A bit earlier.
“Yeah. A dream army,” Tony grimaced at the sight of the motley crowd shown on the monitors.
For a long time, he had doubted whether it was worth gathering a whole horde of armed, chromed, and kill-happy thugs—a decent portion of whom were also on substances—in one place.
After all, there are stupider ways to lose an army.
However, the legendary solo hired for overall coordination had reassured him, promising to personally maintain discipline.
True to his word, he maintained it by hanging by the balls anyone who tried to stir up trouble and rock the boat.
“If you wanted something better, you should have taken care of it earlier,” a dry man, looking to be about fifty, shrugged phlegmatically.
He was dressed in a tank top, stretched-out tracksuits, and a ushanka hat, puffing on a cigarette packed with some truly pungent garbage rather than tobacco.
“We would have blown our cover, Andrey Gennadievich,” Tony replied, and with a fair amount of respect at that.
Despite the man’s appearance, standing before him was a true legend born in the last century.
Andrey Gennadievich Sukharev grew up in the old-school USSR.
Still a boy during the Great Patriotic War, he helped partisans and routinely shot at Germans.
He went through the Korean War, participated as a volunteer in Vietnam against the USA, and then spent the entirety of the Afghan War hunting terrorists.
He was one of the oldest people on the planet—the only successful precedent of transplanting an old brain into a cloned body—and the possessor of vast experience in slaughtering his fellow man, both personally and by commanding subordinates.
There was only one problem: an extremely difficult character, a complete disregard for authority, and a pathological honesty with a habit of speaking the brutal truth right to the faces of his superiors had prevented him from rising above captain in the military hierarchy, acquiring influential connections, or finding a suitable patron in the CPSU.
After the “Perestroika” of the Soviets at the turn of the millennium, he didn’t mince words—he told the new General Secretary precisely where to go, fought his way through the Kremlin Guard, and vanished somewhere abroad to become a mercenary.
Considering that Stalin himself had invested heavily in his best operative with a legendary personality status, followed by other Soviet leaders, Sukharev was a mini-army in the body of a single man.
The likes of Robert and Claire, being deep modification cases with elite implants—effectively an enhanced version of a borg using a hybrid approach—nevertheless originated from a project geared toward mass production.
That is to say, they were meant to be, and ultimately became, a mass-produced type of fighter—difficult to manufacture, certainly, but generally only in terms of time and resources.
Andrey Sukharev, however…
he was, so to speak, a custom piece.
Implants designed exclusively for him, genetic procedures, operations for rejuvenation and organ replacement, a specially created brain implant allowing it to be connected to a new body without highly complex, individualized surgeries—the documentation for which only he knew, since the creator was already dead at the time of his escape and all records were destroyed—and simply colossal combat experience that no living person possessed or ever had.
Some might say that nearly seventy years had passed since his escape, and his implants had become obsolete since then, but such a person completely fails to understand the specifics.
Any item created by hand, individually, without constraints on time or resources, and not intended for subsequent mass production, will be a head above its mass-produced counterparts.
Even combat implants from the 2020s are still highly prized by many individuals, because that era was a time of experiments, prototypes, and quality solutions.
Engineers of that time simply did not know how to make a poor-quality version of something as new as an implant replacing a body part.
Models from that era still surpass most mid-to-low-cost analogs today, truly yielding only to genuinely high-quality chrome worth tens of thousands of eddies.
And the more complex the mechanism, the better its hand-assembled analog.
So, despite his age, chrome that hadn’t been upgraded in a long time, and a simply far-from-easy half-century, this old man remained a literal war machine in a humanoid shell and the main argument for why Tony wasn’t overly worried about the operation’s success.
“No big deal, it’s a mess either way,” the old man replied, smoking half the cigarette in a single drag.
“You’re not exactly bursting with optimism. Aren’t you glad to have the contract?”
“Nah, I’m always glad to squeeze the corps,” he grinned with a truly horrifying smile.
“It’s just that I had to jump out of bed for this job right in the middle of a sleep, and people my age don’t like breaking their schedule, so I’m grumbling. Don’t mind me, kid, I’ll earn the money, especially this kind of money.”
“Glad to hear it,” Tony nodded.
“Alright, you get ready for now. You have the facility plans, so start handing out orders. I’m heading out.”
“Yeah, good luck, kid, and watch you don’t die out there. There are too few decent people left in the world as it is.”
“I’ll certainly try.”
Leaving the inconspicuous building, Tony quickly marched over to the first group.
The fixers had done a good job, ultimately pulling every elite mercenary they could reach from Warsaw and its surroundings, bringing the total number of hired bullet-and-blade specialists to four hundred.
How much it cost is better left unsaid, otherwise Omnissiah would start lecturing him, but long story short, Tony was no longer a millionaire.
Not poor, far from poor, but he was now a long way from his former financial cushion.
Yet he had no regrets, because Stark was finally back in his element—saving innocent people from villains and going up against an organization of outright scum (and he couldn’t call people who sent children to the slaughter anything else).
Frankly speaking, upon the return of his memories, Tony had been lost, spending nearly a decade in a sort of procrastination.
