Hello again, dear readers! Apologies for the delay, but I now have a couple of chapters worked out. Work on the sequel is well under way, so I now have an endpoint figured out for this story. I imagine it should be finishing around chapter 25, but I might be able to work a few more in once I start posting the sequel. In any case, I hope you enjoy this chapter!

A week after her investigation began, and Rosalina was no closer to finding out what the Admiral was up to. There had to be something, she was sure of it. With an exasperated sigh she swiped the interface away. What she needed right now was meditation to clear her thoughts, but with so many people around it was difficult to find a quiet place to do so. She had been restricted to her room once her father needed the workshop for something, so the wall opposite her bed was covered in notes scrawled onto any bit of paper she could find. Displaying the contents of her mind like this had helped her select the important information and build her understanding of complex concepts when she was younger, and this was extremely complex. The few files she had managed to hack into were of little help. Scanning the wall for answers, she heard a knock on her door. Recognising it as Spock's, she called to JARVIS to let him in. The mess of papers arranged on her wall seemingly confused him as he stepped over the threshold.

"Might I enquire as to what you are doing?"

"You may. This is the beginnings of my investigation into Admiral Marcus. There doesn't seem to be anything extraordinary here, which I must admit is rather frustrating."

Spock approached the wall, examining various slips of paper before carefully removing one of them. Perching on the end of her bed, he scrutinised the information printed on it. Seeing his look of confusion, she scooted over to have a look at the document herself.

"This is not a project code I am familiar with. If I remember correctly, the first three digits indicate the department, which in this case is Research and Development." Pointing at the numbers in question, he continued. "The next four correspond to the sub-department, which is weaponry. But the last five are unfamiliar. I know of no federation approved project code which begins with 31…"

"You mean he might be building weapons under the radar?"

"Potentially, yes. Further investigation will be required to confirm our suspicions, although this seems the most likely explanation for the Admiral's piqued interest in Red Matter and the Jellyfish."

"Indeed it does. I've read through quite a lot of files though, and this is all I could come up with. At least I've got some kind of a lead now. Thanks, Spock."

"If any further assistance is required…"

"No, don't offer to help. If they even suspected you had anything to do with this you'd end up in prison. Some of these files are level 12 classified, which I definitely don't have the clearance for. I'm not a member of Starfleet either, which adds another layer of illegality to the whole thing. Thanks for the observation though, that'll be really helpful."

The shocked expression Spock was barely containing made her realise just how crazy this plan sounded. Even if she did find anything, she wouldn't be able to tell anyone or she'd end up in prison herself. But she was in too deep to stop now. Once Spock had left, she cleared the wall, pinning the document in the centre next to her 'mugshot' of the Admiral. Now she could go to work.

The Avengers tower was silent except for the tapping of the keys on Rosalina's laptop. She liked the sound of the old technology; it gave her a sense of productivity, but right now it had the potential to give her away. The lead Spock had given her earlier was proving rather fruitful, so she was furiously hacking and making notes. It was 4am and the lead just kept on giving. There were at least three dozen other documents signed off by Marcus with the same code as the first one she had found. The last few digits seemed to correspond to different classes of starship, though there was an extra two combinations she didn't understand. One must be for weapons that could be used universally, but the other had her confused. It was almost as if there was another class of ship…

"JARVIS, what is the largest class of starship on record?"

"Constitution class, Miss Stark."

"Is there anything above that in terms of the seafaring variety?"

"I believe that would be Dreadnaught, Ma'am."

Hmm… Her father had been wanting to integrate Arc-reactor technology into the fleet for quite some time now. Maybe he was working on something with Marcus? Perhaps she should ask him; he might be able to help work out why the Admiral was so enthralled with weapons of mass destruction. Making a note of it she stuck it to the growing collection of scraps on her wall. They were a lot more organised than her last effort, mainly due to the fact that the different documents actually had a code to sort them by. After admiring her work for a few minutes, she got ready for bed. She might as well get a few hours' sleep before the rest of the tower's inhabitants awoke.

