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Dr. Calder stood in the rotor wash with his hair blown sideways and his entire professional worldview in shambles.
He had the hollow-eyed look of a man who had attended his own funeral and was still trying to figure out how to explain it to his mother.
"Blackout. You're coming with me this time. We need to clear the seabed."
At Ethan's command, the ten-meter Transformer rose from its kneeling position with a low hydraulic hiss. Its red optical sensors tracked down to Ethan's location and locked on. No objection. No hesitation. In Blackout's hardcoded loyalty architecture, the Master's orders were absolute, and the concept of pushing back didn't exist.
Before man and machine could move, Calder snapped out of his stupor.
"NO."
He lunged forward, crossed the deck in three strides, and threw both arms around Blackout's ankle.
If the researcher had been in his right mind, he would have noticed that he was currently hugging a five-foot-wide armored pylon that could crush him without noticing. But Calder was not in his right mind. Calder was in a place beyond rational self-preservation.
"You cannot go down there!"
He turned wild eyes on Ethan.
"Are you out of your mind?! You want this to go down with you? Do you have any idea what two thousand meters of pressure does to joint bearings, sealed electronics, rotor assemblies? This thing transforms! That means hundreds of moving parts, mechanical seams, interlocking panels! The second it hits deep water, every gasket fails, every servo floods, every electronic component short-circuits! It will be a ten-meter paperweight at the bottom of the ocean!"
He jabbed a finger at the Transformer like it was evidence in a trial.
"And I don't care how it transforms into a helicopter — I have never, in my entire life, seen a helicopter that can be submerged. That's because HELICOPTERS CANNOT BE SUBMERGED."
Ethan looked down at the researcher clinging to Blackout's ankle and, for the second time that afternoon, found himself impressed by Calder's commitment. The man had spent half a day oscillating between contempt, denial, and awe, and yet here he was, throwing himself onto a war machine's leg to prevent what he perceived as a fatal engineering mistake.
It was actually kind of sweet.
Also deeply, fundamentally wrong.
"Dr. Calder." Ethan's voice was patient. "The metal in Blackout's chassis isn't a metal you've read about. The Spark reorganized it at the molecular level. J.A.R.V.I.S. can't even identify it, and J.A.R.V.I.S. has the periodic table memorized in forty-seven ways. I've put it through shock testing, chemical exposure, and ballistic trials. Medium-range missiles don't leave dents. Water pressure at two thousand meters is trivial to this chassis."
Calder didn't let go.
"Professor Mercer, with respect, 'I put it through shock testing' is not the same as 'I submerged it to two thousand meters of crushing abyssal pressure.' One of those is recoverable if you're wrong."
Ethan considered the argument. It was, in fairness, a legitimate concern.
Except I'm not wrong.
In the source memories — the Earth-Prime memories the System had downloaded — Megatron had been submerged tens of thousands of meters into an oceanic trench and frozen for millennia. When he was finally resurrected, the cold and the pressure hadn't degraded his chassis by a single component. Transformer-grade material was beyond anything conventional engineering could produce, and Blackout was built to the same standard.
But explaining all of that to Calder would require revealing either the System or his Earth-Prime knowledge, neither of which he was prepared to do.
Blackout, meanwhile, was having a different kind of patience crisis.
A flicker of impatience moved through the Transformer's optical sensors. Decepticon-class units had, by design, aggressive temperaments. Blackout's protocols recognized Ethan's authority as absolute, but his hardcoded attitude toward other humans ranged from dismissive to actively hostile. In the source lore, a Decepticon would have crushed this clinging, noisy human beneath his foot without a thought.
But the protocols embedded during his Spark-activation were non-negotiable. The Master's order: You are not permitted to harm any human without explicit authorization.
So Blackout did the minimum his protocols allowed.
He flexed his right ankle.
Just a small, controlled flex. A pulse of movement through the joint assembly that translated into a shockwave up Calder's arms and sent the researcher tumbling backward across the deck in a graceless, undignified roll.
Calder came to a stop against a bulkhead, blinking.
He was unharmed. Which, given that the force that had just moved him was sufficient to snap a human spine, was clear evidence of deliberate restraint on Blackout's part.
Ethan shot the Transformer a warning look. Blackout's optical sensors dimmed in the mechanical equivalent of an apology.
"Right." Ethan closed the Mark Five's mask. "Let's go."
He stepped to the edge of the deck and dove.
Blackout hefted the fifty-ton reactor onto one shoulder like it was a duffel bag, walked to the railing, and leaped.
The splash was catastrophic.
Water erupted fifteen meters into the air. The research vessel rocked hard against the displacement wave. Every Bureau guard grabbed the nearest fixed object. Calder, still on his back against the bulkhead, managed to stare at the bubbling patch of ocean where Blackout had just vanished and muttered something that may or may not have been a prayer.
-----
Two thousand meters down, the reactor delivery went smoothly.
Blackout set the cargo gently on the cleared area of seabed — gently, because "gently" for a ten-meter war machine still produced a concussive thump that kicked up a cloud of sediment visible a hundred meters in every direction. Ethan and his new partner began the final preparation work.
The light-sensitive marine life returned, as expected. Schools of curious, territorial creatures swarmed in to investigate the new intruders. They discovered, in short order, that Blackout had a very different attitude toward being bitten than Ethan did.
