Thor and Tony came back to the base within the hour, and the rest filtered in behind them over the following stretch of time. Nobody required much rest. They sat down, ate what was available, and moved directly into the next planning session.
The situation was clean in its outline. Every Hydra installation across Europe had been removed. What remained was the primary fortress, embedded in the small country of Sokovia, and Baron Strucker.
The complication was geography.
The smaller bases had been set in remote locations: deep terrain, sparse population, the natural buffer of distance and wilderness between the engagement and anyone who happened to be nearby. Strucker's fortress was not like that. It sat close enough to Sokovia's city that the distinction between military target and civilian proximity was going to be a practical problem rather than a theoretical one. Even a fast engagement, even one conducted with every effort to contain it, would produce blast patterns and structural damage that the surrounding population would feel.
Nolan turned the problem over in his mind for a while, then put a proposal on the table.
David would take control of Sokovia's communications infrastructure: network systems, broadcasting equipment, the emergency alert channels that every government maintained and few populations actually trusted until they had reason to. Once that was in hand, a message would go out under the country's own authority, citing an imminent geological event and directing people away from the city's neighbourhoods. Not a perfect solution. Strucker would notice the evacuation and begin readying his forces. But a prepared Hydra was preferable to the alternative, which was a populated area in the middle of a firefight.
Tony's response was immediate agreement. Thor nodded with the straightforward enthusiasm of someone who had never found the concept of protecting civilians philosophically complicated.
Doom said nothing, which was as close as he came to a formal endorsement of someone else's plan.
Tyberos shifted his helmet slightly, and Nolan saw the movement for what it was: a thought being weighed and then set aside. He could reconstruct the general shape of it without difficulty. In the Imperium, the calculus of a civilian population near a military target produced a different kind of arithmetic than it did here, and the Carcharodons had spent enough time operating in the spaces between Imperial support that they had not developed strong opinions about where the line was drawn. Not cruelty, exactly. More the accumulated pragmatism of a Chapter that had learned to solve the problem in front of it and not the problems adjacent to it.
Nolan filed the observation and moved to the logistics.
The Defence Force companies loaded into transport vehicles before the sun had finished setting, moving on pre-planned ground routes that crossed the border quietly and put them in position outside Sokovia without announcing themselves. The Intelligent Control Corps followed by air, Thunderhawks running low and dark with navigation lights off. By the time the outer camp had been established at the agreed border coordinates, the sky above Sokovia was a deep grey shading into black.
The country was smaller in person than maps suggested. The terrain confirmed what the intelligence files had said: mountainous, the majority of the population living in conditions that generous descriptions would call difficult, the kind of landscape that a man like Strucker would find useful precisely because no one with better options would choose it.
Nolan sent Doom in first, ahead of the main element, with a Defence Force team and instructions to be quiet about it.
Doom returned after dark, the green cape carrying the night's cold, one arm extended with a bald middle-aged man suspended from it in pyjamas decorated with a small yellow fruit pattern. The man's expression conveyed that the evening had not unfolded in the way he had planned when he had gone to bed.
Nolan took off his helmet. The gesture was intentional: face visible, nothing threatening in the immediate posture.
"You can call me Kain Mark," the man said, with the tone of someone trying very hard to sound calm while dangling from a metal arm. He took a breath. "Friends. I would ask that you consider very carefully before starting any kind of conflict on Sokovian soil. We have no mineral resources of note. Our fiscal capacity is limited. Even if you are holding me, the president, the remaining government structure will not cooperate with demands for revenue, and"
"Do you know what Hydra is?"
The president's eyes moved in a way that was not quite an answer and not quite a denial.
"Who are you, exactly?"
Nolan glanced at Doom.
Doom raised one hand. The spell he cast was simple: a compulsion toward honesty, toward compliance with direction, the kind of working that left no permanent marks and produced no lasting harm. The president blinked twice and then became considerably more cooperative.
Nolan asked his questions. The answers confirmed what he had already suspected: the president of Sokovia was not a Hydra asset. He was simply a man who had the misfortune of running a country that Hydra had decided was useful real estate.
He handed the president to David with instructions: go through the emergency broadcast process, use every channel, put the warning out in the president's own voice.
At midnight, every electronic device in Sokovia that could receive a signal received one.
"People of Sokovia, I am your President, Bruno Kain Mark." The voice was steady, unhurried, the particular cadence of a prepared statement. "I am sorry to disturb your rest. However, based on advance monitoring by government departments, a sudden seismic event is expected to affect our homeland imminently. In order to minimise casualties and damage, please evacuate in an orderly manner away from the city's residential areas immediately. This is not a drill."
The message cycled on repeat. In the streets outside, the city's administration scrambled to get people moving, government workers materialising on corners and intersections to manage the flow, doing what they could with what they had.
The evacuation was proceeding.
Then the gunfire started.
It was coming from the neighbourhoods adjacent to Strucker's fortress, close enough that the sound reached the camp perimeter clearly. Nolan looked up toward the city's skyline and turned to David.
"What is happening there?"
David's eyes pulsed blue as it accessed the reconnaissance feeds from the servo-robots running aerial circuits over the city.
"Hydra soldiers are blocking the evacuation routes, my lord. They appear to be taking hostages from the civilian population. The destruction of the other bases has reached them. They know we are here."
Nolan looked at the people around him.
His eyes went to Tyberos first, and the calculation took less than a second. Sending the Chapter Master into a densely populated residential area to clear Hydra soldiers from among hostages would solve the tactical problem immediately and comprehensively, and the civilian casualty figures would be very high.
"Thor. Tony." His voice was direct, no preamble. "Go into the city. Kill the Hydra agents and get the civilians clear. As many as possible."
He turned.
"Tyberos. Take the guards and hit Strucker's fortress from the front. Your objective is their main firepower attention. Buy time for the evacuation to complete."
He found Doom.
"Lead the Defence Force in from alternate approach vectors. The Intelligent Control Corps provides fire support. We crack the fortress open from multiple directions simultaneously."
The camp was already moving before the last order finished.
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