David talked for a long time, and Nolan listened.
The year's worth of operations organized itself into a picture that was more complete than Nolan had expected, and more varied. The base team had not simply maintained what existed. They had moved.
The first major development was territorial. Oceania was effectively Nolan's, and a significant portion of Europe had followed. Neither had been made official in any formal sense that the world's existing institutions would recognize, but the practical reality of who held influence over the key decision-makers in both regions had shifted to a point where the distinction between "officially merged" and "functionally ours" was mostly administrative.
Oceania had been straightforward. David had applied the same combination of capital leverage through Imperial Heavy Industries, targeted assimilation of influential local figures, and methodical cultural pressure that had worked elsewhere. There had been complications, as there always were, but nothing that required revising the approach.
Europe had been a surprise.
The source of it was the first generation of intelligence operatives that Natasha and Hawkeye had trained. Following Nolan's standing orders, David had organized them into a dedicated intelligence department under the name Assassin's Court and deployed them across the continent. The original plan had been patient and conservative: establish cover identities, collect intelligence, build leverage over time, and use that leverage to reduce resistance before any open consolidation move. Money, information, selective removal of problematic individuals. A process measured in years.
The intelligence that came back from Europe invalidated most of the timeline.
The European Union, viewed from the outside, presented the image of a coherent and substantial alliance. Viewed from the inside, through the reporting of Assassin's Court operatives who had penetrated its institutions within months, it was something else entirely. The member states did not agree with each other on almost anything. The shared military framework was poorly integrated and more poorly maintained. The leadership class, across most of the smaller states and several of the larger regional powers, had accumulated enough compromising material between them to fill a significant archive. The exception, which David had flagged immediately, was the nuclear deterrent capability held by a handful of states: that required careful handling regardless of how disorganized everything else was.
David had moved quickly. Several Black Widow operatives from Natasha's network and a contingent of Winter Soldiers were transferred into Europe directly. Working alongside the Assassin's Court cells already in place, they ran a coordinated operation across multiple countries simultaneously: bribery, targeted removal, controlled information releases, and where necessary the application of more direct methods. The senior leadership of most small European states and a meaningful portion of the regional powers' upper tiers came out of the operation either replaced, compromised, or convinced that cooperation with the them was the most sensible available option.
The most notable individual result was Zora, the Prime Minister of Latveria, whom David had successfully inserted into the European Parliament through a carefully constructed exchange of interests, positioned as the leading candidate for the next parliamentary chairmanship.
David did not present this as a triumph without qualification.
"My lord, the conditions that made this possible were not primarily our own doing," he said. "The intelligence collection was essential, and some element of fortune contributed. But the most significant factor was the state of the European Union itself. The internal decay was more advanced than my pre-operation models had calculated. I had not anticipated that consolidating an entire continent's political class could be accomplished at this pace. The Oceania operation, which covered less ground, involved more genuine resistance."
He paused.
"I will admit privately that I am glad the Chaos incursion that preceded your Warhammer deployment did not manifest in Europe. The region contains a large number of individuals with enhanced capabilities who would have been more of an obstacle than an asset in that situation. A Nurgle outbreak in European conditions would have been significantly more complicated than what occurred in the subcontinent."
He continued his account. The Third Company of the Lamenters and the First Company of Stormtroopers were now permanently stationed in Europe, operating under the cover of a United Nations Security Council mandate with Latveria as their primary base of operations. From there they covered the continent in both directions.
The operational log from the Lamenters' Third Company had accumulated quickly. Werewolves. Black practitioners. Dryads. Ogres. Entities that the base's categorization system filed under native daemonic manifestation. And in a small Eastern European country, recently confirmed traces of what appeared to be a blood-worship cult, which from established pattern recognition suggested vampiric activity in the region. An Astartes reconnaissance team was already on the ground. Reinforcement requests would be assessed as intelligence developed.
"I should mention," David added, with what Nolan had come to recognize as his version of dry amusement, "that the local media organizations are currently building toward a public opinion campaign regarding the Stormtroopers' conduct in policing operations. The characterization involves words like 'excessive' and 'disproportionate.' I have not intervened. I am curious to observe which outlets require a more direct response, and which individuals pushing the campaign may need the Astartes to deliver their warmth to them personally."
Natasha had gone east. The Security Council member state in eastern Europe was a more substantial problem than the rest of the continent: significant organized super-powered assets, the nature of which was still being mapped. More intelligence was required before any operation could be planned.
Nolan had been listening to all of it without interrupting. When David paused to reorganize the projection, he spoke.
"Territory and governing capability are not the same thing. This is something the expansion is going to keep teaching us." He looked at the globe projection. "The populations we are absorbing are not simple. They do not defer automatically. Imposing direct military administration is one option, but it produces compliance rather than genuine integration, and compliance has limits when the situation requires actual mobilization." He thought for a moment. "If the current pace of consolidation runs into resistance, hold position and do not force it. In the meantime, identify the smaller Eastern European states with genuine economic disadvantage. Sokovia is one candidate. Establish production lines for equipment and vehicles. Run the same model we used in Latveria and let the results demonstrate the argument."
David recorded it and continued.
Pietro had been operating in the subcontinent since the end of the walking dead war, working alongside a large contingent of survivors whose communities had been destroyed by the Nurgle incursion and who had never fully come back under official government jurisdiction. He was running a guerrilla campaign against the government forces attempting to reassert control over the region, moving faster than any pursuit could track and recruiting from the displaced populations as he went.
His most notable recent action had involved generating a localized tornado by sustaining extreme-speed circulation through a weather system for long enough that the atmospheric effect became self-sustaining. The tornado had overturned more than a dozen armored police vehicles in the process of dispersing an enforcement operation against a refugee settlement.
The accounts spreading through the survivor communities afterward described him as the Emperor's Storm Angel.
He appeared entirely comfortable with the title.