Early in the pre-dawn hours Stack's car, a Ford Tempo materialized out of the pre-dawn dark outside the warehouse. Angela was already in the passenger seat, again looking completely different. She had dirty blonde hair and brown eyes today.
"This your car?" I asked Stack, climbing into the back seat
Stack shrugged. "Nah. Morgan likes to keep a pool of deniable cars for jobs. I borrowed one. What he doesn't know..."
He trailed off.
We drove through streets that were mostly empty at that hour, the city not yet awake, the sky that particular shade of dark blue that comes just before it starts to lighten.
We parked two blocks from the chemical supplier's loading facility in a parking garage. Stack hopped out and opened the trunk Three Tristate Chemical boiler suits in the trunk, folded neat, and a case with the badges Becca had printed. We pulled on the boiler suits in the dark.
Stack checked his badge photo against his face in the car mirror. "Good enough."
I inserted my earpiece and keyed the walkman on my belt.
"Comms check."
Jackson came back immediately. "Reading you clearly. You're at the Tristate facility?"
"Two blocks out. About to walk in."
"Understood. We'll be monitoring."
Stack clicked his own unit twice. Becca's voice came back, quieter. "Good luck."
We walked the two blocks to the logistics warehouse's entrance in silence.
The badge reader accepted my card without complaint, the door unlocking with a clean click. Unlike the vast majority of warehouses I had been inside so far in Earth-616, the facility was a fully operational logistical center. Forklifts moved pallets and the skeleton morning crew moved purposefully.
A harried-looking manager intercepted us before we'd made it ten feet in.
"You the Stane crew?" Without waiting for an answer: "Truck's loaded, manifest's in the cab. You're picking up a return on their end. It'll be waiting at receiving, bring it back with you when you're done. They know you're coming." He was already turning away. "PPE locker's through that door. Gear up."
I kept my expression neutral. Becca had said they wouldn't check anything, but it was something else entirely to see it in person. We followed the signs to the locker, pulled on our respirators and goggles, and headed back out to the truck.
After going outside and climbing into the assigned truck, the manager made his way back over. "You're loaded up. Get going."
With a low rumble, the truck pulled away, and we were on our way to the Stane LI facility.
The drive out to Long Island was quiet. Becca's voice came through the earpiece about twenty minutes in.
"Everything in Tristate's system is copacetic. Delivery is flagged appropriately." A brief pause. "We're going to cut comms shortly because-" I could almost hear the eye roll, "-Darrell has concerns about unusual signals getting picked up on the Stane campus."
Darrell chimed in. "Jackson was the one who brought that up. Regardless. Good luck."
"Oh, so now it's Jackson's idea-"
The signal dropped.
I tucked my earpiece into my breast pocket. Stack and Angela did the same. The earpieces were small enough to not be obvious to a cursory inspection, but it still wasn't worth the risk.
After a few more minutes, we arrived at the Stane LI facility.
In the breaking dawn, the facility looked impressive. The dome of the solar converter caught the morning sun, as we rolled toward the guardhouse. I saw the main factory, low-slung in the background, and the height of the special housing facility to the west. It was far more impressive in person than it looked on the page.
We pulled to a stop at the gatehouse. The slightly lethargic guard checked the manifest and waved us through.
People really didn't check things if they fit within their preconceptions. Or, more likely, the guard didn't want to get yelled at by a Stane higher-up. Either was good enough for my purposes.
The biochemistry building loading dock was quiet at this hour, a single receiving manager waiting with a clipboard and the particular expression of someone who had been there for a while and was bored. Tall, blond, slightly rumpled. He brightened noticeably when the truck pulled up.
Stack and I moved boxes while Angela handled the manager, her voice carrying a light Midwestern accent. It was pretty similar to the one she'd used in the flight attendant disguise. I hefted another box and considered that. Deliberate choice or factory default when she needed to ingratiate herself with someone quickly? Either way it was working. The manager's shoulders had dropped about two inches since we'd pulled up.
Angela turned back to him with an apologetic smile.
"My coworkers have been on since four. Any chance they can grab a break before we load the return? Long drive back." She paused. "Bio break wouldn't go amiss either. Inventory check on our end is going to take a while anyway, no point in them standing around."
The manager shrugged. "Stairs are right inside the door, take them up to the second floor, two rights. Break room's down that way, bathrooms are right next to it."
