Motion cracked the dark overhead. Machinery unfolded out of rust and shadow that a second ago held nothing at all.
Natasha didn't name it. She moved.
The first drone dropped from the rafters with a hydraulic whine, landing in a crouch twenty feet ahead. Its targeting laser painted a red dot over her sternum. She sidestepped, drew, and put two rounds into the joint where its arm met its torso. The drone spasmed, toppled, and went dark.
She was already scanning for the next one before it hit the floor. That was the first mistake most people made in a fight like this: they watched the kill instead of the room.
"Jesus." Happy's voice came from behind her, breath already short. "You make that look like nothing."
"It is nothing." She didn't turn around. "When you know where the joints are."
Two more drones detached from the ceiling. Then three. A wave of them woke all at once, like a hive somebody had kicked.
The pack split mid-descent. Eight peeled toward Natasha, while three broke for Happy.
The split was precise. Too precise for standard programming. She filed it away. She didn't glance at Happy. Eight problems of her own were enough to worry about.
The first drone lunged. She ducked under its swing, drove an elbow into its knee joint, and used its fall to vault the second. A stack of crates gave her cover, so she kicked it over and forced the rest to funnel through the gap it left. She could handle them one at a time.
The third drone didn't take the bait. It circled outside her reach instead, its laser tracking her like it was reading her footwork. The fourth mirrored it, flanking wide.
Standard tactical AI ran patterns like this all the time. What it didn't do was refine them mid-fight, and this timing was too precise for anything off the shelf.
Another drone dropped, aiming to crush her under its weight. She rolled clear, came up firing, and caught it in the optical sensor. It screamed and thrashed blind into its own pack.
Good. Let them do some of the work for her.
But the last four didn't scatter in the confusion. They repositioned instead, synchronized, the flanking pattern widening to account for her last dodge before she'd even finished making it, anticipating the leftward line she liked to run.
Her grip tightened on the gun. They're learning. Somebody's feeding them updates in real time.
She vaulted a gantry railing to buy height and force them to climb after her, and it bought her seconds, nothing more. Every drone's angle kept correcting, kept tightening, like something was watching the failures and fixing them one by one.
It was a test, and she was the subject being graded.
Happy backed away from his own three, hands raised. "Okay. Let's talk about this for a second. I'm just the driver here. Nothing more than that, I swear."
The lead drone didn't care what he was. It swung a fist the size of a ham.
Happy ducked, barely, and felt the wind of it comb through his hair on the way past. He stumbled into a stack of pipe fittings, and pipes rained down around him, one of them cracking across his shoulder. Grabbing one on the way down, he swung wild.
It connected with the drone's knee, and the joint folded under the impact.
"Ha." He swung again, two handed, putting his whole back into it, and the drone's torso caved and dropped it where it stood.
The second drone charged. He threw the bent pipe like a javelin and watched it bounce uselessly off its chassis.
"Right. Bad idea."
He scrambled up a maintenance ladder, boots slipping on oil slicked rungs, the drone climbing behind him with a mechanical ease he didn't have. At the catwalk, he turned and kicked the ladder's release catch. The whole section dropped away with the drone still on it. Something crashed far below, and then nothing followed.
"Physics." He was still catching his breath. "Still works."
The third one waited at the far end of the catwalk. Grating stretched ahead of him, open and bare, with nothing left to grab and a long fall to concrete on the other side of it.
His eyes found the fire extinguisher bolted to the wall. He tore it loose and waited for the drone to close the distance.
It advanced, patient and methodical. He pulled the pin, aimed low at its feet, and let the foam out in a blinding white cloud that slicked the grating under it.
Its foot slid. Arms windmilling, it went down flailing and tipped straight over the railing into open air.
Happy leaned on the rail to catch his breath, foam dusting his jacket, and wiped his forehead, leaving a white streak across it.
"Physics." He was grinning, the bruise already blooming on his shoulder.
Natasha dropped from the gantry behind her last two drones. They turned together, a half second too slow. She drove a combat knife into the first one's neck joint, twisted, and yanked it free as hydraulic fluid sprayed and the drone folded.
The last one raised its arm, a cannon whining as it charged.
She didn't dodge. Instead, she threw the knife, end over end, a clean rotation into the mouth of the barrel. The charge backfired, and the arm blew inward, shrapnel tearing through its own torso on the way out.
It went down.
The warehouse went quiet.
Natasha stood in the wreckage, her forearms trembling from the knife throw. A cut ran along her forearm. Bruises were already rising on her ribs, and her knuckles felt raw and split. She'd taken hits, real ones, the calculated kind that only came from something watching her patterns and correcting for them.
She pressed the back of her hand to her lip, blood coming away on her knuckles, and let her eyes track to the far end of the warehouse.
A service hatch stood open there. Heavy, industrial, the kind sealed by design and meant to stay that way.
It wasn't forced. It wasn't damaged. The locking bolts sat neatly retracted in their tracks, as if someone had turned them by hand and stepped back to let her walk through.
It could have been an invitation, or it could have been a trap. No question which. She'd known the moment she saw it, the same certainty as the weight of a loaded gun in the dark.
"Happy."
He climbed down from the catwalk, wiping foam off his sleeve. "Yeah?"
"Check the perimeter. Make sure nothing else wakes up."
His eyes narrowed. "You going in there?"
"I'm going in there."
He studied her face for a long moment before he nodded. "Holler if you need a pipe swung."
She didn't smile. "Stay sharp."
The corridor past the hatch narrowed with every step, steel walls pressing closer, and the ambient hum of machinery deepened into a rhythm that traveled up through the soles of her boots, steady as an idling engine, or maybe a heartbeat.
She moved deeper alone, cataloguing exits out of habit even as the space gave her fewer of them.
The passage opened into a cavernous room. The room had a high ceiling, gantry cranes frozen mid-reach, and workbenches crowded with arc reactor components and half-built drone chassis.
In the center of it, facing the doorway, a suit stood, not a man wearing armor but the armor itself, waiting alone.
It stood eight feet tall at least, built like a linebacker carved from gunmetal and carbon fiber. Arc reactor light pulsed from its chest, brighter than anything Stark had ever built, rawer, the edges of the containment ring machined by hand rather than by any factory line. Heavy whips coiled at its hips, dormant but humming with charge held in reserve. The helmet's faceplate was a solid slit of red glass, and it threw back a warped reflection of the doorway where she stood.
It didn't move. Its weight never shifted. Patient, it waited, the way something waits for exactly the right moment to stop.
***
Donate Power Stones to support this novel
Advance chapters in patreon.com/Najicablitz