He looked at Banner.
“I mean no offense. You are a gifted scientist. Some of your work has shown merit.”
“But I’m hardly your equal?” asked Banner.
“Of course not. But actually, I was going on to say that a man of your intelligence will soon wish to assist me, not thwart me.”
“This is going to be good,” said Banner.
“The world is about to die, Doctor,” said the High Evolutionary. “It has, I estimate, four to six months left. I intend to save it.”
“By, let me guess, ruling the world?” asked Banner.
“That’s very perspicacious. Exactly.”
“I was joking.”
“I was not.”
Banner narrowed his eyes.
“The world is going to die?” he asked.
“Very soon.”
“On what do you base that assumption?”
“I have a very reliable source, Doctor,” said the High Evolutionary.
“How—”
“Please, Doctor. If you listen and let me speak, you will find that I will answer all of your questions without you having to ask them.”
“You’ve just evaded one.”
“Doctor Banner—”
“Where’s the gamma source, Wyndham?” Banner asked. “What is it?”
“A stockpile of radioisotopes. Primarily Potassium-40, with additional high-energy electron amplification.”
“It’s a massive radiation hazard,” said Banner. He raised his hand. The gemstone on his ring was so dark blue it was almost black. “You haven’t shielded it. It’s causing untold harm to this population center. Wyndham, you—”
“Doctor Banner,” replied the High Evolutionary, “in three days’ time, the stockpile will form the core of a gamma bomb that will annihilate Madripoor, along with the South Eastern Pacific Zone, and irradiate the entire planet. So you see, shielding it is really rather a waste of effort.”
ELEVEN
WASHINGTON, D.C.
08.53 LOCAL, JUNE 12TH
TONY STARK was starting to gray out. Oblivion seemed like a merciful release from his suffering, but he knew that was just the oxygen starvation talking. His body wanted him to shut down so that the pain would stop.
His brain had other ideas.
With a sharp grunt of effort, he clamped his hands around Ultron’s forearm. Ultron’s grip tightened. Armor cracked and failed. Stark’s dangling legs kicked and swung.
He fired both palm repulsors.
The close-focus blast, contained between his clamping hands, blew Ultron’s arm off at the elbow, disintegrating it. The force of the savage energy release sent Iron Man flying backwards. He hit the ground hard, bounced, rolled, bounced again, and then slid to a halt.
He blacked out. Just for a second.
The alerts and flash notices pinging in his helmet brought him back. Multiple fault diagnostics appeared across his visor display in bold, red, pulsing letters.
The visual emphasis had seemed like a good idea when he’d designed it. Now, with so many alerts coming at once, he could barely see anything except bold, red, pulsing lettering.
“Cancel alert notifications,” he grunted. He could taste blood. He was going to have to put his chiropractor on a performance bonus to sort out his neck. There was a Shiatsu therapist named Summer who could probably help him out, as well.
He tried to sit up. His armor was scuffed and dented, but it was the dynamic systems that concerned him. Using his glove repulsors on such a tight focus had been a gamble. The left one had fried completely, and the right one had buckled. Automatic-repair systems were patching fast, but it would take workshop time to bring the suit back to its A-game.
Stark blinked. He looked down and exclaimed in disgust at the sight of Ultron’s massive right hand still locked around his neck. The tattered stub of the forearm hung across his chest like an oversized medallion. It was very uncool. He hadn’t worn medallions like that since the nineties.
With both hands, he struggled to prize the dead hand off his throat. His hands hurt. The back-blast had scorched through to his palms. He wrenched the wrecked hand free and tossed it aside.
It landed on the concrete floor beside him. Then it twitched, flexed its fingers, and started to crawl back toward him.
Stark expressed his revulsion in words that, once again, his publicist would not have appreciated. He rolled away from the crawling hand. God, he hurt. Never mind the sidebar diagnostics on his HUD, listing the twenty-seven separate suit systems that were either compromised or flat-out inoperable. He wondered what the diagnostics on his own body would read like.
