Arc 3 - Race Into Space (1 + Interlude)

"Let's try some small arms fire, I think. No need to get carried away today," you murmured calmly, flexing inside the armor and getting used to the slightly stiffer movement of the sturdier frame. Although you'd given up a few flexible joints and bit of agility, the new layers of protection were a fair trade, and they'd held up under stress testing. "Are you waiting for more permission than that, Jarvis? Go."

Three bullets smashed into the faceplate before you could finish the word, shattering to pieces before the final few intact remnants ended up in the surrounding barricades, still going fast enough to puncture holes. You hadn't even had time to blink before they had come and gone - Jarvis wasn't holding back today. As you'd half-expected, he'd gone for the weakest spot on the armor first, confident enough in his own construction to dare such a stunt. Although a small puff of smoke wafted up, it was just pulverized lead.

"Well, I'm still standing, so I think that works," you got out.

Jarvis didn't answer, and several more rounds were crushed into pulp by the thick layered steel that formed the new outer shell of your armor. The construction had weak spots, for a given definition, but even those weren't particularly vulnerable anymore after the last round of upgrades. Despite that, there had to be a compromise between flexibility and protection to prevent you from just becoming a lethargic statue.

"Quality seems good enough," you observed, glancing over at the automated firing rig at the end of the range and waving. "You can go a little bigger, I think. Not the face again, please - just in case. Don't want to get any uncomfortable surprises." He nodded. "Go."

"Of course, sir. Increasing intensity of barrage by 50%"

The barrage recommenced, and you smiled behind your faceplate. Six weeks had passed since the grand opening of Stark Transcendent, which at the time had been no more than a few dozen nervous faces, a spiffy work floor with shiny robots, and the suit had ended up rather on the backburner. You had ended up fitting in some testing time at the end of every week as a welcome diversion. You were sure very few people had a hobby of getting shot at voluntarily, but such was your strange life. Besides, Jarvis had fun. A little too much, even.

Despite your rather hectic weeks you couldn't really complain. It was a glorious mess to try and educate a few dozen people into using all the various machines and tools that had been built and designed for SI professionals - or yourself. It had been a somewhat unforeseen problem that was slowly tapering off as more and more people used each other as a knowledge base, instead of just relying on you. It was a small blessing that Hank - Dr. Pym - had ended up filling in on occasion so you could get some actual work done.

Six weeks later, you didn't even recognize what you started with. Yeah, people were inexperienced, and made mistakes, and half of them were still just unidentifiable faces that popped up occasionally, but productivity had skyrocketed, and so had morale. Judging by Pepper's smiles and Bambi's confidence in her system it seemed like things were being handled well. You cautiously, tentatively, dared to think this would actually work.

"You can keep going up until we hit the rig's limits," you said. "The upgrades work well, so far, so it's probably not going to catastrophically fail."

"As predicted, sir. My calculations and results of the stress tests indicate that a further 400% increase in damage output would be required to damage anything beyond the topmost surface features of the armor. Should I continue with high-caliber rounds?"

You nodded. "Don't make me bleed, please? I'm wearing my good pants in here." You got into position to turn into the shots, ready to block the blasts as best as you could. "Fire!"

As bullets ricocheted off your armor in every direction, you smiled, considering your new little adventure, so far outside your usual habits. You hadn't met with a single military contact since you'd arrived in New York, short of phone calls with Rhodey. No lobbyists, no shady figures interested in the latest explosives money could buy. The worst you'd had to deal with was the press - and you could work with that.

The first days had been awkward, of course, with some faces at the new company staring at you like you were a living god - which you didn't terribly mind, but it got in the way of work - while others seemed far too happy with dissecting all your equipment, barely paying attention to what they were actually supposed to be doing. Peter had actually been one of the more attentive people there, which was saying something pretty dreadful about the lot, given the boy's tendency to wander off. Still - baby steps.

Bambi, you realized wryly, had been key to the way that things had picked up steam - with more than a dozen years of experience in running companies considerably more complex than ST, she'd taken this opportunity to push through many improvements on both management level and IT-wise that she had been unable to implement in the past due to sheer inertia. Undeterred by normal working hours, she'd had a detailed proposal for you within a day of meeting the new employees, and her first propositions were implemented by Jarvis later in the evening. Without her and Pepper, you weren't sure things would runhalf as well as it did.

