Marvel Avengers: Ghost
"This is a disaster," Tony Stark groaned, pinching the bridge of his nose as the morning headline glared up at him from the front page of the Daily Bugle, "no, this is an absolute goddamn catastrophe! That's what it is."
The limousine cruised on, the city streets passing in a blur of hazy colour. Within the air conditioned interior, the multimillionaire chairman of Stark Enterprises tossed a clutch of aspirins into his mouth, chasing them with a swig from his water bottle. He hadn't slept all night; there hadn't been time for it. He'd spent the entire evening just trying to figure out what had gone wrong, and in that time the tabloids had managed to grab the sensation and run with it. Now, here he was, fifteen minutes away from an impromptu press conference, and he wasn't fit to stand in front of a firing squad.
And those reporters were going to be a firing squad.
The young woman sitting opposite him didn't respond, her attention wholly focused on the P.D.A in front of her, emblazoned with the S.H.I.E.L.D logo on its reverse. He missed Pepper, just like he did every time she went away. Unfortunately, her annual leave had come at exactly the wrong time, and now she was trapped in Antigua until a flight could be arranged. Until then, he had to make do with the substitute the organisation had sent, a studious, if inattentive, girl by the name of Hayley, who had said barely two words to him since they'd met twenty-four hours ago.
He wasn't sure if she was being impolite, or if she was simply nervous, but at least Pepper took the time to try small talk. Still, if it was the latter, he could understand. It wasn't everyday you got to work for a former Time Magazine Man of the Year. He'd certainly never had the honour.
And he couldn't fault her efficiency. She'd gotten this whole conference organised in a matter of hours. Considering who her employers were, he should have expected that much.
He picked up the newspaper again, wincing at the huge, bold print that proclaimed: "Stark Enterprises Experiences 'Technical Difficulties'". His legal team hadn't managed to get on the story quick enough to stifle it, but it wasn't like that would have helped. The proof was there for everyone to see. Every flight leaving the country had been grounded, entire districts in most major cities had been plunged into the Stone Age, and traffic signals had started malfunctioning up and down the east coast. Someone had even erased millions of dollars from various personal bank accounts, Tony's included.
Whatever had happened, some glitch, some virus, some cyber-terrorist, the damage had been awesome in scale, the like of which had never been seen before. His company were the glue that held the United States together and, yesterday, that glue had almost dissolved completely.
The only good news was that the country's defence systems were still intact, but until they figured out what, or who, had cracked their firewalls, and how, there was no telling how long that would last.
"I just don't know where to begin with this," he confessed, rubbing at the back of his neck as he reclined in his seat.
It was supposed to have been a rhetorical statement. After all, he was both a C.E.O and a member of the Avengers. He was never stuck for a course of action for long. Instead, his new assistant looked him up and down appraisingly.
"A shave would probably be the best place to start," she said.
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He took her suggestion, shaving in one of the convention centre's private bathrooms, before fixing his hair and changing into a tailored suit he'd brought along in the trunk of the limousine. His other suit, the one the press didn't know about, stayed in a briefcase he kept in the limo. He didn't want to take the chance that this whole affair had just been a ploy to lure him out into the open. If it had, then he wanted Iron Man close at hand, just in case.
Unfortunately, with the eyes of the assorted press on him, taking on his superhero persona would be slightly difficult. That was why he'd kept it in the car. If things went awry during the conference, he could have his suit make a dramatic rescue with the control device mounted on his wrist. Then he could just hop in and take care of the rest, and the journalists would be none the wiser about his double life.
Steeling himself, he entered the hall where the conference was set to take place. His aide announced him to the congregation as he walked up to the podium. The hundred-strong mob seated there leapt to their feet in unison, squawking like vultures spotting fresh meat. A few were clapping as a formality, probably following Hayley's lead, but their hearts weren't in it.
