Chapter 9: Marvels

I'd been expecting Tony Stark to turn up for a while. The highly publicised nature of the Rhino's attack made it somewhat surprising that he hadn't done so already. I hadn't been expecting to bump into him at work though. A phone call was more in line with my expectations. I guess the voltokinetic lunatic attempting to trash the city rather pushed his hand.

"Uh, I guess. We probably ought to deal with this guy first." I gestured meaningfully to the vegetating villain. He looked a lot less impressive without the cloud of electrons surrounding him. His costume was mainly a bodysuit coloured a particularly unappealing shade of lime green, lumpy, and combined the least appealing visual elements of felt and rubber. Over the top, he wore something resembling an electrician's uniform, in an even less appealing shade of green. His head had a crudely sown green mask over it, which did nothing to make his look any more appealing. The broken nose and bloodstains did not improve the sight.

"Oh sure, there's facilities at my offices in the empire state that can hold him. Probably the only place in the city equipped to hold someone like this. We'll talk once we've got him there."

Wondering briefly why he had facilities for that in his business headquarters, I began lifting up the prone form of our mystery assailant. Before I could finish, Stark grabbed him with one arm and tucked him against his chest. Then he turned to me, and held out his other arm. "Hop on".

"… Please tell me you're joking."

The bastard shook his head, and repeated the gesture. Oh god, here we go again. With a certain sense of the inevitable, I took hold of his arm. Stark turned his head to face Peni. "Hey, we're heading up to the airship. You are welcome to join us." He paused. "I'm assuming that you can get up there, right? You've got a jet pack or something?"

Peni, who had spent the last few minutes staring at Stark with an expression of awe on her mechs face, jerked into motion. "Oh, err, yes of course. I'll follow you up as best I can."

Stark lifted his head, so the mask of his helmet pointed directly at the airship directly above us. Somewhere around his back, a low rumbling noise began. A breeze began to pick up around my feet, and a bulging shape on the suit's back began to glow red. There was a loud WHUMPH, and with a jerk, we left the ground. With a building roar, we soared upwards, a column of flame pouring out of the engine on Starks back.

All things considered, I massively preferred this method of travel. It wasn't any slower than Peni's web swinging, but there were vastly fewer sudden changes in direction, so severe nausea was somewhat less likely.

I briefly glanced down. Peni was in one of her mechs more spider-like forms, scuttling up the side of a building. Amazingly, she was actually keeping pace with us. The roar of Stark's engine began to die down, and our flight path began to level off, as we headed for the front of Stark's gondola. Below the windows, a door was opening. Just before we flew in, Stark angled his body backwards so the thrust of his engine slowed him down, then shut it off entirely, landing us on the gondola floor. Behind us, Peni reached the top of the tallest building nearby, and then leapt from it, in a long arc that landed her just behind us. The hatch closed behind us.

As I climbed of Stark's suit, he laid the mysterious miscreant down on a gurney, strapping on restraints. Then he stood up straight, and the front of his suit spilt open, the helmet sliding open and folding itself back. The man who clambered out was shorter than I was, though that said very little. He was muscular, but in a wiry way. His skin was tanned and scarred, and the only hint of his more refined nature was his neatly trimmed moustache. His hair was black, his eyes were a pale blue, and his eyebrows were thick and bushy. He wore a while vest, and a pair of simple grey trousers.

"It's nice to see you again, Spider. Been a while." That it had. The first time we'd met was when the X-Men had pulled off one of their more daring heists. I'd been holding them off, but was in serious trouble when they'd all ganged up on me. Then the Iron Man had come wading in, swatting them aside like flies. Those who he hadn't hit had simply fled. After so many failed attempts to bring those bastards to justice, the feeling of elation as Stark and me had handed over the injured to the proper authorities had been wonderful.

"Good to see you too, Stark. Although I will admit, I had been expecting you to turn up for a while. What kept you?"

He grimaced. "I was busy testing my mettle against the Latverian dictator, when he tried to annex a neighbouring port. Turns out we're more or less evenly matched, so I couldn't head back until after I'd managed to chase him off. It took a while. I didn't even hear about the Rhino until yesterday morning."

Ah. It was easy to forget that Stark often had to deal with problems in distant parts of the world. I barely got involved in criminal activity beyond my city, never mind my country. But then, the Iron Man did have some advantages on that front.

We walked up the stairs, till we arrived at the cockpit. The word barely did it justice; the actual control station was dwarfed by the windows in front of it. At the controls sat two men. One was a bald Negro, young and fit, as tall and muscular as Stark. The man sitting next to him was white, much hairier, and much, much older. He had to be in his fifties at least, as the only parts of his hair that weren't grey were the bits that had gone white. His moustache had the old fashioned look where the tips fused with his sideburns, a look that had been popular with pilots in the Great War.