There were other reasons things went smoothly, and a part of that was your own presence on the work floor. You weren't averse to taking advantage of your fame, and even though the employees of ST had long gotten over their slack-jawed stares or bumbling nervousness, you could just see them perk up and smile when you pitched in a few hours of work. Whenever you laid out some new propositions and improvements, people got interested despite themselves, just because of who was pitching them. Perhaps your very tangible presence made people realize how much stake you had in things, how much you actually believed in the experiment.

It had taken a week or three for you to realize that you actually liked these people. Peter was entertaining company on any day, of course, and Dr. Pym was such a genius that he made you feel rather inferior, but they were by no means the only names you could put faces to. Not anymore, anyway. It'd been a long time since you'd had actual daily coworkers.

Pryor and MacKenzie came to mind; they had come over from a little project in Alaska that you'd visited years earlier, and even then they had worked together like they could read each other's mind, a result of sheer repetition and experience. Admittedly they were a little odd, but their work was exemplary despite that. There was also Catherine Mason, who was a brilliant IT expert you'd snagged up from a dead-end job in a Stark subsidiary, and her smiles betrayed just how much she appreciated the new opportunity. And then there was Vulpes… You needed some eye-candy around, right?

Admittedly, there probably were reasons you'd mostly hit it off with the female staff. Thankfully, Pepper hadn't actually said anything yet. Yet.

You hadn't been paying attention for a moment, caught up in your thoughts, and a remarkably heavy slug shattered against your shoulder-plate, which snapped back under the stress with a sudden, violent cracking noise. Very slowly, half of the front-facing plate dropped away, exposing another layer underneath. You couldn't feel any pain, thankfully.

"Okay. What the hell was that?" you demanded, peering at the damage as your UI listed the damage specifics on its own. "What do we even have that can do that sort of damage?"

Jarvis answered swiftly, nonplussed. "That was a Gen VI scrapper bullet, sir. You sent the design off last year, and I requisitioned several small batches in your name. They have three times the penetration power of similarly-sized ammunition due to -"

You raised up a hand. "Yeah, yeah. I know how they work, Jarvis," you snapped, rubbing the severed metal on your shoulder with you glove, though the gesture was meaningless inside the suit. "This could be a problem, you know. If these kinds of bullets start showing up on the market, the first people who will have access to them illegally will probably have familiar faces. And not good ones. If a single one can do this kind of damage, a concentrated burst could ruin the suit's motor functions."

"The current armor's materials are already stretched to their limits, sir, so there is little that can be done about that at present. Short of interweaving some of Mr. Parker's proposed formulas, this model cannot easily be improved without sacrificing a great deal of mobility in the process."

"Hm. And we didn't actually get to studying that at all, even though I wanted to," you complained. "Why are there so few hours in a day, anyway? I keep running out!"

"Seeing as you are the one assigning Mr. Parker's duties, sir…" Jarvis intoned dryly, leaving the rest unspoken. "I can attempt a refit using some other materials in the Stark Industries database, but most of them are currently in short supply in New York, given SI's limited presence. I could have some flown in, but it would take time."

"Hmm," you nodded distractedly. "I've been thinking about whipping up a single-layer version that can take advantage of some space-born alloys I made a few years back, but that'd drive the price of the suit way up. I can't really write off my pet projects' expenses now without someone noticing. The armor is clearly a weapon, so it'd be a bit bad for our reputation if it showed up on quarterlies."

"If you say so," Jarvis replied dryly. "Do you wish to continue testing the suit today?"

"NO!" You put up your hands swiftly. "I mean - no. I've probably been slacking off long enough, and that shoulder pad ain't gonna fix itself. Power down the rig, I'll get out of this tin can. I'll go pester the kid for a bit, since I haven't seen him all day."

"That is because Mr. Parker has been spending his time productively," Jarvis chided as the armor slowly folded open around you, jerking slightly as the missing and slightly bent shoulder-plates refused to open easily. "He has logged more than thirty hours this week, sir."

"Yeah, things have been pretty quiet on the front," you murmured. In some of the previous weeks, Peter had been rather less dependable, running off to do superheroics while you scrambled to cover for his absence. Still, you'd ensured the boy that you wouldn't get in the way of his good work, and things had worked out decently so far. It helped that Jarvis could effortlessly lie about Peter's presence when asked, which invariably ended up being a private meeting with yourself or Pepper, whichever was available to handle the alibi.

It wasn't a perfect system, of course, but it seemed to work. At any rate, none of your employees were about to peer into the affairs of their boss, much less his protégé. That little rumor had managed to get widespread despite your efforts to treat Peter as just another employee, and between the actual shared meetings and the fake ones, you couldn't really lie about it convincingly.

