly- strung young engineer and general perfectionist like Nishimura. He noticed as he entered the Stark Tower lobby that most of the work here appeared to be done. The high atrium was finished in gleaming marble and brass, a continuation of the Retro Deco style of the building's exterior - a little too overblown and, well, American for Nishimura's taste, but then he would be the first to admit that he was no architecture critic. The only signs here that the building wasn't finished yet were the draped dropcloths blocking the view of the incomplete upper levels of the atrium and a faint smell of new paint. Those, and the Cianbro NS-5s that still trooped through the site with orderly precision, heading to their next tasks. Most of the buttons in the elevator were dark, signaling floors that weren't finished, but the topmost one, the 38th floor, was lit up. Nishimura pressed it and was conveyed in efficient silence to the building's penultimate floor. Here the doors opened onto another, smaller, more intimate lobby, this one finished in a slightly more modern style. A crimson carpet led from the elevator doors, past what looked a bit like a reception desk, and to a pair of sleek black doors, one marked with a block capital S, the other a matching W. On the curving wall to the left of the doors was a subtly lighted logotype: STARKWIRE WORLD HEADQUARTERS. Nishimura advanced into the middle of the lobby, then hesitated, not entirely sure whether he should go to the apparently unattended reception desk or proceed straight through the doors. A moment later he had his answer, as a small holographic projector on the desk glowed to life and displayed the slightly transparent head and shoulders of a woman - or, he realized after a moment, a female-pattern machine intelligence. He'd seen her before, albeit only on flat screens. "Hello, Mr. Nishimura," said Friday. "Go on in. Mr. Stark is waiting for you." Nishimura bowed slightly. "Thank you," he said. The office beyond the double doors looked about the way Nishimura had always imagined executive offices at high-tech companies ought to - a large and mostly empty room dominated by a panoramic window (offering an interesting but not beautiful view of eastern Shinjuku and Chiyoda) and a massive black glass-topped datadesk with one chair behind it and two, a bit smaller, in front. There were also a couple of small bookshelves along the curving walls to left and right, a modest display case sporting a handful of trophies, and several framed certificates on the walls. To Nishimura's slight surprise, though, Benjamin Stark wasn't sitting in the high-backed leather chair behind the enormous desk. Instead, he was sitting in an armchair, one of a pair arranged, with matching sofa and glass coffee table, off to one side of the door. When he saw Nishimura, he got up with a smile and offered his hand. "Mr. Nishimura, thanks for coming," he said. "My pleasure, Mr. Stark," Nishimura replied, trying not to sound nervous. "Have a seat," said Stark, waving him to the other chair as he returned to his own. Once they were situated, he went on, "I'll get right to the point. I have a project I'm preparing to undertake - not official company business, at least not yet - and I've asked your superiors if I might borrow you and your team for a few days to help me set it up. They said okay, but I figured I should ask you before committing to it, since it's not strictly official." Nishimura looked intrigued. "I'm happy to help with whatever you need, of course," he said. "But why me in particular?" Stark smiled. "Well, I know from experience that you're a man who gets things done, done right, and done quickly... and I believe from instinct that you're a man who can keep a secret." TUESDAY, MAY 18, 2032 10:02 AM JST Irene Chang had an almost identical experience the next day - the lobby, the elevator, the second lobby, the office. This time, though, she found Ben Stark at his desk, intent on something his datadesk's master display was showing him. The only thing to spoil the high-tech business tycoon effect was his outfit. At that desk, in this office, it seemed like a man should be wearing a three-piece suit, but no. Stark was dressed pretty much the same way he had been every time Irene had seen him, in jeans, a grey T-shirt, and a green button-up shirt that wasn't buttoned up. He needed a shave and generally had the look of a man who'd pulled an all-nighter, or possibly two. When she came into his office, he looked up and smiled, but the gesture looked ever so slightly forced. A month ago, Irene wouldn't have noticed it. Now it took her sufficiently aback that she failed to deliver her usual opening line, "Good morning, Mr. Stark," opting instead for a simple, "... What?" Stark blew his cue as well; instead of his customary reply, "Good morning, Miss Chang," he said, "Hello, Irene. Sit down." Irene blinked, then sat down in one of the chairs facing his desk. For a moment, neither of them spoke. He regarded her with a thoughtful but hard-to-read expression; she looked back at him with a mix of puzzlement and faint trepidation. "Am... am I in trouble?" she finally asked. "No," Stark replied. "Not at all. I just... I'm not sure how to tell you what I have to tell you." He put his hands on the top of his desk, sighed, shook his head, and then plunged on. "Irene, I've been looking into what happened to your fiance, and... I have some news that you're probably not going to like." Irene looked as if she didn't know how to respond to that; then she drew herself up and said, "Tell me." "Are you sure?" "Yes. Whatever it is... I have to know." Stark sighed again. "Okay. Kenshiro was part of a special engineering team within GENOM's robotics division." "That part I knew," Irene said. "He told me they were working on boomers for space applications." "Well... " Stark looked uncomfortable. "Not exactly. Space boomer development isn't handled in Tokyo. As near as I can figure from documents my sources have managed to dig up, they were really working on a next-generation combat boomer. Sort of the Mercedes S-class to the 55 series's E-class. Bigger, tougher, stronger. Internal documents refer to it as 'Project 99'." "An improved -combat boomer?- But... that's illegal." Stark nodded. "I told you you probably wouldn't like it. At the time, it was a 'grey project'. GENOM management seem to have been hoping they'd manage to convince the government to lift the moratorium on combat boomer development once they had most of the engineering done." "That'd give them a huge advantage over the competition," Irene realized. "Right. They'd have a prototype ready while everybody else was just firing up their CAD systems. What happened next is a little hazy, but I think I've pieced together the basic outline of the thing. It looks like someone within the development team got cold feet. One of the engineers - I couldn't find out which one - made a tentative contact with the AD Police, looking for protection. Unfortunately... GENOM has sources in the ADP too." Irene's eyes widened with horror. "So to get at one whistleblower, they killed the whole team?! That's insane!" "I think there's more to it than that," Stark said. "The 'accidental explosion' that killed Kenshiro and the other engineers in his team did more than silence a potential security breach. It also destroyed all the physical evidence of Project 99 itself. The physical evidence... but not the data." "You mean... you think it's still going on?" Stark nodded. "I'm not sure, but if I were a betting man - and sometimes I am - I'd put a lot on it. I think someone at GENOM arranged the supposed destruction of Project 99 in order to take it fully underground. Make it black, as they say in the trade. Whether with or without the connivance of GENOM's uppermost management, I'm not sure. That company has more internal factions and deniable cells than a terrorist army. My gut tells me this is some hotshot executive, maybe even one of their young MBA sharks straight out of business school, looking to make a name for himself by completing Project 99 and presenting the product to Old Man Quincy as a fait accompli. The full Bob Morton." Irene looked faintly confused. "Bob who?" "Never mind. The problem is, that gut instinct is about the most solid lead I have right now. Everything else... it'd never pass muster with a city desk editor, let alone in a court of law. Rumors, hearsay, the word on the street... internal corporate documents stolen from poorly secured servers and subject to a -lot- of interpretation. I'll keep digging, but... I think we might have to wait for them to make the next move before we get any traction." Irene sat in silence for a few moments, slowly twisting the top of her small handbag back and forth between her hands. "So... what you're telling me is that Kenshiro was working on something illegal... and someone else within the company killed him in order to... what? Steal the project?" "Basically, yes." Stark gazed solemnly at his young assistant with sadness in his eyes and added, "I'm sorry, Irene." For a moment, she looked like she might cry. Then she pushed it back, hardening herself with what looked like a practiced effort, and said softly, "Not as sorry as someone's going to be." "Look, don't do anything crazy," Stark said. He rose, walked around his desk, and put a hand on her shoulder. "Like I said, I'll keep digging. Whoever did this is going to expose himself sooner or later, and when he does, we'll nail him. With some concrete evidence, StarkWire can blow this little shell game wide open, and that evidence is out there somewhere. We'll find it. But sometimes in this game you have to be patient." "Game!" she cried, turning suddenly angry eyes up to his. "The man I love is dead and you call it a game?" Stark put up his hands in surrender. "It's an ugly metaphor," he admitted. "But... to the man who -did- this, that's exactly what it is. And right now he's got almost all the cards, so until we're in a better position, we have no choice but to play by his rules." He put his hand back on her shoulder, looked her in the eyes, and said, "But there'll come a day, Irene, when he very suddenly learns that it's -not- a game. That it hasn't been all along. I promise you that." Once more, Irene looked for a moment like she might cry. She looked back at him in silence for several seconds, her lips pressed together in a thin line to keep them from quivering. Then she pushed it away again, pulling herself together and straightening in her chair, raising her chin defiantly. "I understand," she said. "Thank you... for telling me what you've found so far." "You're welcome. I'm sorry it couldn't be better." "No... it's important that I know. One way or another." She took a single, shuddering sigh, then squared herself up again. "I hope you have another project planned," she said. "I think I need something to take my mind off things," she added with a slightly wan smile. Stark smiled in return and said, "As a matter of fact I do." They went to a special elevator, smaller than the one that had brought Irene to the 38th floor, off to the side of Stark's office. With a blandly polite welcome from the voice of JARVIS, this whisked them back down again. Irene wasn't sure how far, since the car had no level indicator in it and only two buttons, but it seemed to take a little longer to go down than the main one had going up. When they arrived, the doors opened silently onto... well. Irene had thought the Foundry out in the Canyons was the best- equipped machine shop she'd ever seen, but this place had it beat hands down. To be fair, it wasn't quite as -atmospheric- as the Foundry, with its old-fashioned brick and mullioned warehouse windows, had been. This shop was considerably more modern in appearance, with white concrete and black disc-patterned rubber floor, and much more brightly lit by the closely ranked glowstrips on the high ceiling. It was also comparatively huge, perhaps the size of a soccer field, so that even with its great profusion of machine tools and semi-automated manufacturing equipment, it seemed spacious. And it was apparently not the only room down here; high-arched doorways led off at several points to other, unseen parts of what gave the impression of being a sizeable complex. "This is the main event," Stark said, gesturing to the room. "The arc reactor was just a warmup compared to what we're going to do in here. Welcome to the Armory. New project, new shop, brand new toys." He gestured to the familiar AI console from the Foundry, now installed on a small dais at the end of the room, as if overseeing the whole operation. "Except for JARVIS, of course." "What... what are we making that we'll need all -this- for?" Irene wondered. "Well, that's kind of a long story. Do you remember seeing the piece on the news a few months ago about the firefight at