"Appreciate it." She glanced at us. "Take your time gents."
Stack and I made our way to Room 2-14B on the second floor of the biosciences building. On one of the shelves, surrounded by cleaning products was a nondescript duffel bag. I unzipped it.
Inside were three Stane International maintenance jumpsuits. The suits were brown with the SI logo on the chest. Stack and I quickly changed, doffing our masks, goggles and boilersuits for....another boiler suit. There was an odd sort of duality to that.
We came back down the stairs just in time to see Angela disengage from the manager with an apologetic smile and some excuses I didn't quite catch. Her eyes smoothly moved over us as she climbed the stairs in the opposite direction.
Stack and I followed the signs through the biochemistry building, all the way to the computer sciences research building. Finally, we arrived at the monorail station. A guard stood in front of the doors, looking bored. Middle-aged, white, your average security type.
"Still haven't fixed the badges?" Stack asked conversationally.
"Tell me about it." the guard griped. "I've been manually checking ID's for weeks...."
Stack turned around and drummed his fingers while waiting for Angela to make an appearance. Finally, a woman in a Stane jumpsuit made an appearance. Angela had (evidently) brought a second pair of contacts, her eye color now green, her hair down instead of in a bun. She walked with a slight hunch, and was difficult to recognise as the woman handling the handoff.
With that, we waited. The monorail pulled into the station around two minutes later with an electric hum. It was around 8:30 by my watch and a stream of people disembarked.
The guard watched the new arrivals disembark. Lanyards holding IDs, a few hard hats, someone with a blueprint tube under their arm. He nodded at a cluster near the back of the crowd, most of them wearing dosimeters clipped to their lapels.
"Solar converter crowd. They show up a little early to account for the walk." He shook his head. "Closed down that segment a while back. Everyone working out there's gotta hoof it the rest of the way."
Stack nodded sympathetically. "Pain in the ass."
"Tell me about it." The guard watched the last of them clear the platform. "You maintenance folks have any idea when that segment's coming back online?"
Stack shrugged. "Couldn't tell you. They just transferred the three of us in. Still figuring out what's what around here."
The guard nodded. "Figured I'd ask." He leaned against the door frame. "Man, ever since the buyout the turnover's been nuts. Under Stark, something like that spur closure would've been fixed inside a week. Someone would've caught hell for leaving it that long." He shook his head. "Different times."
The monorail doors chimed.
"Anyway." He waved at our proffered badges without really looking at them. "Sorry for keeping you. Good luck out there."
Our monorail car was completely empty. The automated voice announced our next destination. "Next stop, Central Transit Hub. Transfer available to Southwest Line and Manufacturing Loop. Doors will open on the left."
Angela sighed, cracking her back. "Portraying someone with a slight hunch is always tiresome."
The rest of the ride proceeded in silence. I watched the facility from the elevated track. The scale of it was something else entirely from this viewpoint. You could see how the buildings related to each other, the Research and Development block a cluster of connected structures to the southeast, the main factory low and sprawling to the northwest, the dome of the solar converter catching the early light in the distance, the decorative arch near it. The parking lot below was maybe a third full, cars clustered near the main entrance, the rest of the spaces sitting empty in the morning quiet.
The monorail glided to a stop at the Transit Hub.
"Central Transit Hub. Transfer to Southwest Line and Manufacturing Loop. Doors will open on the left."
The hub was a functional space. Fluorescent lighting, scuffed linoleum floors worn pale in the high-traffic paths between platforms, a facility map under scratched plexiglass on the wall. A service window that might have been staffed during peak hours sat dark. At 8:40 it was mostly quiet, with just a handful of workers waiting on the Manufacturing Loop platform heading toward the factory complex.
We crossed to the Southwest Line platform. The car was already waiting. Two passengers were already aboard. An office worker near the front bobbing his head to a Walkman, oblivious to everything, and another halfway down the car working through a magazine with the focused disinterest of someone killing a commute. Neither looked up as we boarded.
"Next stop, Main Computer Facility."`
The car pulled away. From the elevated track the view shifted, the research block giving way to the administrative buildings. The main computer facility sat ahead at the end of the line, a taller blocky office building.
The car slowed.
"Main Computer Facility. Doors will open on the left."
We alighted. The building was much the same as any other in the complex. Linoleum flooring, flat lighting, blandly inoffensive walls.