At least, you reasoned, nobody had forced Peter or you to pull out the big guns yet. Although you'd been the target of altogether too many assassination attempts, things had been quiet since Bullseye's sniper had been taken out. Going on two months of peace - it seemed so very, very alien. You'd gotten used to bullets flying.

"Sir?"

You glanced up, frowning. "I'm not spacing out, just thinking," you complained, though it came out fairly mildly. You hadn't had any more weird moments of fugue - not while awake, at any rate. That was a massive improvement over your previous hallucinations, and Pepper had proudly claimed that her enforcement of a decent day-and-night rhythm was the reason. You had your doubts. Perhaps that whole mess had just gone - dormant? Waiting for the next time you threw yourself into unimaginable danger on a whim?

The worst thing was that you could very well see yourself doing that. With a smile.

"I'm going back to the main hall," you said at last. "You can draw a bath for me when I head upstairs, Jarvis, in case I forget to mention it again. I will need it." You rubbed your shoulder, glad to note that the gesture actually worked this time, though a dull ache there was already spreading through your arm from the suit's sudden jerks. Such were the risks of unfinished prototypes. "Where's Peter, incidentally?"

"His desk, sir. Where else would he be?"

Spider-Man sitting at his desk... There was a joke in there somewhere.

The former Horizon Labs had become almost unrecognizable in the past few months, turned from a dilapidated and aging mess into something modern, bright and shiny. The walls were off-white, the floor a soothing blue, and every machine and computer station gleamed like someone had oiled them barely five minutes earlier. To enter was like stepping into the engine room of a starship, style and functionality merged into something that was designed to impress. Which was, you had to admit, half the purpose. You didn't expect greatness from a grungy garage that stunk of oil.

The only downside had been, perhaps, the rather clinical coldness and impersonality. That's why at Pepper's urging, and despite your misgivings, you'd given the new employees free reign to decorate the place, as long as they kept things tasteful. Some people didn't really know what 'taste' looked like, it seemed, but things did look a bit more lived in. Family pictures and knick-knacks were spread around personal desks, someone was growing a cactus in what should have been a trashcan, and for some ungodly reason, a tiny robotic dog had been released on the premises, nipping at people's ankles and generally making a nuisance of itself - you had plead ignorance on that one.

At the same, the starkly white walls now sport high-resolution pictures and posters, including a glamorous piece of antique Captain America propaganda - you suspected Jarvis and Coulson had colluded for that one - and a whole host of historical photographs of famous inventors. There was even a rather flattering picture of your father, right besides one of yourself in much the same pose. You were honestly a little embarrassed about it, which was a bizarre feeling considering how often you'd been on magazine covers. You endeavored not to stare at your mirror image.

The main hall itself, the biggest in use by ST, had been neatly divided into two equal halves, each dedicated to its own projects. Energy-related efforts were situated on one end, which the rest of the more violent repulsor research taking place behind a thick, reinforced wall. A few corners of each section were devoted to spin-offs of existing technology, and the most sensitive equipment had been moved into the heavy lead-lined vault deeper in the building, particularly the measuring equipment. Forty-some men and women were officially employed now, though there had never been more than about twenty-five present at any one time.

Stark Transcendent was actually working, and you couldn't help preening a little at that. You had to credit Bambi for a lot, and Pepper was indispensable - but this company was yours, started and maintained based on your intellectual property, your ideas. It might change in the future, evolve, but right now you were doing what your father had done and building something brand spanking new. It felt great.

You were also bleeding money out of every pore, but those were mere details.

Nobody paid much attention to your entrance - probably since they hadn't yet noticed. Butterfingers turned slightly from his spot against the wall, waggling enthusiastically as his prehensile claw clicked together. He, along with Dum-E, had been retrieved from storage after nearly two weeks, and though they'd instantly forgiven you, they'd been a little more needy than usual ever since. Silly little 'bots.

"Hank? Are you around here?" you called out, and a few people now glanced your way from across the room, before they returned to whatever they had been doing. For once, you spotted nobody playing video games.

"I am always present," Pym's voice echoed eerily from rather nearby.

Materializing slowly besides you, the first you saw of him was a toothy grin followed by the face around it, and only then the rest of Pym's body. The Cheshire Cat - cute. Ever since the polymath had gotten his hands on your holographic technology, he had been showing off his latest little improvements, mostly to annoy you. You had to admit that it was a rather successful tactic.

