A/N Well an interesting mix of reactions to Steve's admission in the last chapter. Can I just suggest that you remember the events he's referring to do take place in the 1940s with the inherent "practical" considerations of the time – which, even if Steve was naïve to them when he joined the tour, I very much doubt any of the dancers would have been! So do bear in mind that any "morale boosting" may possibly not have been as salacious as the 21st Century mindset would suggest. We will, of course, never know exact details because Steve comes from an era when a gentleman didn't tell – and he's definitely a gentleman. So read it to mean whatever you're comfortable with.
Once again thank you for the reviews and to those who are hanging on in there with me, we're getting there.
Enjoy!
Chapter Ten
A prolonged silence settled between the two. It wasn't uncomfortable but it wasn't relaxed either.
Tony glanced at the clock, 3am – the hearing was today!
He hated the powerlessness he was experiencing. Tony Stark was used to being able to control and fix problems. He hated that, in the next few hours, this fledgling friendship may have never existed….And, most of all, he hated that his father had sacrificed his childhood for…well what exactly?
"I need a drink…" he groaned, he really had been in this suit far too long. He rose and walked over to a cabinet marked "Medical Supplies" and withdrew a bottle of vodka and a crystal glass. "Wish I could offer you one too…"
"Wish I could have one." Came the quiet reply.
Tony wanted to scream or blow something up…he was so infuriated with the situation. He wanted to shake Steve and force him to do the same rather than him stand there, stoically awaiting his own oblivion….he wanted to….switch the phase modulator off so he wouldn't have to deal with any of this any more.
His hand hovered over the device.
"Go ahead Tony…I wouldn't blame you."
"You'd like that wouldn't you. A few hours of self-pity and then it'd be all over; self-sacrificing to the end." Tony said bitterly, filling the glass and downing it in one.
"If you like."
"You're a bastard, do you know that? Get me believing you're human and imperfect like the rest of us then get all impossibly heroic so I know exactly what messed my Dad up."
"So, a bit like someone who flew a nuke into a dimensional portal with no idea if he'd be able to get back?" Pending non-existence obviously worked wonders for Steve's comebacks.
That was a stupid, impulsive decision…you've had a couple of days to think about this and you're still going to do it."
"Only if I need to – I promise Tony, if I see any alternative I'll take it and come back and annoy you again." Steve smiled.
"You promise? You'll come back and let me bug you for exact details of those dancers? Let me tease you about your crap dress sense and outmoded language?"
"Tough choice between that and oblivion….but you swayed me." The smile was broader this time.
"You know, I think my Dad wanted to find you so bad because he wished he'd been a better friend."
"Can I say something?" Steve looked nervous.
"If you don't say it now, it's a bit hard to see when you're going to get a chance." The second glass of vodka had hit the mark.
"In the context of the time and what the World needed to defeat the Nazis, your Dad was a good man. But although was brilliant…..you're better, not only as an engineer and scientist, but as a person. What you do, what you create and the difference you're making to the World's future…he could have only dreamed of."
Steve paused as though wondering if it was his place to say it….then seemed to decide that there, literally, was no time like the present. "Thing is, there was over 25 years between my crashing into the ice and you being born: I don't know what went through his head during that time but, if he allowed looking for me or needing to create a better mousetrap or whatever else he was working on at the time as an excuse to neglect the one project he needed to be great at, being a father, then he was a complete fool."
Tony was stunned, overwhelmed by the sincerity of the statement.
Then he realised: "How did you know about that?" He knew he'd never mentioned his resentment concerning his childhood in front of Steve.
Steve looked a bit abashed and tapped at his ear. "Sorry. Enhanced hearing. I often hear stuff I shouldn't, even though I try not to."
Tony blanched. He remembered a loud denunciation of "Captain Uptight" Clint had launched into ("Oh hell, you can't just blame him, you were just as bad Stark") the other night when Steve had been in the kitchen. What else had he heard?
As if sensing Tony's sudden concern, Steve reassured him: "I've overheard far worse at SHIELD HQ than anything I've heard here. Some of those agents really aren't as busy as they pretend to be."
Tony steeled his nerves and forced himself to look Steve straight in the eye.
"You need to know that ABSOLUTELY NOTHING that's really special about you came out of a bottle."
"And you need to know you don't need to pretend to be a hero….YOU ARE A HERO!"
"Sir, Director Fury is on the line. It appears there is an emergency requiring the Avengers intervention." Jarvis' clipped tones interrupted.
"At this time of day? Has he lost his toothbrush or something? Tell him he can kiss my…a….ah, 'morning Director….you're up early."
The communication was brief and perfunctory. As Tony signed off and perused SHIELD's initial data he ground his teeth with irritation. He really was sick of aliens at the moment and this just about the worst timing possible.
They had feared something like this since the Chitauri Incident. Scans had detected some kind of weakening of the area where the Tesseract had ripped a hole leading to another dimension – though it had been closed, it was, effectively, like an area of fabric that had been invisibly repaired and remained weaker than it would have otherwise been. Bruce had been leading the project to monitor the region and develop a successful patch but it was a whole new area of research and development and they'd only been able to devise the most rudimentary of monitoring and alert systems so far.
