If Hamr Industries was crushed, Blade Technology Industries could inherit its production lines.
That thought tempted Drex Valen more than he cared to admit.
Hamr Industries was already being squeezed so hard by Blade Technology that it was barely standing upright. Stark Industries had begun reclaiming the contracts it once ignored, and that only made Hamr's situation worse.
Fortunately for everyone else in the arms race, Tony Stark had spent a serious stretch of ti working in silence and ca up with a defensive counterasure built specifically to stop War Machines.
The battlefield had already changed because of War Machines.
Radar and satellites could not reliably track them. They were small. Fast. Hard to intercept even when spotted by the naked eye.
So the entire world had been scrambling to develop anti-War-Machine detection systems, and then Tony Stark did the impossible and beat them to it.
The United States tested War Machines with Stark's new system and was pleasantly surprised to discover that its error rate was only thirty percent.
Thirty percent.
That was the kind of number that made every officer in the room smile like they had just been handed a winning lottery ticket.
Tony Stark really was Tony Stark.
The defensive system he built, along with the weapons attached to it, was designed around countering War Machines directly. Against the armored suits that had once looked unstoppable across every battlefield, it landed cleanly, one shot at a ti. The terrifying war machines that had seed like gods to the rest of the world suddenly looked brittle, almost laughable.
A paper tiger with rocket boosters.
Of course, that kind of news could not stay hidden for long.
And there was always the possibility that the United States had no intention of hiding it in the first place.
Stark Industries had military shareholders. There was no way this system would be sold to foreign powers. Obadiah Stane might try to move it quietly behind the scenes, but not this soon. Not with Washington watching.
"Of course Tony's still the best," one board mber said with a grin, leaning back in his chair as if all their recent nightmares had been scrubbed clean. "He cut that Drex Valen's proudest cross-generation weapon down to size in one move."
Around the boardroom, the other shareholders were practically glowing with relief.
Their earlier gloom vanished in an instant.
A number of them had already started considering selling their Stark Industries stock after War Machines entered the market and cut into their assets. But they were not fools. Blade Technology Industries was not publicly listed yet, and Stark's share price still had room to hold.
The mont Blade Technology went public, Stark's stock would not just fall.
It would hit the pavent so hard it would leave a crater.
The new defensive system was expensive.
The launchers, radar arrays, and command units all ca with eye-watering price tags. But the U.S. military and the Departnt of Defense still chose to order twelve sets anyway.
No need for too many.
After all, it was a mobile defense system.
Blade Technology Industries received the news soon enough, along with video footage from the Arican trials.
In the footage, three enemy War Machines were staged as if they had crossed into U.S. territory. The mont they passed the border line, a missile truck on the ground responded.
Its electronic eye rotated.
It locked onto the preset target.
Then the launcher opened.
Inside were missiles unlike anything most people had ever seen.
The missiles fired.
The War Machines reacted imdiately, trying to dodge and shoot them down.
Too late.
Halfway through flight, the missile split into submunitions, catching the targets off guard. The warheads were built with overwhelming penetration power, not large-area blast damage. The explosion itself was small, almost understated, but it hit deep. The War Machines were torn apart from the inside and blown into fragnts.
Urd watched the footage with a worried look on her face.
Then she turned to Drex.
And froze.
He was not frowning.
He was thinking.
Drex had not expected this.
By forcing the issue so hard, he had actually pushed Tony Stark into producing the Jericho missile system eight years early.
And Stark really was a genius.
Drex had originally thought War Machines would dominate for at least two years, maybe four if the market stayed hot, and then he would unveil War Machine Mark II after saturation set in.
Instead, Tony Stark had already built a counterasure specifically designed to challenge armored suits.
Not bad, Stark.
Turns out you are especially talented when it cos to dismantling your own weapons.
"Drex?" Urd asked, still waiting for his instruction.
"Leave it alone," Drex said evenly. "Even if this defense system is sharp, the military is still going to buy our War Machines."
Urd blinked.
That was it?
Drex's expression stayed calm.
The appearance of the system might make Blade Technology feel targeted, but in practical terms it changed almost nothing.
Interceptor systems had existed long before this.
And yet missiles still got built. Still got sold. Still got used.
So what if the enemy had interception technology?
That did not make the weapon obsolete.
The United States had only bought twelve defense systems. The rest of the market still belonged to War Machines. Their appeal had already conquered the world. Who would not want to fly through the sky in a suit of steel and feel that crushing, invincible thrill of being beyond bullets?
Even those ridiculous, fourth-rate, dual-purpose, two-legged committee beasts in Congress had started proposing that the Army be equipped with War Machines.
The proposal was laughed out of the room.
War Machines were for the Air Force. Not one could be spared.
The Navy and the Air Force were already nearly tearing each other apart over the split in share.
The National Guard was jealous too, but they had no chance at all. The Air Force and Navy were fighting over the budget like wolves over fresh at.
The Air Force argued that War Machines could not go underwater, so what use would they be to the Navy?
The Navy shot back that War Machines were basically the aircraft carried by an aircraft carrier.
How could that possibly be useless?
The argunt went on and on.
Then another massive order landed on Blade Technology's desk.
The United States planned to construct a new aircraft carrier.
Its codena was the Poseidon Project.
The entire ship was ant to be built using secondary kryptonite.
That ant an astronomical amount of the material.
Enough to make it look as if the United States had just bought out Blade Technology's entire secondary-kryptonite supply for the next ten years, maybe even several decades.
"Poseidon Project?" Drex muttered, sounding genuinely unconvinced. "They're building aircraft carriers now? I thought the trend was nuclear submarines."
He still could not quite wrap his head around Arica's absurd financial appetite.
Was the U.S. really that rich?
Secondary kryptonite was priced at eight thousand dollars per gram. And nobody even knew how many tons this carrier would require.
Its manufacturing tiline was estimated at fifty years minimum.
There was a good chance it would die in the cradle before completion.
But Drex did not particularly care whether it collapsed halfway through.
As long as there was money to be made, that was enough.
Even if the project failed, the secondary kryptonite already produced would still have value. Blade Technology was the only company in the world capable of manufacturing it. That alone was a license to print money.
They could live off that kind of monopoly for ten lifetis.
And if he ever obtained more extraterrestrial minerals that could be used in manufacturing, then better alloys could be developed too.
In materials science, one step ahead ant a giant leap for civilization's industrial future.
This order, of course, could not be leaked.
Once Urd learned the scale of it, a lot of the tension in her shoulders finally eased.
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