The footsteps in the corridor outside the hall were heavier than a baseline human's, the power armor giving them their characteristic weight and rhythm. Doom appeared at the entrance, his cloak gone entirely, the armor he wore scored and patched where the field repairs had been applied to the worst of it. His left arm terminated the shoulder. His face was still pale at the edges, but the unfocused quality from the street was gone. Strange's work had done what it could.
He crossed the hall and stopped at the table.
"Mr. David told me Wanda has been taken." He addressed Nolan directly, without softening it. "If she creates complications for the rescue operation due to something I should have trained out of her, I take responsibility for that." A pause. "If the operation also requires a scientific mind with the depth to work on systems none of us have seen before, I have a recommendation. There is one candidate who is, in this specific domain, arguably my equal."
Nolan looked at him.
"Doom. Your injuries."
"Strange transferred the acute damage. The arm will not regenerate quickly and I cannot go into close combat in this state. Scientific research work is unaffected."
Nolan nodded once, filing it. "Jessica was also taken by Loki's contingency. Both of them. I believe their combined capability gives them options wherever they are." He let that settle. "Your candidate."
Doom set his remaining hand on the table.
"Reed Richards. A colleague from university. In terms of raw theoretical depth applied to unfamiliar systems, he is one of the few people on Earth whose thinking keeps pace with mine. If we can locate him, with him and Tony working alongside me on the Cobra-class destroyer's engine systems, I believe we can reach functional understanding in a timeframe that makes an interdiction operation viable. There will still be unknowns, but not the category of unknown that gets everyone killed in the universe."
The table was quiet for a moment.
Nolan stood.
"Then we find Reed Richards immediately." He looked at the others. "Everyone else: Twin Islands base. Now."
The portal opened on the Primogenitor Isle landing platform and deposited Tony, Thor, and Rogers into the Antarctic wind with the abruptness that portal travel always had. Nolan stepped through behind them and was already moving toward Reditus's position before the others had finished orienting themselves.
He raised a finger toward the servo robots that were already converging.
"Rogers gets power armor fitted immediately. Thor gets the Six-Armed Iron Cavalry Terminator." He said the second part without breaking stride. "We have a boarding operation to prepare for. The Carcharodons know space boarding tactics better than anyone available to us. I need them briefed."
Tony said something under his breath about the logistics of fitting Thor into Terminator plate. Nolan did not slow down.
The reason for the Carcharodons being the right call was simple enough. When it came to void combat and boarding actions, the Space Sharks had spent centuries doing exactly what the operation would require. Their expertise was not theoretical.
The other consideration, the one Nolan had not shared with the table at the Sanctum, was the fleet itself. The Chitauri operated at the lower end of what the wider universe fielded in terms of technology, but their ships crossed the void between star systems. The hyperluminal engine systems that made that possible were worth having regardless of what they turned out to be. If they proved compatible with Earth's developing infrastructure, they would compress years of research and reduce the resource cost of building a defensive fleet for the planet. If they proved useful only in the local universe, that was still a significant gain.
He wanted at least one ship taken intact.
The passage was dark and smelled of recycled atmosphere and something chemical underneath it, the kind of air that had been processed through systems not designed with human biology in mind. Jessica moved through it with her power scythe in a two-handed grip, the blade's decomposition field casting its faint blue light across the walls.
Behind her, Wanda kept pace for as long as she could, and then her legs gave out the way they had twice already, the plasma pistol still in both hands, the scarlet energy at her fingertips still responding even when her legs would not cooperate.
Jessica did not wait for her to ask. She turned, got one arm under Wanda, and kept moving.
A Chitauri infantryman came around the corner ahead of them at a run, weapon up, and the power scythe opened it before it had finished the turn. The remains did not slow them down.
Three more appeared from a side branch. Wanda's plasma pistol found two of them before Jessica's blade covered the gap on the third. The suppressive fire from Wanda's position had been doing that work consistently for the past hour, buying fractions of seconds on Jessica's flanks that had compounded into survivable margins.
They pushed deeper into the ship.
When the sound of pursuit fell below immediate threshold, Jessica pulled Wanda into a section of passage where the geometry gave them three potential exits and a structural column for cover. She set Wanda down gently and put her back to the wall, listening.
A long breath.
"They've lost us for now. These aliens don't think independently. They coordinate through something central." She was working it through as she said it. "A hive structure. Like the Tyranids but less sophisticated, from what I can see. If there is a central node somewhere on this ship and we can find it, the tactical situation changes significantly."
She kept her voice low, just above the ambient hum of the ship's systems.
Wanda was looking at the floor. The plasma pistol was still in her hands. The knuckles around it were white.
"Jessica." She said it without looking up. "If I become a liability in the next engagement. If I slow you down badly enough that it matters. Leave me. You have done everything that could be asked."
Jessica looked at her for a moment.
"Wanda."
Wanda looked up.
"My teacher trained me in a great many things. Leaving comrades behind was not one of the subjects." Jessica held her gaze. "And from a purely practical position: without your suppressive fire on my flanks, I would have been dead six times in the last hour. So you can stop that line of thinking."
She let it land.
"Doom will come. Nolan will come. You know this as well as I do. Even setting aside what they owe us personally, the people who invaded this planet have not been fully eliminated. Do you think either of them sleeps comfortably while that remains true?"
Wanda was quiet for a moment. Then she nodded, a small, firm movement.
"Yes. We keep fighting." Something came back into her eyes that had not been there a moment before. "I also need to see Pietro again. He was asking about his new role the last time I spoke to him. He seemed very pleased with himself."
"Wanda."
"What?"
"The giant ape is still following us."
Wanda's head turned. The plasma pistol came up without hesitation, aimed into the dark passage behind them, and she pulled the trigger at the shape moving in the distance.
Jessica tightened her grip on the power scythe and drove herself forward into a run, the nun armor's servos responding, the acceleration building.
The roar that came from her was not a battle cry exactly. It was something more fundamental than that, the sound of someone who had decided.
"For humanity!"