Chapter Text
Unknown Location, Thanos’ Hive-city
May 2012
Jane’s eyes got very wide as soon as they saw the lab.
Tony wanted to laugh at her, but he couldn’t, probably because this was not their lab in his Tower but a large one with awkwardly low ceilings and strange technology made out of oily blue metal and built by aliens who wanted him dead. He was distracted.
And that was before he realized this was built right above the center of the hive-city’s network hub.
“Those look like servers,” Helen said doubtfully, looking down through the floor, which was made of possibly glass, at the racks of grayish sleek boxes below them.
“They are servers,” Tony said, already making a beeline for the center of the room. “Or an equivalent. This isn’t a human network but any system has to have an interface for people to input commands, and a way of displaying outputs. Vision, stay here, I need your help.”
“I thought we were building another of the seidr weapons,” Steve said from the door.
“We are,” Tony said. Vision phased through the wall so he wouldn’t have to push his way to the doorway and walked over to Tony. Jane was already sifting through things with metallic clacking sounds. “But I’m also going to try and get an interface with Thanos’ security system going, because if I do that I can wreck this place from the inside. I can already tell it’s held together with eighty percent technology and twenty percent spite.”
Wanda elbowed Steve aside and swept her eyes around the lab.
“Hey,” Tony said. “Uh—Sharon, or whoever has one—I need a knife, preferably not one that’s been used on an alien in the last few hours.”
“Here.” Sharon pulled a small pocketknife from her boot and tossed it to him. Tony caught the thing and set it aside while he poked around what looked like a keyboard, except larger, awkwardly angled, and covered in spikes instead of keys.
“Tony.”
He looked up. “What?”
“I asked why you need a knife,” Steve said.
Tony shrugged and went back to his examination of the keyboard.
He was on the ground, on his back, with his head jammed into a tiny dusty space beneath the table, when Bruce asked, “Why’s this place unguarded?”
“Likely Thanos sent everyone to Earth,” Maria said. “Same reason the whole rest of the city’s empty.”
“First lucky break,” Clint said.
“You mean aside from Darcy and Loki having a brilliant contingency plan?” Sharon said.
“Stop it, this will go straight to my head,” Darcy said, batting her eyelashes outrageously.
Tony ignored them all, climbing out from under the table. He could make this work.
“Tony,” Sam said. “I kind of hate to say it, but you don’t have your suit. Or any of your normal tech. How—”
Tony grabbed the pocketknife and looked Sam dead in the eyes. “Dramatically,” he said, and cut his left forearm open.
Steve flinched forward. Vision made a grab for the knife, but Tony pulled back and glared at him through the pain. “Back off, I’m not committing suicide,” he said irritably, and very carefully ignored their staring and confusion while he levered a small pellet up and out of his arm. It was black and looked like someone had taken a sphere with the diameter of a quarter and stretched it from opposite ends until it made a long elliptical shape.
Tony cleaned blood of the pellet with his shirt, ignoring the drips—well, more than drips—that ran down his arm, coated his fingers, and spattered to the floor. Time for that later. He dropped the pellet on the table. “Tony Stark, protocol alpha nine one one, activate.”
The pellet clacked and expanded into a slightly undersized but clearly cutting-edge version of a StarkPad.
“The suit’s not what makes me Iron Man,” he told Sam with a grin, briskly tying a strip of torn undershirt around his arm. “You might want to get moving, this isn’t a spectator sport.”
“So most desperate science doesn’t involve you cutting weird ass technopellets out of your body?” Sam said. “Because I could watch that shit all day.”
“There’s something wrong with you, Wilson,” Tony said, already holding up the mini StarkPad and scanning what he was ninety nine percent sure was a person-network interface.
“Like you’re one to talk,” Sam muttered as the group shifted, aiming back for the hallway.
“Very different problems,” Tony said.
They vanished from the doorway. Helen slammed the door and locked it from inside.
“Let’s get to work,” Jane said with a manic grin.