We made our way to the mainframe room. Angela knocked.
"Maintenance." Her disguised voice was reedy, completely unlike her actual voice.
The door opened. The man standing there looked like your stereotypical mainframe jockey. White, slightly overweight, bearded, holding a coffee cup in one hand and wearing a rumpled button-down and tie. He looked at the three of us, mildly annoyed at being interrupted.
"What."
"Hargrave told us to pull one of the daily backups for testing."
Kayden's eyes moved to us then back to Angela. "Shouldn't IT be handling that?"
"IT's stretched. Hargrave said maintenance could handle the transport."
He looked at Stack, then at me. "You know how to properly pull a drive without corrupting it?"
"Yep."
He stepped back and let us in. The room was exactly what you'd expect. Raised steel flooring, cold air, the background hum of a lot of electricity. Tape reels turned on the mainframe units along the far wall, indicator lights blinking in steady rhythms. Three other technicians were at workstations, none of them looking up.
Kayden looked at us again.
"I'm going to call Hargrave to confirm."
A pit opened in my stomach. I managed to keep it off my face by sheer force of will. Stack tensed imperceptibly. Angela shrugged.
"You know how he is," she said. "Your funeral."
Kayden stepped to the wall phone, picked up the receiver, punched in the extension, and hit the speaker button.
Hargrave picked up on the first ring.
"Morning Mr. Hargrave, I just wanted to confirm-"
He didn't get any further than that.
"I have been in this office since seven PM last night." Hargrave's voice was rapid, clipped, with the rushed diction of someone functioning on a truly heroic amount of stimulants. "Seven PM. I reorganized the divisional reports, identified a headcount redundancy before it became a liability, and got reservations at Dorsia. That was before midnight. Before nine this morning I wanted to have the Q3 variance analysis signed off and up the chain."
There was a brief, loaded pause.
"You are breaking my flow state, Kayden. So whatever this is, it had better be good."
"Sir, I just wanted to confirm the backup pull that—"
"You're calling me about a backup pull?" A brief pause that somehow dripped with contempt. "You know what your problem is, Kayden? Not that you're lazy and sloppy, even though believe me, that's a problem. That fucking beard of yours is evidence of that. I've never seen someone who can make a dress shirt look so—"
Kayden reached over and took it off speaker. Stack winced. None of the other technicians reacted.
The voice continued at reduced volume for another ten seconds or so, audible from across the room as a sustained, rapid-fire tone of fury. Kayden stood holding the receiver slightly away from his ear, his expression cycling through several things before settling on something flat and exhausted. He didn't attempt to speak again.
The phone disconnected.
Kayden stood there for a moment. Then he set the receiver back in the cradle with exaggerated care, like he was handling something fragile.
He turned around.
"Bay seven in the drive room." he said. "Full daily set is there."
He walked back to his workstation, sat down, and re-opened his text editor. He was evidently an Emacs man.
"Don't bother signing the log," he added, not looking up. "Let our lord and master puzzle it out for himself."
Angela closed the door with a sympathetic nod. "Can do."
We moved to the second room with the drives. I let out a breath I didn't know I was holding.
Stack went down the hallway and returned with the transit crate on a pallet jack. The drives were substantial. 8 inch HDDs, two hands minimum, heavier than they looked. I unhooked cables, Stack seated them into foam cutouts. Twenty drives. Done.
I allowed myself a bit of optimism. Things had been going very smoothly so far. Working with professionals and with a real plan was amazing.
Unfortunately, the sudden howl of the alarm brought a conclusive end to my backpatting, as I nearly jumped out of my skin.
I cursed my earlier optimism and fumbled for my earpiece. Our AIM mission control might have some insight I wouldn't-
"Start pushing," Angela said. "We find out what it is later."
Stack leaned into the pallet jack with Angela and myself guiding it and we moved forwards.
The monorail station was a ninety second walk that felt considerably longer with the weight of the crate and the alarm still howling. A small cluster of office staff were gathered near a fire exit, talking in low voices, doing the particular directionless dance of the unsure.
The monorail arrived completely on schedule, doors sliding open with a mild pneumatic hiss, utterly indifferent to the alarm filling the building behind us. We wheeled the crate on without breaking stride. The doors slid shut.
