Xcalibur Xc
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[Ironman] Ch: 89 [Proving worth]
🕑 Added 2025-05-13 15:08:40 +0000 UTC[Location: Starfire Base – Sahara Desert, Cloaked Zone]
The boarding ramp lowered with a soft hiss, and a gust of warm desert air met them. But it wasn't the dry heat that made Susan stop at the top of the ramp.
It was the view.
Her breath caught.
What lay before her was so bizarre that for a moment she thought she was dreaming.
Walkways ran along transparent tunnels. Elevators glided along magnetized rails without wires. And everywhere, humanoid robots moved in perfect coordination. Some were tall and skeletal, built for heavy lifting. Others were smaller, designed for finesse tasks like welding, fitting, and analysis.
And in the center of it all…
The Starfire ship.
Still in construction, but already massive. Half of its hull curved like a blade, the other half layered in open scaffolding where plating hadn't sealed the frame yet. It hovered in place, unsupported, held aloft by a web of gravity anchors and magnetic stasis fields that shimmered in soft blue arcs.
Susan stepped off the ramp slowly, eyes wide. "This… This is a science fiction novel with a billion-dollar budget."
Tony smirked. "More like a trillion, but who's counting?"
She turned slowly, taking it all in. Cloaking panels shimmered above them, active camouflage tech embedded into the domed ceiling, reflecting the desert sky with such precision that, from above, it was invisible. There were gravity lifts embedded into the floor, silent conveyor lines shifting massive materials with no wheels or rails.
Tony gestured casually. "The robots are called Hex Cores. Fully autonomous and zero-latency coordination. Some of them have better reflexes than I do."
Susan moved toward the railing and looked down as another platform ascended slowly, carrying a half-ton slab of alloy toward the ship's frame. "These robots are working in perfect sync. No noise. No downtime."
"No egos," Tony added, stepping beside her. "Everything runs off Hermes and Elena. The AIs coordinate task flow down to the microsecond. The only humans in this place are the ones I brought to do the things machines still can't."
"Like solve cosmic radiation mutation at a cellular level?" she said dryly.
Tony smiled. "Exactly. And the main engine that I'm working on, in person. But there's so much I can do alone, so it's taking some time."
They walked along the upper platform. The floor adjusted beneath their feet, sensing their gait, stabilizing each step with micro-thrusters in the panels. No stumbling. No imbalance.
"I don't even feel the slope," Susan muttered. "Is this a dynamic inertia compensator?"
Tony nodded. "Good catch. Keeps the balance stable. Pretty nifty, right?"
They passed a row of stasis tubes, translucent cylinders with humanoid test frames suspended in fields of blue light. Bio-suits. Pressure armor. Liquid nanite assemblies held in mid-form.
"This place is fifty years ahead of anything I've ever seen," Susan whispered. "Maybe more."
Tony stopped and gestured toward a large viewing window. Beyond it, the Starfire core glowed, bright white light humming from a central chamber where three rings spun around a floating prism of light.
"The heart of it all," Tony said quietly. "Synthetic graviton engine. Runs on a giant Arc Reactor. The closest thing we've got to FTL without folding ourselves into spaghetti. But still a work in progress."
Susan stared. "You building this... here?"
Tony glanced sideways at her. "It was either here, the moon, or underwater in a trench. The desert came with fewer fish and more sun."
She turned to him, arms crossed, her voice hushed with disbelief. "You really believe cosmic radiation holds the key to... what, human evolution?"
"In theory, yes. But we'll know once we go up there and test it out in person," Tony said casually.
Susan stood in silence for a few minutes, the soft hum of the reactor chamber pulsing beneath her boots like a second heartbeat. The glow from the graviton engine threw shifting patterns across her face, and for a moment, she let herself just feel the magnitude of what she was looking at.
This wasn’t a lab.
This wasn’t a simulation.
This wasn’t theory.
This was real. Living, breathing science, made practical by someone reckless enough to chase the future and smart enough to build it.
Her fingers gripped the railing tightly. She didn’t notice at first, but they were trembling.
Because deep down, under all the analysis, the equations, the sleepless nights writing genetic protocols and chasing flawed mutations... this was it. This was the edge.
The edge of what’s known. The place where science ends and everything after becomes a question nobody else has the guts to ask.
For months now, she'd been stuck in a loop. Study, test, fail, repeat. And every time she asked the institutions for help, they looked at her research like it was nothing but useless, too radical, too unconventional, too ambitious. They told her to narrow her scope. To think smaller.
And now here was Tony Stark, changing the very concept of sanity with his bare hands and asking her to go with him.
It scared her.
But not in the way most people would think.
It wasn't the ship or danger or the unknown.
What scared her was how much she wanted it.
How alive it made her feel just thinking about it.
She turned slowly from the viewing window and looked at Tony. He was standing a few feet away, arms crossed, waiting... not pushing, or persuading. Just waiting. Like he already knew what she was going to say.
She stepped closer.
“I’ve spent my whole life looking for answers,” she said quietly. “Trying to fix what people say can’t be fixed. Trying to give people a way out when the world tells them to just live with the hand they’re dealt.”
