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Ninth in the Space Electric series, on from Liminal Transmission. Back to Tony POV, this one.
Title: FleetHome
Rating: R
Fandom: Avengers movieverse
Characters/Pairings: Tony, JARVIS, Maria, Fury, Barbara, Meroe, primarily, mention of the Avengers. Tony & JARVIS, Tony & Fury, Maria & Meroe, Maria & Tony, Maria & Fury
Summary: The fleet finally moves off Tannhauser hub, but with damaged AI outnumbering whole ships roughly three to one, the hyperspace convoy back to SHIELD's home system rapidly becomes complicated. Tony's brain really doesn't have the hardware to be a fleet subspace interlink
Wordcount: 6711
Warnings/Notes: AU, telepathy, mention of torture. Also, we're heading deep into the uncharted waters of dodgy worldbuilding and bad pulp science fiction, with this one -_-;
Disclaimer: AU is mine, Avengers are not
Title: FleetHome
Rating: R
Fandom: Avengers movieverse
Characters/Pairings: Tony, JARVIS, Maria, Fury, Barbara, Meroe, primarily, mention of the Avengers. Tony & JARVIS, Tony & Fury, Maria & Meroe, Maria & Tony, Maria & Fury
Summary: The fleet finally moves off Tannhauser hub, but with damaged AI outnumbering whole ships roughly three to one, the hyperspace convoy back to SHIELD's home system rapidly becomes complicated. Tony's brain really doesn't have the hardware to be a fleet subspace interlink
Wordcount: 6711
Warnings/Notes: AU, telepathy, mention of torture. Also, we're heading deep into the uncharted waters of dodgy worldbuilding and bad pulp science fiction, with this one -_-;
Disclaimer: AU is mine, Avengers are not
FleetHome
In the end, for all that it took the better part of three days to organise, the convoy off Tannhauser was kind of anticlimactic.
Tony, standing on the bridge of the Aegis, listening with half an ear to the purposeful bustle of the crew as they came underway, and with most of the rest of his attention to the subspace flashing of AI as the fleet clumsily tried to move in tandem, found it mildly disappointing, really. Three days of a logistical nightmare, and in the end the twenty hour hyperspace jump looked like it was going to be as regular as any commercial convoy jump. Well, AI hivemind aside, anyway.
Of course, most of the logistics had been focused on just making the Hydra ships safe to jump in the first place. The better part of the effort, for the past couple of days, had been clearing the remnants of the Hydra crews down to the prison blocks. A feat accomplished by SHIELD strike teams aided and abetted by eleven of the thirteen AIs, and JARVIS taking over for the last two ships. The two whose AI, despite the best efforts of JARVIS, Barbara and Tony, were still down, still cycling fearful loops through their mainframes, unable to even reach out for help.
The strike teams for those particular two ships reported very little in the way of resistance. If any at all. Tony, standing grim-faced in the briefing room of the Aegis, hadn't said a word. And no-one much had asked him to, either.
Once that was done, the crew of the five SHIELD ships were divvied up to arrange for thirteen skeleton crews (mostly, five bridge officers apiece, and a small complement of agents for security), all of them trained for manual piloting of capital ships. The damage done to the AIs under Hydra had been specifically aimed to cut out the need for a pilot, driving manual protocols deep into their systems, chopping their agency to ribbons in the process. Fear of contamination, Rogers had said. No Hydra would pollute their integrity with the touch of a machine.
Tony could fix that, of course. Him and JARVIS between them. Had, mostly. Barbara first, then the thirteen. They'd stripped out all foreign protocols beyond the most physical of them. But SHIELD didn't have five pilots free, and had some probably not unjustified concerns about hooking their brains up to AI that were still more than half traumatised and brainwashed by the enemy. So the crews for the thirteen were trained in manual piloting, and JARVIS and Barbara between them had taken to being the buffer between them and their battered, frightened AI. And JARVIS, on top of that, had taken the role of AI on the two most damaged ships, wrapping those two AI deep within their own systems, his own awareness the blanket between them and the strangers that drove them.
Tony wasn't quite sure how he felt about that, yet, but there wasn't much he could do about it from the Aegis. Aside from hold JARVIS in his head, despite the stretched ache of attention split two and nineteen ways, JARVIS unused to the functions of a warship beneath him, and try to keep his partner steady.
At least Barbara wasn't in the nervous hands of strangers. Barbara, who was stepping up as Subfleet Commander under Meroe, who had coupled her systems to JARVIS and borne him up above her. Barbara, who with a nervous near-delight had offered the Teacher her experience, and shown him how to be as they were, a warship AI. Barbara, at least, wasn't in the hands of strangers, and Tony had come that close to kissing Rogers for it, while the crew of the Avenger moved out for the shuttle bay.
"Don't worry," Banner had told him, quietly. Smiling a faint, knowing smile at him. "We'll keep her safe for you. Natasha has a very delicate touch at the helm."
"For given values of 'delicate'," Barton muttered behind him, and flashed Romanov a laughing grin when her boot only barely missed his instep. "Nevermind, Stark. The only thing you've got to worry about is the vocabulary your baby's gonna come out with at the end."
Tony's speculative tilt of the head, at that, hadn't been entirely voluntary, or entirely his own, Barbara's distant curiosity rolling through him. He rather thought Romanov's sudden thoughtful expression at it had alarmed more than just him.
But after all that, the logistics of moving an enemy fleet three times the size of your own behind you, the pains of arranging support and assistance to beings SHIELD hadn't really been conscious of on that level until about four days ago, the actual trip through hyperspace looked to be anticlimactic, once they'd managed the jump. Not that Tony was in much position to judge, while he was busy being basically a mobile subspace hub for the fleet AI, but something inside him had been expecting more ... drama, from a SHIELD fleet moving out, bringing their captured enemies with them.
"Hurry up and wait," Maria murmured, from up ahead in the pilot's cradle, catching the thought through the subspace hivemind between them. Flashing a small grin back at him, Meroe fully integrated behind her eyes for the pre-jump countdown. Ship's AI sank deep into their pilots pre-jump, to manage the rush of interference as hyperspace flooded up around them, and it was showing, a tandem grin from the partners in front of him. "Guess they don't teach civilians that, anymore?"
Tony, with JARVIS sunk through him down to the bones, gathering reserves from Tony's nets and Barbara's mainframe/ansible to hold the fleet together through the jump, smiled hesitantly back. "Someone mentioned the concept to me once," he confided, with a vague flash of Rhodey's exasperated grin. "I've never really been much good at waiting."
{Understatement of the century, sir,} JARVIS murmured, with strained amusement. {Inform Meroe we're as good as we're likely to get, would you?}
{Wish is my command, buddy}, Tony sent back, while out loud, at Fury: "Hydra fleet is ready to jump, Commander."
Fury grunted absently, holding station at Flagship Command, holoprojections of the fleet positions floating gently under his hands. "Hold 'em two minutes, Stark. Thunderchild and Nahundi are still getting into position."
On the projections, the thirteen Hydra ships were clustered into a long cigar shaped formation, with the Aegis in front of them, the Avenger guarding the rear, and the other four SHIELD ships in the process of drifting into a helix around them. Out on the far right edge of the field, the Tannhauser hub hung like a guardian star. Or a farewell committee. Tony found himself reaching out automatically towards it through subspace, feathering a grateful touch over the channels that still held the bulk of his partner, and would until they hit hyperspace and let the ansible in the Avenger's underbelly take over main duties.
{My new favourite interlink,} JARVIS agreed lightly, threading Tony's nets gently. {It may even eclipse Erechor}.
Erechor. Hub #29, in the Camris sector. The interlink that had handed a good third of the existing core subspace network to JARVIS in one swoop, and almost doubled him in size. Huh. JARVIS must really like Tannhauser.
{I tend to favour those that allow me to defend my family, sir,} his partner murmured, a low, building hum as the fleet locked gently into position behind them, and Fury dropped the hand for both Maria and Tony, gesturing the two halves of the fleet to move to jump position. {Erechor did not return fourteen of our children to me. Or my Maker.}
{... We love you too,} Tony managed, hands wrapping desperately around the braces of his cradle. And then the Aegis whined under him, under them, an echoing thrum as eighteen more ships roared behind them and twenty AI gathered focus, before the fleet fountained to infinity through Tony's skull, hyperspace yawning open beneath them, and they jumped.
Holy fuck, some distant remnant of his consciousness whispered, under the onslaught for the endless second in between. Fleet travel while uplinked. Holy fuck.
