Tony took a deep breath. Then another one.
He always got nervous when he was going to test a new suit, even after having gone through a lot of them since that first memorable flight. He knew everything checked out through both his and Bruce's calculations and simulations, and that the new alloy was damn near indestructible. The latest generation of arc reactor had a far higher output, would run for months at full power, and again was as close to perfect as they could manage. With Jarvis double-checking everything before the test, and constantly monitoring thousands of parameters at vastly greater than human speed during it, there was relatively little risk.
He knew that.
He was still nearly pissing himself.
Not that he was going to show it, of course. He had a certain reputation to live up to after all. Tony Stark laughed in the face of danger and poked the eye of death, then got the girl and had a drink.
Although the girl tended to sigh whenever she saw him these days, even though she really did love him, he was sure, and as a result of that he didn't drink as much now. Mostly.
As far as she knew.
Whatever. He took another deep breath, held it for a few seconds, then slowly exhaled. He was Iron Man, he was a genius, and his tech worked better than anyone's. So this would be a walk in the park, right?
"Nervous?"
His eyebrow twitched at the question, before he forced his expression to be calm and confident, turning to look at the one who'd asked it. Bruce met his eyes before looking momentarily amused.
"Me? Of course not. Why would I be?"
"Well, you're wearing a suit made of an alloy based on something a weird reptilian girl from another universe casually suggested after tasting the previous sample, powered by an arc reactor that self-same lizard girl fixed the math on while making it look easy, and you're about to test the new thrusters and artificial gravity system we designed using her explanation of how graviton flux could be manipulated electromagnetically. Other than that, no reason."
Bruce's face was very deadpan now, making Tony have flashbacks to Agent Coulson, who was a zen master of humor that left so little visible evidence you didn't work out he was making a joke for an hour after he left the room. He sighed faintly and stepped onto the platform in the main lab, smoothing down the new mono-molecular weave undersuit and flicking a little speck of dust off it.
"You are so much fun when you get into this hilariously sidesplitting stand up comedian mode," he replied with a shake of his head.
"I like to think I can add to the conversation if required," Bruce said, obviously suppressing a smile. Tony glared at him, thinking that since the lizard girl had last visited months ago and spent several hours telling his friend about things that were probably a couple of hundred years past normal knowledge, the man had been acting rather atypically. She'd done something to him. He didn't know what, or how, but the giant rage monster that lurked under the unassuming exterior seemed to have mellowed a hell of a lot. It had certainly changed his personality a little, making it less introverted, although even so no one would ever accuse him of being the life of the party…
Everyone else seemed to think it was an improvement. Fury had spent about a minute staring at Bruce the last time they'd met, then asked, "She visited you again, didn't she?"
No one needed to ask who 'she' was.
"She did. Nice girl, if a little odd." Bruce had smiled widely. "And she knows an awful lot about math."
"I see." Fury had studied him a moment longer then visibly decided he'd sleep better if he didn't ask.
And Thor had returned some time after that point looking very confused, grabbed a bottle of Tony's best bourbon from the bar, then gone and stood on the tower's landing pad staring out over the city while drinking the whole thing. When he'd come back inside, more or less the entire collection of people who called themselves Avengers were looking curiously at him.
"She visited my father," he'd explained, then he'd sat down and turned on the TV, falling asleep on the sofa ten minutes later while possessively cuddling his fucking hammer.
The drunken snoring had been godlike.
Saurial tended to have that affect on normal people. Or even Asgardians.
Tony had wondered what she'd done while she was in Asgard, looked at the blond god of thunder, shuddered, and gone to work on something lethal for a while.
They still didn't have the faintest idea what had happened to Ultron either.
Oh well. Leaving aside the way the creature and her friends and family appeared to wander through space and time making people go "Whut?" she was friendly enough and had been very helpful at some awkward junctures, so there was no point dwelling on it.
And they had, as Bruce had just pointed out, learned some amazing things from her. The Unified Field Theory she'd passed on to the scientist had made every theoretical physicist on the planet gape, then grin like a lunatic when they finally worked through the math, and the applications that would result from that would change a lot of things in future. Not to mention allowed Bruce to write a paper that had put him on the map even more than being the Hulk did, and in a much more approachable manner.
Thinking about it, that might explain a lot of the attitudinal change.