The older man stood up first. "So, you're the Spider-Man. I'm Jarvis." His voice was rough, and had a strong cockney accent. The man was very British, in the lower class grumpy sense rather than the higher class polite one. The clothing he wore suggested an engineer.

"And my name is James Rhodes. Tony's told me a lot about you. I hope he wasn't exaggerating, because I liked what I heard." The younger man had a quiet, cultured sounding voice. I'd heard of him. Tony Stark's loyal companion and friend on his many adventures and escapades, whose knowledge of the world had saved them both many times during their more dangerous moments.

Then both men turned, and got a look at Peni in her Mech. Understandably, both stared goggle eyed at her. Peni's Mech was the only one I had ever seen that could outcompete the Iron Man armour, and mot by a small margin. Stark's armour was magnificent in its power and capabilities, but she left him in the dust.

"Gentlemen, this is SP/dr, my learned and valued colleague. Of course, if you've read any newspapers in the last week, you'll probably already know that, they can't seem to get enough of him."

Jarvis snorted. "Of course we know who he is, man. Not all of us have been under a rock for the past week." Stark made a half-hearted noise of complaint. "It's just…well, look at him!"

Rhodes nodded gravely. "It's on another level entirely." I looked over at Peni. She looked distinctly uncomfortable. The sight was actually quite comical, since the mannerisms of an awkward and slightly shy preteen look very odd when applied to a 14 foot Mech.

"Err, yes, it's not bad." Was it my imagination, or did Peni sound slightly flustered. Then I remembered the slight crush on Stark she had displayed earlier. Oh, good grief. I hoped it wouldn't get in the way too much.

"Coming up on the Empire State building now, Tony" Jarvis called out, as the airship slowly turned to dock with the tall spire. The damage to the spire hadn't been fully repaired, so it didn't quite look right, but on the bright side, the green slime from the Ablisk had gone. I wondered if the ichor had just boiled away to nothingness over time, or if some poor soul had had to climb out onto the spire to clean it off.

We docked with the side of the spire with ease, since Stark's airship was smaller and far more manoeuvrable than the standard zeppelin that would usually dock here. Once we had docked, we clambered out, walked along the narrow path to the buildings entry platform (Peni had some difficulty with this part) and entered into the building through the main door.

Tony Stark's office was decidedly opulent looking. There were probably items of furniture n there that cost more than my family's apartment. The walls were a pale white, the floor light brown and wooden, incredibly shiny and clean. Aside from standard items of furniture like cupboards, chairs and desks, there were glass fronted cases. These held items collected on his travels: A solid silver set of samurai armour, the immense tooth of some predator, a large gemstone the colour of blood.

The most striking decorations in the room were the framed magazine covers that covered nearly all of the walls. They all came from the same magazine: Marvels. These were the magazines that had told all his adventures from before his days as Iron Man, and many that had come after. All the covers placed his adventures as the most important, and illustrations or photographs from them were the cover images. Particularly striking was one that showed Stark staring up in shock and horror at the image of an immense green dragon rising from some long forgotten Asian temple.

"The containment facility is in here" Stark called, as he opened a concealed door in one of the walls. I followed, and Peni, who had been carrying our mystery criminal, had to squeeze in after us. The room beyond was extremely large, and its walls gleamed white with polished rubber and plastics. There were a number of glass fronted alcoves in the wall, and Stark opened one of them. Peni tossed our miscreant in, and the door closed behind him. "This room, and everything in it, was designed to contain and survive incredibly high energy electrical activity. There is no safer place to contain this man in the entire city."

"I assume you have a reason for building this, Stark. It wasn't just a whim or anything?" He nodded, and pressed a button on the wall. A glass panel slid down from the ceiling. It was double layers of glass, with a space between them about one and a half inches wide. Inside the space, were fragments of a strange material that was neither wholly like metal, nor altogether like crystal, but rather something in between. The fragments glowed with an eerie white light, and had been arranged so as to form the shape of the object they had been before being broken. It was the three pronged headpiece of an immense trident.

"Orichalcum," Stark intoned. "The most dangerous and powerful substance on the planet at the moment. It is a superconductor, and it has remarkable properties. With wires made from it, you could power the whole of New York with a car battery. Without it, my suit would be little more than an amusing toy. I have kept it as secret as I can, to prevent unscrupulous individuals from trying to claim it for themselves."

"So unfair." Peni mumbled very quietly.