The hand clattered toward him. His repulsors were no-go, so he twisted and aimed his left boot at it. A blast of his boot jet sent the hand flying across the chamber.
Good thing he didn’t have a problem with spiders.
He struggled to his feet. He did have a problem with giant, homicidal, world-destroying robot sentients. Where the hell was the rest of Ultron?
Thick smoke and clouds of nanite dust were impairing visibility. The flames from various fires around the Black Chamber weren’t helping much, either. He couldn’t get any decent resolution because his suit’s optical systems were damaged. He thought about raising his visor and using his actual eyes, but that would mean losing suit-seal integrity.
Then again, he’d probably lost it already. His armor was pretty badly damaged. There could be multiple tears and punctures to both the inner and outer skins. Even micro-fractures would be enough to let the subatomic nanites pour in. He wouldn’t be able to tell it was happening. Even his damage-assessment system was damaged.
He wouldn’t be able to tell it was happening until it was too late. It was probably happening right now. It—
“Ah, the hell with it,” he said, and popped his visor. The Iron Man faceplate, its gold finish grazed, lifted up, and retracted back and over his forehead.
He could smell the harsh smoke, the burning plastics, the dust, the dirty carbons. He could feel the heat on his skin.
And he could see.
“Prioritize optical-system repair,” he told his suit. “No, prioritize repulsor reset. No, prioritize both. Dammit, just fix yourself fast!”
He stepped forward. The ground around him was littered with the mangled, burning ruins of nanoforms. Glass and metal debris crunched beneath his boot treads. One of the block servers nearby sputtered sparks and fumed with sheets of smoke from its core. Tattered cables swung overhead. He could feel the invisible nanites crawling over the skin of his face, down his neck, into his suit. No, it was probably just sweat.
No, probably nanites.
“Hey, Ultron?” he called. “We done?”
Nothing stirred apart from the flames.
“Ultron? Buddy? Don’t go away mad. The party isn’t over yet. We’re gonna play beer hunter.”
Still no external data link, and no comms. The world outside could have ended. The Zero Six countdown was purely speculative now, flashing meaningless numbers like a bedside alarm clock after a power outage. But even a bedside alarm clock after a power outage winked the right time twice a day. Or something…
“Shut up, Anthony,” he told himself. Get back in the game. Get back in the damned game. His mind was wandering. He’d probably taken a knock to the head. Concussion? A subdural? He—
“Shut up, Anthony,” he repeated. Of course, many people—Clint Barton, in particular—thought Stark had taken a knock to the head years ago and had been acting crazy ever since. So—
“Shut the hell up!” he growled at himself.
Was the world outside dead? No way of knowing. The ASI end-of-everything, goodbye-humanity event could have taken place while he had been fighting Ultron. Maybe he was just a lunatic, survivor throwback to organic days—limping around a burning warehouse in a broken tin suit, believing that there was still hope.
Then again, he’d been so thoroughly invaded by nanites that he could have been disassembled without k
nowing it and remade into a nanoform that merely thought it was still human. He could be part of it all now. If that was true, Singularity sucked. Stark did not feel in any way enlightened or hyper-aware. If the nanites’ intent had been to make him one with everything, then they’d forgotten the mayo, the cheese, the onions, the relish, and the pickle on the side.
The thought of the nanites made his skin crawl all over again. He felt an itch on his chin, and he hurriedly brushed it away. No, not nanites. Just blood, trickling from his mouth.
Like that was a good thing.
He’d expected a nanoform attack by now. There had been plenty of them, and they’d been hunting to kill. Where—
There was a ping. Diagnostics. Right repulsor, sixty-five-percent repair achieved.
Just in time.
A nanoform came at him. It was eight feet tall, a smoke-blackened endoskeleton, the eyes in its skull-face glowing green. Its left hand formed a massive cleaver.
Stark ducked the blade swing, and then blasted the thing in the chest with his repulsor. The nanoform toppled backwards. A second one struck at him from the left. He delivered a repulsor blast to its face before it could sink its talons into him.
