Chapter 32: Ultimate B.O.W.: Nemesis
Yinsen watched Tony staring at the card like it had personally saved his life, which it arguably had, and tried to understand what he was looking at.
It was a card. A small, matte black card. People didn't usually look at cards like that.
"Tony. What is that? Why are you reacting this way?"
Tony took a breath and pulled himself back. "It belongs to a friend. Or, someone in that direction." He kept his voice low. "This is an additional exit we didn't plan for. With this, our chances of getting out of here go up considerably."
He pressed his lips together and shook his head at himself. "How did I forget about this. I've had it this entire time."
"The first day. I should have thought of it on the first day."
He took the card between his fingers and bent it until it snapped.
A brief point of light moved across the card's surface and was gone.
Tony understood from that what it meant. The signal was out. Whatever Matthew Lawrence had on the other end of that chip was now on its way.
[System: +1,000 points. Tony Stark is profoundly grateful for your "incidental" assistance.]
[Total accumulated System points: 6,200. Pass reward: Nemesis x1. Deposited into System storage.]
[Next milestone: 8,000 accumulated System points. Continue benefiting the people.]
On the range, Matthew's movement stopped for half a second.
A thousand points.
From one person.
He turned the number over. He understood how much it mattered to find hope in a hopeless situation. But a single individual producing a thousand points in one moment was not something he had seen before.
The most likely explanation: Tony Stark was not an ordinary individual in this universe. His position, his reach, the weight of what he represented. It stood to reason that the System weighted these things. Someone like Tony generating a thousand points in a moment of genuine relief made more sense than a hundred strangers each generating ten.
That seemed right. Nothing else explained the number.
He was still in the middle of this thought when Hunk moved.
Two shots, fast and clean. The bulletproof vest absorbed both. Matthew felt the impacts, looked down at the marks left on his chest, and by the time he looked back up, a Cold Steel hand axe was in Hunk's grip and the blade was level with his throat.
Hunk held it there for a moment.
Then he stepped back and returned the axe to its place.
"You lose, sir."
Matthew looked at the vest, then shrugged. He pulled out his phone and held it up. "Not a loss. A callout."
On the screen: a position. Latitude, longitude, altitude. No other information. Nothing else was needed.
He raised his voice. "Hunk. Get your team together."
"Yes, sir."
Afghanistan. Sixteen hours after Tony snapped the card.
The suit was close.
Tony had not stopped in those sixteen hours. He couldn't afford to put all his weight on Matthew's rescue arriving in time, which meant every hour that the Mark I got closer to finished was an hour that gave him more options if it didn't. Sweat ran down his face. Metal rang against metal in the closed space. Every strike of the hammer felt like something clarifying.
When the last piece went into place and he stepped back and looked at what they had built, the person looking at it was not entirely the same person who had arrived in Afghanistan. The last of the confusion that had been in his eyes since the ambush was gone. Something else had taken its place.
The playboy was gone. He'd been left in the cave somewhere along the way.
"Yinsen. We're starting."
"Ready."
They lifted the heavy metal shell together and locked the pieces into position.
Outside, the shouting started.
The voices were getting closer. More of them, louder. Time was contracting.
Tony, whatever patience he had been running on finally reaching its end, directed a sustained and highly specific internal monologue at Matthew Lawrence:
Damn it, damn it, damn it. Matthew. Are you waiting until I'm actually dead? What happened to world-class security operations? What exactly did I activate that card for?
Above the cave, at the same moment:
Three helicopters swept low over the landscape, each carrying a yellow cargo container suspended below on a hook. The rotors tore at the air. Below, Ten Rings gunmen scrambled from their positions, weapons raised, two of them hoisting a rocket launcher and scanning the sky.
The helicopters didn't attack.
In the lead helicopter, Matthew's voice came through flat and even.
"All units confirm target area."
"One, confirmed. Standing by for B.O.W. deployment."
"Two, confirmed. Standing by."
"Three, confirmed."
"Deploy."
Three containers dropped simultaneously.
They hit the ground like something the sky had decided to be done with, driving deep into the sand, throwing up a wall of dust. The impact pattern was triangular, three points around the cave entrance, precise and immediate.
The silence that followed lasted exactly as long as it took everyone present to process what had just happened.
"Stay back."
"Don't get near them."
"Could be a trapâ€""
The senior commander's voice cut through it. "Open them."
No one moved.
He looked at his men. "Someone open them."
A bearded man was pushed forward from the group. He looked at the containers in the settling dust, swallowed, looked back at the commander who was now standing at a comfortable distance, and understood that he had no real choice in this.
He walked toward the nearest container.
With every step he was praying quietly to anyone who might be listening.
His hands were shaking. His clothes were soaked through with cold sweat.
He stopped in front of it.
He steeled himself, reached for the latch, and pulled.
The door came off.
From the inside.
A fist the size of a man's head punched through the reinforced steel as though it wasn't there. It moved at a speed that left no time for anything. Before the man had processed what he was seeing, the fist had closed around his skull.
He fired his sidearm into the hand. Multiple times. The bullets did not appear to register as relevant information.
The hand tightened.
His skull went the way of something that had been squeezed past its structural limit, and his body followed.
In the blood mist and the kicked-up sand, a shape stepped out of the broken container.
It was taller than the T-103 Tyrant. Considerably. The figure that stepped into the open air was over two meters seventy, wrapped in a black trench coat, face sealed entirely behind a heavy leather mask. The muscle mass suggested something that had been engineered toward a specific purpose and had been given sufficient resources. In one hand it held a rotary cannon with a barrel diameter that had no business being that large on something a person was holding.
The Ten Rings gunmen looked at it.
They had a word for what they were looking at, and it arrived in all of them at the same moment.
War machine.
[Ultimate B.O.W.: Nemesis. Making his entrance.]
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