Leading an organization ans learning how to paint a picture of the future that your people will walk toward. It is a compulsory skill, and Nolan had no illusions about what he had just done.
He had no diplomatic relations with any branch of the Adeptus chanicus. Not a single prayer of support from Mars had ever reached him. The idea of arranging a visit to the Red Planet was, under present circumstances, close to fantasy. But none of that had stopped him from dangling the prospect in front of Reditus with a perfectly straight face, and none of it changed the fact that Reditus would now throw itself into completing the Micro-Construct Knight Titan with everything it had.
That was the calculation. The promise was real enough in principle, even if the execution was a long way off. And in the anti, the work would get done.
Nolan also knew exactly why Reditus had been spared the exile that Sage Neil had earned, even though by any objective asure of property damage, Reditus had started the worst of it.
Reditus was trouble. It always had been. But its loyalty was not in question. It caused problems for Nolan, not against him, which was a distinction that mattered. Sage Neil, by contrast, had brought a certain professional competence and an equally professional indifference: useful, but cold in a way that made the word "team" feel like a loose approximation. When she had made her mistake, she had made it in the direction of a subordinate who was demonstrably loyal. Given that she had chosen to keep the relationship strictly business, Nolan was content to return the favor and send her sowhere useful, supervised, and far enough away that the foundry could breathe.
He delivered Reditus's punishnt with the sa asured tone he had used for everything else in the eting.
For a defined period, Reditus would no longer hold the managent of the foundry. The two chanicus personnel it had absorbed into its faction would supervise the production lines in its place. Reditus retained one specific authority: if sothing broke down or a production problem erged beyond what the others could handle, it had the power to direct. Outside of that, it stepped back. What it did not step back from was the Knight Titan research. That continued without interruption, at whatever pace and focus Reditus chose to give it.
Reditus received this without objection.
In fact, it said, with a tone Nolan could only describe as gently relieved, that the long stretch of foundry administration had been doing things to its capacity for original research that it had not fully admitted to itself. Running production lines was not the sa as building sothing new. Managing schedules and inventories and personnel disputes left a particular kind of residue on a mind built for engineering problems. Perhaps, it suggested, a period of focused developnt work without the administrative weight would remind it why it had started building things in the first place.
Nolan sent Reditus on its way and went to find the training ground.
Second Company had continued its adaptation drills in his absence. Nolan took over and ran them hard, pushing the forr soldiers who now wore the Stormtrooper designation through the fundantals of Astartes-pattern combat, auxiliary power armor familiarization, and formation discipline under live conditions. The work was unglamorous but necessary. When First and Second Company were both fully equipped with Terminator plate and the remaining Stormtroopers had been fitted with auxiliary power armor, what Nolan would be able to field would at least look like five companies of Astartes to anyone watching from the outside. Appearances of that magnitude had a way of shaping the decisions of other parties before any weapon was raised.
He was not building this for the admiration of strangers. He was building it because the first blessing from a Chaos God was coming, and he intended to be standing on the first ground possible when it arrived. New simulator features had a way of producing generous initial outcos; he did not know what that would look like when a Chaos God's attention turned toward his world, but he was not going to face it under-resourced.
A few days later, Wong arrived at the Sanctuary and opened a portal to Hydra Island.
The helicarrier transfer went cleanly. The unfinished fra was too large and too inoperable to move conventionally, but the Kamar-Taj portal network had no difficulty with large fixed objects, and within the span of a single operation the partially built carrier was resettled in the Pacific, where Sage Neil was already at work. She had arrived to find a ruined Hydra base and a complent of several thousand automatic servo robots waiting for her instructions. By the ti Nolan's Thunderhawk passed over the island, the old infrastructure was already being stripped and the foundry's first structural columns were going up.
He greeted the rotating Astartes garrison on the ground before departing, and before saying goodbye to Wong he asked the question that had been sitting in the back of his mind.
"How is Strange getting on?"
Strange was one of the few people Nolan had identified as a genuine candidate for a strategic role in the future: soone who could think rather than simply execute. Worth paying attention to.
Wong's expression shifted into sothing between a smile and a wince.
"Ever since Strange beca the Ancient One's final disciple, he has been doing two things simultaneously: training the foundational skills alongside the other apprentices, and studying sothing separate that the Ancient One set up for him personally. A private project of so kind." He paused. "No one knows what it is. I go back to Kamar-Taj regularly, and I only see him occasionally now. But every ti I do, the feeling I get from him has changed. He is becoming more dangerous. I don't know how else to describe it."
Nolan filed that away. Strange was accelerating at a rate that caught the attention of people who had spent years in the sa building. That was worth noting.
Wong seed glad to have the conversation. He ntioned, with the air of soone who had been carrying a concern for so ti, that Brother Mordo's project to create a corps of standardized sorcerers was continuing to advance. Mordo had solved part of the problem he had been wrestling with for months: a thod of mass-producing functional magic weapons at a consistent standard. The source, according to Wong, was a body of arcane techniques left behind by an ancient witch nad Morgan le Fay.
Nolan turned that over.
"Tell Mordo to be careful with it. Ancient magical legacies don't usually survive to be discovered by accident. If sothing that old and that functional is sitting sowhere ready to be used, there's a reasonable chance that whoever left it intended for it to be found." He kept his voice even. "It may be exactly what it appears to be. But he should have the Ancient One look at it before he builds anything substantial on top of it. You don't want to construct an army's worth of weapons on a foundation that turns out to be soone else's back door."
Wong nodded, the concern in his expression settling into sothing more resolved.
"I'll bring it to the Ancient One directly. She should review it herself."
A spark caught at the edge of the portal, and Wong stepped through. The Kamar-Taj connection folded shut behind him with a flicker of amber light.
Nolan turned toward the waiting Thunderhawk. He was three paces from the ramp when it occurred to him.
The talisman. He had ant to ask Wong about it while they had the chance: where it had co from, what the Ancient One had originally intended when she gave it to him, what exactly made it capable of absorbing divine power from beings like Qinglong. Four distinct elental forces now resided in it, and the Sky Scale Divine Beast that apparently ca with them had never been tested. There were a great many things he still did not understand about what was sitting on his finger.
He glanced back at the closed space where the portal had been.
Gone.
"I'll have another chance to visit."
He shook his head slightly and walked up the ramp. The internal lighting of the Thunderhawk's troop bay shifted around him as he settled into the seat, the familiar sll of tal and recycled air replacing the sea wind from outside. In the cockpit forward, David's form was already at the controls, the fuselage beginning its slow rise from the island's surface.
Nolan let the hum of the engines fill the silence for a mont. Then he reached back into the simulator interface, felt the familiar weight of sothing that had been waiting there, and drew out a palm-sized coin of bright gold. It caught the cabin light cleanly, its surface smooth and featureless.
"Co on, then. Let's see what the Emperor has ready for us this ti."
He sent it spinning upward with his thumb, watched it turn once in the air above him, and let it fall.
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