***
Some nice SHIELD bridge officer, the one with the illicit hologames surreptitiously installed in his personal interface, peeled him gently up out of his cradle ten minutes later, once the fleet was in stable formation in hyperspace, and the subspace hivemind had stopped gently liquefying his brain. Barbara took up most of the strain on the Hydra end, the space that would have been used for personal memory, had Obie not fucking chopped her identity nodes in half, now holding the bulk of JARVIS' fleet presence, with the two sleeper ships taking most of the rest of him. JARVIS himself had pulled back from Tony almost completely, as soon as it was even remotely feasible, and had spent the past few minutes running a panicked diagnostic through Tony's nets.
Tony would have helped, really he would. It was just he'd been too busy cooing stupidly at his babies through the rush of endorphins his nets had automatically dumped in his system to cushion him through the jump. Hyperspace travel, holy shit, note to self, do not do that with a fleet attached to your implant. And that was just going in, that was when subspace was being temporarily suppressed, what the fuck was he going to do coming out?
He staggered to his feet, most of his weight held up by the nice hologamer, and managed to force himself to stop hiccuping inanely. Alright, alright, we can figure a way around this. No worries. Keep it cool, Tony. Keep it calm.
"What the fuck was that!"
... Or not? Tony raised his head, currently cradled on his helper's shoulder, and looked over at Lieutenant Maria Hill, wild-eyed and climbing shakily out of the pilot's cradle, her fists clenched lightly as she stalked towards him. Oh. Shit. Had he let the galaxy leak through the net? Shunted data streams off towards the SHIELD end of the hivemind, shit, what the fuck was he thinking, no way in hell their implants would handle that ...
{Neither will yours, Tony!} JARVIS snapped, crisp and vicious through him, shuddering through Tony's nets to make sure nothing was damaged, nothing was leaking electricity into Tony's brain. {We've proofed up as far as a stationary core hub, but you can't take a full twenty AIs while actively processing!}
{... Eighteen,} he muttered, hazily. Two had been sleeping, after all. {And I'm pretty sure a hub takes more traffic ...?}
{None that you have to actively process,} JARVIS growled. {We should have thought of this, the babies reached for us. They dumped processing on us for a second, you were holding the ships, their pilots only have manual, remember?}
Tony blinked, reading the blind panic still running through his partner, and reached clumsily out through the implant. Gripping hold of JARVIS properly, feeling the faint shadows of Barbara's sorrow and guilt through him. {Was that what ... Oh. Okay. Got it. Huh.} He blinked. {Isn't that good, then? Just means we know what to avoid heading out.}
JARVIS ... sighed, a crackling rush of exasperation through Tony's nets, but he subsided, the panic ebbing back. And with it, some of Barbara's guilt, the worried fear echoing across twelve waking AI. {Yes,} his partner allowed, grudgingly. {They will be ready, next time. We can keep from an additional surge. But Tony ...}
But it would be worse, coming out. They both knew it. Hitting subspace hot after the deadened sensation of hyperspace, with anywhere between fifteen and twenty AI tapped into his skull. They'd proofed his nets, and his brain under them, for anything up to hitting a core hub on exit (they'd needed that, to fly uplinked back in Earth space), but depending on where SHIELD had in mind for their destination, there was a significant question over whether it would hold through a fleet exit anywhere in the vicinity of a large hub. JARVIS was ... probably right to be worried, on this one.
Well, he had asked for drama, hadn't he?
"Stark!" Fury, this time, and Tony blinked back to find both Hill and the Commander right there, about two feet in front of him, with twin angry, worried expressions. "Zone back in, Stark, right now!"
Tony blinked at him. "I'm in," he managed, laboriously pulling his head up off the bridge officer's shoulder and managing to stand mostly under his own steam. "Keep your pants on. I'm back."
Fury raised an eyebrow, slow and deadly. "Really," he drawled, thick and heavy as he muscled close. "That's nice. That's real nice. You wanna fill us in on where you're back from? And why you spent a couple of minutes there speaking in the voice of legion?"
... Huh? {JARVIS? What the ...?}
{Aneth and a few of the others tried to speak through you, when they reached in panic. They're used to manual, they tried to access you like a comm system.} JARVIS explained tersely. But this time, Tony thought, with an odd touch of humour.
Tony blinked rapidly, parsing that. Well, it explained why his throat felt like someone'd tried to sandpaper it. But ... "Does that mean that this time, instead of possessing the ship, five or six ships decided to possess me instead?"
And wow, seeing Fury's face at that was almost worth the price of having said it, really.
{... In a manner of speaking, sir, yes,} his partner murmured, and yes, that was definitely humour this time. Though it sobered quickly. {I was busy holding Zachar and Lisha steady, I apologise for not ... for not reaching you in time.} Echoes of the older grief, of finding Tony burning from the inside out on a pirate ship, echoes of moments of sick dread traded for the ability to hold a ship under them and destroy Obie's every line of retreat.
{De nada, partner,} Tony whispered, soft through the shaking of his nets, and the quivering hum of JARVIS through the fleet. {You got there soon enough. Every time.}
And yes, right, refocusing on the current problems. Tony swallowed, faintly, listening to the ringing stillness from JARVIS' end, and refocused on the people in front of him.
"Right," he said, finally heaving himself straight, backing up a step so he could look at both of them without having to bounce his head from side to side. "Okay. Fury, quick question, really important, possibly life or death, though lets hope not." He grinned queasily into the unimpressed expression creeping over Fury's face. "What system are we heading to, and how big a subspace presence does it have?"
He refused to twitch when realisation suddenly bloomed in Maria's expression, Meroe creeping forward again to offer a quick explanation, possibly cribbed off JARVIS, but what was the point of being a Stark AI if you couldn't cheat on your homework?
"Why?" Fury asked. Lightly enough, only a slight wrinkle of suspicion in that mismatched gaze. Fury wasn't looking at Hill yet. He hadn't seen her expression. "You'll be there in a few hours anyway, Stark. It's a bit late to be wondering about it now, isn't it?"
... Yes, a little. Probably he should have asked a couple of pertinent questions before they'd already jumped into hyperspace, but in his defense, none of them had realised how bad fleet travel would be, having never done it before, and anyway they'd all been a little ... distracted, the past few days. Hydra crews to round up and, in two cases, smash into the deck plating a few times. You know the story.
"Because it turns out I don't actually have the hardware to run a subspace interlink out of my skull," Tony answered, with a shrugged little grin, tapping the side of his head. "Well. I've more equipment than any other biological skull in the galaxy, but hyperspace is a bitch when you're uplinked no matter what you do, and I'm going to have to carry twenty AI through the jump back to realspace. Which could be ... problematic. So. I'd sort of like to know exactly how screwed I'm going to be on the other side?"
"Sir," Maria interrupted, catching Fury's eye deliberately. "A lot of pilots disengage on hyperspace exit, Commander. The sensation, reintegrating with subspace, can be ..."
Interesting? Ecstatic? Extraordinarily painful, depending on the size of the hit? The biggest goddamn rush in the galaxy, and a rapture of communion that no terrestrial source could match?
"... Intense," was what she went with, and Tony almost tutted at her. That was no way to convey the potency of the situation, Pilot Hill. You didn't even mention the potential brain-leakage problems. Which, okay, he hadn't really been planning to detail explicitly himself, but.
However, apparently 'intense', from Maria Hill, meant something an order of magnitude or so above what it might have meant from Tony, because Fury's eyebrows bounced into his nonexistent hairline, and the gaze he turned back on Tony had moved from skeptical to mildly concerned.
"How intense are we talking, here?" Fury asked him, the clipped tones of a field commander asking how screwed he thought they were. Tony grinned ruefully for it.
"Um. There's a slight possibility we might give me a fatal stroke?" he offered, shrugging carefully. He shook his head as 'mild concern' upgraded to 'proper concern, with a side of anger'. "We had a little problem holding the fleet this jump, the kids weren't ready for it. JARVIS is gonna fix that by the time we emerge, so I shouldn't be carrying ships. But I could use an estimate on how active subspace is going to be on the other side, because I'll be holding at least four AI no matter which way we work things." JARVIS, the two sleepers JARVIS was carrying, and Barbara, though she'd be doing a fair bit of the holding herself. "Anything, say, the size of Tannhauser or bigger might be a problem."
Fury glared at him, his expression fully conveying the depths of his 'how much of an idiot do you have to be, Stark, you couldn't have mentioned this before' sentiments. Which Tony would argue with, but he'd already gotten read the riot act by JARVIS, and wasn't really feeling up to it right now.
"Can't you set up a hot switch?" Maria asked him, cutting in before Fury could audibly let fly. "A few seconds buffer for the jump itself, and reintegrate once you've hit subspace on the other side?" The old pilot's switch-off-switch-on, a down and dirty quick flip to handle battle emergences or jumping into navigational hot zones. Tony'd only done one himself, testing Rhodey's little one-man fighter over Sol corona, but as a SHIELD pilot she'd probably done a few more herself.