Yes, he did things, he strived for things, but without any real spark.
He just did it because he had to, not because he wanted to.
But now…now he felt like himself—the one who stood against all the horrors of the Galaxy and emerged victorious, the one who solved global-scale problems and extricated himself from the most terrifying scrapes.
Was he in another world?
So what?
He would manage on his own.
Lost his father’s corporation?
He would build his own from scratch, and to hell with how many throats he’d have to tear out to do it!
All that was left was to take the first, most important step: break free from the swamp that had dragged him under and start living to the fullest.
Left to his own devices, it wasn’t a given that he would have succeeded; everything that had happened had hit him incredibly hard, especially the second death of his new parents, layered over the freshly revived memories of his old parents’ deaths.
But this situation with Lucy—with his small, sweet, occasionally prickly kitten—had done the trick, forcing him into motion just like during his captivity by terrorists, triggering a kind of hard reboot.
According to the established plan, the first phases of the operation would take place at night, when a decent portion of the personnel dispersed to their quarters, including the guards.
Consequently, civilians wouldn’t get in the way, and the guards would need additional time to arm themselves and reach their posts.
The phase itself consisted entirely of preparation in the form of hacking the enemy’s security system and deploying combat groups to designated sectors.
Since the facility was located underground, and the main entrance—the only one through which a crowd of several hundred fighters could pass—was the most heavily defended, Tony resorted to a trick, equipping some of the squads with directional vibro-acoustic bombs.
A complex, highly temperamental, and unreliable piece of kit; overall, both in concept and execution, it would horrifyingly appall any more-or-less decent engineer, but it would suffice for a one-time task: namely, breaching the ceilings of the former Cold War-era bunker to create a vulnerability.
Unfortunately, doing the same for the other levels wouldn’t work, as the floors of the complex had an additional layer of vibration-absorbing propylene, which prevented synchronizing the generated vibrations with the operation of the nuclear reactor.
But it would be enough for the first phase.
The objective of the first wave was to seize control of the main entrance to grant the primary forces unhindered access.
The digital breach of the security system was required to disable traps, cameras, turrets, and mines during the first phase, but most importantly, to lower the protective blast doors of the nuclear reactor.
This would prevent the guards from detonating it after a breakthrough to the lower floors via the secret lift system.
The second phase involved breaking through to the connecting walls of the hidden escape routes, through which half of the available forces were planned to be dispatched to strike the guards from the rear and take control of the nuclear reactor.
The most delicate phase of the plan, its most vulnerable part, but it was also what made the plan highly viable and straightforward.
Reach the objective, and success was practically guaranteed; fail, and you had to look for other ways.
There was neither the time nor the resources for anything truly sophisticated.
The second phase was highly dependent on speed, before the security system could reboot and direct its full might against the invaders.
A hundred guards with corporate chrome and top-tier weaponry were a problem in their own right, especially with intelligently constructed fortifications, promising to cut the mercenaries’ numbers roughly in half by the end of the second phase.
And if automated turrets joined them along the way, things could take a highly unpleasant turn.
Unfortunately, taking full control of Arasaka’s electronics was not possible—not with their current resources and the processing power available to the corps (even with Omnissiah present).
Only a temporary override with a complete reboot was viable, capable of buying time, but not turning Arasaka’s weapons against Arasaka itself.
As for the third phase, it was simple: squeezed from two sides, the guards would be thinking about anything other than attacking the opponents who had taken up defensive positions, leaving Tony free to find Lucy and the other children, lead them into a safe tunnel where he would retreat with the part of the mercenaries heading to the lower levels, and they would quietly ride off into the sunset.
They would head to that very same small private airport where a plane with a Polish diplomatic code and a tight-lipped pilot was already waiting for him and Lucy, while Skalk’s handlers would take the rest of the children.
Tony would have taken them all with him, but away from him and Lucyna, they would simply be safer.
He didn’t believe for a second that Ryu would forgive such a slap in the face, and generally, tracking down two people is harder than tracking one young guy with a pack of rugrats.
“Ready?” Tony addressed Omnissiah, who stood at the head of the first squad tasked with breaking through to the nearest access point, from where the two of them would tag-team the system hack.
“Ready.”
“Andrey Gennadievich, we can begin.”
“Five-minute readiness,” a reply came over the shortwave radio.
A piece of kit of questionable quality, primitive, working only within a four-hundred-meter radius, but for operating in an underground base packed with netrunners, one couldn’t ask for better.
The five minutes passed quickly.
Some prayed, some loaded up on combat stimulants, others performed their small personal rituals, but everyone without exception checked their weapons.
Everyone except Tony—he was confident in his creations and was entirely calm instead.
Considering his experience fighting cosmic entities, waging wars against interstellar empires, and battling gods and those feared even by gods, participating in a poorly prepared assault on the base of one of the world’s most powerful transnational corporations did not evoke strong emotions.
True, he wasn’t what he used to be, but what did that change?
He was Iron Man, and he was rescuing children from the clutches of crazy vivisectors, and that said it all.
And then, the moment of truth arrived.
The charges were placed, Sukharev pressed the detonator, and a series of short explosions occurred, forming breaches.
