Chapter 101
The Thompson Corp building was quiet. Too quiet. Lifeless.
The automatic doors slid open silently to let them through. The lights were on. Climate control held the temperature at a perfect level. Every system was running, but not a single living soul occupied the building. No security, no assistants. The latter wasn't surprising. Fury would have been astonished if Thompson trusted anyone here besides Stacy and Parker.
He and Coulson swept the first two floors methodically. On the third, they found what they were looking for.
One of the labs stood in sharp contrast to the sterile emptiness of the rest of the building. Work had clearly been underway here, interrupted without warning. Equipment hummed. Several lab computers were active, their screens running streams of data. On the lab bench sat Gwen Stacy's suit, folded neatly. Beside it lay a pair of boots, worn and old-looking at first glance.
"The Hood," Fury muttered grimly. He recognized them immediately. A clue? Or more questions? One thing was clear: these boots needed to be isolated and examined immediately.
"AI. Rubedo," Fury said, recalling the name Thompson had used. "What happened here?"
Silence. The equipment ran, and so were the building's systems. Rubedo was clearly online. Fury could feel it. But it was either operating in some passive, low-power mode or, far more likely, had been designed to respond only to Thompson. Fury would have chosen the second option.
After twenty minutes sweeping the upper floors and confirming no one was present, Fury and Coulson returned to the lab. Just in time. A message came through: Stacy and Parker had entered the building.
"What happened, Director Fury?" the girl asked the moment she stepped into the lab. Parker followed quietly behind her, looking tense, his eyes slightly narrowed as if listening for something.
"Thompson's disappeared," Fury said, not bothering to soften the blow. He watched the color drain from the girl's face immediately. Right. They were dating. Perhaps he should have been more tactful. Then again, tact was the enemy of efficiency, and efficiency was exactly what they needed right now.
"If either of you knows or senses anything, I want to hear it," Fury continued. Parker answered before Stacy could.
"It's strange," he said finally. "It's my sense... I could always feel John, even faintly. I always knew he was somewhere nearby. But right now, there's only emptiness. Like he's just not there."
"What does that mean?" Stacy turned to him, shaken.
"He's invisible to my sense. That's all I can say," Parker answered, scratching his head.
"Death?" Fury suggested flatly, once again noting how pale Stacy had gone.
"No. I would have felt that," Parker said with a faint grimace. "At least I want to believe I would. This is something different. Something else."
His gaze landed on the Hood's boots sitting on the bench.
"Everyone back!" he barked, so sharply and suddenly that even Fury felt the jolt. "Get back from the table, all of you!"
The Director of S.H.I.E.L.D. obeyed instantly, stepping toward the exit.
The four of them stood at the entrance to the lab and stared at the boots. They exchanged glances for a moment before Parker finally spoke.
"They're dangerous. Very dangerous," Parker said, swallowing hard. "I don't know how, but they call out. They pull. Like they're whispering for someone to put them on. I can tell that touching them would end badly."
Without hesitation, he raised his hand toward the bench, curled his middle and ring fingers, and fired a web line. It struck the boots with extraordinary precision, sealing them in a tight white cocoon.
"I've done what I can to isolate them. The webbing won't go anywhere unless I want it to, but it's best if no one enters this room without good reason." Another quick motion sent Stacy's suit sailing into her hands.
"Is Thompson's disappearance connected to these boots?" Fury asked, voicing what they were all thinking.
"I don't know," Peter said, shaking his head. "Everything connected to John is a complete mystery to me right now. But I can't give you specifics on the boots either. So there has to be some kind of link."
"Understood." Fury nodded, thinking through the next steps. Something had to be done.
"He's alive!" Stacy said, her voice unexpectedly firm. It didn't sound like denial. It sounded like stubborn, irrational certainty.
"I'm inclined to agree with you," Fury said, returning to cold logic. Killing Thompson was genuinely difficult. If Taskmaster's assessment was to be believed, his combat power was close to Omega-level. "But in that case, we have to consider that something exists capable of abducting Thompson."
"And isolating him completely. Hiding him from everything," Parker added grimly.
"Then that's the working theory for now," Fury agreed. "S.H.I.E.L.D. will commit every resource to finding him."
Fury meant that. He had a plan: Xavier. The Trask "Sentinels" project alone, which had vanished so quickly after the 'unexpected' deaths of all its key sponsors, said a lot. Brain hemorrhages. Accidents. Fury despised mind-readers, especially Omega-level ones. But Xavier was the only telepath on the planet capable of finding anyone.