"This room is the only safe place to store this much. If exposed to the outside air for too long, low levels of electricity in the atmosphere would build up around it over time. Even a small amount of electricity could be converted into a devastating blast. A few volts was enough to release a blast of lightning bolts that destroyed most of the German air fleet. When a storm arrived near this stuff, thousands of years ago, it released so much power that it completely obliterated the city of Atlantis."

Jesus Christ. "And you thought it would be a good idea to store it in the middle of a city?"

"Believe it or not, this is the safest place. The only natural environment where it would be safe would be at the bottom of the ocean, and it would be very easy to find given its electromagnetic effects. I've seen what happened the last time someone decided to use this to build weapons of war. I never want to see something like that again."

Terrific. Oh well, nothing I can really do about it, so I shouldn't worry too much. Plenty of other stuff that needs worrying about. "Are you sure this thing can keep the Orichalcum safely contained? Because I've got pretty good evidence that says it's not."

I reached into my coat pocket, and pulled out a bundle of insulating fabrics and rubber. All things considered, I had decided the best place to keep this stuff, in absence of proper containment facilities, would be on my person. I quietly unwrapped it, and revealed the small fragment of Orichalcum that the Rhino had been using to power his suit.

Stark grimaced at the sight, but he didn't look especially surprised. "Damn. I'd hoped it might be a smaller piece that Namor might have missed when we collected the fragments. But this is too large for us to have missed. Someone must have stolen it from here."

"I would have thought someone would have noticed someone sneaking in here and stealing a lump of semi-mystical super-metal. I assume there are guards here, and that none of them have mysteriously died recently."

Stark frowned at me. "No, none of my security have died recently. Mind you, there are probably plenty of people who could get past them without being spotted. Even if we're talking people in this city and on public record alone, I can think of one person with the skills needed to get into and out of this apartment undetected. One Miss Katherine Pryde, notorious thief and escape artist. But she couldn't have gotten into this room and retrieved its contents, and nor could anyone else I can think of. That concealed door can't be opened unless you know exactly how, and unless you remember to deactivate the alarms, opening it will trigger some very loud sirens."

"Then who or what managed to get past all that?"

"I haven't the faintest idea, but we can't take any chances. I'm installing some new security procedures to make sure it can't happen again."

I nodded. I couldn't really ask for more. He had to keep the Orichalcum nearby, since it was the only thing keeping him alive. Stark had a damaged heart, and used a device called a repulsor to keep it functioning, and without the Orichalcum, he couldn't power it enough to keep himself from dying of cardiac arrest.

"OK, Stark. Any idea when they might try again?"

He nodded. "Oh yes. Tomorrow at noon, most likely. I have been selected as host for some big party thing for all the great and the good to attend, so it'll be the only time I'll have my attention diverted. It's the closest thing to a perfect opportunity that they're likely to get." He paused. "If it's not too much trouble, I'd like you two to provide security here. Undercover."

I stared at him incredulously, then gestured at myself dramatically. "Stark, I cannot help but see problems here. For starters, look at me. Gaze upon my height. Dwell upon my build. I get away with it most of the time by slouching and wearing loose coats. I doubt that will be an option at a fancy gala."

Peni raised a claw. "And to be quite frank, I probably stick out even more than he does. I'm probably only marginally less conspicuous out of this thing than I am in it."

He frowned. "That can be dealt with. People tend to ignore oddities in their waiters more than their fellow guests. Perhaps you could pose as waiters."

"OK, do you have any other option? Like, at all? I'd take a sufficiently large cupboard to hide in, if there is one."

Stark looked extremely puzzled. "I suppose so, though I can't see why. Your call, obviously."

"I'm assuming you're paying, Stark. I haven't had much work recently."

He nodded. "Well, obviously. You know, if you need money so much, you could always take a job with me."

"Thank you, Stark, but you know what I think of big business. I'll manage on my own." And even if I was willing to put my principle aside for the sake of money, I knew that Aunt May definitely wouldn't. While she disapproved of Tony Stark the least of all the rich and powerful men in the city due to his humanitarian efforts, she would not accept his money.

"Well then, I expect to see you then. Spider-Man, I will have a uniform provided. SP/dr, I will have a cupboard provided, if you really intend to go through with this."

"I'm quite determined, sir."

"Suit yourself." Stark said with a weary shake of his head. "If that's all, I'll be seeing you in another 24 hours.

24 Hours Later

The waiters uniform Stark had found for me didn't really fit me properly, but according to him I didn't stand out particularly, so I could hardly complain. And as an advantage, my height and muscular build meant that most were inclined to be polite when I was serving them. I glanced around briefly at my fellow servers. They were of a variety of heights, and I didn't seem immensely out of place amongst them.

