Pierce agreed with Zola's assessment of the Winter Soldiers — useful, not dominant — but he wasn't ready to write them off entirely.
"Second tier isn't nothing," he said. "We have enough of them to form a capable collection team. When Dragon Ball locations surface, I want them deployed immediately — purchase first, acquire by other means if the seller won't cooperate. Three million per unit is not a problem for us." He paused. "And if the Winter Soldiers can't close it, we use S.H.I.E.L.D. resources. We have access. We use it."
Zola processed this without objection. "Given the scope of what's at stake, should we notify the other branch leaders? Coordinating across all of HYDRA would multiply our collection capacity considerably."
Pierce thought about it carefully.
He was HYDRA's most powerful current leader, but that didn't mean he controlled all of it. The organization was older and more fractured than any single man's authority could span — it had been true of the Red Skull, and it remained true now. Several branches operated under entirely different priorities. The factions dedicated to recovering the entity they called Hive were a particular complication — Pierce had considered their beliefs absurd for years, had shut down the related aerospace program and defunded the research through legitimate bureaucratic channels. But Asgard's existence had quietly eroded his certainty about what was and wasn't possible in the universe.
He couldn't be sure those factions wouldn't pursue their own angle on the Dragon Balls if they learned what was available.
Still. The resource calculation was straightforward.
"Notify all branch leaders," he said. "Full meeting, tomorrow evening. The Dragon Ball situation requires everything HYDRA has. Madame Hydra, Baron Strucker, Whitehall — all of them."
"Understood. I'll transmit the notifications immediately." A brief pause. "Hail HYDRA."
"Hail HYDRA."
Pierce shut down the terminals, waited for the room to go dark, and left to begin the Winter Soldier activation orders.
Fraternity Headquarters.
Smith had filed Tony's anxiety away under things that weren't his to fix. Tony would find his way through it or he wouldn't, but the path was his own. What Smith did know was that Tony was already developing the next armor generation — remote deployment, adaptive navigation, the ability to suit up from any location without a fixed assembly point. Useful improvements, whatever else was happening in that lab.
The Extremis situation was handled. Xu Xialing was already running it down, and Wenwu would back her up if it escalated. Killian was a problem with a ceiling.
Smith pushed open the door to Bulma's laboratory.
She was already facing him when he entered, practically vibrating, holding something small between her fingers — a capsule, standard issue by its shape, matte casing with the Universal Capsule Company logo pressed into the surface.
"It works," she said, before he could ask.
Smith stopped. "The capsule?"
"I replicated it." She was grinning in the way she grinned when something had taken years and she'd refused to let it beat her. "Fully functional. Same compression principle, same deployment mechanism, same capacity parameters as back home."
Smith looked at the capsule in her hand. He had genuinely stopped expecting this. The material science problem had been a wall for years — the components that made capsule technology work in Bulma's original world didn't exist in the same form here, and substituting Earth-available materials had produced nothing usable. He'd quietly moved it to the back of the project list.
"How?" he asked.
Bulma crossed the lab, positioned herself in front of him, cocked her arm back, and pitched the capsule underhand at the floor.
A magnetic hover bike materialized out of the compression cloud — solid, functional, exactly what it was supposed to be.
Smith stared at it.
Bulma grabbed his arm with both hands, her excitement requiring something to hold onto. "The Tesseract," she said. "That's what cracked it. We've always had the design — I know this technology inside and out. The problem was the energy medium and the spatial compression materials. Capsule tech needs to cut through space and fold it. The materials for that don't exist here." She gestured at the motorcycle. "But Tesseract energy does the same thing. I've been running experiments since you brought it in, and I finally found the right application. Tesseract-derived energy replaces the missing components completely. Everything else follows from there."
Smith pulled her into a hug and kissed her on the top of the head. "You're incredible."
Bulma went red to her ears and pushed him off with one hand while looking extremely pleased. "Obviously. I've been saying that for years." She smoothed her lab coat. "We have a flagship product now. The launch conference is overdue."
Smith thought about the timing. The Dragon Balls were active. The tournament would follow, and the interval between activation and competition had historically been enough to move on other things. A product launch during that window would pull significant public attention — Universal Capsule Company already had the brand recognition, and this was a step change from anything they'd brought to market before.
"No conflict with the Dragon Ball timeline," he said. "Plan the launch for before the tournament opens. Get Fox and the product team moving on it."