The car was empty and blissfully quiet, the alarm reduced to a muffled pulse through the windows, then fading to nothing as we pulled away
That lasted about thirty seconds. A flash of light from the manufacturing side of the campus drew my eye. I saw three figures falling, which didn't make sense until I saw the red and silver blur moving between them, catching them before they hit the ground.
Iron Man. Oh. This was Iron Man #200. I clenched my jaw. If I had just pulled the trigger on this a day earlier I wouldn't be getting caught in the middle of this. The monorail continued, indifferent to my self-recrimination.
I saw an armored blue figure rocketing into the air. Stane, I presumed. A burst of energy flashed between the two suits and the red and silver figure went tumbling downwards. Seconds later Stark was back up.
I pulled my eyes away from the aerial duel.
"That's ...suboptimal"
Stack groaned. "Of course we get caught up in some bullshit."
Angela shrugged. "Iron Man seems rather busy with his playmate. We should be fine."
A bright flash pulled my attention back to the fight just in time to see a blue blur arc past the monorail and hit the track bed with a whump I felt in my chest before I heard it. The whole car shuddered. I grabbed for the nearest handhold.
Iron Man had rocked Stane, I wasn't sure what weapon system he had hit him with.
The pallet jack shuddered but stayed put. Stack braced it with one hand and gave Angela a look. Angela had already braced herself against the car wall, not deigning to acknowledge it.
The rest of the ride was thankfully uneventful, the occasional rumble the only reminder that something significant was happening on the other side of the campus. The monorail windows vibrated gently with each one.
We pulled into the Transit Hub. The alarm was audible even here, but the monorails were still running, indifferent to the global alarm. I chalked that up to whatever system they were using being broken unintentionally.
I looked toward the solar converter side of the campus just in time to see the decorative arch tumbling through the air in a long arc toward the research block. I looked away. That was also roughly the direction of our exit.
Thankfully, things seemed to have settled somewhat by the time the Southwest Line car made its way toward the R&D station. The rumbles had spaced out. Whatever was happening, it was either winding down or moving.
The car pulled into the R&D Complex station. Our arrival was heralded by an explosion considerably larger than the previous ones, shaking every window in both the monorail and the building hard enough that Stack instinctively flinched.
We pushed the pallet jack out onto the platform. The guard from earlier was gone. The sparse smattering of staff we passed in the corridors were all moving in the same direction, the exits. Nobody gave three maintenance workers with a heavy crate a second look.
Stack and I changed back to our Tristate garb in the biosciences building while Angela held the hallway. Fastest I'd changed in a while.
We swapped. Angela came back out in her Tristate gear, but was carrying the maintenance bag from the Stane cover. I decided not to ask, and we began maneuvering the pallet jack again.
When we got back to the loading/unloading area, the manager from earlier was nowhere in evidence. The loading dock was deserted. We muscled the crate onto the truck and pulled out.
As we drove towards the gate, the true scale of the fight came into view.
I'd seen superhuman fights before. The Shocker and Iron Fist scuffling in Midtown traffic, Cyclone turning a warehouse into an impromptu wind tunnel. But both of them had been relatively contained. Really, I had only seen one fight. The first Cyclone was solidly a D-lister,who had a hot date with the Scourge of the Underworld soon. He was one of the more prominent villains gunned down in the Bar With No Name, which said something about the clientele of the midwestern location.
The man on the ground near the access road derailed my train of thought.
The general admin building and special housing were on fire, flames billowing from the windows. Two fire crews were working it from opposite angles, the hoses barely keeping it from spreading to the adjacent structure. A section of exterior wall had simply ceased to exist, the edges of the gap glassy and fused.
The man had paramedics working on him. Burns across his chest and arms. His breathing was shallow enough that I could see it wasn't right even from the truck's cab.
Another fire team was controlling some flaming debris on the lawn. I vaguely remembered that Stane had launched a drone attack helicopter of some sort at Iron Man as well as sicced the Chessmen on him before sallying out himself.
The wind kicked up, and I could smell the acrid scent of something artificial burning, even through the truck windows.
My train of thought turned inwards. Seeing something like this was ....was terrifying. I could admit that to myself. It was frankly, shocking what type of devastation two men in power armor could wreak, and this was with Stark trying to limit collateral. This was why I needed control.
That feeling when I saw the building turn into gold hadn't finished processing. I'd told myself the shock was about being wrong on the timeline. That was true, but it was covering something else A more fundamental sense of violation. This universe could rewrite the rules without notice. There were forces that didn't care about plans or preparation or anything I could bring to bear against them.
