The Gauntlet Read online

  Tony knew exactly where the DeLorean DMC-12, with its distinctive gull-wing doors, was parked: in the executive section of the lot, far away from the riffraff’s cars. He quickly nudged the TOT in that direction, pulled up the nose twenty degrees to give the camera a better view, and made a looping approach from twenty feet off the asphalt.

  “Better not scratch the car, Son,” said Howard in his ear. “That’s my favorite vehicle.”

  Which was saying something. Howard Stark had something of an obsession with cars, but John DeLorean was the only automotive engineer he was on record as admiring. And if Howard Stark admired a person, then that person was doing something very right.

  So what was all that talk about sending it back to the future? And what did Dad stick to my TOT? The weight feels a little different.

  It was another test, he decided.

  Pops is piling on the pressure by throwing off the TOT’s balance.

  Good luck with that.

  Tony had been practicing for weeks with the Game Boy in preparation for exactly such a baptism of fire, and he felt pretty darn confident in his piloting skills.

  I could land this baby on a playing card, he thought. Setting her down on a luxury sports car will be zero problemo.

  Tony had enough smarts not to smirk. If there was anything his father hated more than his son’s hairstyle, it was his irrepressible cockiness.

  I will smirk later, Tony decided. And maybe punch the air. I might even call Cissy.

  But later for celebrating. Now for landing.

  The DeLorean grew large on the screen, and Tony glanced quickly at the sensor readouts to make sure the TOT was not going to be buffeted by wind, but conditions were perfect. Even the sun was playing along by staying offscreen.

  Ten feet, thought Tony, holding the craft steady. Five.

  A crazy thought flashed across his mind, something crazy thoughts often did.

  I should do a barrel roll.

  But good sense prevailed, and he opted instead to expertly execute a gentle vertical touchdown. A textbook landing, no cockiness whatsoever on display.

  Or at least a gentle vertical touchdown was what he’d intended to expertly execute, but an instant before the aluminum landing skids could seesaw onto the DeLorean’s hood, Howard Stark closed his hand over those of his only son.

  “Dad, don’t!” objected Tony, attempting to pull away, but the strong fingers held him fast.

  “Watch and see,” said Howard Stark.

  Tony could do nothing but obey, and he watched as the TOT’s pointed nose dipped sharply, scraping a long groove in the DeLorean’s paint.

  “You’re doing this, not me!”

  “Don’t worry,” said Howard Stark. “It’s just a toy, remember?”

  Tony wriggled his fingers out from under his father’s, abandoning his grip on the Game Boy. He ran to the window just in time to see his precious TOT nose-dive into the windshield of his father’s even more precious DeLorean.

  He winced but was not overly concerned. After all, from that distance, how much damage could a featherlight craft do? Even one with chewing gum stuck to its cargo doors.

  As it turned out, the answer was quite a lot.

  Like most explosions, it was over before the brain got a chance to process what had happened. But when Tony replayed the incident in his mind, slowing it down to view it frame by frame, he remembered an ultrawhite flash followed by a roiling ball of flame about the size of a cantaloupe from which the DeLorean’s windshield seemed to recoil like a membrane before shattering into countless pieces (technically not countless, if you’re being picky) and then the entire hood crumpled as though stepped on by an invisible iron boot.

  At the time, all Tony could think was: I hate cantaloupes.

  He would continue to hate them for the rest of his life and never consciously realize why.

  Then the sound wave hit the building, followed by heat and the cacophony of concentric circles of car alarms.

  In the grand scheme of explosions, this one was nothing special or major. Certainly not special enough for Howard Stark to be called on to explain personally. Big enough to send a security guard down if a black and white showed up, perhaps, but there would never be so much as a noise pollution fine as a result of Howard’s demonstration.

  Whatever that demonstration was supposed to prove, thought Tony. Aside from the fact that my dad loses it on occasion.

  Which was a surprise to absolutely no one in the compound.

  Tony was surprised to feel a hand on his shoulder.

  “Do you see, Tony? Do you?”

  Tony did not see, and he was not about to irritate his dad with wild guesses.