Everyone was looking at him with a mixture of apprehension and amusement. They were scared, certainly - everyone wanted to know how much danger they were in, if even Stark Enterprises couldn't protect them. But a lot them were also on tenterhooks, dying to know how the mighty Tony Stark had screwed up. The press loved their fallen heroes.
"Alright, please, ladies and gentlemen, I'll take questions at the end," he insisted, taking his place behind the microphones.
He was already beginning to regret this whole idea. Nothing he could say would make this situation better, because there was no making it better. Given time, they'd figure out how it had happened, and stop it from happening again. In the mean time, they just had to hope that nothing else went wrong.
He waited as they settled themselves back into their seats.
"Okay, I'm aware that there's been a lot of hearsay about what happened yesterday, people talking about some kind of malfunction with Stark Enterprises technology, others talking about some kind of new cyber terrorist," he said, already dreading what would come next, "at the moment, we don't know if any of those eventualities are true..."
There was a cry of general outrage from the audience. They all seemed to have their own theories on what had happened, and the fact that his company didn't yet know for certain seemed to add fuel to their individual fires. He raised his voice to be heard over the uproar.
"But we're putting every available resource at our disposal into undoing the damage that's been done, and introducing safeguards to ensure that nothing like this ever happens again. We now have absolute control of the situation and we will begin looking into the probable cause by the time the day is over."
"How can you say you have absolute control when you don't even know what you're dealing with?"
"What is your company doing about the damage your systems have caused?"
"Has the Department of Defence been warned about this threat?"
"Regardless of what this threat is, the civil defence network that protects this country is impervious," he replied, trying to pick out the final speaker from the crowd, "the security protocols guarding the Department of Defence were designed by some of the best minds my company has to offer. I'm confident that, whatever we're dealing with here, we can handle..."
He paused in mid-sentence as the console wired into his forearm started to hum. Frowning, he glanced at it, disguising the movement as a fleeting look at his wristwatch. On the small status panel was an image of the Iron Man exoskeleton with a barrage of warning labels plastered across it. Along the bottom of the screen was the word "Active". When his eyes turned back to the assembled journalists, he realised that they had fallen silent, staring at him, probably wondering why his face had turned so pale all of a sudden.
He opened his mouth to say something, and then the glass ceiling above them exploded inwards.
Spinning shards flew in all directions, slicing several members of the assorted press to bloody ribbons. Others were trampled beneath the boots of their colleagues in the frantic dash out of the chamber's middle. Tony himself ducked beneath the podium, even as razor-sharp blades of crystal whirled past him. He could hear disbelieving cries going up, and a name that he couldn't believe until he climbed back to his feet to see for himself.
Hovering in the air, where the huge, glass dome had once been, was Iron Man.
Its foot thrusters cut out, sending it dropping into the centre of the room, where it fell into a low crouch amid the bodies of those who had been unable to escape. Then, with the sunlight glinting off its crimson and gold armour, it rose to its feet, head turning as it scanned the chamber. This wasn't the first time that he'd seen it from the outside; it wasn't even the first time he'd fought a hijacked version of one of his suits. But this was the latest model of Iron Man, the pinnacle of all that had come before, and he couldn't begin to guess who had cracked the multitude of security protocols designed to protect it.
The skill of the individual who had commandeered it alone was enough to bring an uncomfortable tightness in his chest. But it was when the machine turned to focus on him, however, that he broke out in a cold sweat.
"You're going down, Stark," it said, its voice tinny and distorted, stalking towards the lectern with an undeniably predatory air.
He dove out of the way as it levelled its palm at him, unleashing a blast from the attitude adjuster built into its hand. The eruption of superheated air turned the podium into a puddle of bubbling slag on the stage. Letting out a string of curses under his breath, Tony threw himself through the nearest exit and sprinted down the adjoining corridor. Moments later, another white-hot flash blew the door off its hinges in his wake.
As he bolted down the hallway, he reached to his wrist, slipping the earpiece out of the device strapped there and fixing it to the side of his head.
