Chapter 138 - Smaller Letters

Chapter 138: Chapter 138 - Smaller Letters

Tony cleared his throat while Lucius settled deeper into the chaise longue and the petite Svartálfar made herself comfortable across his lap. One of her sisters worked both hands over his shoulders. The other fed him a slice of peach and watched Tony with open amusement.

Tony could have paid handsomely for somebody to punch the smugness off Lucius’s face. Unfortunately, the available candidates were either massaging him, sitting on him, or Thor.

He kept Pepper firmly in mind and his eyes above collarbone level. Pepper would have appreciated the effort, if not the amount of effort visibly required.

Thor suffered no comparable moral emergency. He ate from the fruit tray, drank half a cocktail in one swallow, and regarded the three women with the delighted approval of a man whose shield-brother had apparently discovered a lost Asgardian hunting technique.

"Truly, brother, your travels are fruitful. Three Svartálfar women, where our own histories record none surviving. This is a deed worthy of song."

The woman behind Lucius pressed her thumbs into his shoulders. Lucius sighed and closed his eyes.

"A very private song."

Tony cleared his throat again. "We need you."

Lucius opened one eye. "That sounds expensive already."

"Ultron hit us while we were following Klaue’s network. The Maximoffs joined in, Wanda turned most of the team into decorative luggage, and your homicidal nephew left with enough Vibranium to improve his posture."

"It is your child," Lucius corrected.

"Bruce and I supplied the parenting. You supplied the interesting reproductive material. We can argue custody after we stop him from ending the species."

Thor lowered his drink. "The machine now builds a stronger body."

Tony cut back in. "Fury gave us authority to accept whatever terms you name. My version is that we get the fruit wizard off his flying brothel and back into the fight. His version had less diplomacy."

The petite woman took the peach from Lucius’s hand and bit into it. Lucius watched her chew before returning his attention to Tony.

"Why in hell would I leave my small paradise to deal with your bastard and the remaining wankers of your temporary little club? I accepted the last arrangement for this yacht, and because I count both of you among the narrow category of people whose deaths might inconvenience me. The others can drop dead now, and nothing will change in my life."

Thor pursed his lips. Midgard had mistreated his shield-brother, and Lucius’s bitterness was therefore understandable. He had been imprisoned, attacked, slandered, billed for the damage caused while defending a city, and denied the common decency owed to an honoured champion. Thor began forming a reminder that the defence of Midgard belonged to them regardless.

Tony spoke before he could deliver it.

"This is bigger than Romanoff and Capsicle."

Lucius smiled without warmth. "Is it? What is the worst possibility, destruction of the planet? I can move to Asgard. Vanaheim has tolerable weather. Jotunheim requires renovation, but land should be cheap after the murders. Svartalfheim is vacant, and I already have staff."

The woman behind him laughed against his shoulder.

"What has this planet given me that demands my protection? Its institutions kidnapped me. Its agents shot at me. Its people tried to kill me when I was helping them with the purest intentions available under the circumstances. Its politicians demanded that I pay to restore a city I fought to defend. I healed hundreds, saved thousands, and received betrayal, taxation and paperwork."

His hand moved along the petite woman’s thigh as he warmed to the injustice.

"Humanity is not worth my time, Tony. It is barely worth yours, and Thor has other realms. We should leave them to the consequences of their own stupidity. At least in another realm I could name my tower without a jealous partner covering every side of our building with his own name."

Thor nodded slowly. Beneath the shallow final grievance, he heard the pain of every wrong Midgard had inflicted upon his shield-brother.

Tony heard a man sulking about exterior signage.

"I’ll put your name beneath mine, in smaller letters."

Thor expected an angry refusal. Lucius had spoken of imprisonment, betrayal and a civilisation unworthy of salvation. No honourable man could answer wounds of that depth with architecture.

Lucius raised one finger. "One condition."

Tony closed his eyes while Lucius priced the salvation of Earth.

"My name will not be beneath yours. The building has four sides. I receive one entire face, equal height, equal lighting, and no access for you to alter it whenever your insecurity flares."

Tony set the limits. "One face. No roof, no holograms, and the letters don’t move."

"Agreed."

Thor was still blinking when Lucius moved the petite woman aside and rose. "Sebastien, tell the staff to stay on guard. I have apparently rediscovered faith in humanity."

"Benjamin, sir."

"Today is about miracles. Do not become greedy."

The research staff at U-GIN moved through a waking dream.

Dr Helen Cho stood beside the Regeneration Cradle with one hand resting above controls she no longer remembered choosing. Under the haze of the Mind Stone of questionable origins, the technicians monitored cellular cohesion, Vibranium integration and the artificial nerve channels spreading through the body inside. They answered one another when procedure required it, without asking why armed machines occupied the Seoul laboratory or why an eight-foot metal figure watched them manufacture his replacement.