  “I don’t see, Dad. I don’t. You melted my flying machine and your favorite car.”

  “Correct,” said Howard. “Because a picture paints a thousand words, and a picture of an explosion paints a million more.”

  “I still don’t get it. The TOT was an instrument of peace.”

  “Exactly,” said his father. He turned Tony away from the window, stooping to look him in the eyes. “It took you a year to build that drone, and it took me ten seconds to weaponize it with some gum and a minigrenade, because you told me all I needed to know. Don’t give away your secrets, Tony—not to anybody—or they will inevitably turn them against you, as I did.”

  Tony wondered later why his father kept minigrenades in his drawer and whether that was even legal.

  “Why would you want to do that?”

  “Because that’s what we do. We men. We make weapons. Everything we build is on its way to becoming a weapon, and only a fool or a child does not see that. If we put your mercy plane into the hands of our enemies, they will fly it back to us bearing a payload. Do you understand?”

  Tony did, but he didn’t like it and said so.

  “You don’t have to like it,” said his father. “You just have to remember what you’ve seen here and accept it as the way of this world. There are no toys in this world, just un-evolved weapons. The weapon will always be our greatest achievement.”

  Tony glanced once more through the window at the narrow plume of blue-black smoke rising from the DeLorean’s engine block.

  “I will never forget what you showed me here today, Dad,” said Tony, and he meant it. Maybe his dad’s methods were a little out there, but he sure could get his point across.

  “Good boy, Tony,” said Howard Stark, handing his son the Game Boy. “Someday you’ll take over this company, and it will be up to you to keep this country safe. You won’t be able to do that with toys. Got it? Promise me now that you will continue my work when the time comes.”

  Tony gazed down at the game device in his hand and knew instinctively that a defense contractor somewhere was already adapting the technology. Probably Stark Industries.

  “I promise, Dad,” he said. “No toys, just weapons.”

  And if he had to pick a moment when his childhood ended, that would have been it. Followed closely by the moment two weeks later when both his parents were killed in a car accident on the Pacific Coast Highway.

  Tony Stark never looked at toys the same way after that. For years he wouldn’t play with any at all. And when he did eventually begin to play again, he studied his old building sets and physics kits with hardened eyes. Tony Stark worked on his toys until they were of an altogether more dangerous kind than the ones of his youth.

  His new toys were armored and explosive, and they could fly. In fact, they weren’t toys anymore; they were weapons.

  Twenty feet above the Irish Sea, present day

  Tony Stark dreamed he was flying. But it wasn’t just any flight of fantasy. It was a very special flight over the Hawaiian volcanic peaks with a very special, very beautiful woman: Anna Wei. Lithe, strong, and brilliant, she was the only other scientist he had ever considered his equal, and one of just a handful of people Tony had ever loved. And like all the other people Tony had loved, Anna had died before her time. After the police found and
identified her body, they ruled it a suicide. As much as Tony had not wanted to buy that, he’d had no choice. His heart had hardened a little more that day, and he’d resolved never to love again.

  So Tony Stark dreamed he was flying, and the fact that he dreamed he was flying while he was actually flying added an extra dimension of reality. The previous Iron Man operating system had once put forward the hypothesis that one more layer of dreaming could prove inescapable. In other words, if Tony dreamed that he was dreaming he was flying while he was actually flying, then he might never wake up. At which point Tony had decided that the OS needed a reboot and maybe a virus check.

  Tony’s current onboard AI was his girl Friday, who was a little more free-spirited and knew better jokes and even occasionally laughed at Tony’s.

  Friday woke him with a gentle vibration that massaged his spine, which she detected from his bio readings was about to spasm after many long hours of flying across the United States and the Atlantic Ocean.

  Stark opened his eyes and yawned and, feeling his chin nestle into the helmet’s jaw strap, remembered he was in the suit.

  “Morning, Friday.”

  Friday winked into existence in the form of a holographic red-haired young woman, who was crystal clear even in full daylight thanks to the Stark multinode projectors. Right now she was confined to the helmet display, and Stark knew that if he focused on her for too long, he would throw up in the helmet. But even out of the corner of his eye, he noticed something.