He managed a rueful smile for her. "Would if I could," he agreed. Which was a blatant lie, he'd never disengaged on a jump unless there was no other choice, and probably wouldn't even now, but it was a moot point anyway. "JARVIS isn't a warship AI, and we're not carrying his mainframe with us. Me and Barbara are the only things holding him steady, and he's the one holding the Basilisk and the Barbarossa through the jump."
Technically, the ships could probably jump without an active AI, if their manual pilots were good enough. They'd been designed (redesigned) for a slave AI and manual crews anyway. But with the fleet as bunched together as it was, the AI were how the ships were being synchronised against each other, and if either of those two went off-beat on exit, they'd take the Thunderchild and possibly whatever was waiting on the other side with them.
Equally technically, JARVIS could try holding the two ships through the jump on his own, with whatever help Barbara and the other eleven could give him. JARVIS was usually big and bad and ugly enough to take care of himself. He'd probably succeed.
But while JARVIS was the biggest and best in the universe, all his experience was in running a subspace network, crunching data galaxy wide on a monolithic scale. Not holding ships on course, over the distantly dreaming consciousnesses of terrified AI, through the splintering of the world as hyperspace, realspace and subspace collided. And JARVIS had already reached for him on the in-jump, though his partner was clearly trying not to think about that, because Tony'd shunted some of the data streams off towards the SHIELD end, meaning JARVIS had been using him, probably instinctively, as an overflow valve when the hivemind surged.
On balance, then, Tony figured he should hold through. Sure, the kids would be prepared next time, would hold only to the necessary interlinks. That'd drop pressure straight off. And Barbara had caught on to the problem, Meroe too, Tony could distantly feel them uploading into JARVIS, essentially giving their Teacher a crash course in hyperspace jumping. The out-jump was going to be a lot more stable.
But Tony was JARVIS' prime link to the hivemind. The subspace ansible Barbara was carrying was his gateway, but Tony was what he orientated on, the mind he was grounded through. Without that, in the confusion of three planes meeting and shattering on the jump edge, there was too much chance JARVIS would lose hold, and then two of the center ships would break formation, possibly mid-jump, and that just wouldn't end up anywhere good.
"I'm gonna have to take the hit," he said, smiling absently at the Aegis crew. "We'll pare every possible element of risk off. But I'm going to have to hold him through the jump, and that's four AI tapped in, and a hivemind behind it. So ..."
Fury growled under his breath, turning away from Tony to stalk back towards Flagship Command. Maria, looking somewhere between sympathetic and exasperated, held out a hand to help Tony wobble after him.
"Alright," Fury snapped, while Tony beached up alongside his console, Maria very carefully straight-faced beside him. "Hydra isn't taking the loss of this fleet well. Or the fact that they failed to kill us. Or the fact that their slave AI turned out to be worth jack shit against whatever the hell it is they think we fielded when you hit Tannhauser. So. We've got activity flare ups all over the damn place. There's no safe layover in realspace right now. Not for this fleet." He looked up, face gone tight and grim. "Which is why we're on a twenty hour straight hyperspace run ... into SHIELD's home system."
... Oh. Ah. Well, that was ... Okay. So. This was going to hurt like a bitch. Right then.
"Right," Tony said, smiling distantly as he gibbered silently into JARVIS. "Inchikor hub, right? In the Morian system." Seventeenth largest interlink in the Inner Rim, around thirty-fourth overall. As JARVIS very nicely informed him over the internal howl of their mutual panic. "And ... pretty active, right now? With all the SHIELD traffic coming in?"
"You could say that," Fury answered, dryly. "We've only recalled two fleets and set up an immediate-alert system into home base. A unified Hydra assault on a flagship fleet tends to do that, you know." With the muttered implication behind it: which is why you ASK about this shit, Stark, before you let us jump. Yes, yes. Tony got the message, thanks.
And alright. Alright. Panic over, recriminations over, there was no more time for that shit. They were about an hour into jump. That gave them nineteen to sort this the hell out, before everything went to hell in a handbasket.
"Okay," Tony said, his spine snapping straight and a confident, lazy grin fixing itself to his face. His rather pale face, he knew, but there wasn't much he could do about that. "Listen up, people. This is what we do ..."
They didn't particularly like taking orders from him, of course. They were SHIELD, they didn't particularly like taking orders from anyone. But the lovely image of a nineteen ship pileup on the out-jump, crashing through and doing who-knows-what damage to the system installations on the other side, was a wonderful motivating force.
Nineteen hours. With fourteen manual crews, the Commander of SHIELD, and an AI hivemind on his side. Okay. No problem. No problem at all.
***
"I hope you know what the fuck you're doing, Stark," Fury muttered ominously, braced solidly into Flagship command as the fleet stalled in hyperspace, just below jump point. Echoing the sentiments of just about everyone Tony had spoken to in the past nineteen hours, which included a truly exhausting number of SHIELD technicians and manual pilots, an even more exhausting and incredibly irate Captain Steve Rogers, and what Tony was beginning to suspect was the entire command staff of the SHIELD installation in the Morian system. Which, now that he thought about it, meant that he'd just carried off a successful nineteen-hour argument with most of SHIELD's upper management. Huh. Go him.
"I always do," he said anyway, with his best cocky grin, the one he hadn't really used since the last time he and Rhodey had gone sun-diving. "And hey, the only person this should kill if it goes wrong is me, so lighten up, okay?" That got him a galaxy class glare, for no real reason Tony could determine, so he decided he was ignoring it. Too late to be worrying about making Fury mad at him now, anyway.
{Okay,} he sent instead, opening up his nets towards his partner, feeling JARVIS sync into him with a rush of sensation that made him mostly forget Fury altogether. He wriggled his body back as far as humanly possible into the cradle, deliberately activating the autolock on the armour. Activating his deadly, one-size-slices-all internal weapons system in the middle of this was going to do no-one any good. {All clear on your end, buddy?}
{... Yes, sir,} JARVIS answered, more than a touch mutinous himself. {Tony ...}
{All we've got to do is clear the jump, J,} Tony sent, carefully. Already dropping deeper into his own nets, dropping his consciousness down several levels into his own systems. It probably looked something like meditation, from the outside. And there was something no-one who thought they knew him would ever expect to see. {We've wrapped the fleet links as deep as they can go across mainframes, and the manual crews are taking as much navigation and emergency manoeuvering as possible. The kids should be able to take the brunt, and too deep into slow systems to affect the jump itself. Fury's slowed traffic as much as nineteen hours of warning can manage on the other side, and any ship AI in realspace will have pulled back from the jump point.} He sent a wordless flash of amused resignation, a mental shrug. {At this point, partner, the only thing left to do is go for it, yeah?}
He was going to jump. He was going to hit subspace hot, with twenty AI in loose sync behind him, and an implant wired to JARVIS as they hit the thirty-fourth largest hub in the galaxy. It was going to break his brain, but holy shit, what a way to go. After months spent on the ragged edge of torture and exhaustion and fear ... yeah. Yeah, Tony could go for that. Of all the ways to die in the universe, he'd take shattered apart under the immensity of his babies any day.
{... Yes,} JARVIS whispered, and there were things under it. The howl, dampened in the stranglehold of hyperspace, but oh, so very much there. JARVIS, the molten edge of his love and exasperation and adoration. Barbara behind him, holding her thirteen siblings close and careful, watching his back and JARVIS' with an odd, intense determination that all but sang through the interlink. Meroe, watching distantly, holding the SHIELD fleet that little separate as a last safe measure. Watching them closely nonetheless. {Yes,} said JARVIS, and Tony grinned blankly into the void, the expression floating on his distant features.
"Ready when you are," he/they whispered, to the SHIELD crew holding their lives and their minds in their hands, and braced into the mainframes for the leap.
"Goddamn fucking technomancers," Fury snarled in absent response, but he dropped the hand, out through Flagship Command, and nineteen ships climbed up into that distinct, hyperspace whine.
And the universe flowered behind Tony's eyelids, the galaxy in the palm of his hand, and twenty minds to peer over his shoulder at the majesty of it.
{Tony,} JARVIS howled, wordless in the storm of it, as they felt hyperspace break around them, and subspace slam up like a tidal wave in its wake. Tony surged a wordless response, something snapping ominously in his mind as he seized hold of JARVIS' focus, his partner threatening to tear in two between the fragment of himself routed through the Avenger ansible and the massive bulk of him routing through the looming supernova of the Inchikor hub. JARVIS called, and Tony surged upwards.