"I will run my own search too," Parker said with a serious nod.
"So will I," Stacy added, pulling her suit close.
Fury doubted either of them would get far. Honestly, he wasn't confident in the Xavier plan either. What he said, though, was something else entirely.
"I am counting on your help. Consider this the Vanguard's first operational mission."
*****
October 22.
That date is a lie. I made it up. I don't know what the actual date is. My only anchor in this infinite void is the System's timer. The pathetic twenty-four-hour remnant left over from "World Forging."
Day two in space.
It was a day I spent, possibly for the first time in this world, just thinking (if you could even call the slow, sluggish, automaton-like process in my head "thinking").
Every attempt to work through a complex, multi-step problem, every time I tried to recall a sophisticated formula, I hit a wall. A blank. A place where an information package used to be.
"Amputation" was still the most accurate word.
The key conclusion from all that thinking was simple and bleak: in this wretched world, you could not breathe too loudly without drawing unwanted attention. Dormammu, Anansi, and how many more were out there watching the Spark? It was a small comfort that watching it would now be considerably harder, if not impossible.
I also thought about everything I would need to account for once I got back to Earth. I would need to literally draw up protocols for every conceivable situation, and for some inconceivable ones. That would be the first thing on Rubedo's task list when I returned. Though Rubedo would already have far too many things on his list. At a minimum, between the two of us, he was now the only one who retained full access to "Creation." And there would be things to build, things that did not depend on the System, things that were mine.
Speaking of the System: the timer had reset. Time to pull my daily lottery ticket.
[Information Package (Uncommon) received: Mechromancer (Borderlands). Package duration: 24 hours!]
You possess an intuitive talent for gunsmithing and robotics in the Borderlands style. You effortlessly build and maintain standard firearms, power shields, and robotic companions. Your skills also allow you to quickly grasp and apply esoteric technologies such as E-Tech.
Key Effects:
Digi-Struct: You can create temporary digital copies of weapons or items. These Digi-Structs function perfectly but are unstable, tending to detonate spectacularly after brief use.
Legendary Upgrade: Your primary ability. With the right components and a baseline "good" weapon, you can modify and upgrade it to Legendary status. This process turns an ordinary item into a truly unique weapon with special properties.
Signature Style: Regardless of their original appearance, all Legendary items crafted or upgraded with this skill take on a distinctive pearl-like sheen.
I stared blankly at the description for several seconds. Borderlands. A world of guns. Millions of guns. Robots. E-Tech. And me: naked, in a vacuum, without a single bolt to my name. This was not just useless. It was mockery.
One small observation for the record: the System had become slightly more adaptive. The description was more detailed than the "Energist" entry had been. Not that it changed anything. For the next twenty-four hours I would be drifting in this frozen void just the same. Frustrating.
But an engineer's mind, even one so drastically reduced, demanded analysis. I tried to absorb the concepts behind the skill, just in case. "Digi-Structs." Unfortunately, as the description said, these were copies. I could not create a digital spacecraft out of nothing. I needed an original to copy. And I had the feeling that even if I had one, I would not manage it. The size limit was quite strict: nothing larger than a mid-sized mounted turret. Something along those lines had been a limitation in the actual game too, if memory served.
My memory was not something I had much faith in right now. I did not have much faith in anything anymore.
This was not depression. Depression was emotion, a surge. Over the past twenty-four hours I had experienced more emotion than in both of my lives combined. What was left now was something else. Cold, measured acknowledgment of facts. Vacuum outside, vacuum inside.
And that state had turned out to be useful, strangely enough. It made it easier to enter something like suspended animation. Switch off the higher brain functions and reduce Extremis activity to the bare minimum needed to maintain body heat. Then simply wait. Make time pass faster.
Like now. Twenty-four hours had gone by almost instantly. Another full day of my life burned away in the void. Twenty-four hours during which Earth could have been destroyed a dozen times over. And here I was. On a cosmic vacation. Ha.
October 23. Third daily pull:
[Information Package (Common) received: Integrated Geo-Navigator (Dead Space). Package duration: 24 hours!]
You have gained a temporary (24 hours) quasi-sense that functions as an internal "locator" for valuable resources. You instinctively feel a pull toward deposits of rare metals, gemstones, crystals, and any other forms of general purpose treasure.
This "pull" has a unique signature for each type of material, allowing you to intuitively distinguish what it is drawing you toward. As an additional effect, this skill fundamentally sharpens your overall sense of direction, allowing you to simply know the correct path to a destination, as if you had a perfect internal compass marking the route for you.