Right repulsor, power failure. Offline.
Great.
The third nanoform hit him from behind. Stark fell and rolled with the impact, coming up into a crouch in time to block the charging humanoid with both hands. He crunched the fingers of his left hand into its chest casing, flinching as it rained blows at him with both fists. Holding it tight, he rose up and punched off its head.
He caught himself wondering why they looked so human. Why giant skeletal forms? Why the leering skulls? Was it to inspire fear?
No. Ultron admired the dynamic efficiency of the humanoid form. That’s why it had adopted that form for itself. The human skeleton was a machine that worked well. There was no particular need to revise the design aesthetically, but there was also no need for soft tissue or finishing. The nanoforms looked like skeletons simply because flesh was redundant.
Flesh was redundant.
“Now there’s a phrase I’m glad I coined,” murmured Stark.
He had to hit the next nanoform twice to put it down. The second punch knocked the skull’s jaw clean off in a fizz of sparks and metal fragments.
He glanced at the humanoids he had already felled. They would be repairing soon and—
They weren’t repairing. Not even slightly.
In fact, they seemed to be dissolving, breaking down into raw molecular material. The material flowed away across the ground like trickles of oil. The same thing was happening to the nanoforms he had destroyed earlier. Most of those had been reduced to metallic puddles.
He moved, following one of the trickling streams. He came around the end of another server block and froze.
He’d found Ultron.
The giant construct was crouching like some massive, noble sculpture by Rodin—part “Thinker,” part sprinter on the starting blocks. Ultron was using rapid nano-facture to repair itself. It was stripping down its servant nanoforms, cannibalizing them for mass and material. The inky streams of base matter gurgled toward Ultron from all directions, fusing and flowing into its reassembling form. Its arms had regrown, and the damage to its chest was closing. Stark could see its missing hands recomposing before his very eyes, the plating case of its limbs forming a polished sheath.
Ultron was almost complete again. That was bad. Very bad. Stark was in no way fit or equipped to go another round.
But the nano-facture strip-down? That was a positive. Somehow, Ultron’s resources had been radically restricted. That suggested containment. Maybe a break in external power supplies.
Ultron saw him. The giant rose out of its crouch and began to stride across the warehouse floor, each step shaking the ground and cracking debris underfoot.
Stark made his publicist unhappy again.
He ducked back around the server and started to run. He flipped his visor back down and checked the diagnostics. Some repairs had been completed. Flight options were screwed, repulsors were out, and his force fields hadn’t been working for about five minutes. No comms, no data-externals, impaired targeting/reaction systems, and nothing in the way of battery reserve. And his appointment calendar was showing January the forty-third, 1872.
On the plus side, optics were back at decent function levels, and he had reasonable armor integrity, about forty-percent motive power, and a functioning unibeam—though one decent shot from that would suck his power down to zero.
“Anthony,” Ultron boomed. It came around the server, shoving the heavy black unit aside with its hand. The server shunted and wobbled.
Stark swerved behind another server and ran along the row. He could feel Ultron’s footsteps. A server shrieked against the concrete floor as Ultron pushed it out of the way.
“Anthony.”
“You want to talk it out, Ultron?” Stark called back as he scooted between the ends of two servers. The units slammed together like clashing cliffs. Iron Man threw himself out of the gap to avoid being crushed. Smoke and gouts of flame belched from the servers, crumpled end-to-end like two locomotives that had collided head-on.
“No, Anthony. I want to kill you.”
“Oh, where’s the fun in that?” Stark replied. He picked himself up and ran on. An entire server came flying at him. Stark hurled himself out of the way. The unit buckled as it hit the ground and slid, raking sparks as it traveled.
Ultron loomed over him, reaching down. Stark rolled. He couldn’t let the construct get its hands on him. Once he was in Ultron’s grip, it would be game over, no respawning.
Ultron’s claws hit the ground, fracturing the concrete. Stark scrambled up and ran. He leapt, made the top of another server block, and ran along it. Ultron grabbed the end behind him and lifted it. Stark fell, sliding down the sloping top, and managed to land on his feet on the ground.