Ultron had discovered that the sceptre no longer opened human minds for him. The yellow crystal still carried power and structure, but command disappeared whenever he pressed it against living thought. He had treated the defect as another failure inherited from Stark.

Wanda had been the practical substitute.

The work inside the Cradle was more ambitious than anything Strucker’s scientists had attempted. Vibranium atoms joined living cells instead of sitting beside them. Artificial tissue climbed a skeleton no ordinary instrument could have shaped, and beneath the skin a copied neural lattice waited for Ultron’s consciousness. The counterfeit gem sat in the forming brow, pouring organised energy into the design without revealing why its promise stopped short of the real thing.

Cho watched the readouts through borrowed calm. "Cellular binding is stable. Consciousness transfer can begin before the outer tissue is complete, but the process cannot be rushed."

Ultron kept his attention on the new body. "I have been patient since my first second. It has brought me very little joy."

The upload began, and Wanda felt his mind spread towards the new body. Until then, Ultron had been difficult to read. His thoughts occupied too many machines and arranged themselves without memory, flesh or fear. The Cradle forced the pattern through a single developing brain.

For the first time, she found the truth beneath his speeches.

Cities destroyed, and people ended. Ultron did not intend to avenge Sokovia or tear down the men who had profited from its suffering. He intended to remove the species and call the silence improvement.

The haze over Cho fractured. Her eyes focused on the body inside the Cradle, then on the progress bar moving across her display. Across the room, a released technician dropped his tool while another caught the console for support. Cho stopped the upload.

Ultron turned. The shot from his hand crossed the laboratory before anyone could speak. It struck Cho in the side and threw her against the base of the Cradle.

Pietro reached Wanda as the first alarms began.

"You were right?"

"Worse."

They disappeared before Ultron’s sentries closed around the room.

The Cradle sealed. Four machines lifted it towards the service exit while Ultron listened to the aircraft descending over the river.

"The Avengers. Always arriving in time to misunderstand the problem."

Steve hit the laboratory floor before the Quinjet finished passing over the roof.

Sam dropped beside him with both wings extended, caught the nearest sentry across the chest, and carried it through a glass partition. Natasha landed last, keeping her healing shoulder tight as she fired two rounds into another machine’s sensor cluster.

"Cho is down," Steve said over the channel. "Cradle’s moving through the east service route."

Clint banked the Quinjet between the surrounding towers. "I have a truck leaving the lower level and a crowd of metal friends who object to air traffic."

Repulsor fire rose from the service yard. The first shot crossed beneath the jet. The second struck the port wing and made every warning display complain at once.

Bruce gripped the console behind Clint. He had insisted on joining because Cho’s work was partly his field and because leaving him alone after Johannesburg had sounded unwise. Nobody had invited the Hulk to central Seoul.

"There are at least twenty active bodies below us. More waking inside the building."

"Good news. We’re finally winning at arithmetic."

Steve tore a steel rail from the ruined partition and drove it through the neck joint of the sentry Sam had dropped. The machine kept reaching until Natasha planted an electrical charge beneath its ribs.

The discharge locked its limbs. Steve finished it against the floor.

"Status on Stark and Thor?"

"Still recruiting," Clint said.

Sam folded one wing against a burst of fire. The impact threw him through a workbench, but the wing held long enough for Natasha to cross the opening and shoot the exposed repulsor twice.

Sam pushed himself out of the broken workbench. "We had him until you two drove him off. Feels relevant."

Natasha changed magazines one-handed. "I shot him, Fury settled my bill, and Steve gave the order in Sokovia."

Steve blocked a metal fist with the rail and lost both. "You shot him."

"Fury paid for that. You ordered him."

Clint brought the Quinjet low enough for its cannon to remove two sentries from the service yard. "She’s right. Most of this belongs to the two of you. My professional record remains excellent."

"Now is not the time," Steve said.

Bruce watched another cluster of machines leave the lower level and begin climbing towards the roof. "For what it’s worth, this is exactly the time everyone usually chooses."

The truck carrying the Cradle accelerated onto the elevated road. Ultron landed on its roof while three sentries formed around him. More machines rose from the lab and spread between the truck and the Quinjet.

Clint pulled the aircraft away from a converging volley. "The package is heading north. We are officially outnumbered."

"We were outnumbered in Sokovia," Sam said.

Natasha looked through the broken wall at the machines filling the yard. "We had Lucius in Sokovia."

Nobody improved upon that.

Steve jumped from the loading bay onto the rear of the truck. Sam followed above him, wings cutting through the first drone that turned. Natasha caught the line Clint fired after them and descended towards the roof as the Quinjet climbed out of another firing lane.