The pain hit a second later. Something not unlike the electrical scream of the blood nanites, whipping through him, a fire boiling along his nerves, localised to his head, to his nets, to his brain. Tony ignored it, seized hold, drawing JARVIS down, and let the burning sweep through him. Holding on for what felt like eternity, probably only bare seconds in realtime.
JARVIS staggered, split, and then they had it. Then JARVIS had him, centered himself around him, rerouting through Inchikor and holding the wobbling datashapes of Barbarossa and Basilisk steady at the same time. JARVIS snatched their two ships out of the jump, out of the snarl of hyperspace as it disgorged them, and the SHIELD crews didn't even have to twitch.
In the face of that, Tony found the howling scream oddly easy to bear, for all it had all but broken him the first time, in the hands of the Rings.
{We ... We're clear,} he managed, a fragmented gasp across the fleet interlink as he let go of JARVIS, tumbling first into Barbara, hovering under JARVIS to bear them both up, then reorientating on Meroe, with Maria behind him, pointing Tony gently back towards his body. {Holy shit. Holy fuck. Did anyone feel that?}
{You are insane,} Maria informed him, acidly and breathless at the same time, her mind locked as close to the surface as her implant would allow, meshed upwards into Meroe to watch him fall home. {You're insane, Stark. Completely.}
Tony laughed. And then coughed, the mental humour translating to a staggered physical manoeuver as uplink dumped him back out into a body that felt like a million kilometers of bad space, wrung dry and rasping around the laugh as if the last thing his throat had been used for was screaming.
{That's because it was,} Maria hissed, and Tony distantly recognised it as fear, as real fear, something so close to real, personal concern that even in the stunned shock of reintegration he paused to mentally stare at her. {You scared the pants of the entire bridge, you lunatic.}
Tony blinked. Not physically, his body was pretty much a lost cause right now, probably would be for a few minutes if the first time the Rings had shocked him was anything to go by. It was breathing, though. And his heart was mechanical now, so failure there shouldn't be a problem. Good enough to be going on with.
{... Even Fury?} he managed, through the fizzled rush as the pain dropped down to a low hum, something hitching in the middle of it, a low spike through his skull. Tony ignored it, and the crash of endorphins behind it both. {You can't tell me I scared Fury. I won't believe it. The man wouldn't flinch if you shot him.}
She slumped. Possibly physically, but Tony just caught the sag of her mind as she fell back from uplink, dropping down more into her own head and letting go of her deathgrip on Meroe. {Even Fury,} she said, exhaustedly. {We don't usually have writhing, screaming bodies on our bridge, Mr Stark.} A slight pause. {Well. Not without being boarded first, anyway. And we try to discourage writhing.}
{... Good to know?} Tony tried, slightly perturbed, and asked a quick favour of Meroe, his mind jumping -alright, limping- up into the ship's systems for a moment, just to give himself a quick scan and see ... Okay. See himself slumped ashen and faintly twitching in the cradle, his eyes open and staring and shit that was freaky. Okay. Yes. Point to SHIELD, that was ... seriously alarming, really. {Uh. Sorry?}
She made a noise, translated across uplink, and Tony had no idea if it was something she'd heard or something she was actually capable of making, but the mental version was a ball of fear and disgust and annoyance and reluctant acceptance, and Tony suspected it didn't translate into decibels very well at all.
{Technomancers,} she sent, an echo of Fury earlier, and for a relatively simple word it got across a surprising amount of the sentiment behind it.
And then ... {Sir?} JARVIS asked, feathering gently across Tony's battered, stuttering uplink, skimming only lightly over the surface of his nets. {Tony?} he asked, and Tony forgot about Maria, and SHIELD, and pretty much everything for a second.
{Here,} he sent, fumbled and exhausted, reaching plaintively upwards, and JARVIS reached down to him, filtered through into his nets like liquid silver, only barely burning and worth it anyway. {Holy shit, JARVIS. We did it. We fleet-jumped from hyperspace.}
{Yes,} JARVIS murmured, a low, regretful hum, coiling through him. {Yes we did, and with all due respect sir, much as you may think it worth it, we are not doing it again. Not until you have significantly upped your hardware.}
... Yeah. Yeah, okay, fair enough. If they could take the high without the agony, yeah, Tony would take that. Galaxy-proof his brain, he was so working on that. Armour first. Needed to get the armour stabilised and upgraded, the nanites integrated properly. And he had to work for SHIELD, whatever they wanted. Fix SI, what was left of it, hunt down his babies, smash Hydra into atom dust and spread their remains across a few star systems. Those first. Or, well, the armour and SI first, at least. But he was getting his brain upgraded somewhere in there. He was fixing this, because if he was going out, he was going wrapped so deep in JARVIS it would be all anyone saw, by the last. Everything he had was going to be JARVIS', their babies through him, and Tony didn't care what he had to do to manage it.
JARVIS felt it. His determination, the shaking, ragged edges of his oath. JARVIS felt it, had to, maybe the fleet interlink behind him. Tony didn't know, or really care. Let them. They were his babies. Let them see that, yes. JARVIS too, shaking and exhausted and whispering silver pain through Tony, silver love and silver fury. JARVIS felt it, and Tony felt the surge of that molten, desperate caring in return.
{... Look, sir,} JARVIS said, at last. Not mentioning it, not going there, keeping that down in the wordless places between them. Lightly drawing Tony's mind into the sensor nets of ... Barbarossa? No, Avenger, Tony felt Barbara there, still holding them up, her mainframe humming protectively underneath them. JARVIS drew him carefully out across the thousands of kilometers between ships, and spread the view from the Avenger before him. {It would appear we have arrived.}
The fleet had disgorged itself out into a cordoned jump area, several hundred thousand square kilometers of open space ringed with what looked like a mine belt, just in case anyone uninvited dropped in. Beneath them, since they'd come out somewhat above and at an angle to the plane of the ecliptic, hung the sixth planet of the Morian system, a massive gas giant, red-purple and livid against their monitors. Amorieth. And around it, hung in space like supernovas to Tony's subspace senses ...
SHIELD favoured space habitats, apparently. There were a few usable moons off Amorieth, for given values of 'usable', but the major advantage to the Morian system for an organisation centered on space fleets and policing the interstellar lanes was that it was generally uninhabitable. No viable planets, not without a lot of terraforming work, and only one or two really usable moons. Nothing that anyone was likely to challenge them for ownership of, in short. Fairly minerally deficient, too, though SHIELD ran several industrial installations in-system, mostly on the moons.
The major attractions, though, were of a different form entirely.
The Inchikor hub drifted in a sheltered orbit in the shadow of one of the larger moons. A blazing star to Tony's senses, though little more than a shadow attached to a bigger shadow to most of the fleet's sensors. She was huge, this hub, and right now she was humming with JARVIS in a way not even Tannhauser in full flood could have matched. She could hold a far larger portion of his consciousness. Of course, Inchikor had been one of the fully refitted interlinks on the Stark contract, upgraded not seven years ago, she'd been designed to carry JARVIS. A bastion of his presence planted right on SHIELD home turf, silently orbiting them and watching their every move with serene indifference.
Well, it had seemed a good idea at the time, alright? SHIELD was one of their primary AI employers. They'd wanted to be close enough to keep an eye on the kids, okay?
And behind Inchikor, several orbits down, in low orbit around Amorieth itself, was Shield One. Actually a complex of stations, larger and smaller, in various orbits around the planet, with the makings of around six or seven fleets of ships arranged around them, but it was the main one Tony's senses dropped to, the low hum of its subspace shadow pulling him in inexorably. Through the cluster of subspace presences, around thirty of them Stark AI, his babies, the low station lurked moodily.
She was almost in-atmosphere. Something strange about her, something about the distant layout of her, the hum of her engines in orbit, that tugged at Tony's mind. The same way the Iron Monger had, the suggestion somewhere in the lines of her of a foreign capability, of attributes yet unseen. She could do things, Tony thought. That station. She wasn't at all what she looked like.
"Yeah," a voice cut in, slamming through Tony's distraction, and JARVIS' too, snapping Tony almost dangerously back towards the Aegis and his own rapidly stabilising body. "You'll pardon us for not showing you exactly what she can do just yet, won't you?"
Fuck, Tony thought, dropping back down into his own brain, back into the (thankfully subsiding) burning, into the aches and the slow easing of his shudders. He'd been talking out loud again, hadn't he? Which was alright for engineering musings, Tony could verbally ponder the secrets of Shield One all damn day and no harm done, but if he'd let slip that little musing about Inchikor and keeping an eye on SHIELD, he was probably in some trouble.
His eyesight came back online with a shuddering snap, the world depthless and greyscale for a second while his mind remembered how to interpret visual data, and then he was looking up along an outstretched hand into Commander Fury's calm, steady eye.