Deciding that he didn't want to think about insane humanoid lizard people any more, in case it summoned them again, he shook his musings away and said, "Jarvis, initiate test MQ271F," in a firm voice.
"At once, sir," the AI replied immediately. "Please relax."
"I am relaxed!" he snapped, while Bruce snickered. Even Jarvis, good old faithful Jarvis, was different since the last time Saurial had popped up. He definitely had a sly sense of humor that was even more dead-pan than Coulson's, his voice not changing at all from the normal calm tenor tones, but somehow expressing a lot more emotion than he should have been capable of. Mostly slightly snarky emotion at times…
"Of course, sir. Stand by for suit deployment."
The AI, somehow, produced the audible effect of a slight smirk. He had no idea how but he could hear it.
Immediately, there was a rapid clicking sound as the new suit unfolded from under him, starting with a set of boots and quickly climbing his legs, hundreds of little hexagons of intricate armor packed with electronics snapping into place and fusing into a coherent structure. It only took about six seconds before it covered him completely, the end result very similar to his previous suit but lighter, much stronger, and a lot more flexible. He'd toyed with dozens of different ideas on how to miniaturize the technology to make it easier to transport, built a number of them with varying degrees of success, and finally settled on this one. It was, he admitted to himself, inspired by what he'd seen the first time Saurial and her cousin Metis had turned up out of the blue, the much larger black reptile having had armor that worked in a vaguely similar way.
He didn't know how their technology worked or what it was made of, but as soon as he'd laid eyes on it, he'd wanted it. Like he'd seldom wanted anything before. Until the new alloy was designed, though, actually mimicking the effect had proven impractical. It still wasn't nearly as smooth or self-contained but it worked and was a huge improvement over the previous generation.
"Suit fully assembled, sir. All functions report as within normal tolerance. Reactor power at one hundred percent, fuel reserves full, backup batteries holding charge at maximum."
Tony flicked his eyes in a specific pattern, watching the HUD as it came to life and projected a fully spherical data set directly into his eyes. As he looked around, various displays came and went. "Status of flight system?"
"Repulsors fully functional, gravity drive online and ready, life support active, consumables at maximum."
Bruce, who had turned to a console next to the platform once the suit had successfully built itself, was examining half a dozen large translucent holographic displays. "Everything looks good so far, Tony," he stated. "Do you want to power down and go over the results, or just do what you normally do and jump right into a full power flight test assuming everything will work perfectly?"
Turning his armored head, Tony fixed his friend with a hard look, not that this did much to remove the slight smile the other man was wearing. "That only went wrong one time," he said in a growl.
"And that other time. Oh, and both those times over Nevada… And I seem to remember something about..."
"Shut up."
Bruce grinned, then went back to the console. "Well, I can't see any reason here you can't try it. The gravity drive checks out, which is the really big change. You can go for a flight test as far as I'm concerned. Just don't blame me if there's something you forgot and you punch a hole right through the side of a mountain that doesn't get out of the way in time."
"One time!" Tony exhaled harshly. "You wreck one mountain and no one ever lets you forget it!"
Shaking his head, he added, "Jarvis, prepare for flight test, initial thrust five percent, gravity drive inertial compensation to full."
"Of course, sir. ATC data has been downloaded and parsed. I have plotted a flight path avoiding other aircraft." The AI paused, then went on, "And any tall obstacles as a precaution."
Gritting his teeth, Tony nodded. Even fucking Jarvis was making jokes…
It had been one time!
More or less.
"Execute," he said, feeling the nervousness come back for a moment. With a muted roar, the complex network of thrusters lit off, even as he felt a brief falling sensation that settled down almost immediately. His armor rose off the platform on small spears of white fire.
"Stable hover achieved," Jarvis reported. "Opening lab exit."
Tony looked at Bruce, who waved. "Have fun. Remember to go around things..."
"Oh, shut up and go do some physics, will you?" Tony sighed, then tilted forward and ramped up the thrust with well-practiced tiny motions of his limbs. The roar from the repulsors built instantly and he shot forwards, zipping into the entrance of the tunnel that led from the lab out through the roof.
Behind him, he heard Bruce laugh before he was out of range.