"Having a ghost for an employee certainly is an interesting experience," you muttered. That had become rather a common observation, as the presence of a transparent figure still made people stare, especially the handful of press photographers that got a sneak peek inside early on. They'd been tripping over themselves to interview poor Pym, who had vanished into thin air before they could reach him. It had been highly amusing to plead ignorance of the 'haunting'.

"So, what exactly did you need?" the hazy image inquired, crossing his arms. "Because I'm getting a little stir-crazy with that sensor array you have me working on. It's just lots of redundant work." He shook his head. "Besides, my free time is crap right now, so I could use something else to do. Honestly, I went out to clear my head last night, and they sent eight people to keep an eye on me. Eight! If it weren't for all of these holographics, I'd have probably started nibbling off my own fingers by now." He sighed dramatically. "Who knew that 'protection' could look so much like house arrest?"

"Yeah… can't really help you with that. I'm actually just looking for an update," you admitted ruefully. "I've been working on my personal stuff, so I kinda got distracted... I figured that pestering you about it would be more entertaining than just asking Jarvis. He'd be way too smug about his work, anyway."

Pym smiled. "So you come to me? Interesting." He turned slightly, looking at something you couldn't, and pursed his lips. "My files are up to date since fifteen minutes ago - and they mention that the twenty-fourth reactor is rolling off the presses tonight, well ahead of schedule. Needs a bit of work, but nowhere near as much as the first batch, so things are getting better on that front. Production costs are down a further eight percent compared to the original design." He hesitated. "That's mostly due to my changes. Sorry, Jarvis was insistent that I hand them over."

"Figures," you muttered. "Why do you have to be better at everything?" you asked in an attempt at levity, but it didn't come out like that. You pinched the bridge of your nose. "Between the repulsors, the holographics and this, do I have anything left that's my specialty? I feel like a second-rater in my own field, for crying out loud..."

"That's hardly true," Pym replied, frowning. "I don't think it's as simple as claiming I'm cleverer than you. I really doubt that, actually." He rubbed his chin, narrowing his eyes. "You came up with all these things I've been improving. You invented them out of sheer drive, some kind of vision of the future you want to make real. I don't work like that. I play around, I tinker with things because I want to, but I don't really have some grand ambition. I can't think about the kind of changes you intend to bring without becoming a little breathless, awed."

"Are you really going to put this down to silly philosophical differences?" you asked dryly. "Because you know what I think about that poppycock."

"No, no - think about it. You're an engineer, Tony. First and foremost," Pym noted. "That means practicality, right? Functionality. You don't build things just to have them work, you build them to last. You think about the price, and the physical complexities involved in production, and maintenance; I barely consider any of those! Most of my stuff is one-off, built only for myself, and they have never been very conducive to mass-production."

"Hm. Is that because you can't, or because you won't work like me?" you wondered, glancing across a few employees who were nervously looking up at you as they tried to keep their discussion going. "Because I'm sure you could think of all those things…"

"Are you actually feeling insecure over this?" Pym asked incredulously. "Are you mad? You made Jarvis, Tony!"

You raised an eyebrow. "...I did. Your point?"

"You made him in your image, didn't you?" Pym continued. "I can tell. He sounds like you sometimes, when he gets impatient. He obviously has the dry wit down. And I have to keep reminding myself that there's nobody sitting around on the other end, that he's a fully digital person that lives in the computers. It's marvelous."

"Way to give him a bigger head," you muttered.

Pym paced, frowning. "You don't understand… I don't think I could have made anything like him, Tony. I'd be too invested in what the whole endeavor meant, too emotionally involved to consider things from a distance. I couldn't possibly look at an AI as an engineer would, as a technician with a goal to reach. For me, it would be anathema to approach the mind as an absolute, and I shudder to think what the result would look like. Not much like Jarvis, I suspect."

"Hypotheticals are nice, but you won't ever know until you try," you pointed out dryly. "And I don't go around lending out Jarvis's source code, for pretty obvious reasons. He was the culmination of entirely too many sleepless nights, and I still can't quite fathom how I managed everything. I'm - kind of terrified to try again, really."

"Isn't that amazing, though?" Pym shot back. "You made Jarvis because his kind of artificial intelligence, his machine mind, is part of your idealized future, right? You didn't set out to remake humanity there, or make something better than us - you just wanted something that worked for your purposes."

"Just A Rather Very Intelligent System," you murmured wryly.