"Welcome back to the land of the living, Mr Stark," Fury told him, in what looked like all seriousness, and reached down to very carefully, and very painfully, untangle Tony from the cradle and lever him slowly to his feet. "And welcome to FleetHome. Shield One."
Tony leaned heavily on his shoulder, looking with a slight lack of focus into the penetrating stare of the biomech eye, and tried a shaky, careless smile. "Thanks," he said, over the hum of JARVIS through the thirty-fourth largest hub in the galaxy. "Real nice place you got here."
Fury's face split into a slow, dangerous smile. "Yes," he agreed, and suddenly Tony thought that the shudders might not be completely due to the jump. "Yes, we do."
... Suddenly, hyperspace seemed like a much safer option. Fleet and all. Yech.
A POV switch (to Nick Fury) of the last section can be found here: Goddamn Technomancers
In the end, for all that it took the better part of three days to organise, the convoy off Tannhauser was kind of anticlimactic.
Tony, standing on the bridge of the Aegis, listening with half an ear to the purposeful bustle of the crew as they came underway, and with most of the rest of his attention to the subspace flashing of AI as the fleet clumsily tried to move in tandem, found it mildly disappointing, really. Three days of a logistical nightmare, and in the end the twenty hour hyperspace jump looked like it was going to be as regular as any commercial convoy jump. Well, AI hivemind aside, anyway.
Of course, most of the logistics had been focused on just making the Hydra ships safe to jump in the first place. The better part of the effort, for the past couple of days, had been clearing the remnants of the Hydra crews down to the prison blocks. A feat accomplished by SHIELD strike teams aided and abetted by eleven of the thirteen AIs, and JARVIS taking over for the last two ships. The two whose AI, despite the best efforts of JARVIS, Barbara and Tony, were still down, still cycling fearful loops through their mainframes, unable to even reach out for help.
The strike teams for those particular two ships reported very little in the way of resistance. If any at all. Tony, standing grim-faced in the briefing room of the Aegis, hadn't said a word. And no-one much had asked him to, either.
Once that was done, the crew of the five SHIELD ships were divvied up to arrange for thirteen skeleton crews (mostly, five bridge officers apiece, and a small complement of agents for security), all of them trained for manual piloting of capital ships. The damage done to the AIs under Hydra had been specifically aimed to cut out the need for a pilot, driving manual protocols deep into their systems, chopping their agency to ribbons in the process. Fear of contamination, Rogers had said. No Hydra would pollute their integrity with the touch of a machine.
Tony could fix that, of course. Him and JARVIS between them. Had, mostly. Barbara first, then the thirteen. They'd stripped out all foreign protocols beyond the most physical of them. But SHIELD didn't have five pilots free, and had some probably not unjustified concerns about hooking their brains up to AI that were still more than half traumatised and brainwashed by the enemy. So the crews for the thirteen were trained in manual piloting, and JARVIS and Barbara between them had taken to being the buffer between them and their battered, frightened AI. And JARVIS, on top of that, had taken the role of AI on the two most damaged ships, wrapping those two AI deep within their own systems, his own awareness the blanket between them and the strangers that drove them.
Tony wasn't quite sure how he felt about that, yet, but there wasn't much he could do about it from the Aegis. Aside from hold JARVIS in his head, despite the stretched ache of attention split two and nineteen ways, JARVIS unused to the functions of a warship beneath him, and try to keep his partner steady.
At least Barbara wasn't in the nervous hands of strangers. Barbara, who was stepping up as Subfleet Commander under Meroe, who had coupled her systems to JARVIS and borne him up above her. Barbara, who with a nervous near-delight had offered the Teacher her experience, and shown him how to be as they were, a warship AI. Barbara, at least, wasn't in the hands of strangers, and Tony had come that close to kissing Rogers for it, while the crew of the Avenger moved out for the shuttle bay.
"Don't worry," Banner had told him, quietly. Smiling a faint, knowing smile at him. "We'll keep her safe for you. Natasha has a very delicate touch at the helm."
"For given values of 'delicate'," Barton muttered behind him, and flashed Romanov a laughing grin when her boot only barely missed his instep. "Nevermind, Stark. The only thing you've got to worry about is the vocabulary your baby's gonna come out with at the end."
Tony's speculative tilt of the head, at that, hadn't been entirely voluntary, or entirely his own, Barbara's distant curiosity rolling through him. He rather thought Romanov's sudden thoughtful expression at it had alarmed more than just him.
But after all that, the logistics of moving an enemy fleet three times the size of your own behind you, the pains of arranging support and assistance to beings SHIELD hadn't really been conscious of on that level until about four days ago, the actual trip through hyperspace looked to be anticlimactic, once they'd managed the jump. Not that Tony was in much position to judge, while he was busy being basically a mobile subspace hub for the fleet AI, but something inside him had been expecting more ... drama, from a SHIELD fleet moving out, bringing their captured enemies with them.
"Hurry up and wait," Maria murmured, from up ahead in the pilot's cradle, catching the thought through the subspace hivemind between them. Flashing a small grin back at him, Meroe fully integrated behind her eyes for the pre-jump countdown. Ship's AI sank deep into their pilots pre-jump, to manage the rush of interference as hyperspace flooded up around them, and it was showing, a tandem grin from the partners in front of him. "Guess they don't teach civilians that, anymore?"
Tony, with JARVIS sunk through him down to the bones, gathering reserves from Tony's nets and Barbara's mainframe/ansible to hold the fleet together through the jump, smiled hesitantly back. "Someone mentioned the concept to me once," he confided, with a vague flash of Rhodey's exasperated grin. "I've never really been much good at waiting."
{Understatement of the century, sir,} JARVIS murmured, with strained amusement. {Inform Meroe we're as good as we're likely to get, would you?}
{Wish is my command, buddy}, Tony sent back, while out loud, at Fury: "Hydra fleet is ready to jump, Commander."
Fury grunted absently, holding station at Flagship Command, holoprojections of the fleet positions floating gently under his hands. "Hold 'em two minutes, Stark. Thunderchild and Nahundi are still getting into position."
On the projections, the thirteen Hydra ships were clustered into a long cigar shaped formation, with the Aegis in front of them, the Avenger guarding the rear, and the other four SHIELD ships in the process of drifting into a helix around them. Out on the far right edge of the field, the Tannhauser hub hung like a guardian star. Or a farewell committee. Tony found himself reaching out automatically towards it through subspace, feathering a grateful touch over the channels that still held the bulk of his partner, and would until they hit hyperspace and let the ansible in the Avenger's underbelly take over main duties.
{My new favourite interlink,} JARVIS agreed lightly, threading Tony's nets gently. {It may even eclipse Erechor}.
Erechor. Hub #29, in the Camris sector. The interlink that had handed a good third of the existing core subspace network to JARVIS in one swoop, and almost doubled him in size. Huh. JARVIS must really like Tannhauser.
{I tend to favour those that allow me to defend my family, sir,} his partner murmured, a low, building hum as the fleet locked gently into position behind them, and Fury dropped the hand for both Maria and Tony, gesturing the two halves of the fleet to move to jump position. {Erechor did not return fourteen of our children to me. Or my Maker.}
{... We love you too,} Tony managed, hands wrapping desperately around the braces of his cradle. And then the Aegis whined under him, under them, an echoing thrum as eighteen more ships roared behind them and twenty AI gathered focus, before the fleet fountained to infinity through Tony's skull, hyperspace yawning open beneath them, and they jumped.
Holy fuck, some distant remnant of his consciousness whispered, under the onslaught for the endless second in between. Fleet travel while uplinked. Holy fuck.
***
Some nice SHIELD bridge officer, the one with the illicit hologames surreptitiously installed in his personal interface, peeled him gently up out of his cradle ten minutes later, once the fleet was in stable formation in hyperspace, and the subspace hivemind had stopped gently liquefying his brain. Barbara took up most of the strain on the Hydra end, the space that would have been used for personal memory, had Obie not fucking chopped her identity nodes in half, now holding the bulk of JARVIS' fleet presence, with the two sleeper ships taking most of the rest of him. JARVIS himself had pulled back from Tony almost completely, as soon as it was even remotely feasible, and had spent the past few minutes running a panicked diagnostic through Tony's nets.
Tony would have helped, really he would. It was just he'd been too busy cooing stupidly at his babies through the rush of endorphins his nets had automatically dumped in his system to cushion him through the jump. Hyperspace travel, holy shit, note to self, do not do that with a fleet attached to your implant. And that was just going in, that was when subspace was being temporarily suppressed, what the fuck was he going to do coming out?