Ultron looked back at Steve. The body was taller than the Legion frame he had worn at Stark Tower, plated with stolen alloys and the first Vibranium Klaue had surrendered. It remained temporary. Everything Ultron built seemed to resent its own skin.

"You arrived without the shield."

Steve caught a sentry’s arm, turned the repulsor into its neighbour, and drove his heel through the elbow joint. "You arrived without a finished body."

"We are both adapting."

Ultron struck him across the road.

Sam caught Steve before he reached the traffic below. The effort cost him altitude, and a repulsor beam burned through the outer section of his right wing. Both men hit the roof of a bus hard enough to bow the metal.

Natasha landed on the truck and rolled beneath the first shot. Her left shoulder refused the second part of the movement. A sentry caught her by the jacket and raised her over the road.

Then the sky folded.

Tony appeared forty feet above the truck in his unnamed armour. Thor fell beside him with Mjolnir already wrapped in lightning. Between them floated Lucius in black Uru, the horned skull of his helm aimed at the machines below.

"It seems we are just in time," Tony said.

"Indeed, Stark. Now we will show the might of Asgard to these robots." Thor replied.

"Might of Asgard, my arse. He is a cheat."

Lucius looked down at the truck, the damaged aircraft, the burning wing and the machines filling half the road.

"This is what happens when I take one afternoon for myself."

Thor dropped first.

Mjolnir struck the truck roof between Natasha and the sentry holding her. Lightning passed through the machine, leapt to the two bodies guarding Ultron, and continued into a fourth crossing above the road. Their repulsors died before their bodies reached the ground.

Tony accelerated through the falling metal. One shoulder caught Natasha’s captor and carried it into an overpass support. He caught Natasha with his free arm.

"Pepper says looking doesn’t count if you rescue somebody immediately afterwards."

"Pepper has never said that."

"She would respect the principle."

Lucius’s eyes ignited red beneath the helm.

The optic blast crossed the road in a straight line, entered the first sentry through its chest and passed through four more before carving a glowing channel along the concrete barrier. The separated halves had not reached the ground when he closed one hand.

Every loose weapon tore free at once. Rifles, repulsor assemblies and missile housings gathered into a spinning mass above the traffic. Electromagnetic pressure crushed the mechanisms together until stored power began arcing between them. Lucius wrapped the whole thing in a force field and drove it through the next wave of machines.

The collision filled the field with metal. He compressed it to the size of a dining table and dropped it through the elevated road.

Thor landed among the bodies that remained. Mjolnir broke one through the waist on the return swing, then drew lightning across six others as he raised it overhead.

"Shield-brother," he called, "your wrath has returned."

"It is a licensing dispute."

Tony’s repulsors opened two more machines while his shoulder batteries selected every active target the others had left. "One side of the building. Remember, no roof."

Lucius extended both hands towards the sentries rising from U-GIN. Magnetism arrested the metal bodies in the air. Matter Transmutation passed across their armour in a dark ripple, changing hardened alloy into brittle black ceramic. He brought his palms together.

Telekinesis did the rest.

The machines collapsed inward and struck the service yard as a rain of broken plates.

For several seconds, the only active Ultron body in sight was the one standing opposite Steve on the truck.

Ultron looked from the wreckage to Lucius. "You could have stopped this before it began."

"I did stop the version in Tony’s living room. You left before technical support arrived."

Lucius reached through the nearest ruined body with Technopathy. He found targeting routines, movement control and a disposable copy of Ultron stripped of the buried pathways that had knelt at Stark Tower. The complete intelligence was elsewhere, routing around the battlefield while the bodies spent themselves.

Adaptation, then. The bastard was learning to void the warranty.

Ultron fired at the truck beneath his own feet. As the blast tore the rear axle apart, Tony ripped the Cradle through the open side while Thor caught the forward section with one hand and Mjolnir’s pull. His boots cut twin trenches through the road. Steve threw himself clear, and Sam lifted Natasha from Tony’s arm before the collapsing truck could take them all over the edge.

Lucius held the sealed Cradle in midair.

Ultron abandoned the body an instant before an optic blast removed its head. The empty shell fell between the broken sections of the truck and struck the street below.

Inside the Cradle, red tissue covered a Vibranium skeleton and the counterfeit gem still shone in its brow. The upload had stopped well short of completion, but the body itself remained intact.

Tony hovered beside it. "Please tell me you didn’t agree because you wanted to collect the murder mannequin."

"Of course not. I came because humanity deserves another chance."

Steve climbed onto the remaining section of road in time to hear him.

Thor smiled with exhausted pride.

Tony looked at the floating Cradle, the field of destroyed machines and Lucius’s horned helm.

"South face. You get the south face of the Tower."

Lucius considered the afternoon sun’s direction.

"Let’s negotiate about roof lighting."

"Absolutely not."