At least, however, the alert system had been in place and they'd got some kind of early warning of activity in the area.
"Jarvis, get Bruce down here."
"He is already alerted and on his way Sir."
Tony looked over to Steve knowing he understood the situation, if not the specifics. Steve's technophobia only extended to some of the personal gadgets for which he saw no use – he'd made a considerable effort to get to grips with anything that had a strategic or security function and, for the most part, at least understood its purpose and capabilities even if direct usage sometimes still presented a challenge: Tony reflected he'd actually done pretty well for someone who'd come from an era where RADAR was just about as advanced as it got.
"Details?" The Captain's façade was firmly in place and ready to offer any assistance he could.
Tony briefly considered telling him not to bother; he had enough on his mind; it was too technical…but then realised he could do with all the help he could get when it came to possible team deployment (especially given they were very thin on the ground – where the hell was that hammer-wielding maniac anyway?) and anything else he was likely to forget. If Tony was honest with himself, he knew he could solve just about any technical or scientific problem imaginable if needed, but he couldn't organise a bun fight in a bakery let alone organise a team whose members only had one common skill: The ability to cause complete chaos.
He quickly transferred the data from the monitoring system to the holographic screen showing the weakened area. It took the shape of a rough circle with the more densely shaded parts being those least damaged near the edge and the area becoming obviously more vulnerable towards the centre, the point of initial impact by the Tesseract. A small region, relatively close to the outer edge, showed a contrasting signal similar to a pebble being thrown into a body of water, pulsating ripples radiated outwards at regular intervals.
Steve nodded. Bruce had shown him this the other day, when he'd asked for an update on the progress of the work, so he knew what he was looking at.
"Odd that it's in one of the stronger areas, could it be natural or is whoever's doing this just not that accurate?"
"Hard to tell," Tony looked at some of the data the scan was yielding, "…it may not be artificially generated but there appears to be some kind of intelligence behind it, it's too regular for a natural phenomenon – certainly nothing like we've ever seen before but doesn't look like it's close to being as powerful as the Tesseract either."
"Hey Tony" Bruce entered the lab looking like he'd just crawled out of bed – it was 4am, chances were he had. "Good," he said seeing the graphic of the affected zone, "let's see what we've got here."
While Bruce reviewed the data and made fine tuning adjustments to his scanning algorithms, Tony analysed the power signature and its effects.
Steve moved away from the two scientists and observed them working. A large part of what they said was incomprehensible to him but he'd got better at realising he didn't need to know the detail – that was their area of expertise – and was starting to be fairly adept at inferring the gist of what was going on: From the little he could pick up and the changing graphic, he could see that these ripples were gradually weakening the area around the centre of the pulse and it would soon punch through. This wasn't good. Whatever was behind this had to be taken as a serious threat and they still had no idea of what might be on the other side.
"Any chance we have enough information to generate a 3D model of the affected area?"
Tony glanced over at him with a querying look, not wanting to distract Bruce by apparently talking to himself.
"Seems to me, that if they could rip through the entire area then they would. Instead it looks a bit like they're burrowing or creating a tunnel of some kind. If that's what it is then there'll be an angle of entry and it would be good to get an idea what part of the city's going to be first affected so we're focussed on the right location if anything starts to come through."
It occurred to Tony that, sometimes, the problem with being a genius was that you missed the simple stuff. He nodded his appreciation to the Captain and instructed Jarvis to generate a 3D model of the weakened area of the atmosphere, sure enough, as far as the scanner could tell, a "shaft" of sorts was beginning to appear behind the focal point of the pulse.
"Jarvis, extrapolate likely angle of entry should the pulse break through and generate model of 1 square mile below potential impact zone. Add visuals of area from all sources."
Almost instantaneously wireframes of the area sprang up with a representation of the spatial disturbance above them. Images from CCTV cameras, lit currently by street lights only, linked to their locations appeared around the model. A sleepy-looking Clint and an ever-alert Natasha entered the lab at much the same time and proceeded to familiarise themselves with the situation via Jarvis' readouts.
"Looks like this thing's going to break through in a little over 15 minutes. The aperture will be minute but, due to the ripple effect from the pulse, the integrity of the area around it has dropped substantially. It's likely the opening will get bigger very quickly once they break through." Bruce observed. "Tony, do you have the power signature analysis? I think there may be a way to block and reverse this pulse if I can configure the frequencies and we can devise some way of delivering it."
With an elegant sweep of his hand, Tony sent the required data directly to Bruce's interface.
Natasha was looking at the city model: "Is this where whatever these things are will land first?"
"Best guess…almost all office buildings…will be empty at this time of the morning."
"Except for security and cleaning staff. Best alert the police to start making sure all civilians are out of there in case."
Tony glanced apologetically at Steve; that honestly hadn't occurred to him. He went to instruct Jarvis to connect him to the police when Steve added:
"Delegate that to Natasha and get her to update Fury at the same time, then she and Barton should get themselves on the ground down there – it's only a couple of blocks away, you can be there in moments if you need to be. You and Bruce are more valuable here at the moment."