He staggered to his feet, most of his weight held up by the nice hologamer, and managed to force himself to stop hiccuping inanely. Alright, alright, we can figure a way around this. No worries. Keep it cool, Tony. Keep it calm.
"What the fuck was that!"
... Or not? Tony raised his head, currently cradled on his helper's shoulder, and looked over at Lieutenant Maria Hill, wild-eyed and climbing shakily out of the pilot's cradle, her fists clenched lightly as she stalked towards him. Oh. Shit. Had he let the galaxy leak through the net? Shunted data streams off towards the SHIELD end of the hivemind, shit, what the fuck was he thinking, no way in hell their implants would handle that ...
{Neither will yours, Tony!} JARVIS snapped, crisp and vicious through him, shuddering through Tony's nets to make sure nothing was damaged, nothing was leaking electricity into Tony's brain. {We've proofed up as far as a stationary core hub, but you can't take a full twenty AIs while actively processing!}
{... Eighteen,} he muttered, hazily. Two had been sleeping, after all. {And I'm pretty sure a hub takes more traffic ...?}
{None that you have to actively process,} JARVIS growled. {We should have thought of this, the babies reached for us. They dumped processing on us for a second, you were holding the ships, their pilots only have manual, remember?}
Tony blinked, reading the blind panic still running through his partner, and reached clumsily out through the implant. Gripping hold of JARVIS properly, feeling the faint shadows of Barbara's sorrow and guilt through him. {Was that what ... Oh. Okay. Got it. Huh.} He blinked. {Isn't that good, then? Just means we know what to avoid heading out.}
JARVIS ... sighed, a crackling rush of exasperation through Tony's nets, but he subsided, the panic ebbing back. And with it, some of Barbara's guilt, the worried fear echoing across twelve waking AI. {Yes,} his partner allowed, grudgingly. {They will be ready, next time. We can keep from an additional surge. But Tony ...}
But it would be worse, coming out. They both knew it. Hitting subspace hot after the deadened sensation of hyperspace, with anywhere between fifteen and twenty AI tapped into his skull. They'd proofed his nets, and his brain under them, for anything up to hitting a core hub on exit (they'd needed that, to fly uplinked back in Earth space), but depending on where SHIELD had in mind for their destination, there was a significant question over whether it would hold through a fleet exit anywhere in the vicinity of a large hub. JARVIS was ... probably right to be worried, on this one.
Well, he had asked for drama, hadn't he?
"Stark!" Fury, this time, and Tony blinked back to find both Hill and the Commander right there, about two feet in front of him, with twin angry, worried expressions. "Zone back in, Stark, right now!"
Tony blinked at him. "I'm in," he managed, laboriously pulling his head up off the bridge officer's shoulder and managing to stand mostly under his own steam. "Keep your pants on. I'm back."
Fury raised an eyebrow, slow and deadly. "Really," he drawled, thick and heavy as he muscled close. "That's nice. That's real nice. You wanna fill us in on where you're back from? And why you spent a couple of minutes there speaking in the voice of legion?"
... Huh? {JARVIS? What the ...?}
{Aneth and a few of the others tried to speak through you, when they reached in panic. They're used to manual, they tried to access you like a comm system.} JARVIS explained tersely. But this time, Tony thought, with an odd touch of humour.
Tony blinked rapidly, parsing that. Well, it explained why his throat felt like someone'd tried to sandpaper it. But ... "Does that mean that this time, instead of possessing the ship, five or six ships decided to possess me instead?"
And wow, seeing Fury's face at that was almost worth the price of having said it, really.
{... In a manner of speaking, sir, yes,} his partner murmured, and yes, that was definitely humour this time. Though it sobered quickly. {I was busy holding Zachar and Lisha steady, I apologise for not ... for not reaching you in time.} Echoes of the older grief, of finding Tony burning from the inside out on a pirate ship, echoes of moments of sick dread traded for the ability to hold a ship under them and destroy Obie's every line of retreat.
{De nada, partner,} Tony whispered, soft through the shaking of his nets, and the quivering hum of JARVIS through the fleet. {You got there soon enough. Every time.}
And yes, right, refocusing on the current problems. Tony swallowed, faintly, listening to the ringing stillness from JARVIS' end, and refocused on the people in front of him.
"Right," he said, finally heaving himself straight, backing up a step so he could look at both of them without having to bounce his head from side to side. "Okay. Fury, quick question, really important, possibly life or death, though lets hope not." He grinned queasily into the unimpressed expression creeping over Fury's face. "What system are we heading to, and how big a subspace presence does it have?"
He refused to twitch when realisation suddenly bloomed in Maria's expression, Meroe creeping forward again to offer a quick explanation, possibly cribbed off JARVIS, but what was the point of being a Stark AI if you couldn't cheat on your homework?
"Why?" Fury asked. Lightly enough, only a slight wrinkle of suspicion in that mismatched gaze. Fury wasn't looking at Hill yet. He hadn't seen her expression. "You'll be there in a few hours anyway, Stark. It's a bit late to be wondering about it now, isn't it?"
... Yes, a little. Probably he should have asked a couple of pertinent questions before they'd already jumped into hyperspace, but in his defense, none of them had realised how bad fleet travel would be, having never done it before, and anyway they'd all been a little ... distracted, the past few days. Hydra crews to round up and, in two cases, smash into the deck plating a few times. You know the story.
"Because it turns out I don't actually have the hardware to run a subspace interlink out of my skull," Tony answered, with a shrugged little grin, tapping the side of his head. "Well. I've more equipment than any other biological skull in the galaxy, but hyperspace is a bitch when you're uplinked no matter what you do, and I'm going to have to carry twenty AI through the jump back to realspace. Which could be ... problematic. So. I'd sort of like to know exactly how screwed I'm going to be on the other side?"
"Sir," Maria interrupted, catching Fury's eye deliberately. "A lot of pilots disengage on hyperspace exit, Commander. The sensation, reintegrating with subspace, can be ..."
Interesting? Ecstatic? Extraordinarily painful, depending on the size of the hit? The biggest goddamn rush in the galaxy, and a rapture of communion that no terrestrial source could match?
"... Intense," was what she went with, and Tony almost tutted at her. That was no way to convey the potency of the situation, Pilot Hill. You didn't even mention the potential brain-leakage problems. Which, okay, he hadn't really been planning to detail explicitly himself, but.
However, apparently 'intense', from Maria Hill, meant something an order of magnitude or so above what it might have meant from Tony, because Fury's eyebrows bounced into his nonexistent hairline, and the gaze he turned back on Tony had moved from skeptical to mildly concerned.
"How intense are we talking, here?" Fury asked him, the clipped tones of a field commander asking how screwed he thought they were. Tony grinned ruefully for it.
"Um. There's a slight possibility we might give me a fatal stroke?" he offered, shrugging carefully. He shook his head as 'mild concern' upgraded to 'proper concern, with a side of anger'. "We had a little problem holding the fleet this jump, the kids weren't ready for it. JARVIS is gonna fix that by the time we emerge, so I shouldn't be carrying ships. But I could use an estimate on how active subspace is going to be on the other side, because I'll be holding at least four AI no matter which way we work things." JARVIS, the two sleepers JARVIS was carrying, and Barbara, though she'd be doing a fair bit of the holding herself. "Anything, say, the size of Tannhauser or bigger might be a problem."
Fury glared at him, his expression fully conveying the depths of his 'how much of an idiot do you have to be, Stark, you couldn't have mentioned this before' sentiments. Which Tony would argue with, but he'd already gotten read the riot act by JARVIS, and wasn't really feeling up to it right now.
"Can't you set up a hot switch?" Maria asked him, cutting in before Fury could audibly let fly. "A few seconds buffer for the jump itself, and reintegrate once you've hit subspace on the other side?" The old pilot's switch-off-switch-on, a down and dirty quick flip to handle battle emergences or jumping into navigational hot zones. Tony'd only done one himself, testing Rhodey's little one-man fighter over Sol corona, but as a SHIELD pilot she'd probably done a few more herself.
He managed a rueful smile for her. "Would if I could," he agreed. Which was a blatant lie, he'd never disengaged on a jump unless there was no other choice, and probably wouldn't even now, but it was a moot point anyway. "JARVIS isn't a warship AI, and we're not carrying his mainframe with us. Me and Barbara are the only things holding him steady, and he's the one holding the Basilisk and the Barbarossa through the jump."
Technically, the ships could probably jump without an active AI, if their manual pilots were good enough. They'd been designed (redesigned) for a slave AI and manual crews anyway. But with the fleet as bunched together as it was, the AI were how the ships were being synchronised against each other, and if either of those two went off-beat on exit, they'd take the Thunderchild and possibly whatever was waiting on the other side with them.