Where Ethan had been shooting warning bursts and trying to minimize harm, Blackout's approach was more direct. A meter-wide mechanical hand closed around one of the larger creatures, and a split second later, there was no creature. Just fragments, drifting in the current.
The remaining marine life learned extremely quickly. The swarm dispersed.
Thirty minutes of demolition work later, the site was properly cleared — larger than the previous attempt, more thoroughly leveled, with Blackout hauling away the debris in the casual manner of a man moving furniture.
Ethan positioned the reactor at the center of the cleared area.
"Ready for deployment. J.A.R.V.I.S., you have the conn."
"Understood, sir. Deployment initiating."
The reactor housing — which, to Calder's eye topside, had looked like a decorative oversized base — came alive. Four thick mechanical legs extended from the bottom of the assembly, rotated with the whine of industrial-grade torque, and drove themselves into the seabed rock with the focused aggression of pile drivers. Each leg punched through several meters of rock and sediment, locking the reactor to the seafloor with anchoring force that would resist anything short of tectonic movement.
The reactor's core began to pulse. The pale-blue glow deepened, steadied, and settled into the rich, dark-blue signature of Stark-Element fusion.
"Core stable, sir. Initiating low-frequency sonar."
The swarm of marine life that had been creeping back toward the light abruptly stopped. Then turned. Then fled, cohesively and at speed, as the sonar pulse drove them away from the reactor's operating radius.
Ethan floated in the current and watched the reactor take root.
The light from the fusion core bathed the seabed in deep-blue illumination, turning the sediment and rock formations into something almost otherworldly. It was beautiful, in a way he hadn't expected.
If this runs clean…
He let the thought settle. A functioning undersea fusion reactor, producing clean energy at scale, immune to conventional environmental risks, fed by a newly synthesized element that nobody else in the world could produce. The commercial implications were absurd. Every nation on the planet would want this technology. Every power company. Every military. Every industrial operation that required large-scale energy input.
The energy company he was about to found was going to print money at a rate that would embarrass actual currency printers.
And it had started with a glowing rock.
"Deployment complete, sir." J.A.R.V.I.S.'s voice was as calm as ever. "Reactor is operational. Output curve nominal. Monitoring all systems."
Ethan exhaled. Not relief, exactly. Satisfaction.
Because unlike the earlier inventions, this one wasn't purely the System's work. The Stark Element had come from the Mall, yes. But the pressure-resistant framework, the anchoring system, the deep-sea containment housing, the sediment-resistant coolant circulation — all of it, every supporting component, had been designed by Ethan personally using the knowledge that was now part of his own mind. He'd been drawing on his own expertise, not just reading off a blueprint.
J.A.R.V.I.S. had run the simulations. But Ethan had done the engineering.
A flicker of genuine pride went through him.
Turns out I'm not bad at this even without the System.
He turned to Blackout and tapped his own chest plate. "Come on. Time to head up."
Man and Transformer rose through two thousand meters of darkness, back toward the light.
-----
Three hours later, after confirming via J.A.R.V.I.S. that the reactor was running clean, stable, and within all projected parameters, Ethan picked up his phone and dialed Graves.
"Well?" Graves's voice came through on the first ring. He was doing his best impression of a man who wasn't pacing his office, and failing. "Did it work?"
Ethan took a long, theatrical breath.
"Comrade Graves," he said, in the exact tone of a man settling in for a story, "I heard you've been very busy lately. Your schedule is packed. I almost didn't want to make this call—"
"Ethan."
"—given how much official business you have to attend to—"
"Ethan."
"—but I felt it was important—"
"TELL ME IF IT WORKED OR I WILL HAVE YOU ARRESTED FOR WASTING MY TIME."
Ethan dropped the act.
"It worked. Deployment successful. The reactor is operational, stable, and producing clean output at baseline parameters."
Silence on the other end.
Then the sound of a chair being pushed back hard enough to hit the wall.
"It actually succeeded."
"I told you it would succeed."
"Send me the coordinates."
Ethan transmitted the latitude and longitude. The line went quiet for several minutes as Graves, presumably, cross-referenced the location against national maritime charts, international shipping lanes, and military territorial boundaries.
When Graves spoke again, his voice had the specific quality of a man who'd just realized the implications of what he was looking at.
"Ethan. Do you know what you've just built in the middle of my Southern Sea?"
"An energy facility."
"An inviolable strategic asset that produces industrial-grade power from a depth and in a material framework that no foreign nation can replicate, inspect, or interdict. That is not an energy facility. That is a geopolitical artifact."
"So… yes?"
"Ethan."
"I know."
"This changes the map."
"I know."
A long pause.
"Well." Graves's voice softened, just slightly. "Congratulations, kid."
"Thanks."
"Now get back here. We have a lot to talk about."
He hung up.
On the deck of the Meridian Wave, Ethan slipped the phone into his pocket and looked out over the calm, blue expanse of water. Somewhere below, two thousand meters down, his reactor was quietly producing enough energy to rewire the economics of an industry.
And behind him, standing on the rear deck, Dr. Zachary Calder was staring at the transmitted sensor feed on his tablet with the wide-eyed, slightly unhinged expression of a man whose field of study had just been permanently rewritten by events he had witnessed in person.
Calder looked up, met Ethan's eyes across the deck, and managed a single, slightly shaky sentence.
"Professor Mercer. When do we start the next one?"
Ethan grinned.
"Tomorrow, Dr. Calder."
"We have an empire to build."