Tony didn’t say anything. He just watched her, eyes steady.
Susan looked up at the massive ship once more. The blue light reflected off her glasses. “But every time I get close, the door slams shut. Not enough data. Not enough funding. Not enough time. But this... this is past the door. This is what’s next.”
She exhaled slowly. Then looked back at him.
“I’m in.”
Tony’s lips tugged into a slow smile. “Good.”
“But,” she added, raising a finger. “I want full lab access. Total genomic autonomy. And I want two more people in the team.”
“Wow,” he said without blinking. “Anything else?”
Susan nodded. “One more thing.”
She stepped closer.
“No surprises. I want to know everything. Every test. Every risk. I’m not walking into a suicide mission, and I’m not going to let you fly half-broken because your ego didn’t want to share data.”
Tony gave a soft chuckle. “We just met today, and you want all access. Haha. Very well, you want access, you gotta earn it. I showed what I can do, now your turn... I will give you resources and everything you need. So, show me what you can do in such a short time... in the upcoming Expo. Create something groundbreaking..."
"It'd take a huge sum of money and tech, you sure about that?" She asked. Her heart was hammering at this point. If she can get money and technology, maybe a better lab, then she should be able to complete the mutant cure.
"And?" He raised an eyebrow.
"Why trust me? Don't get me wrong, everything so far was like a dream. But as you said, we just met today. So, why the trust?" She asked.
"Think of it as an instinct. Like, I can trust you," He took a step forward and looked into her eyes. "As for whether I am right or wrong, we'll know soon enough."
"Ok. Alright. Yeah, I can do it," Sue took a deep breath. "Can I get a pen and paper? You know, to make a list of things I need."
...
[Location: Susan Storm’s Private Lab – New York]
[Time: 9:27 PM – Same Day]
Susan walked through her lab door, half-expecting things to be as cluttered and half-dead as she left them: burnt-out equipment, low storage alerts, and three-day-old coffee mugs still clinging to the edge of her desk.
What she got instead?
A miracle.
She stopped cold, mouth parting slightly.
Everything had changed.
The old desk was gone. In its place stood a sleek, custom lab bench etched with her initials and integrated with a fully interactive light-reactive display panel. The holographic table she’d been scraping together with duct tape and a secondhand projector? Replaced by a full StarkTech OmniFrame capable of perfect gene modeling and environmental simulation rendering.
The storage wall was restocked. Cryo-chambers. Enzyme freezers. Three new analyzers she hadn’t dared dream about owning. Bio-scanners lined up on a rail that adjusted to her height when she stepped closer. And a completely new chemical synthesizer.
Top of the line.
Proprietary Stark design.
She reached out and ran her fingers across the polished edge of the counter.
"Freakin' hell! This is like a dream workshop," Sue jumped up once in happiness, with a large smile.
She once again took a look around.
Three custom-sequenced viral delivery systems
Two vials of inert X-Gene scaffolding serum
A reinforced containment chamber
Molecular rewriter prototype (Gen V)
Two AI-assisted genetic simulators
A private Stark cloud node link
Plus six crates of lab consumables, untouched and sealed
The upgrade of so real.
Then she walked toward the main computer and started it. She typed the password. The system greeted her by name as usual. It was just an early version of AI she created. But now, it looked like an upgraded version.
'Did he upgrade the AI too?' She wondered. 'Well, whatever. As long as I get to create the cure.'
> Welcome, Dr. Susan Storm. Project Access: VERIFIED. Full permissions unlocked.
> Custom Research Suite: RECODE - ONLINE.
She pulled up her notes. Then the genome models. Then she opened her old trial logs and within seconds, the system converted them into an upgraded rendering format that highlighted previously undetected mutation shifts in red and instability markers in violet. Her failure rates had been caused by low-level protein stack mismatches in nearly all versions.
She wouldn’t have found that for months. Maybe never.
But now?
Now she had a shot.
Susan dropped into the stool, slid her gloves on, and activated the bio-printer. “Alright,” she whispered. “Let’s work.”
She started fast, her mind already sketching out changes. The protein binders needed reinforcement. Carbon-lattice scaffolding was now possible with the new hardware. She began adjusting the base sequence, adding a redundancy buffer, and testing new simulations in parallel.
Her new AI assistant, built into the system, began rendering outcomes as she worked.
The interface glowed with synchronized speed.
**> TRIAL 142: 68% stability.
TRIAL 143: 81% stability.
TRIAL 144: 89% stability – neural harmony confirmed.**
Her hand shook slightly.
She laughed. A short, sharp sound that was half disbelief, half adrenaline.
She adjusted a final nucleotide pair in the recombination strand.
“Run it again.”
It ran again. Still stable.
“Cross-test against the neuromutation cluster from Trial 122.”
Still stable.
She backed away, breath catching in her throat.
It was working.
It was actually working.
The binder she’d theorized months ago, the one everyone dismissed as ‘theoretical noise’, was holding. And not only that, the Stark-enhanced systems were accelerating the simulations tenfold. What used to take days and sometimes weeks now takes five minutes.
...
AN: Next time to create some armor. Maybe mecha.
