Chapter 47: How Did They Build That Shock Absorption System?
With the arc reactor in hand, Stane completely let himself off the leash.
The agents who had come to apprehend him found this out in sequence. Stane moved through them with the relaxed efficiency of someone who had stopped worrying about consequences, and the agents went airborne one after another, their status afterward unclear.
Feeling the Iron Monger suit's capabilities running through him for the first time, Stane found himself entertaining a thought he recognized as unreasonable but couldn't quite dismiss: that he could do anything he wanted from here on.
It was the same feeling that arrived after a good workout, when for about thirty seconds you genuinely believed you could hit a bull hard enough to drop it. Then reality reasserted itself, usually via the bull.
Stane had not yet reached the bull portion of this experience.
He looked at the agents scattered across the floor around him, then at the one still standing, hands shaking, reloading his magazine.
He laughed. It came out loud and genuine.
"I love this! Tony actually gave me something extraordinary!"
The last standing agent finished reloading and opened fire. The rounds hit the Iron Monger's chest plate and left marks that could most charitably be described as decorative. When the firing stopped, Stane looked down at the white scratch marks on the suit with an expression of complete satisfaction.
"All done? My turn."
He moved at the agent with the full weight of the suit behind him. The agent tried to find a way around the enclosed space and couldn't. The impact, when it came, communicated the same physical information as being hit by a truck that had not been watching where it was going.
The agent stopped experiencing things.
Years of keeping his composure. Years of playing the trusted mentor, the steady hand, the company's moral center while Tony Stark wore the name on the door. All of it compressed and released in one long exhale.
He felt better than he had in years.
"Now then." His voice carried through the suit's speakers with something close to warmth. "You're next."
"Pepper Potts."
"If it weren't for you, I wouldn't have had to move this quickly."
The Iron Monger's legs drove down through the workshop ceiling.
Pepper was outside, waiting for the police, when the suit erupted through the pavement in front of her. She went still. Her legs were less cooperative.
The Iron Monger stood over her like a building that had decided to become ambulatory.
"Pepper." Stane's voice came through the speakers without hurrying. "Where exactly do you think you're going?"
"I want you to understand something before this happens. I'm not killing you. Tony Stark is." He watched her face. "He sent you into my office. He made you part of this. Whatever happens to you tonight is his doing."
"Blame him. Though..." The smile in his voice was audible. "He's already dead. Went to hell ahead of you."
The arm-mounted minigun came up.
From the sky: a streak of light, closing fast.
"STANE!"
The shout came down from altitude like something dropped. Stane raised the gun instinctively and fired toward the incoming light, but Tony had been diving from high altitude at near-sonic speed, and the gap between Stane hearing the voice and Tony hitting him was not large enough to matter.
The impact sounded like a building coming apart.
Both of them went through the wall and rolled out onto the road beyond it, traffic scattering in multiple directions.
On a rooftop nearby.
Eleanor was lying prone, eye to the scope of a modified M82A1. The rifle had been altered significantly from standard configuration. The barrel was longer and heavier, the muzzle brake proportionally larger, and the overall impression it gave was of something that could conduct a conversation with a tank on even terms.
The radio on her shoulder crackled.
"Eleanor. What's the situation?"
Matthew's voice.
"Sir." She kept her eye to the scope. "The target took a near-sonic collision from another suit. Based on current observation, neither party appears to have taken any meaningful damage from the impact."
A pause.
"Their shock absorption is genuinely remarkable."
"I know. Keep watching. I'm almost there."
"Understood."
In the street, the fight had resumed.
It was not going well for Tony.
He was losing ground consistently, and the reactor in his chest was visibly dimmer than it had any right to be. The original arc reactor was cave technology. It had been built under duress from whatever was available. Asking it to power a sustained combat engagement against a purpose-built suit was asking a great deal of cave technology.
"JARVIS. Power level."
Tony was weaving around the Iron Monger's fire, not gaining any distance.
"Fifteen percent, sir."
"Fly up."
"Sir, I would caution..."
"I said fly up."
"...Yes, sir."
Tony broke away from the engagement and went vertical.
Stane watched him go with an expression that could be heard in his voice. "Not bad. But I've made some improvements of my own."
The leg panels on the Iron Monger separated. Flame poured from beneath, driving the enormous suit upward like a rocket had made a design decision.
Both of them climbed. Tony pulling ahead, Stane closing the gap.
At some point Tony's ascent slowed. Whether the power was fading or he was waiting was not entirely clear.
Stane caught up. One massive hand closed around Tony's throat.
"I like the idea, Tony! But my suit is simply better than yours."
They were in the clouds.
Tony, encased in metal, looked at the Iron Monger through his faceplate. Ice was forming across Stane's suit in a layer that was getting thicker by the second.
"Is it." His voice was conversational. "How did you handle the icing?"
"The what?"
By the time the question finished, Stane already knew something was wrong.
The cold at that altitude found the systems inside the Iron Monger and began shutting them down one by one. The suit went dark from the outside in.
Then it fell.
Tony's situation was not substantially better. Two percent power. The descent was more controlled than Stane's and considerably less graceful than he would have preferred, punctuated by a backup power reserve activating at the last possible moment. He landed.
It was over.
Then from high above, the Iron Monger came back down.
It hit the ground at the speed that a suit dropped from cloud altitude hits the ground. The impact registered in the surrounding area as a sound and a shockwave.
Then the Iron Monger stood up.
Through her scope, Eleanor watched this happen.
"I did say the shock absorption was extraordinary." She said it to no one in particular, in the tone of someone watching something that was troubling them on a professional level.
The physics involved were doing things physics should not have been doing. A tank dropped from that altitude would be scrap. This was not a tank, but by any reasonable calculation it should have been significantly more damaged than it appeared to be.
She filed this away under technology that was beyond current explanation and kept watching.
In the street below, Tony's mouth was doing the same thing it did when things went wrong in ways he hadn't anticipated. He stared at the undamaged Iron Monger and said nothing.
"Sir." JARVIS spoke quietly. "I would recommend contacting Mr. Lawrence for assistance."
Tony looked at the Iron Monger, which was already moving toward him.
"Believe me, I want to." He sounded like a man who had run out of argument. "But look at where we are right now. Is there even time?"