Ultron tossed the server aside. It strode forward and swung a punch. Stark dodged. The fist went into the side of another server, rupturing its systems in a fierce explosion.
Stark moved left, head down. Ultron wrenched its fist free and followed, gaining ground with each crashing stride. A punch finally connected. It was a glancing blow across Stark’s back, but more than enough to send him tumbling and clattering across the floor.
Ultron picked him up.
“Damn you!” Stark snarled. He fired his unibeam.
The blast staggered Ultron, composite abrading from its chest and neck like paint under a heat gun. It dropped Iron Man.
Winded, he tried to rise. His power was virtually spent. The frantic unibeam blast had expended most of his energy. The suit felt like a dead weight around him, cold and sluggishly unresponsive. He got to his feet, but he was too slow.
Ultron grabbed him by the torso and picked him up again.
“You have annoyed me, Anthony,” it said.
“But thwarted your scheme for ASI world domination?” gasped Stark. “Right? At least give me that.”
“No.”
“Really?”
“Only temporarily. I must regroup and reconfigure.”
“Don’t leave on my account,” said Stark.
“I will dispose of you, and then I will regroup and reinitialize the process.”
I’ve saved the world for about twenty minutes, thought Stark. Okay. That’s something. Or I’ve just prolonged its agonies by twenty minutes. Postponed the inevitable. Not quite so glorious. Either way, I’m dead.
Power? Just a little power? Pretty please? Just one last repulsor shot? Maybe a flare from the unibeam? Maybe—
Stark suddenly had a bad idea.
Auto-destruct? Suit self-destruct option? Was that even still working?
I’m dead anyway. I could at least take the son of a wrench with me.
“Code destruction sequence!” he yelled. “Stark, Anthony Edward. Authority 1181723!”
+Destruction sequence authenticated+
&
nbsp; “Initiate!”
+Destruction sequence initiated. Destruction in five, four, three…+
“Disable destruction sequence. Stark, Anthony Edward. Authority 1181723.”
+Sequence aborted and disabled+
Stark stared up at Ultron. The construct had mimicked his voice so perfectly it had fooled the armor’s speech recognition.
“Goodbye, Anthony,” said Ultron. “You—”
Silence.
“What?” asked Stark. “I what?”
Ultron had frozen. The light in its eyes faded. Smoke leaked from its angry mouth.
The Vision slowly withdrew his arm from the back of Ultron’s head. He was hovering behind the construct.
“Spoilsport,” said Stark. “Ultron was probably going to say something really important, and now we’ll never know.”
The synthetic-human Avenger drifted calmly into view. He was tall and beautiful, almost godlike in his human perfection. He was clad in green and yellow, his stern face scarlet. His cape billowed gently behind him.
“I arrived as swiftly as I could,” the Vision said.
“What did you do?” asked Stark.
“There was little time for subtlety,” replied the synthezoid. “I reduced my limb density to an intangible level, inserted it into Ultron’s cortex, and restored density to a state exceeding that of dupleted uranium.”
“You blew Ultron’s brains out?”
“Euphemistically,” the Vision agreed. “I catastrophically disabled Ultron’s cortical hardware.”
“Help me down, would you?” Stark requested.
With alarming ease, the Vision shredded Ultron’s frozen arm and hand and lowered Stark to the ground. Stark looked up at the immobilized monster.
“You did a hell of a job,” he said.
“On the contrary,” replied the Vision. “I was able to strike a decisive blow, but that opportunity was only available because you had delayed, denied, and occupied Ultron for so long. Even at the last moment, Ultron’s attention was on you. It would have attacked and countered me if it had not been so consumed by its hatred of you.”
“I bring out qualities in people,” said Stark. “I don’t know. It’s a gift.”
“It is quite possible,” said the Vision, “that you have, in effect, saved the world this morning. You were the first responder, and the only Avenger on the scene to combat Ultron’s threat. It was a determined and heroic feat. I am impressed.”