La Vie Riche?" "La Vie... oh! The restaurant you were at when you had your heart attack. The Knight Sabers were there." Stark nodded. "Correct. But they weren't alone. There was a third player on the field besides the Knight Sabers and that gang of mercs they were fighting. Most of the news outlets didn't carry anything about him. The ADP still deny he even exists." He chuckled. "Just like they did with the Knight Sabers for so long." "What do you mean? Who else was there?" "Well... I like to think of him as my personal bodyguard. Here, let me introduce you." Stark walked over next to the JARVIS console, where a dropcloth covered a lumpy shape. Once there, he took hold of a corner of the cloth, then paused and went on, "Some say that he was forged in the fires of the Third Vietnam War, and that he's Stark Industries' one-man answer to GENOM's entire corporate army." With a slight flourish, like a man unveiling a newly designed car, he whipped the cloth away. What he revealed by doing so was a dull grey metallic man-shape, reclining on an angled worktable like a mechanical Frankenstein monster in an old movie, the empty eyeslots of its helmet staring blankly up at the glowstrips. "I call him Iron Man," Stark said. Irene took a few steps closer. "What it is? A robot?" Stark shook his head. "No. It's a powered battle suit - like the K-suits the AD Police use, only about ten times more compact and efficient." "It seems kind of... crude." "It -is- crude. It's a prototype, a first effort." Stark grinned with a fierce twinkle in his eye and said, "Down here, over the next few weeks, you and I - and JARVIS - are going to build this year's model." # The Crystal Method # "Trip Like I Do" # _Vegas_ (1997) In its way, Iron Man Mk. II was a much more involved project than the development of the arc reactor had been. That had been a marvel of miniaturization and a revolution in energy production, true, but Iron Man had a lot more parts and systems, and they all needed to work together. Thus, it was a completely different sort of thing to engineer than the reactor. That had been an invention. Iron Man was a collection of dozens - hundreds - of inventions. Over the next nineteen days, Stark and his charming assistant, plus the ever-faithful JARVIS, teased each of those inventions into careful formation with all the others. They did almost nothing else. Stark's immersion in the project, at least during working hours, was total, and Irene became just as absorbed - whether because she fully shared his intense fascination with what they were doing, or perhaps in some measure was using the matter to keep her mind off other things, Stark wasn't sure. Whatever the reason, she came in every day, even on the weekends. She never asked him again about his research into her fiance's death. She seemed interested only in the project. The three of them handled the design, fabrication, and assembly of the layer upon layer of subsystems that, when complete, made up the finished product. Designing as he went, Stark refined systems that he, Tony, and Professor Yinsen had devised in much greater detail than they had the tools or materials to build, adding his own inspirations and insights on the fly. SATURDAY, JUNE 5, 2032 6:17 PM JST Stark stepped back from adjusting a fitting, put his hands on his hips, and just admired the fruit of his and Irene's labors for a few minutes. The superstructure was mostly complete (albeit rather skeletal, with its underlying systems exposed by a near-complete lack of armor plating), and it was now quite obvious that the Mark II would be much sleeker and more compact than its predecessor. The articulation was much better, as well; the armature, at least in JARVIS's simulations, appeared to have nearly a full human range of motion, a huge leap forward from the Mark I's stiff-legged, barrel-chested awkwardness. Stark was especially proud of the gauntlets. He'd set himself the challenge, when designing them, of coming up with fully armored, fully powered gloves in which he'd still be able to type on a normal keyboard. He hadn't quite gotten that, not on the first try, but he was quite pleased with the outcome anyway. Having completed what he called the raw build, Stark told Irene she should take some time off, but when she learned that he intended to keep working on the suit on Sunday regardless, she insisted on coming to work. "I'm with you," she said flatly. "Until the end." Then she added in a slightly subdued tone, "It's not as if I have much else to do with myself lately." Stark nodded, his face a little solemn, and gave her a cautious I'm-wearing-grubby-coveralls half-hug. "Okay," he said. "But I'm going to be getting a late start myself, so there's no need for you to come in before noon or so." He looked at his watch and smiled slightly. "You've still got time to have a Saturday night," he added as he walked with her through the arch leading from the main fab shop into the Armory's garage area. "Doing what?" she asked rhetorically, but he had an answer anyway: "Go to the gym. It's Linna's night on, isn't it?" "Hmm. You're right." Irene smiled and turned to him as they reached her car. "Will that be all, Mr. Stark?" Stark nodded again, but this time his gravity was entirely mock. "That will be all, Miss Chang." He watched her drive her Stark-blue Evo up the ramp leading from the Armory level to a hidden exit on the bottom level of the Stark Tower parking structure, heard her make a racing gear change at the top of the ramp, and couldn't help grinning a little. He'd not only ruined her for honest work, he'd made a bit of a petrolhead out of her as well. That probably meant he was going to whatever hell was reserved for billionaire rakes who corrupted innocent young girls, but what the hell. What he hadn't mentioned to her, but would become quite obvious as the Iron Man project entered its next phase, was that building the base hardware was the easy part, though, relatively speaking. Once it was constructed, it then had to be made to work, not as a disparate collection of gadgets, but as a coherent whole - a fully integrated personal battle system, with mobility, weapons, personal protection, sensor, and a multitude of other systems to coordinate. Which was where the part of the project team he hadn't yet introduced to Irene came in. Guess I'll have to do that tomorrow, Stark remarked to himself. He was musing over the possible difficulties involved in that while he rode the elevator up to the top floor of the Tower, 39, one above the StarkWire office, where his new living quarters were situated. He hadn't really had a chance to enjoy them fully yet - he figured he'd have to have a housewarming party, perhaps after he was finished riding the full-on first wave of inspiration on the Mark II - but he was entirely satisfied with the way they'd been laid out, which was to his personal specification. The place was just what he always thought a billionaire inventor's personal pad at the top of a Retro Deco skyscraper in the middle of a downtown area should be. He took a shower and dressed casually - jeans, Corcoran jump boots, a finely brocaded black guayabera he'd bought on his last highly memorable visit to Havana - then went back down to the Armory with one of his most prized possessions slung over his shoulder. He knew Priss thought he looked a bit silly in what she called his Mods vs. Rockers cycling gear, but dammit all, he'd hunted high and low for -years- to find a brown leather cavalry jacket, and he'd be damned if he let some punk-rocking -turbine chick- mock him for wearing something that made him feel like the Rocketeer when he rode his Commando. Not for the first time, he made a mental note to show up to one of her gigs sometime wearing his double-breasted blue pinstripe suit and riding a Vespa. "Excuse me, sir," said JARVIS just as Stark was about to climb onto his bike. "Yeah?" said Stark, pausing to turn to the garage wall monitor. JARVIS painted the monitor with a rendered image of the Mark II in its fully realized form. "I've completed the final calculations for the Mark II's exostructure." "Excellent," Stark said. He looked it over, nodded, and thumbed the acknowledgement box in the lower right corner of the window. "Build it and integrate it with what we've already made." "Fabrication commencing," JARVIS replied. Through the arch in the fab shop, Stark could hear the metalworking tools whirring to life. He smiled. The completed suit was going to look -hot-... though, as he looked over the render on the screen once more, he couldn't shake the feeling that it was -missing- something. He couldn't put his finger on exactly what, so he resolved to keep mulling it in the back of his mind in hopes that his subconscious would come up with the answer. In the meantime, he pulled on his beloved Rocketeer jacket, climbed aboard the Commando, slipped on gloves and helmet, and headed out of the garage. Night was just beginning to fall, the western sky was a glorious pink shading to purple at the horizon, and Benjamin Stark felt fully alive and entirely satisfied with things as he roared down the City Centre By-Pass and shot the exit ramp for the Canyons. For he hadn't shut down the original Foundry entirely; rather, once the tooling and machinery used to build the prototype arc reactor were removed, he'd filled it up again with machinery of a different type, and while he and Irene toiled beneath the Stark Tower on the hardware, the other half of the Iron Man project team had been down here, working in secret security on the software. Unlike the prototype, which was built in overpowering haste and without the aid of any but the most fantastically rudimentary computer systems, the Mark II would not only be -made- with the aid of computers, it would also -run- with their help... and that was Nene Romanova's department. Back on May 16, in a deep conference over giant slices of coconut cream pie in a diner Zoner had found deep in the shadowy heart of Itabashi, the three of them - Stark, Zoner, and Nene - had agreed that, for the first part of the project, anyway, the software development should be conducted independently. Nene was concerned that Irene, being acquainted with one of the Knight Sabers (Linna) and having met another (Priss), might develop suspicions if she also encountered Nene in Stark's circle. "It's probably inevitable," she'd said, "but I want to delay it as long as I can. Besides, it's not like I can show my face downtown for the first week or so anyway." Stark entered the old warehouse to find it, just as he'd specified to Nishimura on Monday, stuffed with all the computing power a project of this magnitude required. Seeing the servers, storage arrays, and cooling racks all ranked and ordered where his collection of machine tools had been, he couldn't resist smiling and declaring, "Banks and banks of humming machinery! I've never seen so many knobs." "We're going to have to do something, Charlie," a voice replied from up on the platform where the JARVIS console had been. "Try pushing that button there." Stark, still smiling, went to the master power conditioning unit in the center of the first rank of machinery and hovered his hand above the Emergency Power Cutoff button. "This one?" "No!" Stark left the button alone and climbed up onto the platform. "How's it coming?" "Not bad," said Nene from the center of a huge array of holographic display panels. She looked a bit like someone preparing to take one of those motion-controlled thrill rides - strapped into a padded chair that was angled back like an acceleration couch, her hands secured into a pair of chording keyboard modules. The reason the chair was padded was because the designers had anticipated the user spending quite a long time in it. The reason she was strapped to it was because, after a fashion, it -was- a motion-controlled thrill ride. Or, at least, it had a power swivel that was tied to the visual cursor focus on the display array surrounding it, enabling the operator to turn with a thought or a flick of her eyes to see a different part of the forest of information glowing in space all around her. Next to her, just outside her display ring's "orbit", MegaZone sat at a slightly more conventional computer-aided design station, this one with a single massive display that could be controlled with a joystick and laser tablet from what looked like a dentist's chair. He raised the hand on the joystick side in an absent greeting, his other hand busy with the laser tablet stylus and his eyes intent on what he was doing. Stark stepped gingerly over a couple of the fat cables connecting Nene's seat to the machinery all around it, bent close, and examined the nape of her neck, just above which a pair of control leads entered her cranium through small, gleaming chrome jacks much like the ones on Stark's own head. The skin around them was slightly red, but he could see that the inflammation had almost entirely faded, and there didn't appear to be any complications. "The installation went perfectly," Zoner said, making him jump slightly - the man wasn't looking at him, how did he know he was inspecting Nene's new neuroprocessor install? "Better than perfectly," Nene added. "I was only out of commission for about 48 hours. I thought I'd be laid up for at least a week." "You would've been if you'd let some hack cyberdoc in a shopping mall run your leads," Zoner replied with faint smugness. "-I- happen to be an -artist-." "Indeed you are, Doctor," Nene replied airily. "Even if you're not a suitable dinner date for a young lady of breeding and refinement." Stark raised an eyebrow. "That sounds like it has a story behind it." Zoner snorted. "We went for noodles one day last week - " "At 3 AM, thank you very much," Nene chipped in. " - because SOMEONE didn't want to leave until she'd finished debugging the repulsor targeting algorithm - " "-She- kept -you- waiting while she finished screwing with something on the computer? How'd you like that?" Stark wondered dryly, having spent a considerable chunk of his life waiting in increasing hunger while Zoner finished one more thing. "Ha ha," said Zoner, rolling his eyes. "Finish the damn story," Nene prompted him. "Yeah, man," Stark agreed, affecting an edgy, bug-eyed look. "What -happened?