"Right." Pym sighed to himself. "Maybe the way you approached the problem is the reason that Jarvis is the way he is. A little miracle, spawned from a dream."

You raised a hand. "Okay, now it's getting sappy."

Pym shrugged. "Well, that's just how I look at it. Both our methods have their problems, I'm sure. It's nice to piggyback on yours for a while, though. Focusing on the practical isn't quite my usual ballpark, but it's a change from all my random whims. Besides, what else am I gonna do out here in the middle of nowhere? At least you give me money and gadgets."

"Yeah. Do have fun with those," you agreed dryly. "...And I do appreciate the pep-talk, Hank, though I don't think I really needed it right now. You certainly made Jarvis feel better, so that's something. Don't you dare stick up for Dum-E, though!"

Pym laughed nervously. "It's no problem, Tony. I'd hate for there to be this weird competitiveness between us, like you have with that Richards fellow. I figured it was good to clear the air," he said. "I'll tell Janet you called."

"Right. Call me when you need me." You shut down the connection with a tiny gesture, and looked up at the ceiling with a smile, knowing that your AI was gleefully recording every second of this.

Perhaps you did take him for granted, sometimes.

The smug bastard.

The Repulsor Mk2 was the first new design you'd made since the original version from nearly eight years previous. Back then you hadn't even possessed a suitable long-term power source, so you'd just used the things for momentary boosts in fragmentation bombs. You had never really considered them a viable product for anything else, beyond some theoretical musings. That was an oversight.

Stark Transcendent's proprietary model, in contrast, had been built from the beginning to use arc reactor input, focusing the steady surge of power into a remarkably large amount of thrust, easily able to match and supersede traditional methods, including many full-sized rockets.

That fact was, of course, why a huge section of the repulsor department was dominated by a thick-walled, heavily reinforced structure with only a few windows, all of them thick enough to distort the image inside a little. On one end of the test chamber, a huge metal framework had been set up, covered in scorch marks and dominating the entire wall.

Twenty feet away from it an experimental repulsor was rigged up to a heavy brace, easily ten to twenty times larger than the ones in your suit. On the side of this model, scrawled in white ink, someone had written 'F-1, eat your heart out'. The new repulsor design was obviously very heavy and large, as if someone had taken the engines off a proper rocket and strapped them onto an arc reactor, but it worked. Oh, it sure as hell worked.

That said, the hall was remarkably - empty. You glanced around. "Er…"

"Tony?! Test in fifteen! Cover your eyes and ears!" someone shouted from behind you, and it was only then that you realized why things were so very empty and quiet. A hand grabbed you by the back of the shirt and pulled you away from the observation window. Peter. Before you could say anything, the noise took over.

Subtle wasn't a word that could be used for the Mk2 - not by a long shot. The roar of its supersonic blast was loud enough to make your ears beep through thick layers of metal and reinforced polymers. The echoes rumbled through the building as if someone had set off a bomb, vibrating the walls, and it took long moments for things to calm down. This, then, was one reason that the hall had been split neatly in half - soundproofing. Only in your company would rocket tests actually take place inside, in full view.

That said, you could only see bright light within the testing stand, as the monstrous roar continued unabated, a wash of furious energy that had last almost ten seconds now. Twice as long as the original prototype, which had turned itself to slag soon after.

"Seems like we're getting somewhere!" you yelled over the cacophony, unable to keep a smile off your face as you sheltered behind one of the heavy manufacturing tools that Peter had dragged you behind. "That thing packs a punch! Must've quadrupled since I last saw it!"

"I got a little carried away with the tweaking, alright?" Peter said with a small grin, keeping his hands over his ears until the keening wail finally subsided and the white-hot flame within the testing room faded to a dull red glow. "I admit, I probably overdid this one a little," he said apologetically. "Jarvis gave me permission, though..."

You murmured something unkind under your breath. "Details? Anything I should know?"

"Yes, kind of," Peter agreed, frowning. "We fixed the stability issues from last week - but now we're dealing with something way more annoying. There's a problem with the fuel."

The fuel? You stared at the boy. "Um, I hate to tell you this, but repulsors don't actually run on rocket fuel," you said very slowly, as if speaking to a toddler. "No big tanks of kablooie fluid here. We have this thing called an Arc Reactor."

