Legacy update is live.
Settle in.
The workshop is awake.
⚙️
✦
Pepper drove to the boat shed without turning on the radio.
Rain streamed down the armored sedan’s windshield, turning Boston’s lights into distorted streaks.
Morgan sat in the passenger seat, the pendant hidden under her shirt and T.O.N.Y.’s glasses tucked away in an insulated case.
There were no Roxxon agents in the rearview mirror.
Still, the silence felt like being followed.
When they arrived, Pepper went down to the lab she’d visited the night before.
The workbench was still charred.
A tool lay on the floor, and there was a new crack in the plate they’d used for testing.
Dum-E raised the fire extinguisher, swiveled its camera toward Pepper, and stopped.
“At least one of you has developed a survival instinct,” Pepper said.
Morgan closed the door at the bottom of the stairs.
“Mom, before you see…”
“Yesterday you walked me through what happened.
Today I want you to show me where you could have stopped.
Start with the return from Maine.”
Morgan placed the pendant on the console.
The projection appeared, glitching.
Tony’s face formed in golden blocks, lost definition, and reappeared.
“Hi, Pep,” T.O.N.Y.
said.
“The image quality has gotten worse since yesterday.
The explanation of who I am, unfortunately, is still the same.”
Pepper didn’t answer right away.
Pepper stepped closer.
Light passed through her hand as she tried to brush away a glitch in the projection that looked like a stray strand of hair.
She drew her fingers back before Morgan could say anything.
“He knew I wouldn’t like this,” she said.
“He left a folder called ‘Pepper’s Likely Objections,'” the interface replied.
“I can’t open the index.”
“That saves time.
He probably forgot half of them.”
Morgan almost smiled.
Then she saw her mother squeeze her wedding ring between her thumb and forefinger.
It hadn’t occurred to her that the voice could also lay bare an absence that wasn’t her own.
“When did he create you?”
“During the five years between Thanos’s snap and the final battle.
The core was last updated weeks before his death.
Tony specified that I was only to be activated once Morgan turned eighteen, and only if she chose to open the protocol.”
“Show me where the mesh came from,” Pepper said.
“Yesterday I wrote down what the three of them contributed.
I still want to separate that from what he’d already built.”
Diagrams appeared in the air: programmable materials, neuromuscular sensors, rescue modules, wound sealing, and adaptive structures.
“Tony left the controller and a reserve of protective fabric, but stabilization was still incomplete,” T.O.N.Y.
said.
“Morgan changed how it read muscle signals and modified the fittings.
Maya supplied the harness and actuators.
Leo, the composite.
The assembly on that workbench didn’t exist before the attack.”
Pepper looked at the disassembled armor.
“All of this was integrated while armed men were breaking down a door,” Pepper said.
“Calling it a ‘prototype’ doesn’t make that any safer.”
“I agree,” Morgan said.
“It was improvised and dangerous.”
“And you used it anyway.”
“People would have died.”
“That was your father’s justification every time.”
Morgan had an answer on the tip of her tongue: he saved the world.
But Pepper already knew.
She knew the price, too.
“Project Icarus is active,” Morgan said.
“Voss and Roxxon managed to access part of the orbital network.
If I walk away, they’ll keep going.”
“Then we turn the data over to authorities equipped to handle the threat.”
T.O.N.Y.
projected a list of compromised access points: Roxxon consultants in federal agencies, outsourced maintenance contracts, unauthorized queries of Stark files.
“We don’t know who we can trust,” Morgan said.
“And you’re going to trust three exhausted people without checking what they don’t know?”
Maya and Leo arrived with the lawyer and the doctor.
She checked their bandages; he shut himself in a room upstairs to make a call.
Pepper handed out the food she’d brought and waited for the three of them to eat.
Only then did she ask for the records.
Maya set her fork down carefully before pulling up the first video.
On-screen, Morgan disappeared behind the dish in Maine.
Leo pointed out the stretch when he’d been receiving audio but no video.
Maya showed her the cutoff for pulling back that they’d written down before the mission.
When Pepper asked why they hadn’t stuck to it, Morgan described the closed door and the trapped line.
It took her longer to say that she also hadn’t wanted to come back without stopping the satellite from firing.
“I thought I could keep the signal going,” Leo said.
“I kept raising my estimate every time she asked for more time.”
“And was anyone saying how much time you’d already lost?” Pepper asked.
Maya pulled up the sketch she’d made after the fight.
There were crossed-out numbers, an exit marked too late, and notes in three different hands.
“Now we’re trying to figure that out ahead of time,” she replied.
Pepper read it without offering a solution.
Morgan wished her mother would find a simple fix; she hated needing her help to find it.
The rain grew heavier against the roof.