- What about the -glands.-" "Yeah, so, we went out for noodles in the middle of the night and I almost got arrested by some beat cop who thought I was dragging the poor child off to white slavery or something. Which, you know. Isn't that far from the truth, but she did come willingly. And she's almost not underage." "I had to badge the guy to get him off Zoner's case. But I didn't do it right away," she added with an evil smile. "Good, good," Stark said approvingly. "Always good to let him sweat a bit first." Then, clapping his hands together in a businesslike fashion, he added, "So! What've you got for me?" "We're almost ready to build a working image," Nene told him. "Have you got the hardware to the point where we can start doing real- world testing?" Stark nodded. "JARVIS is working on the outer shell as we speak." "Excellent," said Zoner. "Did you get Irene out of the lab for tomorrow?" Stark shook his head. "She wouldn't go for it when I told her I was going to work on it anyway." "Dude, you're her -boss-. You can -order- her to take the day off." Stark shrugged. "You know I don't like pulling rank. Anyway, I think it'll be okay. I trust her." "Sylia might not be quite as sanguine about it as you are, and it's her operation you're potentially jeopardizing," Zoner pointed out. "I'll call her when I get back to the Tower," Stark promised. "See if we can work something out. Irene's smart, she's tough, she's got motivation... I've been thinking of recommending her to Sylia anyway." With a slight smirk, he added, "She can take Nene's place." "What?! No way!" Nene squeaked, whirling her chair to face him. "You've got me for this project, but don't even -think- that I'm done being one of the Knight Sabers for good! Even you can't seriously believe that." "Joking. Joking!" Stark said, putting up his hands. "Jeez. Give a girl a neuroprocessor and she assumes that you think you own her... " "That's not what I meant! I - ohhh!" She pivoted to face Zoner, who was giggling madly, and yelled, "And just you shut up!" Stark snapped his fingers. "I know! I'll buy my way back into your good graces with -food,-" he said. "Who's hungry?" Over pizza, the three of them discussed the state of the other half of the Mark II project. It seemed to be in about the same state as the hardware: in a condition that looked a lot like the finished product, but almost undoubtedly with a ton of hidden flaws that would have to be ironed out as the integration process went on. Nene's job was to develop the software that would make all of Iron Man's systems interoperate correctly, doing everything from maintaining the pressure and oxygen content of the suit's internal atmosphere to managing the flow of energy from the arc reactor at the suit's core to all the various systems, and everything in between. From designing the head-up interface that would present diagnostic and sensor information to the pilot to refining the algorithms used by the semiautomatic target tracking system, the operating system she was writing from the ground up had to do it all - seamlessly, smoothly, and without error. It was a big job, especially since the bulk of it had to be done within the confines of a three-week medical leave (contrived with Zoner's connivance) from her real job, but she wasn't entirely going it alone. She hadn't had the neuroprocessor installed just to make interfacing with the massive development system she was using easier. She'd also gotten it - indeed, she'd initially raised the subject of having it - in order to work more closely with the ROM-encoded personality construct of the late Anthony Stark. She'd spent a lot of time talking with Tony, running his limited expert system program on a laptop computer, while Ben was in the hospital, and after that when he was taking his long trip to the United States and outer space, and eventually, as she grew more and more intrigued by the program and the vast amount of experience and knowledge it contained, she'd grown frustrated by the limitations of interacting with it in such a limited, third-party way. Ben had been initially uneasy about the idea of Nene... -communing- with Tony's electronic ghost the way he was in the habit of doing - running the ROM construct direct on her own neuroprocessor, brain to digital neurostructure copy. He always found the experience deeply unsettling, and hugely melancholy, to boot. A fully interactive session with Tony tended to leave him out of sorts and downcast for at least a day. Nene, though, didn't have the same emotional baggage attached to the construct that he did, and once he took a good hard look at the situation and made himself acknowledge that, he'd decided to let her go ahead if she really wanted to. The result, once the neural traces to her freshly installed processor were healed enough to enable link activity, was the kind of explosive creative synthesis that enabled this tiny teenage blonde to create a nearly complete, albeit almost entirely unpolished, operating system for the world's most sophisticated suit of powered battle armor in a bit more than two weeks. Looking over what she'd accomplished via a VR helmet set up to mimic the Mark II's planned in-helmet display environment, Ben was both astonished and slightly unnerved. God in Heaven, he remarked silently to himself. Imagine what she could have accomplished if she'd ever been able to team up with the -real thing-... Of course, Zoner hadn't been idle that whole time either. In addition to his considerable skills as a surgeon, he was also one of the world's foremost authorities on cybernetic and cyberneural interface and control systems, and while Nene worked on getting the Iron Man suit's many protocols and subsystems to talk to each other, his job was to give the suit's operator a way to talk to -it-. Instead of the original suit's crude body motion sensors and concealed buttons and switches, the Mark II would sense its wearer's intentions direct from his neuroprocessor, integrating the suit's command and control system with his nervous system - the world's biggest, most elaborate smart weapon. The pair of them had worked on their parallel design courses for two weeks - two nearly nonstop weeks, apart from time grudgingly given to irritants like the human needs for sleep and food. Then they'd started blending their efforts together, a deceptively simple-seeming process that belied the hours of careful work it had taken to make the control software interface seamlessly with the armor operating system. And now, by their development system's best estimate, they were two hours away from having a nominally stable beta test build, ready to install on the armor hardware itself and see what worked... and what still needed work. Stark could tell that, despite their fatigue, neither Zoner nor Nene wanted to wait until tomorrow to upload their creation to his and see what it could do. As soon as the image was built and loaded onto a datatab, they were going to want to drive over there and plug it in. They might be tired, but they wouldn't be able to sleep anyway without at least seeing the thing power up. And that was all right with Stark, because he didn't think he would either. 11:00 PM The first indication Irene Chang had that something was amiss wasn't really an indication at all, in any concrete sense; just an unsettled sense, as she walked away from the restaurant where she and Linna had eaten dinner, that something about the situation wasn't quite right. At first, she'd thought that Linna's car being towed away while they ate was just an annoyance, one of those things you have to get used to in city living. She assured Linna that she'd be fine - she didn't live far from the restaurant, she'd just walk home - and they went their separate ways. Irene had no particular problem with walking alone in this neighborhood, even at this hour. It wasn't a high-crime area, and she was confident in her ability to take care of herself. As she walked, though, she felt more and more unsettled. She couldn't put her finger on any concrete reason until, several blocks along, she glanced up at a street sign and her concerns crystallized. The overnight parking ban on that street didn't start until midnight. Six weeks before, she'd have panicked, probably tried to make a run for home. Now, though, things were different. During the gaps and enforced downtimes in her time at Benjamin Stark's side in the machine shop, while they waited for the automated machine tools to finish making some part or another, she'd heard a number of his stories about his adventures as a reporter. How he'd spent many years of his life ferreting around in places where people didn't want him to be, learning things people didn't want him to know, and how he'd eluded their attempts to stop him reporting what he'd found. Irene felt vaguely silly thinking in those terms - mistakes did happen, after all, and it was probably nothing - but what he had told her about her fiance's death was also rattling around in her head, and she was well aware that she'd made something of a fuss when he died. It was what had gotten her fired from GENOM in the first place. At the time, what she had said to her managers and a few randomly chosen company executives were the ill-considered, hasty words of a half- hysterical, grieving woman... but since then she'd learned that they just might have been true anyway, and that, she suddenly realized, could well have made her a target for someone. Immediately she turned and headed back for the bright lights of the shopping district, going over the street layout in her head. She'd intended to walk home - it wasn't that far - and collect her car from the gym's parking garage in the morning, since Stark had asked her to come in late anyway. Now, though, getting back to that garage immediately seemed like a much better plan. It didn't take her long to realize that she was being followed. There was a car - a black BMW 775i, to be precise, not a model often seen in these parts - cruising slowly along about a hundred yards back, never picking up enough speed to pass by her. She wondered if she'd stymied whoever it was by unexpectedly returning to the shopping district. She kept the bag of groceries she was carrying, for the time being - if she ditched it, whoever was back there would know she'd spotted them - and scanned the street ahead. The crowds on the sidewalks were thinning out, and up ahead the streets were darker and quieter, without any open restaurants or shops. Not encouraging. Making a snap decision, she reached into her handbag, found the key to her car, flipped the housing on the top open, and pressed the button underneath, wondering whether the special feature it activated would actually work. She'd read about it in the car's manual, but it had seemed too fantastic somehow. Irene lingered on the street, trying to act casual, pretending to window shop, and wondering how long her mysterious pursuer's patience would last. She was still considering that when she bumped into someone, turned, and saw to her surprise that Linna was doing exactly the same thing. "Oh!" they both said at once. Then Linna added, "Thought you were going to walk home." "I thought about it, but... " Irene hesitated, wondering whether to share her suspicions with her friend. Linna was kind of a badass, into karate and such - it was a standing joke between them that Irene half-seriously suspected her of being one of the Knight Sabers - but surely she'd