"What's your status, Mister Stark?" the S.H.I.E.L.D operative who answered the call asked him, his voice clear despite the carnage raging behind him.
"I'm at the conference centre on Belmont Drive," he explained, bolting down a flight of stairs that led in the direction of the building's rear entrance, "Iron Man is active and I'm not in control. Repeat, I am not in control."
"Roger that, sir. I'll reroute all available units to your position now."
"Yeah," he replied, as he burst through the emergency exit and out into the street, "you do that."
He cast around for a new destination, somewhere he could go to lose a rogue exoskeleton, impervious to damage and armed to the teeth. Unfortunately, when faced with something like that, not very many places sprang to mind. He knew Iron Man inside and out, knew its every strength and every weakness. That just made the idea of being outside of it, of being its target, all the more terrifying. He was aware of exactly how unstoppable it really was. Usually, the weakest thing in that suit was him.
He glanced up, just in time to see his stalker again, dropping to earth right in front of him. It landed on the roof of a silver four-door, shattering the windows, buckling the chassis, before it stepped down into the middle of the road and started to march towards him. Its hand rose once again, fixing on him.
"Nowhere to run this ti-"
Before it could even finish speaking, an unmarked black jeep careened into it, knocking it off its feet and sending it tumbling along the road. The vehicle - the same model his security staff had been driving - swung around and the door popped open, revealing the aide, Hayley, sitting at the steering wheel. Without hesitating for a moment, Tony jumped into the passenger seat and slammed the door shut behind him as she gunned the engine and roared away along the street.
"Nice driving," he told her, turning to peer through the rear window in search of his pursuer.
"I am a SHIELD agent, sir," she reminded him, moments before the entire jeep lurched violently.
She wrestled with the wheel to keep control as he glanced upwards. A metal fist burst through the metal above, its fingers curling around the edge of the hole and peeling away the entire roof. Iron Man was perched atop the vehicle, its head turning slowly as it scanned the interior. Its eyes locked with Tony, and then it drew its right hand back, using the other to maintain its grip as it prepared to vaporise him.
And then something - a blurry streak about the size of a car hubcap - whirled past, striking the armoured suit full in the chest and throwing it from its seat with a loud, metallic clang.
A second figure landed on the roof of the vehicle as they sped on, and he looked up to find himself staring into a pair of steel blue eyes framed by an azure mask, beneath a bold, ivory letter "A". In that instant, he blew out a sigh of relief when he realised that the cavalry had arrived.
"I heard you could use some help," Captain America said to him, before turning his attention to the woman at the wheel, giving her a crisp salute when she dared to glance up at him, "make sure he gets to safety, agent. I'll take care of this."
With that, he vaulted off the roof and sprinted back down the road, little more than a blurry streak of red, white and blue in the rear-view.
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His shield turned a broad curve in the air, the inbuilt smart technology altering its trajectory and sending it whistling back towards him. Lifting his hand, he intercepted the handle mounted on its backside without so much as missing a stride. He powered on down the street, towards where the stolen Iron Man armour was resting atop the mangled wreckage of the parked car it had landed on. Even as he watched, the thrusters on its heels ignited, carrying it skywards.
Once upon a time, Steve Rogers had been one of the most technologically advanced men in his Midwest hometown. He'd been able to work a rifle, and a radio. These days, he'd long since given up on trying to understand how machines, especially computers, worked. He left that to other Avengers, like Tony, and focused on what he knew best - battle. Everything else was just so much useless information. This situation was no different. Iron Man was Tony's armour, and if he wasn't in it then that meant someone else was. That made it a threat - one that needed to be quickly neutralised, especially if it was gunning for his long-time friend and ally.
That was all he needed to know.
"Just as I expected," the suit said, its voice mechanical, distorted by the filter that Tony used to keep his identity a secret, "Stark's in trouble, so they send out the Boy Scout. Private interests own the government, and the government owns Captain America. You're just a puppet's puppet."