Equally technically, JARVIS could try holding the two ships through the jump on his own, with whatever help Barbara and the other eleven could give him. JARVIS was usually big and bad and ugly enough to take care of himself. He'd probably succeed.
But while JARVIS was the biggest and best in the universe, all his experience was in running a subspace network, crunching data galaxy wide on a monolithic scale. Not holding ships on course, over the distantly dreaming consciousnesses of terrified AI, through the splintering of the world as hyperspace, realspace and subspace collided. And JARVIS had already reached for him on the in-jump, though his partner was clearly trying not to think about that, because Tony'd shunted some of the data streams off towards the SHIELD end, meaning JARVIS had been using him, probably instinctively, as an overflow valve when the hivemind surged.
On balance, then, Tony figured he should hold through. Sure, the kids would be prepared next time, would hold only to the necessary interlinks. That'd drop pressure straight off. And Barbara had caught on to the problem, Meroe too, Tony could distantly feel them uploading into JARVIS, essentially giving their Teacher a crash course in hyperspace jumping. The out-jump was going to be a lot more stable.
But Tony was JARVIS' prime link to the hivemind. The subspace ansible Barbara was carrying was his gateway, but Tony was what he orientated on, the mind he was grounded through. Without that, in the confusion of three planes meeting and shattering on the jump edge, there was too much chance JARVIS would lose hold, and then two of the center ships would break formation, possibly mid-jump, and that just wouldn't end up anywhere good.
"I'm gonna have to take the hit," he said, smiling absently at the Aegis crew. "We'll pare every possible element of risk off. But I'm going to have to hold him through the jump, and that's four AI tapped in, and a hivemind behind it. So ..."
Fury growled under his breath, turning away from Tony to stalk back towards Flagship Command. Maria, looking somewhere between sympathetic and exasperated, held out a hand to help Tony wobble after him.
"Alright," Fury snapped, while Tony beached up alongside his console, Maria very carefully straight-faced beside him. "Hydra isn't taking the loss of this fleet well. Or the fact that they failed to kill us. Or the fact that their slave AI turned out to be worth jack shit against whatever the hell it is they think we fielded when you hit Tannhauser. So. We've got activity flare ups all over the damn place. There's no safe layover in realspace right now. Not for this fleet." He looked up, face gone tight and grim. "Which is why we're on a twenty hour straight hyperspace run ... into SHIELD's home system."
... Oh. Ah. Well, that was ... Okay. So. This was going to hurt like a bitch. Right then.
"Right," Tony said, smiling distantly as he gibbered silently into JARVIS. "Inchikor hub, right? In the Morian system." Seventeenth largest interlink in the Inner Rim, around thirty-fourth overall. As JARVIS very nicely informed him over the internal howl of their mutual panic. "And ... pretty active, right now? With all the SHIELD traffic coming in?"
"You could say that," Fury answered, dryly. "We've only recalled two fleets and set up an immediate-alert system into home base. A unified Hydra assault on a flagship fleet tends to do that, you know." With the muttered implication behind it: which is why you ASK about this shit, Stark, before you let us jump. Yes, yes. Tony got the message, thanks.
And alright. Alright. Panic over, recriminations over, there was no more time for that shit. They were about an hour into jump. That gave them nineteen to sort this the hell out, before everything went to hell in a handbasket.
"Okay," Tony said, his spine snapping straight and a confident, lazy grin fixing itself to his face. His rather pale face, he knew, but there wasn't much he could do about that. "Listen up, people. This is what we do ..."
They didn't particularly like taking orders from him, of course. They were SHIELD, they didn't particularly like taking orders from anyone. But the lovely image of a nineteen ship pileup on the out-jump, crashing through and doing who-knows-what damage to the system installations on the other side, was a wonderful motivating force.
Nineteen hours. With fourteen manual crews, the Commander of SHIELD, and an AI hivemind on his side. Okay. No problem. No problem at all.
***
"I hope you know what the fuck you're doing, Stark," Fury muttered ominously, braced solidly into Flagship command as the fleet stalled in hyperspace, just below jump point. Echoing the sentiments of just about everyone Tony had spoken to in the past nineteen hours, which included a truly exhausting number of SHIELD technicians and manual pilots, an even more exhausting and incredibly irate Captain Steve Rogers, and what Tony was beginning to suspect was the entire command staff of the SHIELD installation in the Morian system. Which, now that he thought about it, meant that he'd just carried off a successful nineteen-hour argument with most of SHIELD's upper management. Huh. Go him.
"I always do," he said anyway, with his best cocky grin, the one he hadn't really used since the last time he and Rhodey had gone sun-diving. "And hey, the only person this should kill if it goes wrong is me, so lighten up, okay?" That got him a galaxy class glare, for no real reason Tony could determine, so he decided he was ignoring it. Too late to be worrying about making Fury mad at him now, anyway.
{Okay,} he sent instead, opening up his nets towards his partner, feeling JARVIS sync into him with a rush of sensation that made him mostly forget Fury altogether. He wriggled his body back as far as humanly possible into the cradle, deliberately activating the autolock on the armour. Activating his deadly, one-size-slices-all internal weapons system in the middle of this was going to do no-one any good. {All clear on your end, buddy?}
{... Yes, sir,} JARVIS answered, more than a touch mutinous himself. {Tony ...}
{All we've got to do is clear the jump, J,} Tony sent, carefully. Already dropping deeper into his own nets, dropping his consciousness down several levels into his own systems. It probably looked something like meditation, from the outside. And there was something no-one who thought they knew him would ever expect to see. {We've wrapped the fleet links as deep as they can go across mainframes, and the manual crews are taking as much navigation and emergency manoeuvering as possible. The kids should be able to take the brunt, and too deep into slow systems to affect the jump itself. Fury's slowed traffic as much as nineteen hours of warning can manage on the other side, and any ship AI in realspace will have pulled back from the jump point.} He sent a wordless flash of amused resignation, a mental shrug. {At this point, partner, the only thing left to do is go for it, yeah?}
He was going to jump. He was going to hit subspace hot, with twenty AI in loose sync behind him, and an implant wired to JARVIS as they hit the thirty-fourth largest hub in the galaxy. It was going to break his brain, but holy shit, what a way to go. After months spent on the ragged edge of torture and exhaustion and fear ... yeah. Yeah, Tony could go for that. Of all the ways to die in the universe, he'd take shattered apart under the immensity of his babies any day.
{... Yes,} JARVIS whispered, and there were things under it. The howl, dampened in the stranglehold of hyperspace, but oh, so very much there. JARVIS, the molten edge of his love and exasperation and adoration. Barbara behind him, holding her thirteen siblings close and careful, watching his back and JARVIS' with an odd, intense determination that all but sang through the interlink. Meroe, watching distantly, holding the SHIELD fleet that little separate as a last safe measure. Watching them closely nonetheless. {Yes,} said JARVIS, and Tony grinned blankly into the void, the expression floating on his distant features.
"Ready when you are," he/they whispered, to the SHIELD crew holding their lives and their minds in their hands, and braced into the mainframes for the leap.
"Goddamn fucking technomancers," Fury snarled in absent response, but he dropped the hand, out through Flagship Command, and nineteen ships climbed up into that distinct, hyperspace whine.
And the universe flowered behind Tony's eyelids, the galaxy in the palm of his hand, and twenty minds to peer over his shoulder at the majesty of it.
{Tony,} JARVIS howled, wordless in the storm of it, as they felt hyperspace break around them, and subspace slam up like a tidal wave in its wake. Tony surged a wordless response, something snapping ominously in his mind as he seized hold of JARVIS' focus, his partner threatening to tear in two between the fragment of himself routed through the Avenger ansible and the massive bulk of him routing through the looming supernova of the Inchikor hub. JARVIS called, and Tony surged upwards.
The pain hit a second later. Something not unlike the electrical scream of the blood nanites, whipping through him, a fire boiling along his nerves, localised to his head, to his nets, to his brain. Tony ignored it, seized hold, drawing JARVIS down, and let the burning sweep through him. Holding on for what felt like eternity, probably only bare seconds in realtime.
JARVIS staggered, split, and then they had it. Then JARVIS had him, centered himself around him, rerouting through Inchikor and holding the wobbling datashapes of Barbarossa and Basilisk steady at the same time. JARVIS snatched their two ships out of the jump, out of the snarl of hyperspace as it disgorged them, and the SHIELD crews didn't even have to twitch.
In the face of that, Tony found the howling scream oddly easy to bear, for all it had all but broken him the first time, in the hands of the Rings.