find it a little silly to learn that Irene thought she was being stalked by a sinister black car. A moment later - just as she realized that foot traffic on the block had thinned enough that she and Linna were the only ones on that side of the street - said car took the decision out of her hands by suddenly revving up and charging at them. "Look out!" Linna yelled, shoving Irene out of the way as the BMW sped past. It jumped the curb and plowed into the plate-glass window of a closed dressmaker's shop, setting off alarms. Before Irene and Linna could do more than utter inarticulate expressions of surprise, another car sped up the street the other way, accelerating toward them with the snarl of a high-powered engine, then halting right next to them with a bark of tires on tarmac. Linna saw to her considerable puzzlement that there was no one in it. "They're not after you - run!" Irene told Linna, and then, before her startled friend could ask for more of an explanation, she yanked the driver's door of her Evo open, jumped in, and roared away. Linna stood looking after her in utter dismay for a moment, then darted into the nearest telephone booth to call for help. She'd only just gotten connected when, out of the corner of her eye, she saw the black car finish extracting itself from the wreckage of the dressmaker's, swing around, and accelerate toward her. Cursing, she jumped for her life a second time, barely clearing the booth before the black car smashed it flat. She rolled to her feet, ready for round three, but it seemed Irene was right. The car kept on going, shedding flecks of glass from the booth and its smashed right headlight as it burned rubber trying to catch up with the already vanishing taillights of Irene's Lancer. Sylia Stingray turned from the suddenly blank screen of her videophone, frowning the frown of a woman who doesn't know what's going on, but doesn't like it anyway. "Mackie," she said. "Page Priss. I think Linna needs help." 11:20 PM Nene removed the datatab from the writer and held it up between thumb and forefinger, her green eyes glittering with the reflection of the tab's own green inner light. "Let's go see if it works," she said. Stark grinned and was about to answer when his cellphone rang. "That's odd," he mused as he dug it out of an inside pocket. "Everyone I'd normally expect to be calling me is -here-... Hello?" He listened for a moment, then blinked in surprise. "Irene? I can barely hear you, where - what? Where are you? Just hang - hang on! Irene? Irene!" He took the phone away from his ear, glared at it, and then stuffed it back into his jacket. Swearing, he vaulted the railing from the console platform down to the warehouse floor. "What was that all about?" Nene asked as he ran toward Zoner's company Land Rover. "I don't know," he called back over his shoulder. "The signal was shit and I lost her completely after a few seconds, but she was in her car and I think she said someone's trying to kill her." He yanked the Rover's passenger door open. "Get in! Zoner - drive!" "Right," Zoner replied, sliding behind the wheel. Without further prompting, Nene jumped in back, yanking a microportable from the pocket of her vest and unfolding it on her lap with one hand while she fastened her seat belt with the other. By the time the garage door was up and Zoner was hurling the Rover out onto the streets of the Canyons, she was already online and penetrating the Tokyo Highway Patrol traffic disturbance computer. "Got them!" she declared. "Blue Evo with Stark Industries corporate registration, pursued by a black BMW 7-series, no plates. Highway Patrol has a chopper on them. They're in Yokohama, heading north. Looks like she's keeping to the surface streets." Stark nodded, his jaw set. "Good. Her car has the advantage in agility down there." # Kasabian # "Club Foot" # _Kasabian_ (2004) Irene had been a bit dismayed when she first got the Lancer home, read its owner's manual, and realized that Mr. Stark had pulled a fast one and bought her what was, in effect, a road-going World Rally Championship car... but now that, and some lessons from a childhood mentor that she would have guessed she'd long forgotten, were probably keeping her alive. Her first instinct had been to make for the freeway, but just in time, she realized that she'd be throwing away her car's best card if she did that. By keeping to the surface streets, she was using every ounce of her Evo's agility advantage, as well as the explosive power of the car's twin variable-vane turbochargers, to keep ahead of the charging BMW. She didn't know whether she'd succeeded in conveying her plight to Stark before her mobile phone cut out - presumably her mysterious pursuers in the BMW were jamming it - but she hoped she had. In the meantime, her best bet was to make for Stark Tower. If she could get far enough ahead, she could disappear into the parking structure's hidden recesses and these people would -never- find her. That was the plan, and all things being equal, it probably would have worked. Her Evo XXV had the German completely outclassed in cornering -and- acceleration, and down here, the BMW couldn't use its only real advantage, brute top speed. What was more, it quickly became apparent that of the two, Irene was the better driver, or at least the more inspired. Slowly opening a considerable lead, she worked her way northeast, always northeast, blitzing traffic lights, dodging slower traffic, sometimes haring down side streets, always with one eye on the satnav screen. Just keep heading for Shinjuku, she thought. Keep the Tower somewhere in front of the car. By the time she rounded the northern tip of Tokyo Bay and crossed into the 23 special wards of Tokyo itself, Irene was feeling pretty good about her chances. All she had to do now was pass under the Central Expressway and she was on home ground, in territory she'd driven dozens of times, exploring the area around Stark Tower and getting a feel for the car in her offtime after hours. She glanced in her rearview mirror and saw the single headlight of the BMW far in the distance, still dogging her trail but well behind. Then she returned her eyes to the road ahead - and saw, to her horror, the familiar blue shape of a 55-series combat boomer just past the Expressway overpass. That's fucking cheating, she thought indignantly as the plasma beam slashed the right front corner clean off the Evo and all control slipped from under her hands. Then there was a momentary impression of a highway overpass abutment looming out of the darkness at very high speed, and then... nothing. Nothing at all. Priss Asagiri saw the flash of the boomer's plasma cannon from up on the Expressway and knew what it was almost by instinct. Swearing viciously, she rammed in a downshift and slung her bike onto the nearest offramp. The flash was also apparent to the occupants of Zoner's Rover, which was charging down the same street Irene had just been headed up. They had, in fact, just recognized the back of the 55 for what it was in the dark when it fired - and what happened next was all too apparent. "AAAH!" Stark yelled inarticulately, his hands white-knuckled on the grab rail running along the dash in front of the passenger seat. "SONofa - " Zoner snarled. Reaching for the Rover's semiautomatic gear lever, he overrode the auto function and punched in a downshift, put his foot all the way down, then threw the switch on the dash that energized a nonstandard system. While Stark had been in outer space, Zoner had found himself looking for ways to fill time. One of the ones he came up with, aside from hanging around the Stingray Building looking for new ways to chat up Sylia, was hanging around the Stingray Building with Mackie, fooling around with new ways of using Knight Sabers weapons technology and fishing for hints about chatting up Sylia. One of the results was a larger-scale reapplication of one of the Knight Sabers' close quarter weapons, a device Ben had also ended up adopting for the Mark II Iron Man. As installed on the Land Rover, Mackie had dubbed this particular device "the bumper bomber". In this case, applied at 120 miles per hour with the full power of the Rover's seven-litre V8 still accelerating the heavy vehicle behind it, its effect on the unsuspecting Bu-55C was best summarized as "devastating". When what remained of the boomer came to rest a hundred yards away, it looked like it had taken a direct hit from a main battle tank's cannon. Zoner powered the Rover picturesquely through the smoke cloud and slewed it to a halt next to the wreckage of Irene's Evo. Before the vehicle was completely stopped, Stark was out of it, almost falling headlong on the pavement before getting his feet fully under him and racing to the smashed automobile's side. Zoner and Nene were only seconds behind, and a moment later, Priss pulled up on her bike, nearly dumping it when the rear wheel slid in the pool of oil running from the Evo's mangled engine. The Lancer had very advanced crew safety equipment, and Stark momentarily dared entertain the hope that Irene had survived the crash. People survived, even walked away from, the most dreadful-looking car wrecks these days... but one look inside the driver's window dispelled that hope immediately. She'd been doing almost 130 miles per hour when she hit that abutment almost straight on. Even an Evo could only do so much to help you in a crash like that. Slowly, he crumpled to his knees by the side of the car, his hands falling slack to the fragment-littered pavement. Only a flash of light out of the corner of his eyes penetrated the horrified fugue his mind was settling into. Roused for a second, he turned his head to see the dented BMW with its one working headlight stop a hundred yards or so away, back up, turn around, and glide away. "Zoner," he said, his voice like broken glass. "I'm on it," Zoner replied, unhesitating. Without another word he turned, climbed into the Rover, and roared off in pursuit. Priss balanced her bike with one foot and watched him go, considered following, then decided against it. She punched a key on the mobile phone console built into her bike's gas tank and gave Sylia the short version. Then she turned to Stark, still kneeling on the ground, and said in what was for her an unusually gentle voice, "I have to go rescue Linna, she's still stuck in Yokohama. You gonna be okay?" Stark blinked tears from his eyes, dragged himself to his feet, pushed his hands up his face and through his hair, then shook his head. "I don't know," he said. "But there's nothing you can do." She nodded, recognizing the simple statement of fact for what it was and not taking offense. "Okay. See you." Then she toed the bike into gear, closed her visor, and rode off. 11:33 PM The police and Stark's Silver Spectre, the latter guided by its autopilot, arrived within a minute or so of each other, and Stark spent the next few minutes answering - or failing to answer - questions while Nene hovered quietly in the background, next to the Rolls. Because a Boomer was involved, the AD Police were called, and within a few more minutes, Leon McNichol and Daley Wong were on the scene. "You want to tell me what happened?" Leon asked Stark without preamble. "Who's this?" Stark took a breath and let it out slowly, then said in a too- calm voice, "Her name is Irene Chang. She was my assistant. If you'll excuse me, I need to locate her family, apologize for bringing her into the life of someone GENOM dislikes, and make arrangements for her funeral." Leon tipped down his shades - why, some part of Stark's mind had to wonder, was he wearing sunglasses at night? - and said, "Got any proof GENOM was involved?" "You mean besides the boomer?" Stark replied acidly. "(He's kind of got you there, darling,)" Daley observed dryly, sotto voce. "Of course I don't have any proof," Stark snapped. "If I had, I'd have included 'write and post the article that brings down the world's most powerful multinational' in that to-do list I just gave you. Good night, Inspector McNichol." So saying, he turned on his heel and started walking toward the Rolls. "Hey, -wait- a second, pal - " Leon began, reaching to catch the departing tycoon's shoulder, but Daley's hand on his forearm stopped him. "Just let him go, Leon. You can talk to him later." Shaking his head with a resigned little smile, the younger detective added, "You'd think you, of all people, would recognize a man with too much anger in him to think straight." "What's -that- supposed to mean?" Leon growled. He raised a hand to make one last attempt at calling Stark back, but he'd already stepped into the Spectre, shut the suicide door, and driven off. Leon watched the car glide near-silently away, blinking. "Was that -Romanova- with him?" he asked. Daley shrugged. "Could've been," he said. "Why not? Everybody needs friends." SUNDAY, JUNE 