The Antarctic airfield did not look like a facility preparing a void warship for combat. It looked like a facility that had decided to become one, and was doing so with complete seriousness.
Servo robots covered the Cobra-class destroyer's hull in dense, purposeful patterns, carrying out maintenance tasks on the heavy armor plates in organized waves, one section finished and sealed before the next was opened. On the floor around the ship, Carcharodons work crews were loading boarding torpedoes onto cargo sleds that the servo robots then carried into the ship's interior. The torpedo launch bays on the flanks had already been inspected and filled. The lance defense turrets at the bow were being refurbished, each one pulled apart to its components, checked, and reassembled.
Thirteen Fist-class assault boats from the Carcharodon fleet sat in a row to the port side. The two Tech-Priests who had been at odds with each other since before Nolan had returned from the Warhammer universe had apparently reached a temporary operational understanding, because they were working adjacent positions on the torpedo fabrication line without active hostility, which counted as a significant achievement.
Reditus had submitted a proposal to thicken the ram at the bow by several factors. David had intercepted it during a routine patrol and explained, with the patience of someone who had done this before, that the Cobra-class destroyer's tactical doctrine was speed and boarding, that the torpedoes and lance batteries were supplementary, and that adding the mass Reditus was proposing would compromise exactly the qualities that made the ship effective. Reditus had argued the point, received a second explanation, and eventually accepted that its vision of a ship covered in every available weapon system was not what this mission required.
The ship it was prepared to send into the void was already, by any standard available to Earth, a devastating opponent for the Chitauri fleet.
Inside, Nolan watched the research team work.
Doom stood with his remaining hand extended, his telekinesis decomposing the outer structural housing of the Warp drive in careful sections, pulling components apart in a sequence that preserved their relationships to each other. Tony moved through the exposed internals in his armor, Jarvis building a three-dimensional design schematic from continuous scanning passes, the virtual model accumulating detail with each circuit. Both of them were operating at the edge of what they could individually process.
Reed Richards was operating at a different edge entirely.
He had extended his arms to roughly four meters in length, each finger adding another half-meter, and the total reach of him was working across dozens of external interface devices simultaneously, feeding data streams to a set of screens that covered every surface within range. His body had twisted itself into a configuration that would have been uncomfortable to look at if he had shown any sign of finding it uncomfortable himself, which he did not.
Twenty-four hours passed.
The team called a halt and gathered in the central engineering space. The faces that Nolan read as he came into the meeting told him there was mixed news before anyone spoke. Relief in some expressions, frustration in others, the specific combination that came from people who had solved most of a problem and found that the remainder was not small.
The summary, when it came, had two distinct parts.
The technology in the drive systems was advanced relative to anything Earth had independently developed, but it was not so far advanced as to resist analysis by people of Reed's and Tony's caliber. The reverse engineering had progressed to a functional understanding of the core systems. In the course of that work, they had identified two distinct operating modes in the drive architecture.
The first was a sublight navigation mode, operating at velocities up to ninety percent of the speed of light, fully characterized and understood.
The second was the Warp drive's primary function: the ability to open a spatial wormhole for superluminal transit to an unspecified destination. This mode remained unresolved. Reed had said it plainly, without apology: he needed substantially more time and data before he could guarantee the safety of anyone inside the ship when that mode activated. The destination of a wormhole opened without complete understanding of the drive's targeting parameters was genuinely unknown, and unknown in the void was not a recoverable state.
Nolan had been listening with his arms folded and had started forming an alternative when Reed continued.
The sublight mode, however, had been fully mapped. And through Tony's structural and energy analysis combined with Doom's offhand mention of Antarctic vibranium as a potential conductor material, they had identified a modification pathway. The vibranium's properties, applied at specific points in the drive's energy routing, would allow the sublight mode to be pushed to 99.9 percent of light speed. Not superluminal, not capable of galactic transit, but faster by a meaningful margin than anything currently in the solar system except light itself.
The Chitauri fleet was in the solar system.
Nolan told them to proceed with the modification and left the engineering space.
Reditus was commanding a servo robot work gang near the aft section when Nolan found it.
The request was simple: retrieve the Infinity Gauntlet from wherever Reditus had been keeping it since Nolan had handed it over for safekeeping.
The servo skull's altitude dropped perceptibly when the question landed. It began speaking about unrelated aspects of the ship's maintenance schedule. Nolan waited. Reditus's gaze moved to various points in the airfield that did not include Nolan's face. Nolan waited again, with more visible patience than he felt.
The truth emerged in stages.
Reditus had disassembled the Infinity Gauntlet. The analysis had been in progress when the discovery was made: the Gauntlet was not simply a mounting structure for the Stones. Its metal composition and internal architecture had been designed specifically to channel and distribute the energy of the Infinity Stones without destroying the wearer, and these functions were integrated at a structural level that did not survive disassembly intact. The rune networks and energy transmission pathways inside were gone. What remained was components.
The options Reditus had identified for resolution were two. The first was for Reditus to be given sufficient time to complete a full study and fabricate a replacement. The second was to take the broken components to Nidavellir, where the dwarven forges operated at a level that could recast the Gauntlet with its original properties intact.
Both options required time that the current situation did not have.
Nolan's face did not move through many expressions. It moved through one, slowly, at a speed that Reditus apparently found informative enough to begin speaking faster.
He let Reditus finish.
He did not demote it. He did not impose any specific consequence. He acknowledged, internally, that the Gauntlet had been sitting in storage without particular attention from him for long enough that this was partly his own accounting failure. He had treated it as a collection piece rather than an operational asset, and the results of that decision were now visible.
What it meant practically was that the option of using the Space Stone for large-scale Astartes teleportation during the counterattack was no longer available. The Kamar-Taj mages were theoretically capable of interfacing with an Infinity Stone, but the Ancient One would intervene. Nolan was certain of this. The Ancient One had maintained careful custody of the Time Stone across millennia and would not accept a comparable risk applied to a different Stone on short notice, regardless of the circumstances.
He walked away from Reditus and did not look back at it.
"The Infinity Stones of this universe have no function in the Warhammer universe regardless," he said, to no one in particular. "The shortcut was always temporary. Since it is gone, we use what has always worked."
He kept walking.
"Let the alien races of this universe see the Astartes clearly. Let them understand exactly what that means."