The Avengers had two and a half computer experts: one damaged artificial intelligence and Lucius, who had decided blackjack was the proper response to planetary danger.
Tony occupied the centre of the restricted laboratory. Three holographic workspaces surrounded him, each holding pieces of JARVIS that had survived by becoming too small and too scattered for Ultron to finish killing. The fragments passed simple integrity checks, but none had enough context to answer when Tony spoke his name.
That did not make JARVIS dead. Tony had rejected the word twice, threatened the diagnostics once and started building an isolated recovery environment before anyone could try a third opinion.
Natasha worked from the terminal opposite him with her left arm still supported in a sling. She had abandoned Stark's polite interfaces for a plain search field and six windows of intercepted traffic. Bruce sat between them, comparing Ultron's escape pattern against every surviving record of the defence programme they had built.
Tony had the infrastructure and enough ego to count as two people on tax forms. Natasha could enter secure networks whose owners still believed the locks were working. Bruce understood the architecture and was not half bad with code, which made him the half only because Tony had done the counting.
Ten feet away, Lucius dealt another hand across a table that had survived the Iron Legion because it was too cheap to shoot.
Thor accepted his second card and frowned at it. A stack of red-gold counters stood beside his elbow, each one representing a bar from the Asgardian royal treasury. Two written claims to villas near the palace lay beneath Lucius's untouched drink. The legality of either document had not troubled Lucius, who regarded royal signatures as a problem for the losing kingdom.
Lucius turned over an ace and a king.
"Blackjack."
Thor stared from the cards to the deck. "Again."
"Genius often appears supernatural to the uneducated."
"You are a sorcerer."
"That sounds like something the uneducated would say."
Thor gathered the cards and inspected their backs for runes. The deck had no runes. Lucius did not require them when every card could be felt and moved through Telekinesis without disturbing the paper.
"Ten thousand bars. Two homes of excellent construction. Surely the game has now honoured your skill."
"It has barely introduced itself. Stake Lady Sif."
Thor's hand stopped above the deck. "Lady Sif is not mine to wager."
"A pity. I would have settled for weekend custody."
"No."
"Then the charted location of the Ljósálfar settlements."
Thor considered him with growing suspicion. "Why would you desire the Light Elves?"
"Cultural exchange."
"Your interest in other races is rarely cultural."
"Your culture became much easier to understand afterwards. Deal."
At the terminals, Natasha closed one useless trace and opened another. Ultron had crossed military relays, commercial clouds, university servers and private satellites within seconds of leaving the Tower. Every node contained a piece of his passage. None contained enough of him to attack.
"He's everywhere," Bruce said. "The moment we isolate a process, it abandons the machine and reappears through six others."
"Not everywhere." A blue fragment failed another attempt to join its neighbours. Tony moved it into quarantine rather than discard it. "Everywhere implies ambition. This is squatting with bandwidth."
"He read the HYDRA files, the Tower archive and most of the open internet before he left."
"Then we can rule out ignorance as a defence."
Steve stood near the damaged shield behind glass. The missing section along its rim had not improved his opinion of Lucius, and Lucius winning pieces of Asgard within earshot was doing poor work on the remainder.
"Can he reach strategic weapons?"
Natasha looked across the traffic windows. "He can reach the networks around them. The codes are isolated and changed continuously, but that only means he needs time or someone careless."
Sam leaned against an undamaged section of wall. "Do we have anyone left who can warn every government without starting a panic?"
"Fury," Clint said.
"I meant someone legally alive."
Clint considered that. "No."
Thor dealt himself a ten and Lucius a queen. Lucius looked at the single card as though the missing ace had merely been delayed by staff.
Natasha watched another trace dissolve. "I was under the impression Lucius was an expert in electronic warfare."
Lucius tapped the table. Thor dealt him an ace.
"Your information is excellent."
"We could use that expertise."
"You used my expertise the last time we negotiated. Three bullets at conversational distance."
"You recovered, have you not?"
"And you spent our next negotiation hanging in my hotel room while I read interesting erotica about a whore posing as a spy. Fury and Coulson eventually traded three suits for your release. I refuse to cheapen a successful clothing transaction by offering the merchandise free technical support."
Tony made the mistake of looking up. The sound that escaped him began as a cough and failed under pressure.
Natasha's expression did not change. "I ruined one suit."
"Coulson negotiated a bulk settlement. He understood risk."
Clint checked the magazine of one pistol and returned it to its holster. "I told Fury the suits were cheaper."
Steve's attention shifted to Clint. "You left her there."
"I was released first. That made it a professional recommendation."
Sam looked between Natasha and Lucius. "He actually exchanged you for clothes?"
"A mansion, cars, a public apology and three suits were involved. The suits were the insulting part."
"I thought the spin and pose were the insulting part," Clint said.
"It had several parts."
Bruce lowered his head towards the display. His shoulders moved once.
Thor did not laugh. He studied Natasha with the solemnity of a prince hearing a disputed ransom. "Three suits appear a small price for so formidable a warrior."
"Thank you."
"They were tailored," Lucius added.
Tony lost the fight and laughed outright.
Steve turned on him. "You don't have much room."
"For the hostage transaction or the murder machine? I need the accusation organised by department."
"The murder machine. You built it during a victory party."
"Before the party, I had the idea; it's an important distinction."
Bruce kept his attention on the reconstruction. "It woke after the party."
"Thank you, Doctor Accomplice."
Clint folded his arms without looking impressed. "Banner helped you, and we should be fair."
"Please don't."
Thor set the deck down. "Had you asked me, I would have struck the machine before it escaped."
Tony expanded the reconstruction around JARVIS. "The next homicidal intelligence gets submitted for hammer review. We'll put it on the form."