6, 2032 12:22 AM JST Benjamin Stark sat in his office at the top of Stark Tower. Someone who didn't know him terribly well might have assumed, between his black mood and the fact that he hadn't bothered turning on most of the lights, that he was brooding. He wasn't. Brooding was a wasteful, ineffectual thing, an exercise in self-indulgence. Stark was -waiting-. One minute later, his wait was over. The telephone rang. He reached and pressed the key on his datadesk that answered it, and wasn't surprised when the video feed showed only the words "NO SIGNAL". He gave no salutation, only waited, and after a moment a filtered voice said, "I've got the information you wanted. It wasn't easy." "Tell me." "We have to talk price first. This job cost me three Excaliburs and put one of my assistants in the hospital. He'll recover, but it's not gonna be cheap." "I said I'd cover any expense," said Stark, punching a code into his datadesk keypad. "Tell me. Short version now, evidence under separate cover." "Okay. The man you want is officially the Vice President for Special Advanced Technology Projects. His name's Mason. Brian J. Mason. He's 32, graduated summa cum laude from Harvard Business School, Class of '21. A very sharp guy - and completely ruthless. Not someone to go up against lightly." "So noted," Stark said dryly. "All I'm saying is, if you're planning to go take on Mason, pay me before you leave." "I paid you already," said Stark. "Where can I find him?" "One of GENOM's supposedly abandoned factories in the old Kawasaki complex," the filtered voice replied. "I should warn you, though - if you're planning to go over there tonight, dress warmly. Lot of activity in the old place tonight. Almost like your friend's expecting company." Stark nodded. "Understood. Thanks. Good work." After breaking the connection, he sat a moment in thought, then tabbed another key. "Friday," he said. "Here, boss," Friday replied at once. "Have you located Irene's family?" "Yes. They're in Los Angeles." She hesitated. "Her grandfather is Simon Chang." Stark raised half an eyebrow. "Chairman of the Chang Financial Group. That's interesting." He sighed. "But it doesn't change anything. Make travel arrangements. The Globehopper, ASAP. I'll take her home. They deserve to get the news in person." "The ME's office might not release her body to you," Friday pointed out. "They will." He chuckled bitterly. "It was an obvious rogue boomer incident. They'll want to cover it up as quick as they can. You might see what you can do to nudge them along. Quietly, of course." "Will do." "And Friday?" "Yes?" "This can never happen again. Reopen search 82K2K and proceed with acquisition soonest." "Understood." Stark touched the key again, breaking the connection. Then he got up and took the elevator down to the Armory. Nene was at the master console down there, working three windows at once and talking on a headset mic to someone - presumably Mackie, he realized, when he heard her mention the Knight Sabers. "Are they launching?" he asked, a dark suspicion forming in the back of his mind. Nene swiveled her seat to face him, nodding. "Mackie and I think we've figured out where the black box from the Aqua City job ended up. It looks like it's part of a secret combat boomer development project - " "Run by a man named Mason out of a hidden research facility in the old Kawasaki complex." Nene blinked. "How'd you - " "He's the one who ordered Irene killed. That secret boomer project is what he killed her fiance for." He shook his head. "Tell Sylia she's heading into a trap. Mason knows the Knight Sabers are coming for him." "Did you get that? Uh-huh. Right. I'll monitor from here. Good luck, you guys." "Nene," Stark said, his voice quiet but intense. Nene took off her headset, put it down, and just looked at him, awaiting whatever question he had in mind. "Do you have the datatab?" "Sure, it's right here - wait a second! You can't mean to - " "The hell I can't," said Stark flatly. "Will you stop interrupting me!" Nene burst out. "The hardware's mostly untried, the OS has never been tested except in a simulation, the control system's completely untested! It'd be... it'd be -suicide!-" "HE KILLED IRENE, NENE!" Stark roared. "She trusted me to help her and -that- sonofabitch KILLED HER! I can't let that stand. I CAN'T! Now -load the armor.-" Nene hesitated. She'd seen him like this once before, at a peak of emotion, and, as then, it frightened her just a little, especially compared with his normal, easygoing manner. But in this case, that didn't frighten her half as much as the thought of what might happen if she, or Zoner, or Stark himself had made some unforeseen mistake. "I - " she said, and couldn't go any further. He didn't yell. He was over yelling now, his white-hot fury spent and replaced by something even more unnerving: a -cold, implacable- fury. "Do it," he said quietly, and then added, in an even softer voice that destroyed any remaining notion she might have had of arguing with him, "Please." While she made final preparations at the console, Stark went into a changing room off to the side. He emerged a few minutes later dressed in a snug black one-piece undergarment that covered him from neck to toe and vaguely resembled a wetsuit. Without a word, he walked to the center of the open area just behind the master console, stopped inside a small yellow circle painted on the floor, held his hands slightly away from his sides, and said simply, "Begin sequence." # Ramin Djawadi # "Mark I" (begin at 0:43) # _Iron Man_ (2008) Nene had once helped Stark put on the Mark I, an elaborate, time-consuming affair that had involved individually bolting on most of the armor's pieces by hand. The contrast between that process and the smoothly choreographed mechanical ballet that was the Armory's half- dozen multi-axis robotic arms, all choreographed with perfect precision and grace by JARVIS, fastening the Mark II onto its operator piece by piece was something to see. It nearly took her breath away, made her forget for a second the awful risk Stark was running, as the arms quickly and precisely built the Mark II from the ground up. She had the impression that it would have looked exactly the same if the system were just assembling the empty suit for display - the only difference was that this time there was a man inside. Thirty seconds after it began, the assembly sequence was complete, and where Benjamin Stark had been, there stood a figure clad in gleaming silver armor, compact when compared to a state-of-the-art K-12 unit, or even the Mark I, but still more massive and powerful than any normal man. Only the open helmet, the faceplate still pivoted up like a medieval knight's visor to expose Stark's human face beneath, gave any indication that what Nene was looking at wasn't a pure mechanoid of some kind. She stared for a few seconds. She'd seen the completed suit a million times in simulation while working on the OS, but that somehow hadn't prepared her for seeing it in person. Then she shook herself out of her reverie and turned back to the console. "Standby power engaged. Core software uploaded. Now preparing for arc reactor startup and main system boot," she said, trying to keep her voice steady and professional. "Ready," Stark replied. Nene triple-checked that all of her displays were still showing that everything was nominal, swallowed hard, and put her finger on the master switch. "Here goes everything," she said. "Iron Man main system... -program drive!-" With a nearly inaudible rising whine, the second-generation arc reactor buried in the armored suit's most heavily armored part - the chestplate - came to full power and began distributing energy throughout the suit. With a clank and hiss, the faceplate swung down and sealed the helmet. In the center of the chest, the transparent unibeam array began to glow with a pure white light, the light of the arc reactor embedded beneath. On the master monitor, and projected crisply into Stark's field of view by the holoprojectors inside his helmet, text scrolled past. IMLO booting mk2... active mode, booting to CPU, console messages not suppressed 20480520000 bytes for swap cache allocated Console: Iron Man Mark II, 1 helmet holo-environment tty00 at 0x03f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A sndrx3 at 0x2290 irq 5 drq 1 optix5 at 0x9830 irq 7 drq 2 fstrk3 at 0x1123 irq 9 drq 6 sns4 at 0x1120 irq 3 drq 0 Drive 0: CR-52x-x (4.31) WDCPX: 1 SlotMaster chipsocket array(s) at 0x0230 WDIPX: 1 PlugMaster Plus enhanced central interface array(s) at 0x0240 Calibrating delay loop... ok Memory: 19312/20480T available (476T kernel, 384T reserved, 308T data) This processor honours the WP bit even when in supervisor mode. Good. Checking armor/operator neuro-coupling... Ok, NPU using exception 16 error reporting. StarkOS System I Release 1 version 1.12 (sidehack@jarvis) #3 Sat May 22 11:12:23 UTC 2032 Partition check: sca: Starktronics CT-2032 positronic storage unit (202PB SCSI4 w/64TB Cache, MaxMult=3200) sca: sca1 sca2 sca3 scb: Starktronics CN-210 positronic storage unit (30PB SCSI4 w/16TB Cache, MaxMult=800) scb: scb1 (backup) Loading NR No. 1 Holographic Interface Shell... ok STARK INDUSTRIES IRON MAN MK II READY At the instant "READY" appeared, the inside of the helmet seemed to disappear, "scrubbed" from Stark's view and replaced by a full- immersion holographic environment. From outside, the white backglow of the holosystem filled his helmet's eyeslots, obscuring his eyes completely and preventing retinal identification. Inside, text and special display items appeared as if superimposed on the real world. The illusion was seamless and perfect. Mark off one system working precisely as intended. "Talk to me," he said, his voice automatically amped and adjusted to confound voice print analysis. "Everything looks good so far. I almost don't dare to say so, but... it looks like it's working. Well, mostly working. Flight systems are offline, but that's by design." Stark nodded. He'd made the decision to leave that system inactive on purpose, reasoning that getting something as unaerodynamic as Iron Man to fly would be too complex a task to expect Nene to accomplish in simulation before they actually started testing the physical hardware. It was going to be the first thing on their testing agenda. So much for that plan. "What are my other options?" "I included a modified copy of the code that semiautomates booster-assisted jumping in the Mark III hardsuits," Nene told him. "Good enough for now. Start plotting me a course and power up the launch tube." "You're going to use the - of course you are," Nene said, shaking her head. "Forget I said anything. Readying launch tube." Stark walked to the elevator that led up to the StarkWire office, marveling inwardly at how smooth and simple walking was in the Mark II compared to the clumsy crash-a-thon that had been his first few minutes trying to move in the Mark I. When he reached it, the elevator doors opened on both sides, giving him a path through the car into a small circular chamber beyond. Once enclosed there, he stood in the center and looked up. A hatch opened in the ceiling, then another, and another, until the shaft stretching above him reached a vanishing point. For a moment, nothing happened. Then he felt himself levitate off the floor, as if gravity had taken a momentary break, and Nene's voice in his ear said, "Energizing launch magnets. Waypoints plotted. Clear airspace confirmed. Ready for launch." Stark made sure his arms were flat against his sides, looked up again, and said, "Hit me." By the time he emerged from the top of the glowing beacon that crowned Stark Tower, he was doing 500 miles per hour. If he hadn't been in such a bad mood, he might have whooped at the sheer sensation of it, like being fired from a giant rifle. Well, honestly, he did whoop just a little anyway. # Ramin Djawadi # "Fireman" # _Iron Man_ (2008) His holographic virtual HUD adapted to the situation instantly, drawing a horizon reference for him and then showing him where his carefully plotted series of leaps would take him. Off in the distance, the system was highlighting and drawing reticules around various items of air traffic, but they were all green - far enough away that he didn't have to worry about them. All he had to do was get into the rhythm and push off on each landing; the armor would handle the rest. If everything worked. He arced into the air, reached apogee, felt a moment of weightlessness, and then started plummeting downward, gathering speed at a furious rate, wind whistling past his helmet's audio pickups. Just before he reached the bottom of the arc, which his every instinct told him would end with his making a huge crater in the roof of another downtown building, a bright red message reading "JUMP" appeared in the center of his vision, accompanied by an