Chapter 425: The Vulture
Latveria. An unnamed castle in an unnamed district of a country that most people who weren't immediately affected by its decisions had largely stopped thinking about.
The nation had started small -- agricultural, insular, the kind of country that appeared on maps without drawing attention. Then a scientist named Victor von Doom had come home. The change was not gradual. He had a precise understanding of what he wanted the country to become, and the technical resources to make it happen, and the kind of personality that treats a national economy as an engineering problem. He had converted Latveria into a functional modern state over the span of a few years and had done it well enough that the population had given him everything he asked for without needing to be coerced.
Officially, a king still sat on the throne. In practice, the king did what Victor said. The arrangement had been stable and self-sustaining, and would probably have continued indefinitely.
Five years ago, Victor von Doom had disappeared without warning. The puppet king had been assassinated shortly afterward. A woman named Lucia von Bardas had stepped into the resulting vacuum and taken control of the country before any of the external parties with opinions about Latverian governance could organize a response.
More than a decade before any of that, a pair of CIA operatives had worked Latveria under deep cover. Their objective had not been a document or a location. It had been a person: the Tinkerer. An engineer of significant expertise, especially in mechanics and human-machine interface systems. Lucia's predecessor regime had been attempting to use the Tinkerer to militarize the country's technical base -- an insurance policy against both American intervention and the possibility that Victor von Doom might eventually return and want his country back.
Two years ago, SHIELD Director Nick Fury had identified what was happening and deployed a covert team to solve the problem. Lucia and the castle she was in at the time had been destroyed in the operation.
She had not died. She had, with the Tinkerer's assistance, spent the intervening two years replacing the compromised portions of her body with mechanical components. The result was functional, if not comfortable. In coordination with HYDRA and guidance from a patron whose identity she didn't advertise, she had arranged the extraction of over a dozen criminals from New York's prison system and transported them to Latveria through means that had left no conventional trace.
The Tinkerer was working now. He had been working for hours.
"That's everything I have." Adrian Toomes exhaled slowly and evenly, the way someone does when they've been holding their breath for longer than they realized. "I hope it's useful."
He was standing inside a laboratory that had been built to the scale of a manufacturing floor. Around him, the newly extracted criminals were being processed one at a time. Several members of the Serpent Squad were nearby -- too nearby. Scorpion Mac Gargan was lying on an operating table perhaps twenty feet ahead, unconscious, the Tinkerer's instruments tracing the lines of what would become his upgrade. Yuri Petrovich stood at the far southern end of the space, making adjustments to a large crimson armored suit that had been damaged in transit. Boomerang was crouched a few feet away, turning his signature weapons over in his hands with the focused expression of someone relearning what he was holding.
Beyond the people Toomes recognized from the New York system, there were others he didn't know at all. A dozen or more, brought from various countries -- the United States, Mexico, Italy, points further east. All of them had one thing in common: their criminal operations were technology-based.
There was someone who called himself Whirlwind, whose suit was built around high-rotational mechanisms that could generate localized cyclone-force wind at close range. There was Blizzard, whose equipment operated at the extreme low end of the temperature spectrum and showed no signs of ice buildup on the suit joints, which meant the engineering was better than it looked. There was a man called Firebrand, whose fireproof suit was paired with a flame projection system that was frankly more powerful than it needed to be for anything other than structural demolition. And there was Stilt-Man -- who fought on pneumatic stilts, which was either the most creative or most ridiculous combat approach Toomes had encountered, and he genuinely wasn't sure which.
"One more thing I should add," Toomes said quietly, mostly to himself and the surrounding air. "Lucia appears to have been collecting profiles on technology-based criminals worldwide long before tonight. The Tinkerer already had equipment prepared in advance for all of them. This wasn't improvised."
The Serpent Squad members near him were too close. One of them had asked him a question about the equipment calibration systems twice in the last twenty minutes. Toomes could feel the cold sweat working its way down the bridge of his nose toward his eyes, which he was not blinking.
He was not a spy. He was aware of this. He did not have the training, the psychological conditioning, or the field experience that would make what he was doing remotely safe. He was an electrical engineer with a significant body of research in aerospace applications, and the reason he was here rather than in a cell somewhere was that Batman had put him in front of a Manhattan Police intake officer two months ago and stood there until the process was complete.
"When you want to fly again," Batman had said, in that exact tone, "find me. But not like this."
He hadn't given up the dream. He wouldn't. But the method mattered.
He had been here for several hours now. In that time he had managed, through a sequence of small thefts spread across the lab supply inventory, to assemble the components of a functional radio transmitter. It was not elegant. But the power output was adequate.
The problem was transmission. A radio signal originating inside this building would register on whatever detection equipment the Tinkerer was running within seconds. He needed to be outside the building's shielded envelope before he activated it.
The Tinkerer solved this problem for him, though not intentionally.
He brought over the suit.
It was not what Toomes had been expecting. His original design had been built around the principle of avian flight -- wing geometry, load distribution, the specific relationship between wingspan and center of gravity that he had spent years calculating. The suit sitting in front of him shared no structural DNA with that work. The wings were steel -- rigid, turbine-driven, the lift generated mechanically rather than aerodynamically. A jet pack occupied the suit's back panel and provided additional thrust. There was a full helmet. The materials throughout were primarily metal.
It was a weapons platform with flight capability. It was not a flying suit with defensive features. The distinction mattered to him in a way that would be difficult to explain to someone who hadn't spent years on the other design.
He didn't explain it. He put the suit on.
Like everyone else in the room, he began running the calibration sequence.
The steel wings on his back snapped open without warning. Both turbines and the back thruster activated simultaneously and at full output. The thrust was directed straight toward the far wall, where Yuri Petrovich was standing in front of the Crimson Dynamo suit making final adjustments.
The lab went loud in an instant. Petrovich saw the metal shape coming at him and ran. Every head in the room turned toward the noise.
Toomes wrestled with the controls. He managed -- barely, with perhaps a meter to spare -- to redirect the trajectory away from Petrovich and the suit. The new trajectory was directly upward. He didn't fight it.
The ceiling came apart around him.
He was outside. Cold air, open sky, the castle's other structures visible below him in the dark. He continued climbing, counting under his breath.
One second. Two. High enough that the building's profile had gotten smaller. Not so high that the flight itself would look like anything other than a calibration malfunction.
He activated the transmitter.
He didn't aim it toward New York. He aimed it at the moon, which was low on the horizon and positioned at an angle that would work. Radio waves reflected off the lunar surface. It was not a reliable or efficient method. The signal would attenuate significantly in the round trip. But Batman had demonstrated the kind of equipment sensitivity that suggested he would be listening for signals other people weren't looking for.
Toomes opened the transmission channel and transmitted everything -- Lucia, the Tinkerer, the full list of individuals present, the advance preparation, the purpose. Everything he had collected and spent the last several hours quietly filing away behind calm eyes and sweating palms.
Toward the moon, on the horizon, in hopes of reaching someone thousands of miles away who had once stood next to him at a police intake desk and told him the dream was worth keeping.