Seconds later he exited the roof, already moving at two hundred miles an hour, then as soon as he was safely clear, opened the throttles. The world dropped away faster than any flight he'd ever experienced by a significant amount and he was still only at about thirty percent power.
"Holy shit," he whispered, smiling inside his helmet.
"Thirty thousand feet, Mach three… Forty thousand feet, Mach four… sixty thousand feet, Mach seven… ninety thousand feet, Mach ten..." Jarvis reeled off the every increasing altitude figures, the rate of change going up at the same time. "One hundred and fifty thousand feet and holding at Mach fourteen, sir. All suit functions still nominal. Life support fully functional, armor heat dissipation working to design. Do you wish to continue, or return to analyze the data collected?"
"We could do that. Or… we could shoot for the Kármán Line." he said with a smile.
"That should present no serious difficulty, although I would advise that with the suit so new, it would be preferable to wait until the second flight to do so." The AI's voice was as always even and calm, but it did also sound very slightly disapproving.
"You do recall what has happened in previous tests when we pushed too hard too fast, I expect, sir?"
"We fixed those problems years ago, Jarvis," he replied, rolling his eyes slightly. "This design has been simulated so many times I'm certain it will work." He was, his nervousness had completely gone, forced out with the exhilaration he always got from flying like this. It was a hell of a rush.
"If you wish, sir. New flight plan calculated and set. No other air traffic at this altitude, we can proceed."
"Let's do it." Grinning like an idiot, Tony ramped the thrust to full and yodeled in joy as his suit accelerated madly.
"Having fun?" Bruce's voice in his ear made him twitch, having nearly forgotten his friend and team-mate was monitoring his telemetry and course. "You seem to be heading for orbit."
"I thought I'd give it a good workout," he replied happily. "Everything's working perfectly. The AG system has completely removed any inertial effects, it's so smooth I could be standing still." He tried a slight turn, then a harder one. By now he was so high that the aerodynamic control surfaces did nothing, the course changes requiring attitude thrusters. "No inertial forces even when maneuvering. This is a massive improvement over the old design."
"Excellent," Bruce replied, a smile in his voice. "That's what the simulation predicted but I'm pleased to see it works for real."
"It works unbelievably well," he chortled, still roaring upwards at increasing speed. Jarvis reduced the power as he passed through two hundred and fifty thousand feet to stop him hitting orbital velocity before he could do it himself. "The heat deflectors work a lot better than I hoped too. At this speed I should be practically white hot, but the external temperature is only four hundred and thirty degrees. Incredible, you were right."
"Try not to get lost in space," the other man said. "I'll keep monitoring and let you know if anything comes up."
"Thanks."
The communication channel fell quiet. Shortly afterwards, Jarvis announced, "We have passed three hundred and thirty thousand feet, sir. We are officially in space."
Tony grinned widely. This was definitely better than the last time he'd found himself in space…
Throttling back and tipping over into horizontal flight, he leveled off at sixty five miles up, outside almost all the atmosphere, and cruised out over the Atlantic. From this altitude the Earth was obviously a sphere, blue and white filling half his field of view while black space filled the other half. "Amazing," he whispered to himself, just enjoying the experience.
"Radiation levels through the armor are acceptable at this altitude, sir," Jarvis said after a couple of minutes. "However the suit shielding was not designed for extended extra-atmospheric operation. I would suggest that you not exceed two hours maximum to allow a sensible safety factor."
Tony looked to the side at the radiation sensor readout in the HUD and nodded a little. His faithful program was right, the levels were low but very slowly climbing. With so little air surrounding him at this altitude, under a two-millionth of the pressure at sea level, there was enough hard radiation from the sun to be fairly dangerous given enough time. That could be fixed but it was going to need some modification to the suit.
Even so, this was a huge achievement. He was inside what was technically probably the smallest and lightest manned spacecraft capable of reaching orbit anyone had ever designed. Thanks to some help from a scaly weirdo, of course.
By now halfway across the Atlantic, he decided to start making a shallow turn, arcing around to eventually take him across the pole and back down over Canada. As he did, Jarvis told him that he'd updated the flight plan filed with the relevant authorities so that no one would think he was an ICBM coming from Russia with hate.
He was embarrassed to admit to himself, silently of course, that he hadn't thought of that.