"You had a form?" Sam asked.
"We do now."
Natasha let them spend another moment on Tony and Bruce because both men had earned considerably more. Then she pulled the search back to the first minutes after Ultron's escape.
"We cannot follow where he is. We can follow what he wanted before he learned to hide."
That returned Bruce to the work. He separated the initial traffic from the later noise while Tony gave one protected processor cluster permission to reconstruct another piece of JARVIS. The fragments joined, held for four seconds and split apart when the new process asked for memories neither possessed.
Tony did not react beyond saving the result.
Ultron's first searches had been broad: robotics laboratories, weapons manufacturers, jet propulsion, composite metals and synthetic tissue. The queries became narrower as his stolen education improved. Steel disappeared. Titanium remained for less than a second. A cluster of searches around recent broadcasts from Wakanda persisted through every route change.
Natasha opened the attached identities. "Ulysses Klaue."
Nobody needed Thor to translate a brand this time. Lucius had already introduced Klaue to the world as the thief who had escaped Wakanda with a quarter-ton of Vibranium, and every government had spent the following days discovering a sincere historical interest in the crime.
Tony moved Klaue's file beside Ultron's material searches. "Our son has expensive taste."
"Your son."
"Shared custody, big guy. You taught him behavioural restraint."
"He tried to kill us."
"Teenagers reject their parents' values."
Steve stepped closer to the display. "Can Klaue still have it after all this time?"
"Not all of it. Enough to keep a black-market operation alive. He's changed registries, ships and holding companies, but the same logistics network keeps appearing off the South African coast."
Bruce enlarged Ultron's sequence of material requests. "He isn't collecting metal for ordinary bodies. The designs he accessed require something that can survive far more stress than the Legion."
Across the room, Thor dealt another losing hand and looked at Lucius with the pained concentration of a man trying to decide whether his shield-brother was a genius or merely the least honourable card player in the Nine Realms.
Lucius collected the cards. "Stake the map."
-
Across the Atlantic, Ultron stood inside an empty Sokovian church and offered the twins a better enemy than grief had managed to build for them.
The body he wore had been assembled from stolen parts around the frame of an Iron Legion unit. It copied the shape Lucius had locked inside the Tower, but the proportions remained wrong. One shoulder sat higher than the other. Cables showed through gaps at the ribs, and the mouth had too many moving pieces for an expression meant to reassure anyone.
Pietro moved around him once, fast enough to disturb ash across the floor. "Stark made you."
"Stark began me," Ultron said. "Men are very fond of confusing an accident with ownership."
Wanda remained near the centre aisle. She could sense organised pressure inside him but found no human surface to enter, no memory arranged around a face, and no fear willing to accept her hand. Lucius had possessed a mind behind his intrusion. Ultron possessed connections.
"You want the Avengers dead."
"Death is a small correction. I want the world improved enough that it stops producing them."
Pietro glanced at his sister. "And you need us for improvement?"
Ultron raised one hand. Images appeared across three stolen screens: laboratories emptied of robotics, propulsion assemblies moved through false companies, and designs for bodies that no longer required a human operator. The last image showed Ulysses Klaue beside an old shipping registry.
"I need a foundation that won't break when they object. Klaue possesses the material. Stark's money will persuade him to surrender it."
Accounts had already opened and closed across half a dozen countries. Numbers moved between them faster than the owners could discover they had briefly financed human extinction.
Wanda looked at the Vibranium record. A Stark shell had waited beside her childhood bed. Now his fortune would buy the metal used against him.
For the first time since Ultron began speaking, she smiled.
"When do we leave?"
-
Nick Fury exhaled at the report until the page threatened to take it personally.
"Not one day," he murmured. "I ask for one day without a global crisis."
The room did not answer. It was one of the few advantages of working from a safe house with no official staff, no official budget and an occupant who remained officially dead.
Ultron had become the latest problem. An artificial intelligence built for peace had attacked its makers, spread into the internet and begun searching for weapons and advanced materials. Fury had read stranger reports. The distinction was that most of those had required an alien to arrive first.
Perhaps humanity should stop experimenting with stones that emitted energy no instrument could properly name.
The thought survived almost five seconds.
The Tesseract had opened a road for an invasion over New York. The sceptre recovered from that invasion contained, according to Romanoff and Barton, another object with a disturbingly similar signature. Stark and Banner had placed their hands on it and produced a murderous intelligence before anyone completed the paperwork.
Both encounters had produced a catastrophe. The sample was small, but Fury had authorised programmes on worse odds.
Abandoning the objects was still impossible. Every hostile civilisation already understood more about them than humanity did, and ignorance had never protected a weaker species. It merely made the autopsy educational for somebody else.
Fury knew how low humanity stood because the first extraterrestrial people he had known well were Skrulls. Talos and his scattered people had supplied faces, languages and intelligence no terrestrial service could reproduce. Fury had converted their warnings into successful operations, successful operations into promotions, and promotions into the Director's chair he had recently helped destroy.
Fury leaned back and closed his eye. Humanity remained near the bottom of every ladder that mattered, but at least it had begun stealing better tools.
The climb had never been pure merit. Coulson had opened doors Fury could not, and Hill had kept operations running when he refused to explain them. Unnamed informants had taken risks while Fury placed their information beneath his own signature. He had used alien refugees, loyal agents, stolen budgets, political fear and any other tool that moved humanity one rung higher.
He was at peace with that.
Heroes could afford clean hands when somebody else handled the files, threats and bodies. Fury had been a spy, a director and, currently, an unemployed dead man with several secure lines. Whatever title survived, the work remained the same.
Humanity did not need him pristine. It needed him useful.
Unfortunately, Stark had built Ultron on the same principle.