"I don't agree."
In the living area at the top of Avengers Tower, Steve clasped his hands in front of his face and flatly rejected Tony's proposal.
"We cannot bring Spider-Man into the Avengers."
"You were the one who supported the idea at first, Cap." Tony tapped his knuckles against the table. "You said he was trained, disciplined..."
"I said he had training. I didn't know there was a minor under that mask." Steve cut him off immediately. "Tony, we're dealing with war. We do not bring children into war."
Tony lowered his eyes to the table for a moment, then looked back up and pushed back.
"And war is going to spare a kid? Come on, Steve. You've been through war. You know what kind of war we're talking about. What we need is an army, not a small team. That kid could help."
"And I know better than anyone that a soldier without conviction is a bomb waiting to go off in the middle of the battlefield," Steve shot back. "We're talking about a child. A teenager who's only had these abilities for a few months. Does he really understand what he's fighting for? Maybe right now he's just acting on instinct, trying to do good because that's who he is. But the things the Avengers deal with? He's not ready for that."
The New Avengers Initiative.
That was the expansion plan Tony had proposed after the Battle of New York, an attempt to build a line of defense strong enough to survive the next extraterrestrial invasion. After all, this time the Chitauri had only come through a portal. If next time their fleet arrived directly at the edge of the solar system, could five Avengers really hold back an army of that scale?
It wasn't just the Avengers who understood that. Nick Fury knew it too.
After the Avengers split from S.H.I.E.L.D. and became an independent organization, S.H.I.E.L.D. put together its own enhanced team under Clint Barton, a fallback unit known as the Thunderbolts. Tony and Steve both knew it existed, and both of them had quietly chosen to avoid working too closely with Fury, who kept far too many secrets.
But right now, the argument over whether Spider-Man should be recruited to the Avengers was turning the room into a war zone all its own.
Bruce crunched through a mouthful of chips. As the team's nuclear deterrent, most of his time was usually spent in the lab anyway. Unlike the movie version, where everybody tended to drift toward their own lives, the Avengers in this world functioned more like a tightly coordinated combat unit, though Thor still had a habit of disappearing. For the moment Bruce was just watching the argument while thanking Janet as she set down a fruit platter.
"What are Tony and Cap even arguing about?"
"Uh, whether it's a good idea to recruit a high school kid into the Avengers." Bruce's mouth had gone dry from the chips, so he speared a piece of apple with a toothpick and ate it. "Honestly, I think the idea's kind of insane too."
Janet blinked in confusion.
"A high schooler? Seriously? You'd consider recruiting a high school student before considering me?"
Janet van Dyne, the Wasp, Hank Pym's girlfriend, was the Avengers' manager, not an Avenger herself.
"Yeah, but he's still just a kid, young, inexperienced, and still figuring things out" Tony took a slice of orange from the fruit platter and popped it into his mouth. "At least he wants to be a good person, and he's actually doing something about it. We can train him. We can guide him into becoming the kind of hero he needs to be. And if you still think it isn't a fit, Steve, we can at least ask whether he wants to join."
Tony flashed a sly smile.
"I don't think he'd say no."
And that was exactly what worried Steve.
"He'd admire us. He'd imitate us. He'd throw himself into danger trying to prove he belongs." Steve pushed the fruit platter aside, his knuckles whitening against the tabletop. "He'd end up dying in your arms or mine, asking if he did the right thing, just because we handed him more than he could carry. We'd be the ones who put that weight on him."
"We can protect him. Keep him behind us in the field..."
Steve cut him off again.
"How exactly are we supposed to protect a kid in a war where we ourselves might die?"
Janet rolled a cherry stem between her fingers, still looking lost. Bruce rubbed his temple, already feeling a headache coming on, before finally offering his first real suggestion.
"Since the aliens probably aren't showing up tomorrow, what if we table the question for a few years?"
"Thanks, Bruce." Tony pointed at him. "Any chance you can calculate the exact date of the next alien invasion for me? I need to plan my calendar."
"Never mind."
Bruce rubbed his jaw like a man with a toothache and looked over at Janet.
"What's Hank doing?"
"Locked in the lab with that Vibranium sample you brought in. He hasn't slept in two days." Janet rolled her eyes. "I've had to carry his meals in there myself."
"Maybe you're underestimating the kid, Steve." Tony kept pressing his point, though now it sounded less like persuasion and more like a refusal to lose the argument.
Steve was just as stubborn.
"No matter how highly you rate him, he's still a fifteen-year-old kid, Tony."
"I had my first doctorate at sixteen. How old were you when you got your first one, Bruce?"
"Uh, sixteen. For experimental physics."
"Guys, you are not going to believe what I found..." Hank Pym came out of the lab looking half-dead, hair a complete mess and dark circles carved deep under his eyes, one of the confiscated Shocker launchers still in his hand. He didn't even get to finish before Tony cut him off.
"When did you get your first doctorate, Hank?"
"Seventeen? Why?"
Tony grinned triumphantly.
"Aha. I was younger."
"You studied engineering. I studied theoretical physics and quantum mechanics. Of course you got there at sixteen."
"Anyway." Tony wisely dragged the conversation back toward the point and turned to Steve again. "Fifteen isn't that young."
"We're not talking about age, we're talking about mental readiness..."
"Guys!"
Hank cut in more forcefully this time, finally forcing both of them to stop.
"You need to hear this. You are seriously not going to believe what I found in the lab."
"We can listen to your scientific breakthrough in a minute, Hank."
"This isn't a scientific breakthrough, Tony." Hank's expression hardened. "This concerns active operations."
A few minutes later, a schematic of the Shocker launcher, now disassembled into pieces, was projected onto the screen. The Avengers gathered around and stared at the structure diagram while waiting for Hank to explain.
"This thing is crude. Really crude. At first I thought it had to rely on Chitauri components to function at all."
As he spoke, Hank manipulated the projection and swapped out every Chitauri component in the schematic for existing Earth-made parts.
"But look at this. Whoever designed it is a gifted engineer. This thing can be built entirely with Earth technology."
That clearly was not the point, but by now everyone in the room knew Hank well enough to let him finish the part where he talked about how remarkable the invention was and how much he had enjoyed dissecting it. Eventually he got to the real issue.
"The problem is that the system has a fatal flaw. The longer it's used, the more efficient its energy conversion becomes. Yes, you heard that right. More efficient over time. Which means the system regulating output strength gradually stops working. The longer it runs, the harder it becomes to control. Higher and higher output, over and over..."
Everyone in the room reached the same conclusion.
Explosion.
"Can't it be fixed?" Tony leaned back in his chair, supporting his chin as he stared at the schematic, trying to think through the problem the way another engineer and inventor would.
Even he had to admit it.
The flaw was buried in the system's core logic. It could not be saved.
"It's a fundamental design problem. If you want something this simplified and this efficient, the flaw is the cost. We need to warn the police about how unstable the technology is before they decide to adapt it into riot-control gear..."
"Blast radius?"
Poor Hank got interrupted again, but this time he answered immediately.
"If it's using Chitauri components, the yield is larger, maybe a diameter of two to three kilometers. If it's rebuilt using only Earth tech, the blast is smaller and more predictable. Roughly one kilometer."
"J.A.R.V.I.S., what was that guy's name again..."
"Herman Schultz," Steve said at once. He remembered it clearly.
Hank still had not caught up to what was happening, but Tony and Steve exchanged a look and both realized the same thing.
"How long has he been out, Cap?"
"Almost a week."
"And we have no idea how many unstable weapons he could have built in a week." Tony let out a long sigh. "That is the real problem."
(End of Chapter)
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