A few minutes later he was nearly at the pole, the ground far, far below brilliant white. He could see the terminator coming towards him as the planet slowly rotated around into night, but he'd be in daylight the entire way home.
"I have a radar contact approaching from the rear, sir," Jarvis suddenly said, popping up a 3D tracking display. "Similar altitude as us, at extreme velocity. It will overtake us in forty seconds."
Tony's eyes widened at the icon in his HUD that showed something moving at one hell of a speed on the same course he was, but at nearly twice the velocity. There were dozens of other aircraft shown in the display, many miles below and vastly slower, but only this one had no label attached.
"Did someone fire at us?" he asked urgently, already maneuvering to alter his course. "Is it a missile?"
"Unknown at this time," Jarvis said. "There is no thermal plume to indicate a rocket engine. Velocity of unknown contact is increasing, time to intercept twenty-two seconds."
"It's tracking us?" He changed course again, speeding up a bit.
"That appears to be the case, sir." Tony watched with worry as the icon shifted direction so it was still aimed directly at him. It was going at more than orbital velocity, so had to be using a lot of power to follow the course it was on and not simply leave the planet completely. More power than even this suit could produce, definitely. He wondered frantically if it was some metahuman, although he couldn't think of any that were capable of flight at this speed and altitude.
"Ten seconds, sir. I have a visual, running pattern recog..." The AI cut off abruptly. Tony could swear he heard it make a sound that might have been the beginning of a laugh before it fell silent.
"What is it, then?" he asked sharply. "Talk to me, Jarvis." By now the red icon was nearly on top of him, only a few miles behind and closing at incredible speed. However, as he stared, the icon changed to green and at the same time decelerated at about four hundred G, showing that it was a level of technology as high if not higher than his own. Even this current suit couldn't produce anywhere near that acceleration even with the gravity drive.
Before he could ask again, the thing was level with him, only about fifty feet away. It happened so quickly he was shocked.
Tony stared. Then he closed his eyes, counted to three, and stared again. Just to be sure.
Saurial waved gaily at him.
"Oh, for god's sake," he sighed incredulously. "How the fuck did she…?"
"Hi, Tony," the lizard-girl's voice said through his comms system. He could see her mouth moving at the same time, since she wasn't wearing anything other than a modified version of the armor she'd had on when he'd seen her before. The main difference was that instead of an armored skirt, she had a sort of pair of metallic pants with a sleeve for her tail.
Strapped to her feet was something that looked like a hybrid between a skateboard and a rocket engine. Presumably that was what let her fly, but he didn't know how it worked. The technology didn't look very advanced from where he was. She seemed to just be coasting now, as there was no obvious indications of any exhaust.
The thing that really stood out was that there was no visible life support at all. She was just whizzing through a near vacuum with a grin on her face. And she had that fucking fedora on her head too, which was just rubbing it in. How she was even alive baffled him, as did how she was managing to talk over an encrypted radio channel with no apparent technology.
"I like the new suit," she said, smiling at him as they coasted along nearly seventy miles up. He'd stopped trying to evade her when he recognized who it was and cut his power too. "The alloy working out well?"
"The performance is very good," he replied after a moment, struck by the surreality of having a technical conversation in near-orbit with a sapient reptile flying a skateboard. "Your suggestion made a big difference."
"Glad to hear it," she nodded. "Looks like the reactor mods helped too."
"They did, yes," he acknowledged. "You saved us months of work. Thank you."
"No problem."
After a moment, he had to ask. "Look, what the hell are you doing?"
"Doing?"
"You're in space! Without any life support even? And how did you actually find me? For that matter, why did you find me? I nearly had a heart attack, I thought someone was trying to shoot me down!"
The lizard-like female chucked. "Life support isn't an issue. Sorry about worrying you, I just wanted to catch up and say hi." She grinned widely. "And if I was trying to shoot you down you'd never have known I was there, so you don't need to worry about that either."
"Oh, great," he mumbled after an appalled look at her, hoping it was just a joke… "I feel so much better hearing you say that."
She waved a hand. "Forget it. I was in the neighborhood and thought I'd stop by and see how you guys were getting along. Nice to see you're doing well."
That still left how she'd managed the feat up in the air, so to speak, but she didn't seem likely to tell him.