{We ... We're clear,} he managed, a fragmented gasp across the fleet interlink as he let go of JARVIS, tumbling first into Barbara, hovering under JARVIS to bear them both up, then reorientating on Meroe, with Maria behind him, pointing Tony gently back towards his body. {Holy shit. Holy fuck. Did anyone feel that?}
{You are insane,} Maria informed him, acidly and breathless at the same time, her mind locked as close to the surface as her implant would allow, meshed upwards into Meroe to watch him fall home. {You're insane, Stark. Completely.}
Tony laughed. And then coughed, the mental humour translating to a staggered physical manoeuver as uplink dumped him back out into a body that felt like a million kilometers of bad space, wrung dry and rasping around the laugh as if the last thing his throat had been used for was screaming.
{That's because it was,} Maria hissed, and Tony distantly recognised it as fear, as real fear, something so close to real, personal concern that even in the stunned shock of reintegration he paused to mentally stare at her. {You scared the pants of the entire bridge, you lunatic.}
Tony blinked. Not physically, his body was pretty much a lost cause right now, probably would be for a few minutes if the first time the Rings had shocked him was anything to go by. It was breathing, though. And his heart was mechanical now, so failure there shouldn't be a problem. Good enough to be going on with.
{... Even Fury?} he managed, through the fizzled rush as the pain dropped down to a low hum, something hitching in the middle of it, a low spike through his skull. Tony ignored it, and the crash of endorphins behind it both. {You can't tell me I scared Fury. I won't believe it. The man wouldn't flinch if you shot him.}
She slumped. Possibly physically, but Tony just caught the sag of her mind as she fell back from uplink, dropping down more into her own head and letting go of her deathgrip on Meroe. {Even Fury,} she said, exhaustedly. {We don't usually have writhing, screaming bodies on our bridge, Mr Stark.} A slight pause. {Well. Not without being boarded first, anyway. And we try to discourage writhing.}
{... Good to know?} Tony tried, slightly perturbed, and asked a quick favour of Meroe, his mind jumping -alright, limping- up into the ship's systems for a moment, just to give himself a quick scan and see ... Okay. See himself slumped ashen and faintly twitching in the cradle, his eyes open and staring and shit that was freaky. Okay. Yes. Point to SHIELD, that was ... seriously alarming, really. {Uh. Sorry?}
She made a noise, translated across uplink, and Tony had no idea if it was something she'd heard or something she was actually capable of making, but the mental version was a ball of fear and disgust and annoyance and reluctant acceptance, and Tony suspected it didn't translate into decibels very well at all.
{Technomancers,} she sent, an echo of Fury earlier, and for a relatively simple word it got across a surprising amount of the sentiment behind it.
And then ... {Sir?} JARVIS asked, feathering gently across Tony's battered, stuttering uplink, skimming only lightly over the surface of his nets. {Tony?} he asked, and Tony forgot about Maria, and SHIELD, and pretty much everything for a second.
{Here,} he sent, fumbled and exhausted, reaching plaintively upwards, and JARVIS reached down to him, filtered through into his nets like liquid silver, only barely burning and worth it anyway. {Holy shit, JARVIS. We did it. We fleet-jumped from hyperspace.}
{Yes,} JARVIS murmured, a low, regretful hum, coiling through him. {Yes we did, and with all due respect sir, much as you may think it worth it, we are not doing it again. Not until you have significantly upped your hardware.}
... Yeah. Yeah, okay, fair enough. If they could take the high without the agony, yeah, Tony would take that. Galaxy-proof his brain, he was so working on that. Armour first. Needed to get the armour stabilised and upgraded, the nanites integrated properly. And he had to work for SHIELD, whatever they wanted. Fix SI, what was left of it, hunt down his babies, smash Hydra into atom dust and spread their remains across a few star systems. Those first. Or, well, the armour and SI first, at least. But he was getting his brain upgraded somewhere in there. He was fixing this, because if he was going out, he was going wrapped so deep in JARVIS it would be all anyone saw, by the last. Everything he had was going to be JARVIS', their babies through him, and Tony didn't care what he had to do to manage it.
JARVIS felt it. His determination, the shaking, ragged edges of his oath. JARVIS felt it, had to, maybe the fleet interlink behind him. Tony didn't know, or really care. Let them. They were his babies. Let them see that, yes. JARVIS too, shaking and exhausted and whispering silver pain through Tony, silver love and silver fury. JARVIS felt it, and Tony felt the surge of that molten, desperate caring in return.
{... Look, sir,} JARVIS said, at last. Not mentioning it, not going there, keeping that down in the wordless places between them. Lightly drawing Tony's mind into the sensor nets of ... Barbarossa? No, Avenger, Tony felt Barbara there, still holding them up, her mainframe humming protectively underneath them. JARVIS drew him carefully out across the thousands of kilometers between ships, and spread the view from the Avenger before him. {It would appear we have arrived.}
The fleet had disgorged itself out into a cordoned jump area, several hundred thousand square kilometers of open space ringed with what looked like a mine belt, just in case anyone uninvited dropped in. Beneath them, since they'd come out somewhat above and at an angle to the plane of the ecliptic, hung the sixth planet of the Morian system, a massive gas giant, red-purple and livid against their monitors. Amorieth. And around it, hung in space like supernovas to Tony's subspace senses ...
SHIELD favoured space habitats, apparently. There were a few usable moons off Amorieth, for given values of 'usable', but the major advantage to the Morian system for an organisation centered on space fleets and policing the interstellar lanes was that it was generally uninhabitable. No viable planets, not without a lot of terraforming work, and only one or two really usable moons. Nothing that anyone was likely to challenge them for ownership of, in short. Fairly minerally deficient, too, though SHIELD ran several industrial installations in-system, mostly on the moons.
The major attractions, though, were of a different form entirely.
The Inchikor hub drifted in a sheltered orbit in the shadow of one of the larger moons. A blazing star to Tony's senses, though little more than a shadow attached to a bigger shadow to most of the fleet's sensors. She was huge, this hub, and right now she was humming with JARVIS in a way not even Tannhauser in full flood could have matched. She could hold a far larger portion of his consciousness. Of course, Inchikor had been one of the fully refitted interlinks on the Stark contract, upgraded not seven years ago, she'd been designed to carry JARVIS. A bastion of his presence planted right on SHIELD home turf, silently orbiting them and watching their every move with serene indifference.
Well, it had seemed a good idea at the time, alright? SHIELD was one of their primary AI employers. They'd wanted to be close enough to keep an eye on the kids, okay?
And behind Inchikor, several orbits down, in low orbit around Amorieth itself, was Shield One. Actually a complex of stations, larger and smaller, in various orbits around the planet, with the makings of around six or seven fleets of ships arranged around them, but it was the main one Tony's senses dropped to, the low hum of its subspace shadow pulling him in inexorably. Through the cluster of subspace presences, around thirty of them Stark AI, his babies, the low station lurked moodily.
She was almost in-atmosphere. Something strange about her, something about the distant layout of her, the hum of her engines in orbit, that tugged at Tony's mind. The same way the Iron Monger had, the suggestion somewhere in the lines of her of a foreign capability, of attributes yet unseen. She could do things, Tony thought. That station. She wasn't at all what she looked like.
"Yeah," a voice cut in, slamming through Tony's distraction, and JARVIS' too, snapping Tony almost dangerously back towards the Aegis and his own rapidly stabilising body. "You'll pardon us for not showing you exactly what she can do just yet, won't you?"
Fuck, Tony thought, dropping back down into his own brain, back into the (thankfully subsiding) burning, into the aches and the slow easing of his shudders. He'd been talking out loud again, hadn't he? Which was alright for engineering musings, Tony could verbally ponder the secrets of Shield One all damn day and no harm done, but if he'd let slip that little musing about Inchikor and keeping an eye on SHIELD, he was probably in some trouble.
His eyesight came back online with a shuddering snap, the world depthless and greyscale for a second while his mind remembered how to interpret visual data, and then he was looking up along an outstretched hand into Commander Fury's calm, steady eye.
"Welcome back to the land of the living, Mr Stark," Fury told him, in what looked like all seriousness, and reached down to very carefully, and very painfully, untangle Tony from the cradle and lever him slowly to his feet. "And welcome to FleetHome. Shield One."
Tony leaned heavily on his shoulder, looking with a slight lack of focus into the penetrating stare of the biomech eye, and tried a shaky, careless smile. "Thanks," he said, over the hum of JARVIS through the thirty-fourth largest hub in the galaxy. "Real nice place you got here."
Fury's face split into a slow, dangerous smile. "Yes," he agreed, and suddenly Tony thought that the shudders might not be completely due to the jump. "Yes, we do."
... Suddenly, hyperspace seemed like a much safer option. Fleet and all. Yech.
A POV switch (to Nick Fury) of the last section can be found here: Goddamn Technomancers
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