The Sage of the Mind

Disclaimer - The rights of the respective characters are with their respective owners. I don’t mean to violate their intellectual property rights and thus, only my original characters are my IP. 

The Sage of the Mind: Chapter 54 [September 2010, Day 1 of the Stark Expo]

–Axle Riddle–

Man, what he wouldn’t have given for Frank to be the commander for this operation, preferably with the protection he was looking for, that would help Frank lead a team of super powered bulletproof manchildren.

“Team 1, all clear,”

“Team 3, all clear,”

“Team 2, all clear,”

The six of them were distributed into three teams each. All of them were in civilian clothing with no armour underneath. He was able to sneak in the armoured parts that any two hulks could wear at any given point in time so that he could use them as over glorified smash balls against the drones that have arrived at the back of the Expo.

He couldn’t get a complete scan of them from this far away but just by a rudimentary one, he could see multiple weak points where they were normally hidden in Tony Stark’s Iron Man suit. 

The three teams were stationed separately in three different sectors of the Expo. There was the store part of the Expo where companies set up shops to sell their tech, along with a food court for the entire Expo. The second part was where companies showcased their products, needing large flat areas for them to be able to showcase their latest tech.

Somehow, there were multiple companies he could recognise from the bunch that was displaying their products.

Oscorp was one that stood out the most to him, so was Pym Industries (soon to be Cross Industries if Hank doesn’t do anything about it), and lastly Rand Enterprises. Huh, he hoped to meet some of the big people associated with these companies but he could not find any sign of a high level delegation from either of the companies.

They must be here just to maintain a presence then.

Then came the third section of the Expo, the Stage. Hammer was actually given the primetime stage for the event, he must have shelled out a lot of money for that. That Stage was then modified according to his requirements, that was where the popping up of the drone part must have come from. 

The wrecking ball equipment was stationed exactly in this auditorium. As soon as the first sign of attack on Iron Man appeared, he was going to let loose. He knew that the chances of anything happening elsewhere were quite low but he was not going to risk it. 

He just hoped that Tony did not go out of the auditorium using the glass windows, shards of glass were a pain to deal with, especially at the edge of his range. It just got more and more difficult to multitask the farther he was from the object. For this purpose, he had rented a room at the very edge of Manhattan. It was not good and obviously not worth the price but it is what it is so he adjusted for the sake of the innocent people, to make sure that nobody was hurt in Vanko’s stupid quest for revenge.

Seriously, how hard was it for him to realise that Anthony Stark was not Howard Stark, who was admittedly a dick in many things he did throughout his life, so it was not that far fetched to think that Howard had Vanko’s father ousted from the project because he did not want a Russian to be working on what was in all but name, a Fusion Nuclear Reactor.

They did not have the best of reputation at the time and that certainly did not help his case. As a result, Anton Vanko rotted away in Soviet Russia and Ivan Vanko grew up with a deep seated pathological hatred for the name Stark. Since Tony was dead, he set his sights on the man who piloted a walking armour of a tank.

“Randall? How are things looking on your end? Is Bruce’s help required?” He asked Randall who was busy hacking into the Hamer Industries records to see if they could find anything helpful. 

Randall had done it a dozen times beforehand as well but there were no records about the drones or anything of that regard, anywhere in the manifesto. It must be kept all off the books to help Hammer maintain plausible deniability later on.

So, now that there was an official trail to the factory through which the Drones came from, Randall was trying to see if everything could be traced back to Vanko and if his systems could be hacked or not, nullifying the need for the Hulks to take action in the first place. Though killing Vanko while he was unarmed would be akin to cold blooded murder, he had long since resolved himself that one day, he would have to kill someone and for the greater good, he would have to take that burden upon himself. It would be better than killing him after he had threatened hundreds of innocent people and blown up prime real estate in New York.

The property damages alone would have cost Vanko a life sentence in prison, before he was inevitably broken out of the prison by parties interested in the Arc Reactor, renewing the cycle of revenge that would only be broken once Vanko was dead.

“Um, I don't know? Look he is doing something, that’s for sure but unless the link to the drones comes online, I can’t do anything without actual physical access to the servers. I could try and bomb the servers but we don’t know if the drones have some sort of limited autopilot or not, that could turn out to be more dangerous,” Randall warned him.

Yeah, that would definitely be more dangerous because, in the original setting, the drones targeted one thing and one thing only.

Iron Man.

They didn’t see the civilians, law enforcements, or anything else. The entire target of the algorithm that had taken over everything was Iron Man, so while it did make things difficult for Stark, he was in a suit of advanced armour so he was fine. The civilians, on the other hand, would die if they took on even a mid sized blast of Repulsor Arrays.

So, making sure that if they were unable to disable them from afar, then at least making sure that their target is a highly advanced, protective shell around a man would be a good priority.

____xxx___

“I still think we should have taken a venue closer to Manhattan,” Pepper Potts, the CEO of Stark Industries voiced out her thoughts to her newest, and so far, very capable PA, Natalie Rushman.

“And displayed what? A few stalls? Because that is all the space we could get. Don’t worry, I have heard that the Invisible Man acts in a limited capacity in this area as well so law and order should not be a worry plus, when I mentioned the Invisible Man to the NYPD, it was as if it lit a fire under them. You can see the results of that statement over the Expo,” Natalie told her.

“Yeah, I can see the police but you do realise that Tony has enemies that cannot be handled by the police. And he was already feeling sick and after the party, *sigh*” Pepper sighed as she remembered the string of controversies Tony had found himself in, lately. He even forgot to sign on important documents that were necessary for the Expo to run in the first place. She had to forge his sign, as she had done many times in the past but this was the limit of what she was going to tolerate.

Once the Expo was wrapped up, Pepper Potts was going to tender in her resignation as CEO of Stark Industries. She loved Tony but being around him was stressing her way too much. She even started finding grey hair, for Pete’s sake.

Her worries stemmed from the attack on Tony last month. If she was closer to the Invisible Man’s territory, she would feel much safer considering that whoever it was, they made sure that their area remained void of crimes, no matter how large or small.

She was sure even the Vanko guy from before would find it tough to do even a single thing before the Invisible Man had him in his, well, Invisible grip.

“Any update on what Hammer is going to showcase today?” She found herself asking Natalie, just to pass the time because her anxiety was not helping things today. This was the single largest event that she had coordinated in all of her career in Stark Industries.

Everything has to go perfectly.

“Something about Robot drones, though, judging by the previously leaked footage, it is probably nothing noteworthy,” Natalie tried to reassure her and she was probably right and yet, she could not help but shake the feeling that something was wrong.

“Natalie, I want you to go with Happy and check the security of the plaza. Make sure that nothing is amiss. I don’t want Hammer crying later on,” Pepper ordered her before she started taking her calls.

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