"My sister wanted to race," Saurial went on, "and then we saw you, so we thought we'd pop over and say hello."
"Your sister?" He looked at his HUD, seeing no other trace than the two of them anywhere in range. He also noticed that his speed had very slightly dropped as the traces of air left this high up caused tiny amounts of drag.
"Yep. You haven't met her yet," she smiled. "She's a little bigger than me, but she likes flying just as much." The lizard-girl looked over her shoulder. "She'll catch up in a moment, she went to have a look at Bermuda."
While he was thinking that over, she added, "Hi, Jarvis. Things still going well for you too?"
"Yes, thank you, Miss Saurial," the AI said, sounding somewhat amused even as the voice stayed the same. He was still baffled as to how it did that. "I am finding existence quite satisfactory. Please pass on my best wishes to Miss Dragon."
"I'll do that. She wanted me to see if you were OK after that little unpleasantness a while back."
Another blip appeared, just coming over the horizon far behind them. "Oh, there she is," Saurial said, glancing back again. Tony was wondering how on earth she'd detected her sister at that range without any obvious technology.
Then he wondered in complete shock what the hell her sister was flying, as she was moving at a truly insane speed, far outstripping both of them. She'd be here in under a minute, which was hellishly impressive.
"Over here, Kaiju!" Saurial waved an arm. As if something moving at about 60000 miles an hour a thousand miles away would be capable of seeing the gesture.
"Oh, there you are," a very, very deep female voice rumbled in his ear. "Is that your little friend next to you?"
Apparently it could. And it sounded… big.
"Yep, this is Tony. His cape name is Iron Man. Sort of a Tinker."
Tony wondered what she was talking about, since the terms she used, while unfamiliar, clearly had meaning to her.
He watched the icon close on them until his rear-view camera showed something huge approaching, a plume of vapor behind it apparently from whatever the source of her thrust was. It was firing up and back, holding her down against the far above orbital speed.
Moments later, about a hundred miles away, the thing flipped over and the plume increased massively as she decelerated even harder than Saurial had done. His suit instruments, to his shock, only showed water vapor in the plume.
They were flying around in orbit on rockets that used water?!
And the water seemed to disappear almost instantly as well, he numbly noticed, as there was no trace of it behind either of them.
When 'Kaiju' slipped into a position on the other side of Saurial, he just stared wordlessly in awed horror.
She was rather more than 'a little bigger' than the lizard girl. In fact, he could say without hesitation that she was the single largest living thing he'd ever seen, heard of, or even in his wildest dreams considered. At least two hundred feet from nose to tail, probably eighty or ninety feet tall on her hind legs, with a head large enough to eat him like a skittle, the fucking insanely huge reptile was terrifying.
The thing smiled at him and waved. "Hello, Iron Man. Or Tony. Whichever you prefer. That's a very shiny power suit, I like it. A friend of ours would approve of the color scheme."
"...Thank you?" He couldn't think of anything else to say no matter how hard he tried. "Either is fine."
"Wonderful." Kaiju looked down. "You appear to be keeping your planet in reasonably good order. Well done."
He looked down too, then back at her.
"Well, can't hang around all day," Saurial announced. She pointed ahead. He followed her finger to see that the full moon was brilliantly visible. "Last one around the moon has to buy dinner."
"You're on," Kaiju chuckled, the sound making his head vibrate.
"See you later, Tony. Give my best to Bruce, and if you see Nick, ask him if he liked the video." Saurial waved again. "Right. Three, two, one… Go!"
Both reptiles, the little one and the big one, did something. There was a pair of plumes of unbelievably high-pressure water from each device, Kaiju's far larger, before they accelerated at a rate that would have pulped him even in the suit, presuming it could get anywhere close to it in the first place. Which it couldn't, it would have needed a reactor fifty times the size.
Saurial disappeared almost instantly, her trajectory aimed straight at the moon, while Kaiju's plume being so much larger was visible in the sunlight for several more seconds. By the time they were invisible, they were going fast enough to hit solar escape velocity and still accelerating.
Tony coasted silently along for some minutes, watching the two icons zip across his HUD until they vanished from range, then he shook his head, decided that he needed a very large drink, and started to descend as quickly as possible before he had to think any more.
Lizards were weird. Especially ones capable of trans-lunar injection under their own power...