A blue gleam in a hole in one of the buildings broke me out of my brooding as we drove down the road. I wondered absently what it could be, then it hit me like a bolt. Stane's armor. The Iron Monger armor was just sitting there.
"Stack, stop the truck."
My mind whirled. Later suits with the same name showed up in the record, but those were reconstructions. Stane's engineers had sold what they knew at some point, and the knowledge proliferated. Mostly to crooked cops, if I recalled correctly. The original hardware though, the actual suit Stane had been wearing today, just dropped out of the record entirely. We had never seen it on panel again. It probably went into a lockup somewhere and stayed there.
"If you hadn't noticed, we're in the middle of a-"
"I'm aware," I said, and got out of the truck.
The smell tripled in intensity as soon as I hopped out..
The stench was in fact a blend of several different notes. Smoke and burning synthetics were dominant, underlaid with the sharp petroleum tang of avgas from the crashed drone. The finish was an unmistakable hint of burnt flesh that I was going to be tasting in the back of my throat for the rest of the day.
I wouldn't recommend it. Walking off of the roadway towards the glint near a massive hole in a office building, the armor came into view.
The Iron Monger armor was there. The first thing that struck me was the size. It was noticeably bulkier than the Iron Man suit. The helmet sat on the ground alongside it, separate.
These were the earthly remains of Obadiah Stane. Behind him, the wall showed where he'd impacted with a hole in the bricks exposing a corner office. To my right was a much more interesting hole, the one that mattered more. The repulsor on maximum hadn't left a clean gap. It had simply removed most of the wall, the edges fused and glassy where the energy had been too intense to leave debris. The metal collar of the torso piece had caught the edge of it. Part of the collar was just missing.
I knelt and began feeling around the armor for a catch, hands shockingly steady.
"Help me get this off this guy."
Stack looked at me. "Old boy looks pretty dead. Don't think we can help him."
I stared at both of them while running my hands over the back of the torso. "I'll bump your cut by 2 percent each if you tell nobody about me acquiring this, help me load it, and drop it off at a secondary location."
Hopefully they bit. I didn't HAVE a secondary location so I was going to have to blow the location of my warehouse, but I didn't plan to spend much more time in NYC post the sale of the information, so it shouldn't matter.
My inner sense of caution shrieked at this. I needed to grab the armor anyway. The suit ticked three boxes simultaneously. Holdout option, asset, and a more tactile path for understanding Stark's tech before Armor Wars. I was rationalizing a bit but I wasn't wrong.
I'd been reacting since I arrived. Rolling with whatever this world threw at me, trying not to make waves, telling myself that was prudence. It was time for me to start acting.
My second objection was that this offer was better delivered when I didn't appear to be fondling a headless set of power armor. Needs must..
Stack nodded. "Sounds fine to me. We have a pallet jack. Think we slip the sucker on there once you've got it off our friend, we drop the lift gate, and put it in."
Angela nodded. "I'll take that offer." She had agreed too quickly, and I didn't quite trust her, but I'd take what I could get.
Serendipitously, my fingers found a recessed catch under the collar. I flicked it and the suit hissed. The articulated metal under layer connecting to the gloves pulled back, showing Stane's bare arms as the pressure equalized with a sound like a vacuum seal breaking.
"Oh CHRIST."
The suit had been sealed, and whatever Stane's body had done in the minutes since he'd died had stayed trapped inside it until exactly now. The smell of fecal matter and urine cut straight through the acrid chemical smoke that had been hanging over the entire campus.
I started breathing through my mouth.
Stack took a step back. "Inconsiderate asshole. Least the fancy suit looks modular. Might not need the pallet jack."
Angela turned smoothly on her heel to face the access road. "Gentlemen," she said primly, "I'll leave this delightful experience to you. I'll make sure nobody's looking this way."
She grabbed the maintenance bag from where it sat by the truck, stepped around the far side, and was back in thirty seconds wearing one of the Stane jumpsuits, her Tristate gear nowhere in evidence. She'd rubbed ash from the nearest debris onto her forearms and one cheek, and her hair was down and slightly disheveled.
She assessed herself briefly, tugging the jumpsuit collar.
"That'll do."
She adjusted her posture, her gait shifting into something slower and slightly unsteady, and walked toward the access road without looking back.