Peter rolled his eyes. "I'm talking about those," he said, crossing his arms in a huff. "They work alright, but we're - having problems. I don't know exactly how we're managing to do so, but I think we're overdrawing the arcs with the new repulsor. The reactors have started bursting into pieces after only one or two shots, utterly ruined. We can't really see the damage on the cores between uses, so we're probably dealing with disruption on a smaller scale - hairline cracks throughout the whole shell, or some kind of short-circuit…" He trailed off. "It causes some nice fireworks…?"

You frowned, considering the arc reactor that was humming in your chest. "You're sure it's the reactors? Because they've worked just fine so far. Have you considered..."

"Probably. I've excluded everything I could think of," Peter said before you could finish. "I also checked with Hank before I changed anything, and obviously I asked Jarvis. This is not a case of user error, and the Mk2 is performing as expected. The reactors are the weak link."

You distantly realized you believed Peter, despite his rather limited experience, and that probably said something about him. You wouldn't call Peter the hardest worker in ST given his frequent side-jobs that involved punching people really hard. Still, you had to admit that he was the quickest to pick up the principles behind what you were doing - even if he knew next to none of the actual calculations, working mostly by trial and error. Mere weeks after starting, the teen already sounded like a vet, throwing around observations that had nothing to do with numbers, and everything to do with accumulated experience. You gave it a couple more months before he'd start tinkering with his own repulsor designs.

Despite that swift learning, it had become evident that a lot of the teenager's knowledge was the result of self-education, and that left some rather annoying holes in his know-how. Who had ever heard of someone who could figure out arc reactors and repulsors, but had trouble with basic statistics or anything beyond Newtonian physics? You weren't even sure how something like that was possible. That's why, to Peter's utter embarrassment, you'd been forced to tutor him on some very basic high-school stuff that you'd internalized somewhere in the eighties. Thankfully, the process was swift.

"Well, if you're sure," you said at last. "Then this sounds like a job for me." You walked closer to the window, to take a glance inside. "You can rely on a network of arc reactors until this problem is fixed. Just switch to a fresher batch whenever something starts failing, and deliver the broken ones to me. Hopefully, we can recycle the important materials." You glanced down to your chest. "I'll have to get on this at some point, since I kinda can't afford to have it happen to my own reactor - not to mention the power plant we're working on…"

"There's people working on it already," Peter said dismissively. "I hear you've got enough to work on, and the team can handle some basic quality testing - most of them know this stuff better than I do. Jarvis can do the precision analysis as well as any of us can, anyway." He shook his head. "Besides, the longest burn we've had was about twenty seconds, before the line cut out. That's not terribly much."

"I will divert processing time to the problem as soon as I finish current calculations, Mr. Parker." Jarvis piped up. "You have but to ask."

"The name's Peter," the boy murmured under his breath. "And that would be great. Thanks!"

"I live to serve, Mr. Parker," Jarvis agreed lightly.

You raised a curious eyebrow. "You do know I designed this puppy," you said, tapping the glass. "You can just call me down here when you need me, you know. I always have things to do, so that's not really a reason not to try and steal me from the energy sector." You looked over the slowly clearing test chamber curiously. "I've been a bit busy with my own projects, so I sort of lost track of the other big stuff. I hope Pepper was able to come through for you?"

Peter smiled thinly. "There's been no need for the costume, actually. Which is a welcome change." He looked back to the chamber, where the last of the smoke was sucked away, revealing a rather droopy-looking repulsor. "Well… that's engine number four we ruined today, so I hope you don't look too hard at our expenses." He grimaced. "I'm onto something with the thrust angle, but small-scale tests just don't show the same effects. I'm forced to improvise and cross a whole bunch of things off my list at once. The effects of the air cavitating in front of the repulsor is what makes the biggest difference - and that only happens on this scale…"

"You sound like you're on Star Trek," Tony murmured in amusement. "Anyway, the supersonic waves are probably just messing with things," you observed. "My suit can go through the sound barrier - I've tried it before, and I managed to get a nice boom going over the ocean. The repulsors managed that just fine."

"Your suit only goes up to Mach 1 and a bit," Peter replied dryly. "Which fast, but we're dealing with an output here that outmatches yours by orders of magnitude." He gestured vaguely to the dripping engine. "The goal is reaching orbital velocity, right? The majority of the acceleration required will still have to take place against large amounts of friction, similar to regular rockets, in order to break through the atmosphere quickly. Unless you want to putter into space and only then accelerate, which would be a hassle in its own right. Your old repulsor wouldn't work properly in high altitudes, and the new ones could burn away reactors the entire way up, which would be very bad news for everyone."

