Star Dust (A Paladin Adventure)

Nick Fury's baby

"It all started with Nick Fury," the second part of the book began. "And it actually kicked off with Fury's attempted recruitment of the Hulk. That didn't go so well." Because nothing was publicly known about Bruce, the account kicked off with the destruction of a lab known to be experimenting with the effects of radiation on people for the military, under the aegis of General Ross, now our Secretary of State. What was not stated in the book was that Bruce had been working on an extension of Project Rebirth, the program which had transformed Steve, using bioengineering and gamma rays instead of SuperSoldier serum and VitaRays. Bruce had tested the formula on himself, a real throwback scientist. I had no room to speak, of course. We both had the mindset that it was ok to test one's work on oneself, a view that had largely disappeared because it could be freaking dangerous. It was a mindset that Stark shared as well, come to think of it. He'd Hulked out for the first time there, inadvertently hurting his girlfriend--Ross's daughter-- and others, and becoming a fugitive to avoid being pressed into becoming a weapon for the military. That was when Bruce, seeing no way out, had tried to kill himself with a gun in his mouth. The Hulk had spat it out, waded into the ocean, and walked to Europe. I'd been fascinated by this, and asked Bruce about the ocean floor, but he'd been frustratingly vague, saying only that it was cold, the plate boundaries were interesting, and the pressure was significant.

The book picks up with the Hulk being tracked to South America by Emil Blonsky, on loan to Ross from the British Royal Marines. After another encounter with lots of damage, Hulk got away. It was after this encounter that Blonsky was coaxed by Ross into volunteering to be given a small quantity of SuperSoldier serum, and after another encounter with the Hulk, even more serum. He started to experience psychosis, which he hid, and then agreed to treatement with a quantity of the Hulk's blood. This created his alter ego Abomination--bigger and stronger than the Hulk, uglier, and orange. He broke out of the lab and ultimately engaged Hulk in a battle royal in Harlem, during which Ross was almost killed by his protege, but Hulk managed to defeat him despite Abomination's superior strength, nearly strangling him with a massive chain before leaving the battlefield. Abomination was taken to a cryocell in Alaska, under the supervision of General Ross. After that, sightings of the Hulk ended and his existence faded away for most people.

Colin picked up the tempo, providing an entertaining description of Nick's attempt to bring Tony into the SHIELD fold, sending Coulson in to make contact. Coulson's assistance to Pepper during the Stane's Iron Monger power trip was described in harrowing detail, as was Tony's follow-up press conference. I shook my head at that, then frowned, considering. Tony had no humility at that point, just a massive chip on his shoulder. Now, though, his ego had been bitch-slapped a few times and the chip whittled down quite a lot. Is is possible that Tony was evolving from his natural state as an overly entitled genius manchild? The book details Coulson's offer of SHIELD training for Tony--"You fight like an inventor. You're supposed to cheat." "Yeah, I've watched professional wrestling." Then an account of the rocky process of bringing him into the fold, the palladium poisoning from his arc reactor that nearly killed him. I shook my head. I could think of a couple of ways around that just off the top of my head, and obviously, somebody else had too. The Senate hearings, where the right of a civilian to privately own technology like the Iron Man suits was hotly contested. Seizure of one of his suits by Jim, who had taken it to the military, against Stark's determination that the government wasn't fit to have the technology. Interestingly, it seemed that Natalia had infiltrated Stark Tech as Pepper's assistant at the time. She'd have done whatever she needed to do to achieve her objectives, which were not revealed in the book. I wondered if she'd tried to seduce Tony, but dismissed that; he'd still been with Pepper at that point and she'd never worried about other women. Then an encounter at a doughnut shop, where Nick talked him down out of a giant doughnut sign, told him that his dad had helped found SHIELD, and gave him some of his dad's old things to research a cure for his poisoning, which he found. There's an amusing bit about how he supposedly Macgyvered some sort of, I dunno, laser/ particle collider in his basement to synthesize a new element, to the dismay of Coulson, who'd been stuck babysitting him and had to leave for New Mexico.