I bumped my estimation of her disguise skills up another notch. She was good.
Stack watched her go. "Wondered why she took that bag." He turned back to the armor. "Aight. Let's get this thing off our pal."
What followed was undignified for everyone involved, including Stane, who was past caring. Stane's corpse was also beginning to lock up which made extracting him from the armor an exercise in tragicomic improvisation. Thankfully the suit was modular, making the process less painful than it would otherwise be.
After some flailing,we set what remained of Obadiah Stane against the wall with something approximating dignity. As dignified as a headless corpse in a wifebeater and boxers could get anyways...
Getting the suit put away was less of a problem then one might assume, the suit's modularity coming in handy again. Once Stane's earthly remains were out, Stack and I heaved the various components into the rear of the truck.
We finished up, and returned to the cab, Angela nowhere in evidence. A minute later, Angela hopped into the cab, ash-streaked hands leaving smears on the seat as she settled in. "First responders are always easy to redirect."
She wiped her hands on the jumpsuit. "Employees are even easier."
Stack looked at the smear on the upholstery. "Real glad AIM's handling getting this truck back to the depot." He started the engine.
As soon as we were about a mile away from the Stane International facility, I put my earpiece back in and keyed the Walkman. Things were silent for about 5 minutes, but then Becca's voice chimed in.
"What the hell happened there? One of the AIM cells flagged an atmospheric re-entry over the ocean about sixty minutes ago. The other NYC metro AIM cells have been buzzing about it since. EMS channels lit up and they're getting called out to Stane LI?"
I keyed the Walkman.
"Iron Man flew in and got into a fight with some armored character. We acquired the drives and are exfiltrating now. The facility is a mess. Iron Man and this other guy weren't holding much in reserve."
Becca paused. "Iron Man can fly that far up now? Wild."
Jackson interjected. "Intresting, but irrelevant as long as you have the data. We'll see you in Jersey."
Before we arrived back in New Jersey we had a brief stop to make. I directed Stack to Hell's Kitchen, around where I was picked up and pointed them to the warehouse at the end of the block.
I stepped out and opened the side door of the warehouse. I wasn't fully sure if the main loading doors even worked.
A cursory visual inspection proved me right. The motors had a fine patina of rust, and while my luck with the underground portion had been good, this mechanism had been exposed to the air for years absent any maintenance.
The side door was wide enough. I returned to the truck.
"Main door is inoperable. We're going to have to take the pieces and move them through the side door."
Stack sighed.
Angela smirked. "I'll keep an eye out."
It was late morning. Foot traffic on the block was light, which was fortunate, as Stack and I grunted and heaved and shoved our way from the truck to the warehouse side door with various components of the armor hastily wrapped in drop cloths from the truck bed.
After what felt like several sweaty hours but was, by my watch, roughly thirty minutes, every component was inside. I was quietly grateful that Stane's engineers had kept the modular design from Stark's original schematics.
The last component was the helmet. I waved off Stack. I wanted to take this inside myself.
After the requisite drop cloth covering, I walked it into the warehouse, dropping it on the decrepit work table near the elevator in the rear.
I uncovered the blue metal helmet, its empty visor staring at me sightlessly.
I was used to power armor being abstract. Something that existed on a page.The weight of the helmet in my hands made it concrete in a way I hadn't anticipated.
I was nervous. I'd be moving on from NYC soon, ideally before anything else I'd half-remembered came hurtling down the pike. There was still a significant amount of work between here and anything resembling a plan for Armor Wars.
But underneath the nervousness was something else. A hint of excitement.
The honest truth was that my plan for making money off the Armor Wars was under-baked at this point. I had theories about what Stark's neutralizer packs were bricking, but that and 1 dollar would get me a Coke. I needed to actually understand how Stark's power armor technology worked before I could patch it.
That was what the suit was for. First step: figure out how it worked. Second step: develop a working theory of what Stark was going to break and how. Third step: be in position to offer something useful to the people who were going to find themselves holding some very expensive paperweights. Or wearing them, as the case may be.
I also had some preliminary ideas about a heads up display. Something to think about on the drive west.
A horn derailed my train of thought.
Stack shouted from outside. "Man, let's GO. We still gotta drop the drives."
I covered the helmet back up. Just a few more loose ends to wrap up, and I'd be leaving 616 NYC behind