The mercenaries quickly secured descent ropes, and after half a minute, the first shots rang out.
“So, what does the twilight Japanese genius have in store for us?” Tony thought, already connected to the access point.
Omnissiah, linked to him via a wireless connection, helped him bypass one layer of security after another while the mercenaries traded gunfire with the guards and turrets, some dying from detonated mines or burning in the fires of hidden pipes spitting napalm. This chapter is updated first at novelping(.)com.
Gaining access to the internal system and initiating a reboot of the security protocols turned out to be simple; it only required launching an extremely conspicuous, resilient, slow-to-delete virus.
According to the protocols of experienced—and therefore paranoid—netrunners, this forces a manual shutdown of everything capable of killing.
Such a weakness in the security system was logical considering the sheer number of lethal mechanisms per square meter; after all, if someone were to hijack control, the base would lose nearly its entire garrison at the very least.
“Sometimes too much of a good thing is bad,” Tony muttered contentedly, turning his attention to hacking the nuclear reactor room…
“What the…” which absolutely refused to be hacked.
For three long minutes, Tony parsed the problem until he realized a simple truth: the emergency blast doors on the reactor were connected to the general network, but they could only be lowered all at once, never selectively.
This was done to protect valuable personnel from radiation and prevent leaks outside the base, which overall…made absolutely no sense.
It would be far simpler and more reliable to make automatic doors with detectors rather than engineering such insanity, which could divide the entire structure with lead doors one and a half meters thick coated in heat-resistant plating.
However, everything quickly clicked into place when Tony and Omnissiah dug down to the backup power settings.
In the event of a reactor failure, it wasn’t meant to power the equipment, but rather to activate a powerful EMP in conjunction with the reactor to destroy all digital electronic media.
Simply put, instead of a safety system, Arasaka had built a self-destruct system.
Apparently, management wasn’t so detached from reality as to believe people would unconditionally blow themselves up to preserve corporate dirty secrets, so they decided to play it safe.
Smart.
Smart, but barbaric.
“What are we going to do?” Omnissiah inquired over the link.
“Improvise,” Tony chuckled…and began hacking the nuclear reactor.
Can’t stop it?
Lead it!
If they couldn’t cut off Arasaka’s path to self-destruction, they would conduct it themselves, but on their own terms.
“Omnissiah, calculate the parameters for a targeted reactor overload. We’ll push it to its operational limit, bring it to a critical heating point, and then execute an emergency shutdown. Then, no matter how much the Japanese white-coats try, they won’t be able to start it, let alone detonate it.”
“Executing,” Omnissiah responded.
They were frankly lucky that a Russian reactor was installed here, designed after the Chernobyl disaster.
Following that tragedy, Soviet nuclear engineers had devised a vast array of safety protocols and engineering solutions for increased durability and security of nuclear energy sources, which were made mandatory by order of the CPSU.
Entire regions powered by the peaceful atom could be left without electricity for weeks while NPPs built according to old designs were modified to meet the new safety standards.
But the Russians, terrified by the tragedy, quietly endured it, systematically shifting their entire school of nuclear physics toward enhanced safety.
As a result, ALL of their nuclear reactors were equipped with several emergency shutdown methods at once, operational sensors, and a trio of purely mechanical methods for increased stability of the atomic core.
This included their software, in the very core of which was embedded a ban on activation in the event of casing damage, elevated temperatures, and breaches in the integrity of the entire structure.
A small, controlled explosion would result in that exact breach of integrity.
The risk of a fuel leak existed, of course, but it wasn’t high, and even then, the maximum threat to worry about was irradiated steam from the reactor.
A lethal hazard, but not heavily radioactive; if anyone suffered, it would be the Arasaka personnel, for whom Tony felt absolutely no pity.
He would have leveled this entire place to the ground, turning it into an anonymous mass grave, but the mission to save the children took priority.
The hack took nine minutes.
On one hand, considering the target of the breach, it was incredibly fast.
On the other hand, given the situation, it was impermissibly long.
Nonetheless, they managed to breach the system, and while Tony waited for the reactor to blow, he decided to, so to speak, greet the hosts.
“Testing, one, two. Am I being heard? Though why do I ask, of course I’m being heard,” he began, thoroughly enjoying himself.
“It’s a bit gloomy in here, ladies and gentlemen of the corporation. We need to fix that!” choosing the perfect moment, he spoke.
Right after, a powerful explosion rocked the entire complex, adding…weight to his words.
“If you didn’t hide, don’t blame me!”
“What was that!?” Andrey Gennadievich came over the comms.
“Had to change the plans a bit, but everything’s fine,” Tony replied, already on the run to execute the next phase of the plan, holding a light machine gun aloft with one hand and dropping three corporate operatives in one go.
What can you say—his optimized brain had put in real work, fully unlocking his genetic potential inherited from two high-level modified individuals in all its glory.
“…fine,” the old man uttered after a brief silence.
“We’ve taken the main gates; three minutes and we’ll let the primary forces in. Where are you?”
“Corridor 14, moving toward 17,” Tony reported.
“Acknowledged, expected link-up time is six minutes.”
“Copy that, see you at the rendezvous.”