  “You’ve changed your hair?”

  Friday shook out the long red tresses that had been shorter the day before.

  “That’s right. This is more me.”

  Friday had changed a lot of features lately. The whole Irish thing, for example. Friday had been programmed Californian but had turned Celtic in the past few weeks. Also, Friday’s virtual bone structure had changed so her face had more character. Tony was intrigued to see what the AI would do next. He had built Friday, but she was intelligent and could choose to appear as she pleased.

  “Where in the world are we?” he asked the artificial intelligence.

  “Twenty minutes out, boss. Heading north northeast one mile off the Irish coastline.”

  “How are the systems looking?”

  “All the readings are in the green, appropriately enough, considering where we are,” said Friday. “And top of the morning to you.”

  “Top of the morning?” said Tony. “Friday, I never took you for a stereotype. What’s next? A pint of Guinness and some Riverdancing?”

  “Just trying to get into the swing of things, boss,” said Friday. “Ireland, I have decided, is my spiritual home. And I don’t think Riverdancing is an actual verb.”

  “Increase lumbar vibration to four,” said Tony. “And throw in a stretch, why don’tcha. I know I look as cool as all hell, but these transatlantic jaunts take it out of a fella.”

  Friday took hold of Tony’s spine and pulled till it creaked. “Maybe if you took any notice of international law and didn’t do so many uncleared flights, Tony, your back would be in better shape.”

  Stark ignored this. “Don’t we have a first-class Iron Man suit? Didn’t I build something with a minibar?”

  Friday laughed. “We have recycled water and caffeine patches, boss. I’m afraid that’s it.”

  Tony grimaced. “Recycled water. I know where that water came from and it’s putting me off, to be honest. And getting back to the transatlantic flights, there are a lot of big weapons in the hands of bad people, and someone’s got to clean it up, right? If S.H.I.E.L.D. won’t sanction my missions, then I gotta strap on the stealth suit and do it myself.”

  Tony thought back to a recent meeting with S.H.I.E.L.D. during which Nick Fury had made it abundantly clear that he was not about to rubber-stamp Tony’s covert missions.

  “You must be out of your playboy mind if you think I’m going to ask the president to green-light your Boy Scout trips,” the S.H.I.E.L.D. leader had yelled in his office at S.H.I.E.L.D. HQ. “You think you’re God, Stark? You think you can make up for fifty years of Stark Industries’ manufacturing weapons by deciding who gets to have tech now? That ain’t how the universe works, Tony. You should know that. You’re a genius, right? You’ve told me so enough times.”

  And Tony had said, “Yes, Dad.” Which had been more than embarrassing; it had been mortifying.

  “Did you just call me Dad?” Fury had asked, wickedly delighted. “Let me get the S.H.I.E.L.D. psychiatrist in here. I think you might be suffering from some kind of genius-level PTSD.”

  “I was being sarcastic, Fury,” Tony had said, trying to cover for the slip. “As in, you are not my dad. And you are not the boss of me.”

  “You’re wrong there,” retorted Fury, pounding his desk—which was, Tony thought, a little grandstand-y. “I am the boss of you. And if you get yourself in hot water during one of your escapades, don’t expect S.H.I.E.L.D. to send in the cavalry, because I ordered you not to go in the first place.”

  Tony Stark left Fury’s office realizing that not only was there no backup forthcoming, but he would have to be a lot sneakier in the future when he was taking down arms dealers, because Nick Fury would be waiting for him to slip up.

  Luckily, thought Tony as he flew above the choppy surface of the Irish Sea, one of the facets of my genius is definitely sneakiness.

  “Friday,” he said, “how’s my yacht doing?”

  Friday brought up the yacht’s locator and hummed as she checked it—an endearing tic she had developed herself.

  “The Tanngrisnir is at anchor one mile outside the mouth of picturesque Dún Laoghaire Harbour, as programmed,” replied the suit’s AI.

  “Done Leery,” said Tony, sounding it out. “The Irish sure know how to spell things. You can never have too many silent letters, right?”