You hated these situations. "Catch-22 bullshit, I see." You rubbed your brow. "And we can't exactly build a ship composed entirely of reactors, nor invent another new reactor design in the intervening time when the current ones aren't even up to snuff. Annoying."

"And the price of so many reactors would be crazy," Peter observed, aghast. "We're kind of caught between a rock and a hard place. Flying around while already in space will be just fine, since you can probably ride anything you get up there to the Moon without the slightest issue. Thing is, I don't know if the repulsors will be ready to handle the initial flight."

It wasn't hard to imagine why that would be problematic. Mach 25.4 was the number you recalled for orbital velocity, which was more than two dozen times the speed of sound, faster even than the best scramjet you'd heard about on paper. Reaching space without just falling back was hard, and even with repulsors and arc reactors, it wouldn't be a matter of slapping things together and hanging on for dear life. Space wasn't that forgiving. The Mk2 repulsors were a far too fresh technology to be bug-free, and your arc reactors were in trouble besides. It seemed like you had a lot of work still ahead. And your self-imposed deadline was getting awfully close.

It had been three weeks ago that Reed Richards had announced, quite confidently, that he would launch his brand new space plane before the next month was out, and that he had reserved a launch site at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California. You had, with the mere mention of your name, reserved your own spot there, and it would take only a little more pushing to get a similar launch window to Richards. Multiple flights in tandem were hardly ever done by the government, of course - but what was private spaceflight for if not to flaunt those pesky rules? You doubted Richards would make a fuss, for fear of losing his spot to the richer competition.

"We could talk alternative launch plans, maybe?" you asked at last. "Something in between the current ideas? Launching to get just above the atmosphere, and then activating the big burn could work in theory. Maybe a mixture of Mk1 and Mk2 tech?" You had to admit, those sounded like fantastic ways to screw things up, given the evident flaws of the new repulsors and your old reactors. "Hell, we could just get a chemical rocket for a boost…"

"And what would that prove?" Peter asked dryly. "You'd be tacitly admitting that your tech isn't good enough. Our tech." He groaned. "Did you have to make a bet?"

You scowled. "He started it."

"Very mature."

"Says the kid who wears pajamas under his labcoat," you drawled.

"They're not pajamas."

You scoffed. "It counts."

Distracting yourself from continuing the increasingly silly argument, you turned back to the test rig, a few last glowing patches fading to brown and black. You had time - a little time. You would certainly get an opportunity to debug the Mk2, and maybe figure out what was causing the overdraw problem. Maybe your arc reactor could be reinforced to survive the mission, even if it wasn't a permanent solution. It was doable.

That left, of course, the ship itself. You had the engines - after a fashion - and you had power generation too. Those, on their own, did not a spaceship make. You only had a little over three weeks to design, manufacture, test, and transport something which could replicate what NASA engineers had taken years to accomplish. A vessel which could beat a ship that had been ready for months, stuck in limbo only because of low funding.

No pressure.

The suit hadn't been your only pet project. Between shifts you scurried off to one of the larger side-buildings of the Horizon Labs, where a small and personally selected team took over the majority of the practical work on the framework of the 'ship', under your guidance.

An over-sized Stark Industries ballistic missile had been stripped of its explosive load and rocket engine, disassembled into pieces in one of the side-buildings. The hulking fuselage was perpetually surrounded by the drawings and designs you'd once seen as little more than fanciful dreams, delineating every aspect of the vessel as you envisioned it. It didn't look like a real spacecraft yet - but it would start to, soon enough.

You could spend months working on the thing, maybe more. You had three weeks. It was high time to do the company name justice, and transcend some freaking limits already.

You needed all the coffee.

Interlude - Tony & ?

There were days when you wished that twenty-four hours was just a guideline, not a brute fact. Even while straining your agreement with Pepper to its limit, eighteen hours of work per day was awfully short in the grand scale, especially on a big project.

It didn't help that you'd gone all-out with your design, and you needed half a dozen people doing arc-welding alone, not to mention everything else. You barely had enough space to fit everyone, and that was after you'd pretty much drained 90% of the company's available personnel.

Peter, at least, was getting work done, and Pym was sending more fixed blueprints than seemed humanly possible, though you suspected his wife might be pitching in on some of that. Not that you minded a free employee.

Your own part, dealing with getting the entire system to work nicely with all its parts, especially the custom ones, was a barrel of fun but entirely too strenuous. And Jarvis was glad to point that out.

"Perhaps you should get some sleep, sir. I could realign the arc reactors - I have done it before," Jarvis chimed in, as if on purpose.