"And what does that make you?" he asked, looking up at the armour as it hovered overhead, "what do you think you'll accomplish by killing Tony Stark?"
"I'm my own man, Cap'. And Stark's just the beginning. This country's going to rue the day it let big business take precedence over the good of the people. Not that you'll live long enough to see how it ends."
It whipped its right hand forward, a compartment opening on its forearm to reveal a compact missile. The rocket shot towards him, a plume of smoke erupting in its wake. He swung his shield up, the projectile detonating against it, flames blossoming out from the white star at its centre. Even as he lowered his defences, however, his opponent landed on the street in front of him, throwing a heavy punch straight for his head.
The shield came up a second time, armoured knuckles bouncing off its surface with a metallic clang, before a second blow sent him into a quick retreat. A third strike banged against the shield, and then he swung the impervious disc around in a hook punch of his own. The edge caught Iron Man full in the face, sending it reeling backwards. Even as it righted itself, he brought his weapon around once more, slamming its broad façade against the armour's chest, driving it into retreat, before lunging into an uppercut that snapped its head back sharply.
It staggered and then found its footing again, igniting its boosters and shooting forward into a punch that practically dented the impenetrable metal of the shield. This time, it was Captain America's turn to reel, holding fast as the airborne armour rained down blow after blow. Then, before he could react, it lifted its palm and fired with its attitude adjuster, the force of the blast sending him shooting straight into the front end of a bus. Fortunately, the passengers had abandoned the vehicle upon seeing the fight, but that didn't stop the impact from causing him a lot of hurt.
But he was a soldier. He'd suffered before, and he'd suffer again. It was his job, and as the country's original super soldier, he could handle a little pain. He picked himself up from the crippled chassis, the ringed star emblem on his shield scorched and smoking from where it had taken the brunt of the attack.
"People look at you, and they think they see a symbol, something to aspire to," the rogue suit began, dropping to the asphalt in front of him, "but you're just a distraction, like the tabloids, like television, keeping them blind to all of the injustice in the world. Was this the country you fought for, seventy years ago? A place where we'd be slaves to insurance companies, where corporate tax breaks are more important than the welfare state? You're not even a hypocrite, Cap'. You're nothing but a tool."
The shield whirled towards it like a discus once again, bouncing hard off its chest and throwing it onto its reverse. Captain America lifted his hand, effortlessly catching his weapon for the second time.
"You're pretty eloquent, for a terrorist," he commented, coming to stand over the downed exoskeleton, "I hope you're this talkative when S.H.I.E.L.D has you in custody."
He reached down to hold the machine in place by the neck, but it grabbed him instead, clamping its bulky fingers into the flesh at the top of his arms. Its mechanical grip caused him to bruise instantly, despite his enhanced resilience, and then its foot thrusters ignited, carrying them both into the air. Unlike many of his super powered brethren, he didn't fly. Unfortunately, it seemed that now, whether he liked it or not, that was exactly what he was going to do.
The armour began to carry him skywards, but he brought his shield around, hammering it into the machine's faceplate. In response, it drew its legs in and kicked him hard in the stomach. The added flare of its boosters sent him hurtling through the window of the vacant bus. The moment he landed in the aisle of the vehicle, he let out a groan, clamping his free hand over his scorched gut. The heat from the blast had eaten through the Teflon weave of his battle costume and scorched the flesh on his abdomen, fusing the edges of the burnt hole in his outfit into the wound. He'd heal, but the pain would be torturous until then. He was lucky. If the thrusters had been on full, they'd have eaten right through him.
He used the empty seats to pull himself back to his feet, only to see Iron Man hovering some twenty feet above the asphalt through the now-shattered windshield. The exoskeleton levelled its left arm, another compact missile popping out of the compartment at its wrist. The projectile hurtled forward, missing him by inches as he leapt upwards. With a swipe of his shield, he cleaved a hole in the bus's roof and clambered through it.
