CHAPTER 34
The Expo was in chaos. Tony thundered overhead, low enough that Pepper felt the wind of his passage. Firing wildly, the air force drones came close behind, with Rhodey an unwilling passenger in their midst. Around Pepper, the world dissolved into explosions. She dropped to her knees. When everything had passed, she looked around again, amazed to still be alive. She’d stayed to make sure Justin Hammer left in handcuffs. Now that was done and she decided she needed to stay until the park was clear. That’s what she told the police officers doing crowd control.
But what she really wanted was to call Tony. She’d been trying to coordinate Jarvis’s efforts to break Vanko’s control over the drones, and Rhodey, but so far nothing had worked.
Coming in low and hot back over the lake, Tony was shocked when he was jerked downward as War Machine caught up with him and wrenched him off course. They both scraped along the side of a building, peeling off a floor’s worth of windows and a long line of steel framing.
They shot clear of the building, out toward the edge of the Expo grounds. Tony braked hard, pivoting him and War Machine around their collective center of gravity. War Machine’s grip on him loosened, and Tony took the opportunity to fling War Machine—with the unfortunate Rhodey inside, yelling all kinds of things—into the reflecting pool.
But Agent Romanoff was saying something he couldn’t hear, and the War Machine armor suddenly went inert. Uh-oh, Tony thought. He landed next to Rhodey and heard Romanoff saying, “Reboot complete. You got your best friend back.”
“Thank you very much, Agent Romanoff,” he said. That was one more thing he hadn’t known about her. She was apparently a hacker with serious chops, if she could do that faster than Jarvis.
“Well done with the new chest piece,” she added. “I’m reading significantly higher output, and your vitals all look promising.”
“Yes, for the moment, I’m not dying. Thank you.”
Pepper had apparently been listening in, because her face appeared in Tony’s heads-up display practically as soon as he said the word dying. “What do you mean, you’re not dying? Did you just say you were dying?”
“That you? Uh, no, I’m not. Not anymore.”
“What’s going on?” she demanded.
“I was going to tell you. I didn’t want to alarm you,” Tony said.
Her voice started to pitch higher. “You were going to tell me? You really were dying?”
“You didn’t let me,” Tony protested. “I was gonna make you an omelette and tell you!”
Agent Romanoff broke back in. “Hey, hey, save it for the honeymoon. You got incoming, Tony. Looks like the fight’s coming to you.”
“Great,” Tony said. “Pepper?”
“I am fine,” Tony said. “Don’t be mad. I will formally apologize—”
“I am mad.”
“—when I’m not fending off a Hammeroid attack,” Tony finished.
“Fine,” she said in a voice that told him it was definitely not fine.
“We could have been in Venice,” he said, remembering their conversation on the plane. That had been the first time he’d meant to tell her about the palladium poisoning.
She rolled her eyes. “Oh, please.”
A moment later, War Machine’s faceplate flipped up. “Man, you can have your suit back,” Rhodey said.
Tony couldn’t help but laugh. But they didn’t laugh for long. There were more drones to handle, and they were closing in.