"No. Half of these will need some wiggle room to make sure they don't interfere with each other, and I'm fairly sure you don't really have an algorithm for experience," you muttered darkly. "Trust me, I built one of these in a cave. I can manage this on my own."

"I submit to your experience with caveman engineering," Jarvis agreed blithely. "The last of the reaction control systems should be installed by tomorrow, if current schedule holds. That leaves approximately one week to solve the engine issue and ensure cabin cohesion."

"Yeah, tell me something I don't know," you replied testily. "We've got about forty people around here, Jarvis - there's alwayssomeone who's got the time to fix what you can't."

"Of course. Printing of the exterior hull sections is 72% complete, incidentally. The last should be finished by Monday, if none are found to be unsound. Installation should take no more than 48 hours in total, I believe."

"Good. Good." You twisted the seventh arc reactor into place, and it hummed to life happily. "There! Am I good, or what?" It fizzled out. "Ah… crap. Never mind."

"I initiated an emergency override to prevent a short-circuit," Jarvis said lightly. "The reactor is a full milli-"

The AI paused unnaturally, and you looked up from your precarious location underneath the wing of the would-be spaceship. "Jarvis?"

"Sir - I have just gained access to Mr. Stane's flash drive."

"You finally cracked it?" You sat up, smiling ear to ear. "Excellent! I knew that upgrade would come in handy, you know… I should think about giving you another one!"

"Enticing as the proposition is, I cannot claim victory. I did not finish my cracking algorithm, I'm afraid. My archive shows that it has been two months, to the day, since Mr. Stane was injured, so I believe that my attempts had no relation to the sudden resolution."

"A timed release, huh?" you noted. "It makes some sense, but I suppose it's backup to a backup way to get in... Alright - can you forward access down here? I gotta take a look at this." You reluctantly turned away from your work. "Just for a minute, of course."

"Of course, sir."

The computer that you'd been using to look over the blueprints cleared before you'd even reached it, and a folder popped up. There was a lot to be seen - many folders which contained information related to the company, likely financial statements, and several links to online briefs which would contain more. You scrolled down the list, and stopped in surprise.

There was a file named 'FOR TONY' - not a folder, but an apparent video, a hundred megabyte or so in size. Although the icon was fuzzy, you recognized the image, and a shiver ran down your back. "Jarvis?" you inquired shortly. "Are you seeing this too?"

"The file in question appears to be the one most recently added, sir," Jarvis confirmed after a moment. "It registers as two months and one day old. It is somewhat anomalous in make-up, possible due to conversion, though I can detect no malicious activity."

"A video file that Obi saved for me, from him." You sighed. "Well, ain't no time like the present, I suppose. Fire it up."

The image flickered momentarily as a frazzled-looking figure appeared, standing behind some kind of model city. Howard Stark - your father. You grimaced a little as you saw him fidget, glancing up at the camera rather uncomfortably.

"...Tony," he began at last, and you started, despite knowing it was coming. "You're too young to understand this right now, so I thought I would put it on film for you." He gestured across the model, which you vaguely recognized as the Stark Expo that your father had organized in the past, before his accident. "I built this for you," he added.

"Pause," you said shortly, staring at the image for a long time. Howard Stark had never been a… kindly man. Too caught up in his work, perhaps even more so than you were, he let his family slip to the background. For all the things you'd done while overworked, you'd never gotten that bad. And now, here he was. "...Unpause."

"Some day you'll realize that it represents a whole lot more than people's inventions," Howard continued, his eyes boring into the camera. "This represents my life's work. This is the key to the future. I'm limited by the technology of my time, but one day you'll figure this out. And when you do, you will change the world."

You smiled - you couldn't help it. You looked down at the arc reactor that hummed in your chest, the tangible proof of your forward strides, your successful harnessing of something that your father had never perfected. It was hard to realize that the only acknowledgment you'd get was posthumous - but it was there. Dad had cared, beneath it all.

"What is, and always will be my greatest creation… is you," Howard finished. The video froze on the last frame, seemingly looking through the screen, straight into your eyes.

"...Thanks, dad," you murmured. You turned away from the screen, looking at the Arkbird that was in a state of partial construction, and the handful of people across the room who were working on it. "Hope you're proud of me."

"Always."

You glanced back to the screen, to the frozen image of your father. "Jarvis…?"

"Sir?" Jarvis inquired. "Are you having a - moment?"

You glared up in annoyance. "...Never mind."