The explosion rocked the vehicle, blew out the remaining windows, and caused the flaming wreckage to buck wildly. Captain America landed on top of its burnt out carcass a moment later, his jump taking him clear of the detonation completely.
The second he landed, he began sprinting towards his floating opponent, hurling his shield and watching it streak, spinning wildly, through the air. The hijacked armour veered out of its way, its whirling edge scraping sparks from its right arm, and then he was tackling it around the waist, forcing it down to the concrete below. They landed hard, the super soldier landing astride his friend's stolen suit and immediately landing a punch to its head so vicious that relays exploded in pops of electric discharge along the left side of its neck. The next blow dented the chest plate, mere inches from damaging the glowing battery core at its centre.
He got the impression that Tony was probably regretting outfitting Iron Man with its own power supply, rather than just letting it leech off the life support system grafted into his own chest.
He was about to land a third strike when his adversary fired back with a double palm thrust to his stomach, throwing him backwards onto the concrete. Head jerking erratically, it stood up, something that sounded like a growl emitting from the voice filter. He smirked, pleased that he'd at least managed to provoke the new pilot to the point of anger. The thief - whoever he was - had probably imagined he was indestructible, even if his skill wasn't even on a par with Tony's own. He was quickly learning that nothing could have been further from the truth.
But then, he'd obviously not taken into account that his opponent had fought Iron Man before and won.
It came towards him, lifting its hand in preparation to give him another scorching blast from its palm thrusters, and without his shield to block it he knew he'd take the full brunt of the extreme heat. The shield saved him another way, however, slamming into the small of the armour's back as it returned to him, throwing it forward. He lifted his feet and kicked out, hitting it solidly at the tops of both thighs, the impact of the underside of his boots causing yet more electrical systems to short out.
The shield whirled over his head and embedded itself in the concrete, where it came to a complete stop.
Iron Man reeled, moving stiffly now that its legs had sustained damage as well. Not to be deterred, it aimed its right arm at him, the flamethrower built into its wrist ejecting from where it was hidden beneath the armour. Captain America knew for a fact that the weapon was actually a cutting tool, capable of burning through even the thickest steel bulkheads. Used on human flesh, even that of a superhuman like himself, it would melt through it like a blowtorch against a candle.
He grabbed the handle of his shield, wrenching it loose from its sheath of stone and bringing it around as the tongue of flame licked out towards him. It would have seared the flesh from his bones. Instead, he simply felt the extreme temperature through the metal. The surfacing on the road began to give out before his weapon did, the street turning to liquid where the heat was steadily growing. His entire body was slick with sweat after a few seconds, and the shield began to grow hot against his forearm. He almost felt as though it were going to fuse onto his flesh.
But then the flamethrower cut out, the lance of blazing plasma dying, leaving him free to retaliate.
He leapt forward, clearing the bubbling pool of tarmac that had formed in front of him, and thrust the shield forward, slamming its white-hot façade into the armour's head. He slipped his arm free, watching Iron Man stagger backwards, the buckler melted onto its faceplate. It gripped the rim of the shield and tried to pry it away, but it had stuck fast. In the next instant, he jumped into a flying kick, knocking it over onto its back. It slammed against the concrete, sparks erupting around it as it scraped across the floor, and then he was on top of it, clamping his fingers around the glowing battery core. It started to flail, trying to shake him off, but then, with a sharp tug, he ripped out the power supply.
It fell limp beneath him as he discarded the miniature generator and wiped the sweat from around his mouth.
"Okay," he muttered, "let's see who you really are."
He kicked the prone suit over onto its front and dug his fingers into the spaces between the armour plates on its back. The metal sheets were segmented, designed to slip into place over Tony's body at a moment's notice. Anything that was designed to open and close so easily left plenty of structural weakness to exploit. He wrenched back on the panels, peeling them away, struggling with the resilient alloy that his fellow Avenger had used to construct his armour. After a few minutes, he'd ripped away the metal sheet guarding the pilot's upper back, giving him a clear view into the suit's claustrophobic interior.