attention tone. He did as he was told and jumped. The main thrusters in his boot soles, and supplementary jets in the small of his back and at the backs of his calves, fired perfectly, breaking the fall at the very instant he made contact with the roof and sending him hurtling back skyward again. The next one was a little easier, now that he knew what to expect, and very shortly he found himself in the groove, bounding across the city with effortless delight. Oh, Irene, he thought. How I wish you could have seen this thing in action. Everything went perfectly until the very last jump. He could see his destination in the distance, perhaps a quarter-mile away, the dark and looming shape of a supposedly abandoned factory building on the waterfront. This time, though, when he kicked off the roof of an office block at the edge of the docks area, something went wrong. The thrusters in his left boot fired unevenly, turning what had been a neat parabolic arc into an out-of-control corkscrew tumble. As he half-flew, half-fell, various attitude thrusters fired, adding interesting new vectors to his control failure. The onboard computer was clearly trying to correct the situation and land him safely, but it didn't really know what to do, and the failure of calibration in the thruster control system itself meant everything it tried just made the mess worse. ERROR, the HUD informed him helpfully. THRUSTER SYNC FAILURE. This is probably going to sting a bit, he thought, and then he hit the factory parking lot. "Ben? Ben, are you all right? I'm not getting any telemetry. Do you have a problem?" Stark listened to Nene's voice for a few moments with a sort of detached bemusement, then regained full consciousness, got to his feet, and climbed out of the crater, brushing bits of asphalt and gravel from his slightly scuffed but fully intact armor. Not too bad, actually, he thought. "Just showing off a little bit for all my fans," he said. "What?" "I'm fine. Glitch in the thruster control system, but I made it where I wanted to go. Are the others here yet?" "They're already inside. I need to advise them you're here. I never expected Build 1 to go straight into combat, so you've got no IFF." "Roger, understand." He scanned the front of the building and decided that one rolling steel door was as good as another. "Guess it's time for me to go introduce myself," said Iron Man. Elsewhere in the complex, the three Knight Sabers who had taken the field that night were working their way toward the center from three separate entrance points. Sylia was moving down an access tunnel, a wary eye on her short-range sensor displays, when Nene appeared in a small comm window off to the right. The little blonde's face was unusually serious, even for a time like this, and when she spoke it was in the clipped tones she'd learned as a police dispatcher, not the sunny, informal voice she customarily used for Knight Saber communications. "Saber One, be advised that you have an unregistered friendly entering the combat zone," she said. Sylia blinked. "Excuse me?" "Iron Man has just breached the outer perimeter," Nene explained; then, in a more normal voice, she added, "I haven't had time to write the code for his IFF yet, so he won't show green on your HUDs." Priss's face appeared at the other side of the display. "Just so we're clear, are we talking about clunky slow jungle-improvisation Iron Man, or... ?" Nene shook her head. "You'll know him when you see him. Armory out." She disappeared. A moment later Linna's image took her place. "She's really getting into working for him," Linna observed. "I hope we don't have to find another ADP mole." "Mm. Well, if we do, we do," Sylia said philosophically. "It's not as if our arrangement with Mr. Stark isn't paying us anything in return. For right now, though, we have work to do. Let's stay focused." "Right." There were probably half a dozen ways in which Iron Man could have gotten through the door he chose as his entry point into the old GENOM factory. They varied in complexity and subtlety, each calling into action a different armor subsystem, from palm repulsors to electronic lock confounders to a retractable diamond-blade reciprocal saw. Iron Man chose none of them. He was in no particular mood for subtlety at the moment, and it was both simplest and most efficient to just smash the door down. That method also had the virtues of being quite noisy and physically satisfying. # The Crystal Method feat. Filter # "(Can't You) Trip Like I Do" # _Vegas_ (UK release) (1997) He'd have entertained the possibility that he had the wrong building, in which case he had an apology to make about the door, if not for the security response. The noise brought Mason's security force running, just as he'd hoped. They'd surrounded him before he'd walked more than 30 feet into the building. He stood looking around at the derelict industrial machinery of what appeared to be an abandoned motorcycle factory for a few moments, panning around with his unibeam in searchlight mode, wondering if they could tell that he knew they were there. The searchlight was just a distraction for their benefit; he didn't need it to detect them. That was what the ultrasonic echolocators were for. "Four targets, moving to encircle me," he reported, mostly for the test recording's benefit, though Nene could hear him in real time. "Humanoid. I'm not getting any reading from the threat analysis system." "It's got no reference database," Nene informed him. "Still on my to-do list." "Understood." Stark looked from target to target, their silhouettes outlined and wireframed by his HUD for easier identification. "They're not reconfiguring for combat; they must be 33Cs." He chuckled darkly. "In Danskins. I feel like I'm being stalked by feral aerobics instructors." "Linna must feel insulted," Nene replied. Iron Man had no more time for jokes, however lame, as one of the four boomers broke formation and charged him. He pivoted to face her - it, he reminded himself, it looked like a woman, but it was really just a murderer's tool - and timed its charge. "Combat effectiveness test number one: standard punch with baseline augmentation," he said for the record, then stepped inside the boomer's charge, its razor-sharp extensible fingernails sparking harmlessly off one of his pauldrons, and slammed the strongest blow he could muster into the middle of its torso. The impact threw it clean off its feet backward, sending it crashing through some hanging lift chains and into a disused conveyor belt. A flashing message at the top of its target identification box informed him that it was still operational even as it began scrambling to its feet. No shock or windedness for boomers, he reminded himself; if your blow didn't scrap a boomer, chances are it wouldn't even really slow it down. Another one broke from the ring and came at him from the back. A flashing arrow in his HUD told him turning right would get him facing it soonest. He pivoted, sending a cybernetic command to charge a weapons system, and a little wireframe diagram of the system operating appeared in the upper right corner of his vision to tell him it was ready to go. Down on his left gauntlet, a band of armor studded with plasma discharge caps snapped into position over his knuckles and the caps began to glow with a high-pitched, low-volume keening sound. "Test number two: punch, concussion array," he said, then finished the turn and drove his fist into the boomer's upper chest. The plasma caps fired on impact, blowing a hole clean through the boomer's superstructure and destroying its fiber-optic spine. Orange coolant fluid sprayed everywhere as that one dropped like an unstrung puppet. Its target ID reticule dissolved as Iron Man's onboard computer determined it was no longer operational. He got too busy to give running test commentary at that point, as the other two both charged at once, joined a moment later by their colleague he'd knocked across the room before. He blasted that one with a full-power repulsor. Some part of Stark's mind that remained always detached from these things admired the circular blue-white shockwave that pulsed briefly outward from the emitter when the main body of the beam emerged; he'd never noticed that before, possibly because the repulsors he'd used to date were less powerful than these. The beam sent the boomer smashing back through the conveyor's wreckage and then clean through the far wall and out of sight. It quickly became obvious that these boomers, all of them apparently 33C combat/security models, posed no credible threat. They lacked any kind of beam weapon and their talons, while perfectly suitable for dealing with civilians and even people in unpowered tactical body armor, could do nothing to Iron Man's reinforced, power- articulated shell. With more skill than their rote-programmed combat systems had and a decent measure of luck, they might have been able to find a weakness in his plating - all armor has to have joints, after all - but they had neither. Even with the relative inexperience of the man inside, the armor's performance was so far superior to their own that the ending of the fight was never particularly in doubt. He smashed one of his two remaining attackers with his right fist's knuckle bomber, just so both of them got tested. With an almost human snarl (presumably some kind of intimidation programming), the remaining one threw itself at him, trying to grapple him around the midsection with its legs and pry at the seams of his helmet with both hands' talons. It had just enough time to realize its mistake, if indeed its rudimentary AI was advanced enough for concepts like that, as his chest-mounted unibeam switched from searchlight to laser mode and burned an eight-inch hole clean through its torso. He'd just finished prying the wreckage of that one off him when a wrenching crash behind him got his attention. Turning, he saw the 33 he'd blasted out of the room a few seconds before climbing through a fresh hole in the corrugated steel wall. It didn't look much like a woman any more. Under the false flesh his repulsor blast had stripped from its superstructure, it had a metallic structure, like a smaller version of a 55-series military unit - bulging synthetic muscles of memory metal and myomer over a titanium-alloy skeleton, glowing optics in a death's-head face of armor plate. Iron Man raised his left gauntlet, narrowed his repulsor's emitter and boosted its power output, and blasted a hole clean through the center of the charging 33's chest. It skidded backward, blown off its feet by the impact, and its power cell detonated before its remains could hit the floor. Lowering his gauntlet, Iron Man nodded to himself. "That worked," he said. "Any luck pulling a floor plan? I'm on an abandoned factory floor here, the boomer lab must be hidden deeper in the facility." "Wait one," Nene replied, sounding distracted. Then, "The Knight Sabers are in trouble. Finding you the quickest route to their location." The only upside to this situation, Priss Asagiri told herself, is that there aren't -really- two of these damn things. You're only -seeing- two of them because it hit you in the head so hard. Caught wrong-footed and with their power cells largely depleted by slugging their way through their own pack of 33-series bodyguard boomers to get this far (and running shorthanded in the first place), the Knight Sabers were ill-prepared to deal with the late-arriving threat of a full-dress combat boomer, let alone the biggest, baddest, most heavily armored one any of them had ever seen. It looked generally like a Bu-55C, but it was about 30 percent bigger and had red armor plating instead of blue, and it seemed... -smarter- somehow. It could also fire its particle beam more than once in an engagement, which came as an unwelcome surprise to Linna (though offset a bit by the welcome surprise that her hardsuit's thermal shielding was more effective than she might have assumed). And that, Sylia learned as she helped Linna to her feet, juggling damage reports from the other two hardsuits and scans of their attacker in her HUD, wasn't the last of its nasty surprises, either. "Uh... sis?" said Mackie in her comm earpiece. "I'm seeing a familiar broadcast signal from in there... " "What? Oh, -tell- me it's not - " A moment later, part of the factory's south wing vanished in a brilliant blue-white flash, the thermal shockwave blowing down the corridor and nearly knocking Sylia and Linna off their feet. Even the boomer tottered a little as the hot wind blew by. "Yup," Mackie said resignedly. "It's the beam satellite control signal." "I have tracking from this station," Nene interjected. "The satellite array isn't responding normally. I think USSD's controllers are fighting the boomer's black box for command authority. They're throwing off its aim." "Well, -that's- comforting - " Priss declared, launching herself in a booster jump that interposed her between her two colleagues and the red boomer. "You guys get out of here. I'll cover you." Sylia didn't argue; Linna was barely able to move and her own suit was best-suited to help her evacuate. Of course, Priss's didn't have the firepower to bring down an enemy like that on her own, but she had the maneuverability to keep it busy for a bit and still stand a decent chance of escaping. Hoping this wasn't going to prove to be the day that the Knight Sabers bit off more than they could chew, Sylia got a shoulder under Linna's crippled suit, lifted her into a fireman's carry, and boosted out of there, using the giant circular hole left by the first beam satellite strike as the quickest escape route. Priss dodged a shot from the boomer's own beam cannon and raked its face with chaingun fire, thinking she might get lucky and put out an optic. With one eye on her tactical display, she watched for Sylia and Linna to reach the evac point, feinting and weaving, keeping the boomer at bay and feeling like a stereotypical lion tamer with a whip and a chair. This strategy might actually have paid off, but she got greedy. It occurred to her as she ducked a bayonet swipe that would've taken her head clean off that she might just have the tools at hand to take this thing out. Ever since her fight with the 55C out on the highway a while back - the one in which, though she didn't know it at the time, she first met Benjamin Stark and MegaZone - she'd been training hard in the simulation room to perfect that limpet-mine trick she'd attempted that night. She'd gotten it to the point where she could pull it off about 90 percent of the time, and the other 10 percent of the time, while it didn't work, it didn't end poorly for her either. She knew, of course, that this model's performance was significantly improved, but then, so was her hardsuit's. She figured it'd be a wash. Unfortunately, she was wrong, but at least when the thing grabbed her by the head, the limpet mine ended up getting flung harmlessly into the maze of pipes behind the boomer instead of staying in her gauntlet and blowing her arm off. That was fairly cold comfort given that it was probably going to either crush her head like a beer can or blast her point-blank with its beam cannon, but still... The concrete wall off to her right, the boomer's left, suddenly burst inward with a noise like a train wreck. Out of the cloud of dust and flying gravel came a silver figure with glowing eyes and a bright blue-white light in its chest, trailing powdered concrete from the joints and plate edges of its finely interlocked armor. In midflight, bootsole and back-of-calf thrusters howling, it belted the boomer full in the face with a charged knuckle bomber, blasting away a layer of armor plating and sending the monstrous mechanoid reeling for a moment. Priss capitalized on its momentary distraction by raising her right hand and firing her vambrace cannon into its elbow joint, wrecking the actuator there and forcing it to let go of her head. "Took you long enough," she grumbled. "Nice outfit." "Thank you," Iron Man replied dryly, but before he could go on, the boomer closed in with startling speed and sent him head-over-heels into the pipes with a backhand from its remaining fist. Snarling, Iron Man wrenched himself free of the pipes, lunged forward with gauntlets open, and... ... nothing happened. "Uh... Nene?" he said, ducking another punch from the boomer and fading back. "What's going on with my repulsors?" "Dammit!" Nene repied, presumably not intending the remark as a direct response. "I was afraid this would happen. Your weapon management system is in complete meltdown, everything's offline. Get out of there! Without KBs you can't even dent that thing's armor." In the corner of Stark's vision, a sensor display popped up and informed him with faint electronic alarm of a major spike in local EM radiation. As it did so, Mackie's voice cut in on the Knight Sabers freq: "The beam satellites are resynchronizing!" Stark considered his options for a couple of nanoseconds, and his next course of action became suddenly clear. Without really thinking about it, and with the same sort of intuitive do-what-I-mean flair that he used to envy about Tony's engineering skills, he opened a submenu he hadn't known, but logically surmised, was there and started manually adjusting configuration parameters. "What the hell are you doing?!" Nene demanded as Iron Man's flight hardware came online. "You've got -no flight control software,- remember!" "I don't need control," Stark replied. "Just altitude." Then he darted past the boomer, feeling a faint jolt and a flash of heat as its particle beam sheared off one of his shoulder caps, swung in behind it, looped his arms under its own, and locked his gauntlets together behind its head in a full-nelson hold. Then, freezing his armor's exostructure in position from the waist up, he opened the taps on his boot jets all the way. # Bad Religion # "Heroes and Martyrs" # _New Maps of Hell_ (2007) The boomer struggled as the two punched through the ceiling, but it had very little leverage in that position, and it couldn't raise its arms high enough to bring its one functional hand to bear. It hunched its shoulders, straining with all its strength to break Iron Man's grip, but with his armor magnetically locked in position, he was holding on with considerably more than just the brute physical strength of the armature. Only a countermagnetic force stood a good chance of dislodging him, and the boomer had no such capabilities. Without proper flight stabilization and with no semblance of worthwhile aerodynamics, Iron Man powered skyward on pure brute thrust. The displays in Stark's helmet were juddering in his field of view, the vibration in the suit so intense that the HUD projectors' automatic shock compensation couldn't quite keep up. He concentrated on the altitude and ambient temperature indications, sparing the occasional glance at the turbine temp and pressure gauges down at the bottom of the status cluster. Down in the troposphere, it gets cold fast with increasing altitude. Standard aircraft flight planning calculations, which Stark knew well, called for a decrease of about three and a half degrees Fahrenheit for each thousand feet of climb, though the actual figure would naturally vary with pressure and humidity. Even on a balmy late- spring day, the temperature plummeted as Iron Man and his unwilling cargo rocketed toward the upper boundary of the atmosphere's lowest layer. Up around 30,000 feet - airliner territory - it was cold enough that Stark's unprotected flesh would have frozen solid. It didn't have quite that dramatic an effect on the boomer's biosteel outer casing, but like human skin, that casing was never designed to experience such conditions. The Bu-99C "super boomer" was intended purely as a ground combatant. Its connection to high altitudes was limited to the satellite control device it carried inside its skull. All of which meant that at this temperature and pressure, the boomer's armor became brittle and highly sensitive to temperature differentials. Iron Man's flight jets were audibly straining, their keening wail vibrating the suit's whole chassis and making its operator briefly fear for the fillings in his back teeth, as they passed through 33,000 feet. Not quite to the stratosphere, but certainly high enough. Maybe I -don't- have the strength to compromise this thing's structural integrity with my weapons offline, Stark thought, but at about 6x10^24 kilos, my friend the planet Earth makes a hell of a wrecking ball. He killed the power to his jets, causing the turbine temp warnings to vanish almost instantly, then powered down his surface magnetic beam, releasing his hold on the boomer. They didn't come apart immediately; a fairly thick coating of ice had formed on both, locking them together until Stark shunted power to his armature and shattered it with a full-power shrug of his shoulders. Unlocking his gauntlets from behind the monstrous boomer's head, he pushed himself up and away from it, tucking his feet up underneath him. The boomer twisted, cracking the coating of ice that still imprisoned its limbs, and he wondered if it was trying to turn over and bring its beam weapon to bear on him. Well, can't have -that,- he thought, planted his feet against its back, and hit full boost on his boot jets again. The sudden, brutal blast of heat and kinetic energy smashed into the boomer's cold-brittle armor, blowing its back to pieces. The superheated boost plasma ripped into the more delicate systems below, starting fires in subsidiary systems and compromising the boomer's central skeletal structure. It fell away, limbs flailing, engulfed in flames and already beginning to break up, and fell cometlike back into the wreckage of the factory that had birthed it. Iron Man hurtled off along his own ballistic trajectory, tumbling and blasting here and there with sole and calf jets as he tried to exert some vague form of control over his flight path. Without any working software to help his merely human thought and reaction speeds tackle this complex problem, it was a largely futile effort, though he did manage to make sure he was going to hit Tokyo Bay rather than, say, Harajuku. Under the circumstances, he decided he'd take the win. You know, he thought to himself, if my repulsors were working, I could probably cut the reaction compensators on them and use them as supplementary thrusters. That would make this flying thing a -lot- easier. I hope I remember that when I come to. He hit the bay with a towering splash, startling revelers at a beachfront rave in Minato-ku, some of whom had noticed the fireball high in the sky but assumed it was part of some unscheduled fireworks display. Back not far from his starting point, the Knight Sabers stood by their truck and watched the factory burn. "That place sure went up fast," Priss remarked. "They must've had it wired with self-destruct charges. And the satellite strikes didn't help," said Sylia. "I guess it's safe to say that the black box is up in smoke." Leaning against the side of the truck, Linna said in a quiet voice, "It's just as well." Priss glanced at her sharply, or would have if she hadn't had her visor down. "What about our 20 million yen?" Linna tried to shrug, but her crippled hardsuit didn't do a good job of reproducing the gesture. "I didn't join this outfit to become a dealer in weapons of mass destruction," she said. "Linna has a point," Sylia said. "A technology like that... it's better destroyed. Come on. Let's get back to base and get Linna out of that wrecked suit." "What happened to Iron Man?" Mackie asked from the cab. The ravers on the beach in Minato were startled again, a few minutes after the huge splash, by the sudden appearance of a freakish figure in the surf at the edge of their party zone. It appeared head first, then shoulders, wading ashore like a monster in a B-grade horror flick. It had glowing eyes and a light shining from its chest, and its shiny metal skin caught the beams of the deejay's laser arrays and reflected them in tripadelic new ways, briefly entrancing some of the more chemically augmented partygoers. A large starfish was suckered persistently to its faceplate, adding to its bizarre appearance. "Is that a boomer?" one of them asked. "I don't -think- so," another said. "Not any type -I've- ever seen, for sure... " The strange metallic figure ignored them, lumbering up the beach with whining servos and a liquid squelching sound, water draining from cracks in its armor. A dozen yards away, up on the shorefront road, a black Land Rover with a logo on the door pulled to a halt and a tall man in a long black trenchcoat got out. Without a word, he opened the Rover's rear door and helped the armored figure aboard, then went back to the driver's door, climbed in, and drove away. The few ravers who were alert enough to take in details of that scene, a small group at the periphery of the gathering, glanced at each other in puzzlement. "What the hell is Stark Industries?" one of them wondered, but the others could only shrug. Stark slumped in the back of the Rover, bemusedly watching the parade of error messages scroll across his vision within the Iron Man HUD, as Zoner drove back toward Stark Tower in grim silence. Eventually he got tired of that and opened the helmet visor, looking around at the inside of the vehicle. "Different Rover?" "Wrecked the other one," Zoner replied. "But it got the job done." "Ah." "Fucking assassin boomers," Zoner snapped suddenly, as if apropos of nothing. Stark just sighed, sounding too drained to share his friend's anger at that moment. It took Zoner, Nene, JARVIS, a detailed schematic, and a couple of impact wrenches to pry Ben Stark out