"Well, Peter, spotted any potential thieves? (Scronch, Scronch)"

"No, no one yet who seems to be trying any – are you eating?"

There was a wet chewing sound, and Peni spoke in a distinctly muffled voice. "Yup. Mr Stark was kind enough to provide some snacks."

"Why do you get snacks? You're not a guest or member of staff, and you've spent the last hour sitting in a cupboard. What precisely have you done to earn snacks?"

"I asked him politely. You might want to try it someday, it works better than you might think. He gave me some comics too."

"Comics? Why do you get comics?"

"Peter, I am sitting in a cupboard, with my Mech in low power mode to avoid attracting attention. I'm going to be staying in here for hours if you do your job properly. If I didn't have something to entertain myself I'd go barking mad!"

"Why couldn't you just go undercover the normal way? It would be so much easier and simpler."

"Well, let me think. Could it be the fact that it's only the gents who get the nice outfits in that job, or could it be that I don't much fancy getting racial abuse from a bunch of rich idiot drunks?"

Urgh. In all seriousness, I understood why Peni didn't want to go undercover my way. Apart from the issues she had mentioned, it would have meant revealing her identity to Stark, and I wasn't sure that was a good idea. I trusted the man, and I knew he was completely uninterested in matters of race, and fairly understanding about matters of sex, but Peni's age wouldn't be so easily explained. Tony Stark was one of the most brilliant men in the world, and the Iron Man armour had been a great effort on his part. I wasn't sure how he'd react to an eleven year old with better technology in her sit than him. It would certainly raise a lot of questions I didn't really want to answer right now.

I looked around. Assembled around me, I could see various rich folk from various parts of high life. Some were respectable, many were not. Commissioner Stacy was present, though thankfully Gwen was not. I didn't fancy explaining my presence to her. Next to the commissioner was an older man, clean shaven, with a full head of hair that was an odd shade of greyish white that looked almost like metallic silver. I recognised him as Eric Magnus, the New York police's chief of homicide investigations. Unlike Stacy, he wasn't a man I much trusted. I didn't like some of the things I'd heard about the man, like his violent methods, or the often quashed but persistent rumours of corruption that followed him wherever he went.

I was communicating with Peni via some sort of miniaturised communications device inside my ear, which was connected to her Mech's systems by wireless. Very fancy. And probably completely commonplace where she came from. She'd gotten me to wear it so I could keep her up to date with the situation outside her apparently remarkably spacious cupboard. Mostly, we'd been using it to Chat and bicker.

Tony Stark walked over to me, under the pretence of collecting some choice food. "Spotted anything, Mr Parker?"

"Nothing as yet, Mr Stark. Then I frowned, and turned to look at one individual. "Forget that. That guy, is it just me, or is he wearing something odd under his Jacket?" The man had extremely non-descript features, and beneath his suit, I could see another, odder item of clothing. It looked like a white bodysuit."

Stark looked over at the man, and went pale. "Damn" he whispered. "I thought he was dead. That's our man." We went over to him, but as soon as he saw us coming, he turned, and headed out of the door. We ran after him, me pulling my mask out of my jacket pocket and pulling it over my head.

We turned into an empty room, and the man came flying at us, lashing out with a remarkably powerful punch, striking me on the side of the head. I tried to grapple with him, but he slid out from under my hands like an eel. I swung my fist at his chin, but instead he grabbed my hand, pulled me into a lock, and brought his knee up twice, once into my solar plexus, and once into my nether regions. He let me go, and I crumpled to the floor, wheezing in agony.

The thief had removed his jacket and shirt, revealing the white bodysuit beneath. He had put on a pale grey mask, with black eyes, and a trailing white scarf around the neck. As Stark went for him, the figure ducked, wrapped his arms around Stark's waist, and flipped him over, smashing him through an expensive chair. As Stark and I lay on the ground, he got a fair few kicks in at us, to the head and the chest. When we both stopped fighting back, he stopped, and spat onto Stark's chest. Before he turned to leave, he spoke to Stark. "I can't begin to tell you how long I've been waiting to do that." Then he walked out of the door, and headed for Starks office.

As we struggled to our feet, I turned to Stark. "I take it you know this guy? Who is he?"

"He's the Ghost. A notorious thief and spy, big thing for industrial espionage. He'd have been top of my list of potential suspects if I'd known he was still alive, but I'd thrown him off a plane years ago, and I was under the impression people didn't usually survive that."

Well, wasn't that just dandy. "SP/dr, can you hear me? Hello?" No response. I put my hand under my mask, and pulled out the earpiece. It had snapped in half under the Ghost's punch.

"Right. Stark, which cupboard was my friend in again?"