And that was when he realised that there was no one inside the machine.
"What the hell?" he grunted, looking down into the empty Iron Man.
Captain America was well aware that Tony could control his suit remotely, that he didn't need to necessarily be inside the thing to pilot it. However, he was also aware that the other man's skill with the remote was nowhere near what he could do with direct control. Someone had been working the puppet's strings from elsewhere with ability comparable to that of Tony's. Still, even knowing that, he was sure that Stark Enterprises had the ability to stop them from continuing their anarchic crime spree. They were the best that the Earth had to offer; no villain - human or otherwise - had ever managed to defeat them before.
He didn't have time to muse much on what had happened, though. His attention was caught by the sound of what sounded like a miniature jet engine and, when he looked up, he spotted the familiar bulk of a second armoured suit hovering above him. The chrome finish made it clear that it wasn't Tony.
"Guess I got here a little too late, huh?" War Machine asked, lowering gently to street level.
"Don't worry about it," the super soldier assured him.
"I take it you won't be needing my back up either, then," he added, gesturing upwards.
Following the motion, he found himself looking up at the underside of S.H.I.E.L.D's flying fortress, a marvel of modern technology. Even as he watched, he could see small craft detaching from its sides, gliding down towards the now-resolved conflict on the ground. It was good to see that, even if the stolen Iron Man had managed to overpower him, there'd still have been people on hand to control the situation.
"You wanna get that looked at?" the gun metal-coloured armour suggested, bringing his attention back to their conversation, before nodding at the scorch mark across his belly.
"Don't worry - a couple of days and I'll be good as new," he replied, without even needing to look. He could already tell that his advanced healing factor was at work.
"We'll take it from here."
"Yeah, I figured," he said, turning to walk away, before pausing in mid-stride and looking back, "and when you see Tony next, tell him he owes me a shield."
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It had taken them several hours to extract the damaged shield from where it had been fused onto Iron Man's faceplate. It was a particularly tiresome procedure, given that all of the sensory systems and flight recorders were contained within the mask, near the driver's head, necessitating a clean and precise extraction. In the end, however, the hard work had paid off, and they had retrieved the suit's internal circuitry mostly intact.
The suit itself was now a bust. Captain America had done more damage than could be feasibly repaired - a fact that was easily forgiven considering that Tony might well have been killed without his intervention. Fortunately, he'd already been considering some modifications to the armour, and decided to simply incorporate those adjustments into a completely new model. In the end, there had been some positive outcomes. He now knew exactly how imperfect the current design really was, both in terms of its combat capabilities and its security protocols.
Of course, before he could begin the redesign, he had to know how his technology - particularly this piece of technology - had been infiltrated. He couldn't afford for something like this to happen again. Property had been damaged; Cap' had sustained some serious injuries; people had even died during the suit's rampage. Whoever the hacker was, they meant business. Not only that, by hijacking the suit they had been promoted from a menace to a threat in his eyes. He needed to find a way to protect himself, his colleagues and the people they were sworn to defend from future attacks. Then, he'd find either the individual or the group responsible, before they struck again.
Unfortunately, he hadn't had any luck scouring the flight recorder for information thus far, and he was beginning to feel the familiar battle between focus-induced insomnia and fatigue taking its toll. He pinched the bridge of his nose and moved to turn away from the console - to get himself a drink or to slump into a chair and pass out, he wasn't sure which - and almost crashed right into Hayley.
She had apparently been standing right behind him for some time without him noticing.
"Can I help you?" he asked her.
"S.H.I.E.L.D were wondering if you had any updates," she told him simply, her expression earnest and intense and as well-rested as he wished he was, "I was just wondering what to tell them."
"Tell them I'm working on it," he replied, before turning back to the workstation and hitting a few select keys, "but I did find this."
He stepped back to give her a clear view of the monitor, where a simple message encoded in the Iron Man suit's memory was displayed.
It read: "You may have won the battle..."
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