The cold, sticky apathy I had sunk into to enter suspended animation cracked and fell apart. Dead Space. Dead Cosmos. The irony was not lost on me. But this, this was something to work with. This was not "Energist," boosting the efficiency of nothing. This was not "Mechromancer," refusing to let me build guns out of nothing. This was an actual tool. This was a chance.
The fog lifted as if it had never been there. I pushed my sluggish mind to its limits, actively listening to the new sensations. I probed the void, trying to analyze what had previously seemed like absolute nothingness to me.
Objective? Find something. Anything. An asteroid. A comet. Resources.
Unfortunately, the void was exactly that. I didn't know the exact radius of my temporary ability, but it was enormous and empty. I floated at the center of a vast, frozen nothing.
What now? Wait? Wait for this gift to fade so the next pull could turn out just as useless as the ones before it? No. I wasn't about to pass up a chance to find an asteroid I could break down for materials later. If there was nothing within my radius, I needed to move that radius. I needed to go.
Trust my intuition? No, to hell with that. I was trusting basic logic. I was completely blind; the nanobot cocoon covered my entire body, including my eyes. But the skill gave me a perfect internal compass.
I chose a direction. Random? Possibly. But the compass inside me was silent, which meant one direction was as good as any other. I concentrated plasma into my legs. The nano-skin tightened, forming improvised thrusters. I oriented myself in space and gave the mental command.
A jet of superheated plasma fired into the void. I lurched forward.
It was a colossal risk. Energy expenditure increased exponentially. My estimated survival reserve, which I had stretched to three months of passive waiting, had now collapsed to one month. I had traded two months of passive drifting for a few hours of active flight. But I was done waiting for the System's random mercy. I needed to take things into my own hands. I was a spacecraft now.
Speed built. The absence of air resistance meant every engine pulse added to it. I had probably already reached speeds comparable to those of spacecraft. Dozens of kilometers per second? Something like that. It was unpleasant to be less intelligent. Before, I would have calculated it instantly.
Opening the System interface, I noted that I had been actively flying for roughly seven hours. Seven hours burning precious calories, flying blind through the void. And in all that time: nothing. The Geo-Navigator was silent.
I was about to cut the 'thruster boots' mode. It made sense to assume that after building up some extreme velocity, I could coast the rest of the way on inertia and conserve energy.
And it was exactly at that moment that the ping came.
It didn't reach my ears. It reached my mind. At the very edge of my new sense. Far away. Very far away, something was moving through space. A signature. The Geo-Navigator analyzed it. Ice? Yes. Definitely ice. But not only that. Large. Much larger than me. Too soon to say exactly what. But the internal compass, silent until now, suddenly sparked to life and pointed to a clear vector. That way. Turn left, or whatever direction counted as left in open space.
I cut thrust. Carefully, using short bursts, I rotated my body in space and fired the plasma drive again, pushing toward the target.
Now I was certain. An asteroid. Or a comet. The closer I got, the sharper the picture became. Primary composition: water ice. Additional contents: yes, carbon. And two gases, specifically ammonia and methane.
Size. If I could, I would have let out a low whistle. The analyzer showed something in the range of seven to eight kilometers in diameter. Were asteroids actually that large? My amputated brain struggled to recall basic astronomy. Apparently yes; they just burned up in the atmosphere, and only fragments reached the surface. Well, in my case, no complaints.
This ice could be broken down into components. More oxygen for my recirculator. More carbon for the nanobots' raw material. Even hydrogen was in there. I had no idea what to do with it yet, not without advanced knowledge, but I was counting it as fuel.
This find could sustain me for months. Maybe years. That was a sobering thought. I hoped it wouldn't come to that.
The flight to the asteroid took a solid twelve hours. By cosmic standards, an instant. And there I was. I hadn't braked. I simply cut the engine and let inertia do its work.
CRUNCH.
I slammed into a massive wall of ice, leaving a deep, body-shaped impression on its surface. The nanobots and Extremis absorbed the impact. I was down on solid ground.
I allowed myself a mental exhale. For the first time in three days, it wasn't an exhale of despair. It was relief. I had a foothold.
Now I waited out the remaining hours until the timer reset, then made the next pull.
I took one last sweep with the Geo-Navigator in all directions. Nothing. For tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of kilometers, there was nothing but this enormous block of ice. My new temporary home.
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