That night, Obadiah dropped to his knees in front of Tony and begged for mercy. Without that Iron Monger armor, he was not some supervillain, only an ordinary, rotten old man. Against magical armor, he had no power to resist.
Tony had no intention of killing someone who had once been family. He simply decided to send Obadiah to prison.
The next day, he showed up at the dock right on time, ready to carry out the test flight as planned.
"Hello, Stark."
That was what Skyl had said to Tony in greeting, and it was also the headline splashed across The New York Times.
That day, a huge number of reporters had been invited to the spaceport dock for live coverage, and even more people gathered outside the Stark Industries complex to watch.
On April 12, 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin rode Vostok 1 into space and became the first human in history to leave Earth. Eight years later, Armstrong walked on the Moon.
After the Cold War ended, the once-fierce space race came to an end along with the fall of one of the giants. Humanity's pace of exploration into the cosmos slowed sharply. The space colonization dreamed of in twentieth-century science fiction seemed impossibly distant, and national competition in space narrowed to launching more satellites into near-Earth orbit rather than pouring vast resources into deep-space exploration.
Until today, when a private company announced that it was about to begin interstellar travel.
The alien invasion in London a few days earlier had made humanity realize it was not alone in the universe, and people across the world, along with governments everywhere, had turned their eyes back toward the stars.
By now, everyone understood that the cosmos was full of both life and malice, and humanity, being a species whose own history was written in war, naturally assumed the worst about alien civilizations. People had begun to suspect that humanity might be dragged into an interstellar war at any moment and crushed as a weak native civilization.
That rising sense of crisis showed up first in the financial markets. Stock prices for companies tied to aerospace and space projects surged, and an entirely new frontier had opened. Just as every tech company was rolling up its sleeves and getting ready to cash in, Stark Industries suddenly fired the opening shot in the race for space, catching the entire world off guard.
It was as if everyone else was still feeling for stepping stones to cross the river, while someone else suddenly leaped into the air and landed on the far bank in one effortless bound, giving the whole world a little Stark-style shock.
If this test flight succeeded, Stark Industries would go straight into the history books.
Once again, people placed their hopes on the genius engineer and scientist Tony Stark.
Facing the reporters' cameras, the young billionaire looked cold, exhausted, and unusually quiet, like a man who had just been through something deeply draining.
"Mr. Stark, is your company's spacecraft related to the alien civilization that appeared in London?"
"No comment."
"Mr. Stark, is your company's spacecraft based on German technology from World War II?"
"Are you kidding me?"
"Mr. Stark, why isn't Mr. Stane, the head of your company, present today?"
Tony suddenly turned his head. "Obadiah Stane is under investigation for multiple criminal charges. The company has already begun termination proceedings. From this moment on, he has no further connection to Stark Industries. His successor will be Ms. Pepper Potts."
Pepper, standing beside him, looked even more shocked than the reporters.
"Tony," she whispered, lowering her voice, "what are you talking about?"
Even in front of the cameras, the playboy could not stay serious. He lifted a hand to touch Pepper's cheek and flashed a frivolous smile. "I'm going on a long trip, probably tens of thousands of light-years long. No telling when I'll be back. I need someone I can trust to run the company. And besides you, I honestly don't know who else I could trust."
Tony's bodyguard and driver silently shrugged off to the side. He badly wanted to say, Boss, you've still got me. But seeing Pepper with tears in her eyes, he decided not to interrupt the farewell.
With cameras and flashing lights all around them, the crew boarded one by one, and people were stunned by what they saw.
In most people's minds, astronauts wore bulky space suits, and every one of them represented the peak of human physical fitness, mental fortitude, and reason, the kind of people needed to endure the loneliness and darkness of outer space.
But take a look at this group. One young man in wizard robes, one tall beauty in a blue evening gown, one girl in a sweatshirt and jeans, and finally a businessman in a tailored suit. They looked less like the elite specialists operating a spacecraft and more like ordinary passengers boarding a commercial flight.
Doubts rippled through the crowd as everyone watched them walk into that willow-leaf ship as light as a feather. A blonde reporter shouted, "What's the name of this ship?"
All four of them stopped and looked at one another, then at last they all turned to Skyl.
The wizard thought for a moment and said, "Let's call it the Planeswalker."
The bridge held five control stations in total. Tony took the pilot's seat, Skyl sat beside him as copilot, Lady Moonshadow took the central position as navigator, and Gali sat in the rear handling the defense and weapons systems.
The ship powered up. Holographic projections unfolded across the bridge, casting the scenery around the hull onto the inner surfaces. The operators felt as though they were floating in open space, able to see everything around them with perfect clarity.
"Planeswalker, Planeswalker, this is the tower, over." The message crackled in over the radio.
"Tower, tower, this is the Planeswalker. Open the dome, over."
Controlled by sixteen telescoping hydraulic arms, the dock's dome slowly opened overhead. Daylight spilled down as the gantry cranes around the ship gradually withdrew, leaving a clear vertical launch corridor.
The reporters watched in excitement, cheering like a pack of crazed fans.
Inside the ship, Tony looked down at Pepper Potts in the crowd below, waving without pause, then lifted his eyes to the clear sky overhead. A relaxed smile finally appeared on his face. He turned to Skyl and gave him a completely unserious salute. "Oh, captain, my captain, give the order."
"We're heading out. Destination, Morag."
Tony started the engines.
The anti-gravity drive lifted the Planeswalker smoothly into the air. Just from the steadiness of its ascent, people could already tell the test flight was as good as successful.
The ship rose into the sky like a kite carried off by the wind. It never looked back. It passed through the soft clouds, through the ionosphere, past geosynchronous orbit, and all along the way its communication with the tower remained perfectly stable.
As their altitude continued to rise, the blue of the sky grew dimmer and dimmer, shading toward violet. Then the stars began to emerge. The planet below curved clearly beneath them. They could see the Rocky Mountains in western North America, and faintly, on the far side of the horizon, the Appalachian Mountains on the East Coast. Nearly the entire Pacific Ocean stretched into view.
When the sky finally turned black, they could see the arc of the atmosphere wrapped around Earth. Gravity had grown extremely weak by then, and the ship switched on its artificial gravity.
"Tower, tower, we are about to perform our first spatial jump, over."
"Copy that. Good luck, over."
Tony took a deep breath and pushed the controls forward with conviction. The starlight ahead began turning blue and stretching into lines, while the starlight behind them shifted red. The ship surged forward. Once it exceeded the speed of light, a honeycomb-like lattice of spacetime appeared ahead of them, the peculiar jump tunnel of the Marvel universe. The ship entered the tunnel and vanished from the solar system in an instant.
...
Morag.
Redbone's "Come and Get Your Love" echoed across the barren surface of that abandoned world.
The Planeswalker came down on a plain of broken stone. One by one, they stepped onto the ground, while a floating speaker drifted beside Skyl, blasting a classic old hit from twentieth-century Earth. They whistled along with the beat and swayed to the rhythm. In a world this dim, damp, and miserable, music from Earth somehow made everything feel delightfully cheerful.
Tony took Lady Moonshadow by the hand and spun her into an impromptu tango. Then he noticed another unfamiliar ship descending through the clouds and landing up ahead.
"Hey, Captain, looks like we've got company."
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