Tony gave the orders as instructed. This was why he wasn't cut out to lead; he tended to forget the small things like laying the groundwork that made life easier along the way and he also had a habit of trying to focus on too many things at once rather than using the team to lighten the load and allow him to focus on his strengths.
The two SHIELD agents had left the lab. Natasha had already finished frightening the life out of a poor unsuspecting Night Desk Police Sergeant, who'd immediately despatched several units to the area, and was completing her briefing to the Director by the time the two of them emerged from the elevator on the ground floor of the tower.
"Has Stark been reading 'Leadership for Dummies' or something?" Clint asked her with a sideways glance.
She looked exaggeratedly exasperated and clipped him around the back of the head using little enough force to suggest she may have been thinking the same but was just too professional to admit it.
Bruce and Tony had isolated the weaknesses in the pulse signal that was drilling its way through the fabric of the atmosphere and identified a means to combat it. One of the hand repulsors on Tony's suit, aided by a similar signal from the communications array on the top of Stark Tower had a suitable output to allow them, when synchronised, to deaden the effect of each pulse or at least slow its progress significantly: It would take both elements working in unison to achieve this but did not require any additional hardware, essential given the brief time period within which they had to work. The difficulty was delivering a second signal that would actually negate the effect of the pulse so that Tony could close the aperture completely.
Looking at the schematic required for the delivery system of the second signal, Tony's eyes darted across all the data with that extraordinary focus Steve had seen only the day before when he was creating the phase modulator. The Captain could only marvel at the two scientists' ability to communicate so much complex data with so few syllables.
"Quinjets: We can use the tracking system on a couple of quinjets. All the components are there, it'll just need a software modification."
Bruce contacted Fury outlining the proposal and was immediately patched through to a rather bleary-eyed engineer who nodded dumbly as he received his instructions. He advised around 30 minutes to complete modifications…
"Tell him it needs to be 15" Steve was concerned that sensors appeared to be picking up movement the other side of an increasingly thin fragment of space that seemed to be all that was left at the focal point of the pulse.
Tony urged Bruce to whittle down the engineer's estimate - significantly!
After a brief altercation, and assurances he'd be paid overtime (even though he had no idea Bruce didn't have adequate seniority to authorise it), the engineer agreed to wake the rest of his team up and make the necessary changes. The quinjets still wouldn't be available for at least 30 minutes even with the helicarrier making all speed towards Manhattan: Iron Man, with Jarvis synchronising the tower array, was going to have to restrict the opening of the aperture for as long as possible.
Tony completed the modifications to the hand repulsor and instructed Jarvis to upload the additional software and synchronisation program.
"Tony, you MUST not exceed the amount of power to the signal that's been programmed, the most you can hope to do is slow the rate of the aperture expanding: If you increase power you'll deplete your arc reactor too quickly." Bruce warned as the process completed.
"Listen to him Tony. If you jeopardise yourself before those quinjets arrive, you jeopardise everyone's safety." Steve's voice was authoritative and controlled - Tony wondered how the hell he was managing to suppress his own overwhelming personal concerns; that was the Captain he figured. "They're breaking through." He added, to Tony's dismay.
Tony looked at the 3D representation of the pulse epicentre. As the area had become progressively weakened sensors were able to penetrate further into the space behind it. Although the hole in the atmosphere was only a few millimetres in diameter, it could clearly be seen that there were a large number of wriggling, snake-like creatures battling to get through the opening and into the sky above Manhattan.
Iron Man rapidly prepped the suit and made to leave. Bruce was finalising and double-checking the final specs for the SHIELD engineering crew who were already working on the modifications to the quinjets.
"Tony, deploy Hulk here if you need to." Steve indicated an area around a quarter of a mile from the entry point for the aliens.
"I can't control the Hulk" Tony hissed in a low voice so Bruce wouldn't hear.
"You won't need to, just drive everything towards him and he'll stay put."
"Jarvis," Tony muttered, knowing the AI would hear him no matter how low his voice, "leave an open comms link to the lab at all times and maintain all visuals to the city model.
"Understood." Tony was grateful Jarvis never questioned any orders given during a crisis, even if he didn't understand them.
"What's understood?" Bruce moved away from the terminal having uploaded everything the engineers needed. "Where d'you need me?"
"Just giving Jarvis some last minute instructions." Tony indicated the area he wanted Bruce to cover. "Don't scale up till you need to Big Guy, you'll know when and if you have to."
"On my way" Bruce grinned tentatively, he hated knowing he might have to change soon, it was never a pleasant form of anticipation.
Tony tapped the phase modulator on front of the suit. "Wasn't built with battle in mind, hope it holds up."
"I'll help all I can Tony, but you're more than capable. You'll be fine." Steve's voice was soft but firm and broadcast a reassurance Tony knew he didn't feel.
"Don't go anywhere till I get back." The expression that met his instruction said that the Captain knew he couldn't guarantee to follow that order.
Tony closed his faceplate and, regretfully, headed off towards the threat.