As usual, Tony was down in the workshop tinkering. Rosalina had somehow managed to sleep through lunch, despite her recurring nightmare. The events of the day Vulcan was lost replayed in her mind, each time with a different person in Amanda's place; in her dreams, the suit was too late to save them. Sometimes it was one of her friends, occasionally an Avenger. The worst ones were where she saw the children. She always awoke wracked with tears, bitter-sweet memories of their admiration of her work in her mind. She was grateful that JARVIS sent for her father once she had calmed a little, even disguising his messages as 'urgent phone calls' so as not to worry her mother. Last night's victim had been Spock, which was even more difficult to handle as he had actually been there at the time. Softly knocking on the glass door of the workshop, Rosalina waited for her father's invitation to enter. This was their signal to say she needed to talk. Her father beckoned her over, pulling up a stool beside his own so they could whisper to each other. After a particularly bad dream, it was the only volume she could manage without immediately breaking down. Tony pulled her into a one armed embrace, kissing the top of her head.

"You okay, Rosie?"

"Yeah…" She could already feel her throat closing up.

"Who was it this time?"

"Spock."

His grip around her shoulders tightened, giving her an excuse to rest her head on his shoulder. She inhaled his scent as he planted another kiss on her hair, finding comfort in the familiar layers of cologne and detergent. A few tears leaked onto his shirt as he combed his fingers through her short hair.

"I remember when your hair was long, like your mother's. She always used to braid it for you. I was never allowed to."

"Yeah, because the one time you did I ended up with a chunk of hair missing."

Rosalina couldn't help but smile at the memory. Pepper had been in hospital with a particularly bad case of (space disease) after a trip to a Starfleet outpost in the Lorentian system. They had been going to visit, so Tony decided to try doing her hair. Naturally, it ended in disaster.

"I promise you, that was an accident. I would never intentionally pull your hair out, love."

"I know Dad." She hated snivelling, but all the cuddling had brought her emotional barriers down.

After a few minutes of sitting in silence, Rosalina picked up the blueprints on the desk. It was yet another design for an arc-reactor powered phaser. Tony had come up with thousands of these designs, but she recognised the sort code on the bottom right of the page. Scrutinising it further while her father resumed work, she finally worked up the courage to ask him about the mysterious five digits.

"What does that code mean?" feigning innocence would hopefully work an answer out of him.

"Some Starfleet thing. It's so they can organise everything."

He hadn't played into the trap. Damn. "So, is the first one for the department of origin?"

"That's right" Tony smiled. "And the second one is the sub-department. So that means this design is for the weaponry section of R&D."

"Ah, right." What to ask next without drawing suspicion? "So, what are these last five numbers?"

"I'm not entirely sure. I think it probably corresponds to the section of the archives it'll be kept in."

Wrong. He was so wrong. "Huh. I would have thought that it meant something like, say, what class the weapon is. For instance, the size of ship it can be used on. That way they'd know where to install it, or if it needed installing at all."

Tony nodded thoughtfully, smearing oil into his beard as he scratched it. "That might make more sense actually. Good thinking, batman."

Well, he clearly didn't know what was going on. Shame really; it would have been nice to wrap this whole thing up. Her expectations had probably been too high, if she was honest with herself. Maybe she should try another angle.

"Dad, have you ever worked with Admiral Marcus?"

That certainly got his attention. "Why do you ask?"

"Well, he was the one asking me, Spock and Pike questions when we got back from Vulcan… I was just wondering what he's usually like."

"Why, was he mean to you or something?"

"Well, some of the questions he asked Spock were a little insensitive considering his home planet had just been destroyed and everything. He was very persistent with them as well. I had to step in and answer for him at one stage because he was getting worked up. Not that the Admiral would have known of course, but still."

"He's very old school. He's not of a generation where acceptance of other cultures was strictly necessary. You grew up with Vulcans and Orions and a whole range of other species around you. Most of Starfleet's Admiralty were military leaders back in the day when the biggest threat to our safety was eachother. New ideas are, to him, a threat to our culture."

"Maybe we shouldn't have such close minded people in charge of Earth's interplanetary peacekeeping armada."

"Watch where you say that, Rose. You don't want the wrong people to hear it; talk like that could land you on the blacklist." Her confused look prompted him to continue. "If you get put on the list, no matter who you are, they can ensure that you never get a career in Starfleet. I've even heard rumours of people being fired from other Federation jobs for saying unsavoury things about Marcus."

If she wasn't worried about what would happen if she was discovered before, she definitely was now. Admiral Marcus definitely seemed like a man you wanted to cross, and she had been digging into all his secret files. Deciding to stay silent on the topic, she simply nodded in reply to her father's warning.