The sky above Twin Islands was its usual grey.
On the landing pads, the Thunderhawks sat with their displacement engines already cycling through their pre-launch sequences, fuel tanks loaded to capacity. Every pilot was in their seat. The Lamenters companies were staged and waiting. All that was missing was the order.
Inside the base hall, the overhead lights were at full brightness. David moved through the network with the quality of attention he brought to problems that genuinely interested him: every visible point of contact in the global internet, every camera feed that could be accessed, every data stream that could be read, all of it processed simultaneously. Procellas had linked herself into the search to help manage the volume, her vast operational mind sorting and discarding thousands of false signals per second.
Nolan sat at the round table in his vibranium power armor with the Warscythe and Frost Fang secured on the back of his power pack, the Heart of the Furnace and the Masterwork Bolter at his waist, and an expression that revealed nothing at all.
There was good news and there was bad news and neither of them was resolving into the other.
The good news: only Nurgle's blessing had descended. The other three Chaos Gods' Holy Numbers had locked and stagnated when Nurgle's countdown completed. It appeared the system functioned with some kind of exclusivity: until the current blessing had run its full course and been resolved, the other three had to wait. This bought time. It did not eliminate the problem, but it defined it, which was the first step toward addressing it.
The bad news was twofold.
The Emperor had sent nothing. No direction, no signal, no equivalent of the golden light that had broken through the clouds above Terra's palace walls. Nolan had understood, from an early point in his thinking about all of this, that the Emperor's guidance would not arrive like a courier and would not take the form of convenient revelation. He had not fully accepted, until now, what that meant in practice: that he would be finding the blessing's location through his own resources, on his own timeline, with no external assistance. What they had was David's network reach, and David's network reach, formidable as it was, had gaps. There were parts of the world where the internet was thin or absent. There were communities that produced no digital signal that could be found and traced. The native world was not fully legible to the tools they had.
Natasha existed precisely because of this problem. She had access to networks that did not run on cables and servers. That access needed to be formalized, expanded, and given infrastructure.
This was lesson one, and Nolan filed it.
Heavy footsteps in the passage. Three figures entered in sequence.
Doom in his dark green cloak, the silver surfaces of his power armor catching the hall's light under the fabric. Natasha in the nun-pattern power armor that Reditus had modified for her, compact and practical, its surface stripped of the decorative elements that would otherwise mark it as ecclesiastical. Hawkeye in auxiliary power armor with the oversized metal bow mag-locked across his back.
"Lord Primarch." Doom stopped a few meters from the table. "We've drawn equipment from the foundry. Has David located the invasion site?"
Nolan shook his head without elaborating.
He looked at Natasha.
"After this operation is over, the intelligence organization needs to be stood up immediately. No more delays." He kept his voice level. "I want the team named the Assassin's Court. Resources and combat capacity will be at your discretion. I need to see results from the first month after formation. Understood?"
"Understood, Lord Primarch." Natasha's expression was already serious before he started speaking.
Barton raised one armored hand.
"Nolan." He caught himself. "Sir. Do I actually need the power armor? The defense is good, but I lose range of motion. For what I do, range of motion is the thing."
Nolan looked at him for a moment.
"Doom may not have explained in full what we are going into." He took a breath. "The enemies are Chaos Daemons aligned with Nurgle. Their patron is a concept-entity: everything that despair, decay, entropy, and the ending of living things represents in the physical world given form and will. The body of this entity will never physically enter the native world. Its lesser servants can and have. We do not yet know how far they have adapted to this environment, or how much time we have given them to do so."
He held Hawkeye's gaze.
"The power armor is not a guarantee. Nothing I can give you is a guarantee. What it is, is better than nothing when something breathes plague at you from two meters away. Wear it."
Hawkeye's expression had shifted to something more carefully attentive than it had been before. He lowered his hand.
David's head turned from the projection array.
"My lord." His optical sensors were bright. "We have a confirmed location. Not one of the previous suspected sites. A new one."
"Where."
"South Asian subcontinent. Uttar Pradesh."
Nolan was on his feet before David finished the sentence.
"Everyone moves. Now." He looked around the room at each of them in turn. "For the sake of every person in the path of this thing, we end it."
In the mountains above Latveria, in a base that did not appear on any map that had not been drawn in the last two years, the Wehrmacht Defense Forces were forming up in the cold air.
Guards in carapace armor with lasguns at the carry stood in straight lines while NCOs moved through them for inspection. Behind the infantry formations, transport aircraft were being oriented for departure. Rhino APCs sat in rows with their hatches open, ammunition being loaded by a combination of servo robots and mortal logistics teams. Tornado missile racks were being checked, rechecked, and loaded onto the launchers.
Latveria had become something different from the country it had been before Doom and then Nolan had remade it. Prime Minister Zora had continued the transformation after Doom's attention moved elsewhere: a small nation with no strategic depth and no powerful neighbors had converted itself into a military economy with the particular efficiency of a place that understood it could not afford to be anything less. Every citizen had a function. The factories ran continuously. The supply chains were maintained with the attention that other countries gave to diplomatic relations.
Wanda was at the edge of the loading area, using her power to shift ammunition boxes rather than loading them by hand.
"Wanda." Pietro appeared from approximately nowhere, wearing carapace armor that fit him better than it had six months ago. The training had changed him: the restlessness was still there, but it had been given direction and the result was something that looked like purpose. "The servo robots are not decorations."
"Ms. Zora said I need to practice using it in low-stakes situations so I can use it reliably in high-stakes ones." Wanda set the last box down and turned. "This is Mr. Doom's principle, apparently. He applies it to his own work."
"That does sound like him." Pietro looked at the activity around them. "Why has everyone been deployed?"
"I was going to ask you the same thing."
"Enemy contact. Not another country." Pietro's tone shifted slightly. "Real monsters, according to the officers. They've issued the special defense equipment." He glanced at the sealed cases being distributed along the vehicle line. "Have you noticed everyone has something additional on them today?"
Wanda had noticed. She had not known what to make of it.
"Pietro." She lowered her voice. "We could leave. Ms. Zora has been kind to us, and if Mr. Doom becomes my teacher I would be glad of it, but if this is a real battlefield..."
"I'm not going to the battlefield." Pietro smiled, and it was the same smile he had been producing since she was small enough that it actually helped. "I am a messenger. The fastest one in the whole regiment. Whatever is out there, it is not going to catch up with me."
He reached out and ruffled her short red hair with one hand.
"Stop worrying. I need to go."
He was gone before the sentence had fully finished, the air closing in on itself with the quiet snap of his passing.
Wanda stood in the loading area alone and watched the space where he had been.
Around her, the army continued to prepare for something none of them had faced before.
She looked down at her fingers. The scarlet energy was there at the edges of them, the slight trembling that was always present now, easier to feel when she was anxious.
She thought about the name that Prime Minister Zora had mentioned in the briefing. The god that this was about.
She did not know if she believed in gods. She had been raised with certain prayers, and prayer had seemed like one of those things that adults did for themselves rather than because anything was listening.
But Doom had his gods, apparently. And there was clearly something on the other side of this situation.
"If you actually exist," she said quietly to the cold mountain air, "then please look after him."
She hesitated.
Then, because it was what they said here in Latveria now, in the army and the factories and the government buildings with the double-headed eagle on their walls, she added:
"For the Emperor."