of the Iron Man armor, but once they did, they found that he was unhurt except for a few scrapes and bruises and a mild thermal burn on his right shoulder. As for the suit, it was battered and dented, but the sheared-off shoulder cap was the only substantial damage. The rest of it had held up quite well to its first full-on combat situation. Stark sat in a chair next to the assembly table, on which Nene had arranged the various parts of the suit in more or less their correct positions, while Zoner examined him for injuries. "I've had an idea that I think will make the flight control system more effective when you get to developing the software for it," he said to Nene while Zoner took his blood pressure. "And the crash protection systems are first-rate." He winced as Zoner sprayed the burn on his right shoulder with antiseptic. "I think we need to look at some kind of refractive coating to mitigate beam weapon effects, though." "Refractive coating. Right," Nene mused absently, only half- listening. Then she turned to him and said, "You know you could've gotten killed about eight different ways tonight, right?" Stark nodded, no flippancy in him at all. "Yeah. I do. Just like you could any time you suit up." Nene blinked, unsure how to proceed after such a bald-faced (and, if she was honest, accurate) accusation of hypocrisy, and he went on in a slightly gentler tone, "Nene, I love you, but I'm really not in the mood to be lectured by a teenager tonight. Why don't you head home, get some rest." She looked like there was more she wanted to say, but she relented all the same, reading the pain and weariness in his eyes. "Right," she said. "Okay. Home. Uh... good night." Stark smiled very slightly - about all the good cheer he could muster. "Good night, Nene." "Night," said Zoner distractedly as he applied a synthetic-skin spray bandage to the burn. She'd been gone for several minutes by the time Zoner finished his checkover (which also included a full neuroprocessor diagnostic and one, facilitated by said processor, on Stark's Model 74), stowed his gear in his little black bag, and said, "Well, you're okay, apart from fatigue, borderline dehydration, and that burn on your shoulder. And I'm not going to be able to talk you out of playing armor jockey any more than Nene is, so I'm not going to try." Stark mustered a slightly wider smile. "Smart," he said. Then, more seriously, he added, "It's... just something I feel like I have to do. Because... because somebody has to. Because I have the tools. Because apart from Sylia and her crew, I'm the only one who can." Zoner nodded. "You realize you could just build the suit and field someone more... " "Expendable?" "I was thinking 'competent,'" said Zoner without rancor. "Someone with military experience. Rhodey, for instance." Stark snorted. "Come on, Zoner. I can't ask an employee to ride my experimental shit into combat against rogue boomers." "Rhodey's more than an employee," Zoner pointed out. "That'd make it worse," Stark replied. Then, raising his voice slightly, he said, "JARVIS, be a buddy and get me Friday?" "Of course, sir. One moment." A pause, then Friday's female- modulated voice replaced JARVIS's in the speakers. "Friday here, Mr. Stark." "What's the story on the stuff I asked for earlier?" "The Globehopper's ready and waiting at Narita. The medical examiner's office has released Miss Chang's body and I'm in the process of having her transported there now. You can leave within the hour." Stark got slowly to his feet, groaning. "Good." "You're leaving -now?- Tonight?" Zoner asked. Stark nodded. "I have to," he said. "Irene's family... they probably don't even know she's dead. I should be the one to tell them." "Guess I'm coming with you, then." At Stark's questioning look, Zoner went on, "Friday told me who Irene's relatives are. We both know Simon Chang's connected to some dangerous people. They might not take this news well." Stark nodded, pulling a hand down his face. "Right. Yeah. You're right. Of course you should come." "Sure you don't want to get some sleep first?" "I can sleep on the way." "Also, Mr. Stark... " Friday put in. Stark glanced at the console. "Sorry, Friday. I thought you were finished. What else?" "Acquisition of item 82K2K is complete." Stark blinked. "That was fast." "The item has been available for some time. I've kept tabs on it in case you decided to reactivate the search." Stark smiled his first non-wry smile of the evening. "Good work," he said. "Have it transported to Stark Industries Long Beach. I'll bring it back with me." "Will do." Nene Romanova let herself into her apartment, shut and locked the door behind her, left a trail of clothes through the living room, made the usual check of the small apartment's few potential intruder hiding places (a girl can't be too careful living on her own, after all), took a shower, and then crawled gratefully into bed. It had been a while since she spent a night at her own place. The bedroom above the shop in the Foundry, the one that had been Ben Stark's before he moved to Stark Tower, had almost become more familiar. She curled up, wondering how long it would take her mind to stop racing and let her sleep. Just before it did, as it spun down from the feverish speed it had been running at since Irene Chang's panicked call to Stark, it tossed out a memory fragment - something she'd heard but not consciously registered earlier in the long evening. Nene sat up and blinked into the darkness of her bedroom. "... he loves me?!" she said to no one. # Joe Satriani # "Out of the Sunrise" # _Professor Satchafunkilus and the Musterion of Rock_ (2008) Eyrie Productions, Unlimited presented BUBBLEGUM CRISIS: THE IRON AGE Issue #3: This Year's Model The Cast (in order of appearance) Keiko Sonoda Benjamin H. Stark MegaZone Friday Nene Romanova Henry Rausch Two corporate tough guys Pepsiman Hanzo Yamada Priss S. Asagiri Sylia Stingray Linna Yamazaki Tezuo Nishimura Just A Really Very Intelligent System (JARVIS) 1.1 Mackie Stingray Irene Chang Brian J. Mason Leon McNichol Daley Wong A mysterious information specialist for hire written by Benjamin D. Hutchins with MegaZone series devised by Benjamin D. Hutchins MegaZone series logo designed by Janice Barlow indomitable The EPU Usual Suspects Based on BUBBLEGUM CRISIS (Toshiba-EMI) BUBBLEGUM CRISIS: TOKYO 2040 (JVC/AIC) HOPELESSLY LOST (EPU) TALES OF SUSPENSE (Marvel Comics) KNIGHT RIDER (Glen A. Larson) et al. Sylia Stingray, Mackie Stingray, Linna Yamazaki, Leon McNichol, and the Knight Sabers' hardsuits designed by KENICHI SONODA Priscilla S. Asagiri and Nene Romanova designed by MASAKI YAMADA Tony Stark and Iron Man created by STAN LEE Iron Man Mark II (TIA Type) designed by PHILIP J. MOYER EPILOGUE MONDAY, JUNE 7, 2410 STARK TOWER MEGA TOKYO, JAPAN After sleeping in to an outrageous degree even by her own liberal standards, Nene called Stark Tower on Sunday afternoon to be told that both Benjamin Stark and MegaZone had left Japan, but that they'd be back the following day, and that Mr. Stark would appreciate it if she would stop by the Tower after her shift at the AD Police. She proceeded to turn in the most worthless day's work she'd ever produced, though she was reasonably successful in preventing the full extent of her uselessness from coming to her superiors' attention, and headed for Stark Tower the instant she could, with anything approaching propriety, clock out. Nene found the Tower bustling, not with construction robots but with actual people, about half of them Japanese and the other half, judging by the snatches of conversation she caught as they went here and there, Americans. The occupation of the rest of the Tower had apparently begun. She was surprised to catch a glimpse of Pepper Potts, whom she'd met briefly before Stark's heart replacement surgery, as she crossed the lobby and rode the elevator up to the StarkWire office. What's -she- doing here? Nene wondered. The office was deserted but for Friday, who appeared at her faux reception desk as soon as Nene emerged from the elevator. "Hello, Nene," said Friday cheerfully. "Mr. Stark asked me to send you down to the Armory as soon as you arrived." "Uh... okay. Thanks, Friday." She went through into Stark's office, where the hidden elevator opened silently at her approach. Moments later it deposited her in the gleaming white main machine shop of the Armory. The Mark II Iron Man suit was still laid out on the assembly table, just where Nene had left it, damaged parts and all. "Good afternoon, Miss Romanova," said JARVIS politely. "Mr. Stark is in the garage." "Thanks, JARVIS." Nene went through one of the arched doors and found Stark right where the computer had placed him. He was dressed in one of his shop coveralls, Stark Industries blue with a neatly embroidered logo over the breast pocket, and he was working under the hood of a car Nene had never seen before, some kind of sports car, sleek and black, its styling somehow timeless and slightly retro at the same time. Sensing her approach, he looked up, wiping his hands on a rag, and Nene blinked at the sight of the dark circles around his eyes. "My God, you look awful," she said. "Have you slept?" "Not much," Stark admitted. "I've been busy." "What happened to your -face?-" she demanded as she realized that, in addition to the fatigue circles, he had a bruise at one corner of his mouth that hadn't been there after his adventure in the Mark II the other night. "I took Irene home to her family in the States last night. This morning. Whatever." He shook his head. "Her grandfather wasn't pleased." "Her -grandfather- did that to you?" "No. Her grandfather's 95 years old," said Stark. "He had his bodyguard do it." He sighed. "I probably deserved it. I did get her killed." Nene put her hands on her hips. "Don't be stupid. Brian Mason murdered her, just like he murdered her fiance." "I never set out to endanger anyone but myself with this," Stark told her. "If I'd been a little smarter, I'd have gotten Irene -out- of here, instead of drawing her further into the line of fire." "Linna knew her better than I did," Nene admitted, "but... working with you made her happy. Gave her a purpose. If you had tried to get her out, I don't think she would've gone." "No," Stark conceded. "Probably not." He fiddled with another part of the car's engine, which Nene recognized as a compact gas turbine, then looked up at her with tired, sad eyes and said with a faint smile, "And you won't either... will you." "I was in this before I ever met you," Nene replied. "I'm damn well not quitting now." Stark looked at her for a few seconds, his expression impossible to read, then nodded. "I didn't think so," he said. He replaced the tools he'd been using on the rolling cart next to him, wiped his hands again, and stuck the rag in his back pocket. Then he stood there, watching her, for a few seconds, as if unsure what to say next. "Nene, I can't tell you what to do with yourself. Like you said, you were involved in all this before -I- was. If you want to stay with the Knight Sabers, I don't have anything to say about that. If you want to keep working with -me,- I won't turn you away. I'm glad to have your help. But I won't... I -can't-... let what happened to Irene ever happen again. And that means if you're going to stay with me, you're going to have to do something for me." Nene eyed him a trifle warily. "... What?" she asked. "You're going to have to accept a... a -partner.- Someone who can look after you. Someone who'll always be nearby. Someone who'll do whatever it takes to keep you safe." Not completely convinced he was serious - but how could he not be, she didn't think it was in him to joke about something like this - she gave him a baffled look for several seconds, then came to an internal decision and nodded, her face taking on a characteristic stubborn look. "Okay," she said. "I'm with you. All the way. If that means playing by your rules... that's fair enough." Stark looked into her eyes for a few seconds, then smiled and closed the black car's hood. "Well, then," he said, "come on over here and meet your new partner." Nene stepped closer, more confused than ever. She noticed as she did so that there was a curious device set into the car's front fascia - a recessed slot just ahead of the seam between the nose and the leading edge of the hood, within which sat a multisegmented red scanner lamp. As she approached, the scanner's speed increased, the red light sweeping back and forth a couple of times with an audible sound, and Nene had the curious prickly sensation that she'd just been scrutinized. Then the car spoke. "Good afternoon, Nene Alianovna Romanova," it said in a pleasantly modulated man's voice. "I am the Knight Industries Two Thousand. KITT, if you prefer." and introducing KITT The Iron Age continues in "What Goes Around... " E P U (colour) 2008