Maya carried the plates to the workbench, leaving mother and daughter by the console.
“The labs connected to the attack are sealed off for now,” Pepper said.
“All three of you have protection and counsel.
I want you to come with me to New York while the technical team assesses Newark.”
“No,” Morgan said.
Pepper turned slowly.
“You’re in no position to set conditions.”
“I’m not trying to.
I’m saying I won’t leave Icarus in Roxxon’s hands as long as there’s a way to stop them.”
“Your father died so you could live, not so you could inherit his war.”
“I don’t want his war.”
Morgan took the pendant off the console and held it in her palm.
“Voss opened a system I didn’t even know existed.
Then he used my responses to get further in.
I can hand over the records, and I will.
But I need to keep track of what they do with them.
I don’t want to find out from a news report that someone tried to wake up another satellite.”
Pepper took a deep breath.
“And I don’t want to find out from a news report where your armor crashed,” Pepper replied.
Morgan looked away first.
Pepper rested her hand on the workbench, close to Morgan’s.
“How many hours have you slept?
Can you lift that arm?
I’m asking about you, Morgan.
Not the system.”
“It hurts.
I’m scared.
And I’m tired of feeling like admitting those things will make everyone shut me out of the conversation.”
“That doesn’t reassure me.”
“It wasn’t meant to.
It was the answer.”
Pepper went quiet.
Morgan felt the urge to add some reassurance to what she’d said.
Instead, she turned her palm up and let her mother examine the edge of the bandage.
“Your father used to tell me about the armor when I asked how he was.”
“Then help me not do the same thing.”
T.O.N.Y.’s projection flickered violently.
His face lost half its detail.
“Interruption…
matrix…” the AI said.
Morgan rushed to the console.
“What happened?”
Gray lines ran through the core.
Leo opened the diagnostics.
“O.B.I.S.’s attack kept running inside the indexing sectors.
The corruption is accelerating.”
“Don’t try to force the projection,” Pepper said.
T.O.N.Y.
tried to answer.
His voice came through in fragments.
“Can the file in Newark fix this?” Pepper asked.
The image disappeared.
The lab fell silent.
Morgan pressed her hands against the workbench.
“If that backup exists, it’s our only chance to restore the system and figure out how to block Icarus.”
Pepper looked at her daughter, then at Maya and Leo.
When she spoke, her decision still didn’t mean she was giving in.
“No one’s leaving tonight.
We have to confirm there’s a recoverable file and a way to reach it.”
She stepped away from the table.
“We still need to watch the retreat from Maine.”
Morgan handed over the recordings without cutting out the falls or the seconds when the video had gone blank.
Pepper watched the moment the thruster had faltered over Cambridge.
Then the retreat from Maine: Morgan landing unsteadily, Leo leaving the computer to hold her up.
In the background, Maya was telling them both to move clear of the gate.
Pepper paused the video before the camera caught the blood on the sleeve.
“Your father showed the footage where the suit worked,” Pepper said.
“I saw what he tried to hide.”
“You can keep going,” Morgan said, though she would rather Pepper didn’t.
Pepper let the video play.
This time, her daughter didn’t point out the part where everything had gone right.
Her mother walked over to the Chrysalis harness.
One strap was twisted, hastily cinched over the fabric.
Morgan had shown her the circuits the night before; that piece of cheap fabric was what had kept the modules against her body during the escape.
“When Tony said the armor was ready, I asked whether he’d eaten, slept, and told anyone where he was going.
He thought I was changing the subject.
I was trying to find out whether there was still a person inside the machine.”
Morgan stepped closer.
“Was there?”
Pepper didn’t answer right away.
“Sometimes.
Other times, he only came back after something broke.
I don’t want to wait for you to break before I can reach you.”
Morgan opened the safety log and showed Pepper where she would add a contact who could call a halt.
She didn’t enable access until she’d called Leo over to check what would be transmitted.
Her mother waited.
It was a small delay, and neither of them tried to cut it short.
“I want you to tell me when you can’t assess the situation,” Pepper said.
“Not just when you’re already trapped.”
Morgan looked at the paused video.
“I might need to stop.”
Leo saved the change.
Maya took a blanket to the bunk, annoyed at having to clear space among tools she’d left there herself.
“I don’t know if I’ll always recognize it,” Morgan admitted.
“But I’ll listen when you see it before I do.”
The afternoon had gone by as they reviewed the records and took calls from the technical team.
Pepper exhaled and looked at the dark console.
“We’ll check Newark tomorrow.
Tonight you’re going to bed.
I’ll stay by the console.”
Morgan nodded.
It wasn’t approval.
Pepper pulled up a chair.
It took Morgan a few seconds to accept that her mother really intended to stay.
✦
✦
✦
Ready for the next breakthrough?