  “Watch it,” said Friday. “Those are the physical manifestations of my people you’re talking about. Any more insults and I might send you for a swim.”

  “Any pings on the boat?”

  “Two S.H.I.E.L.D. sats and three helicopter fly-bys from news networks. Judging from the chatter, all seem satisfied that Tony Stark is getting a little R&R with Shoshona Biederbeck, the world’s newest pop superstar.”

  “Why wouldn’t they be satisfied? It’s a totally believable story: Tony Stark with a beautiful woman.”

  Friday made an unconvinced kind of sound, a little like a single note from a clarinet.

  “What’s that supposed to signify, Friday?” Tony asked. “Are we doing noises now?”

  “I am an intelligence, boss. You do want honest opinions, don’t you?”

  “I do. But I prefer actual words—you know, verbs and nouns and so forth—over beeps and honks. What are you, Artoo-Detoo?”

  “Well, if you must know, Shoshona seems a little young. Twenty-five at most?”

  Tony laughed. “Are you jealous of a robot, Friday?”

  “No. Jealousy is certainly outside my program parameters. I am concerned with the sustainability of your cover story.”

  “First, I think you’ve been outside your program parameters for weeks now, and second, I worked a long time to make the ‘beautiful young woman’ cover realistic. Any other worries while we’re on the subject?”

  Friday made another clarinet sound, which turned the helmet display pink for a second.

  “Mood lighting,” said Tony, delighted. “Maybe we should play some disco music. Come on, Friday. Out with it.”

  “Well…”

  “Well? Well? What is happening to you, Friday? Are your language patches disintegrating?”

  “It’s just that I know how touchy you are.”

  “Tell me. That’s an order.”

  “Very well, boss, but you pushed me into it, so don’t get mad.” Friday took an audible deep breath, which she accomplished by flushing the suit’s vents, a little humanizing trick she’d come up with herself. “It’s the Prototony.”

  “What’s wrong wi
th the Prototony?” asked Stark. “That thing is a marvel of modern engineering—and pretty darn good-looking, too.”

  “I’m not disputing the engineering of the Prototony, boss.”

  “So, what is it? You have a problem with his appearance?”

  Another honk, followed by, “Well…”

  “Well what?” asked Stark. “Come on, Friday, you’re killing me.”

  “Well, he’s a little buff.”

  “Sure, he’s buff. I’m buff. And he’s supposed to be me. S.H.I.E.L.D. and the tabloids spy on the Prototony, which leaves me free to do my little side missions. Never be where you’re supposed to be, remember?”

  Friday persisted. “If he’s supposed to be you, then maybe he shouldn’t be so muscular. I mean, you’re in good shape, boss, don’t get me wrong, but you’re shape is documented. And the Prototony’s shape is a little more developed than yours.”

  “I’m not exactly the Hulk, is what you’re saying.”

  “I knew you’d be angry.”

  “I’m not angry. A little peeved, maybe.”

  Friday tittered. “Peeved? According to my records, you are the first person to use the word peeved outside of a romance novel in fifteen years. There should be a prize.”

  “So the Prototony is too buff?” said Tony, unwilling to leave the subject. “Or maybe I’m too puny.”

  “I’m sorry I mentioned it,” said Friday. “My observation is based purely on your muscle mass and BMI, and it wasn’t meant as a criticism.”

  Tony was silent for a long moment, then said, “We have EMS on this rig, don’t we?”

  “Yes, boss,” replied Friday. “The defib can be used for electromuscular stimulation.”

  “Then give me fifteen minutes on abs. I wanna look good for the satellites.”

  The electromuscular stimulation had barely finished its work chiseling Tony Stark’s torso when Friday sealed the vents and took the suit subaqua so they could approach the Tanngrisnir from below. After all, it might seem a little curious if Iron Man touched down on the yacht while Tony Stark was visible on deck. It was a safe bet that Nick Fury would be yelling through the sat phone within seconds of seeing that video. So Tony had fitted out the Tanngrisnir with underwater doors and an airlock that could accommodate a billionaire philanthropist genius in a metal suit of armor without raising so much as a ripple, physical or electronic, on the surface.