There is a saying about the Dark Angels that functions as both observation and mockery among those who know enough to make it: that the First Legion has no secrets. The irony cuts because the Inner Circle of the Dark Angels is perhaps the most secretive institution in the entire Astartes order, a concentric hierarchy of oaths and concealed truths that has been protecting the same terrible knowledge since the Heresy.
Deadpool had become the Inner Circle's newest and most profoundly unqualified member by the simple mechanism of never shutting up about it.
It had started with the hot-melt incident. Then the plasma wash. Neither had produced a corpse, and both had produced approximately thirty minutes of commentary before the body in question finished reconstituting. Deadpool, whose face had been restored to functionality at some prior point by the base's panacea and whose relationship with personal mortality had always been theoretical rather than practical, had apparently experienced something in the vicinity of the Emperor's statue that he interpreted as a spiritual calling, and had restructured his entire personality accordingly. He was now a deeply committed servant of the Emperor who happened to also be impossible to kill, whose understanding of Dark Angels doctrine consisted primarily of the word "secrets" repeated with increasing solemnity.
He had recruited a mechanical parrot.
He had also, by some process that David described as "contamination through sustained exposure," brought a subset of the base's automatic servo robots into philosophical alignment with his worldview. These units were now conducting themselves in ways that their original programming had not anticipated and that David classified as pranks rather than threats, a distinction that was technically accurate and practically unsatisfying.
David had catalogued several solutions. Packing Deadpool into a sealed container and depositing him at the bottom of the Southern Ocean was feasible. The Space Stone could theoretically deposit him somewhere considerably further away. Neither option had been exercised, and the reason was not sentiment.
Two reasons, actually.
The first was that the Emperor had appeared to Deadpool while he was praying at the statue, and David had been observing through the base's surveillance array when it happened. Whatever that meant, it was not nothing.
The second reason was more useful.
In the course of several extended confrontations, David had arrived at a conclusion about Deadpool's fundamental nature. The man was a Blank. The Warhammer universe had a technical term for this: Untouchable. The precise mechanism varied between those who carried the trait, but the core characteristic was consistent. The Blank's soul made no impression on the Warp whatsoever. It was not diminished or weakened there; it was simply absent, presenting instead as a kind of null space, a dead void where the psychic resonance of a living being ought to be. The practical consequences were significant. Blanks were naturally immune to psychic manipulation. Daemons could not possess them. Chaos could not erode them through psychic channels. Within a radius that varied by individual, they dampened psychic activity in everyone nearby, making them extraordinarily effective counter-measures against psykers, Daemons, and anything that operated through Warp-connected power.
There were very few of them. Finding one in the Marvel universe, fully functional and apparently unaware of what he was, was the kind of occurrence that warranted reclassification.
So David and Deadpool had reached an arrangement, arrived at tacitly rather than formally. If Deadpool's behavior reached a level that a base personnel found genuinely intolerable, that person was permitted to kill him once. In return, Deadpool and the collection of eccentric entities he had gathered around himself were permitted to remain at Twin Islands Base and continue serving the Emperor in whatever idiosyncratic manner they chose. The kill clause was, in practice, also a rest period. The aftermath of a Deadpool death was a quiet span of several hours before the body reassembled itself and the noise resumed.
Nolan listened to all of this and stood quietly for a moment with his eyes slightly narrowed, processing.
"I didn't see it that way the first time I met him," he said finally. "The Emperor's appearance may be connected to what he is, not just who he is. A Blank that the Emperor has taken notice of has more potential value than I initially accounted for."
He thought for a moment longer.
"Leave the killing policy as it is. As for the rest: Connors and Banner both want live subjects for surgical research. Deadpool is ideal. He can be used for implantation trials repeatedly without the usual consequences of a failed procedure. That is not wasted effort, it is productive iteration." He paused. "He also appears to have fully committed to the Dark Angels identity. When circumstances allow, I will try to source Dark Angels gene-seeds and see whether a viable Blank Astartes is achievable. An Astartes without a Warp presence would be genuinely novel. If we could produce a unit of them, calling them the Deadpool Corps would be the most honest name available."
He stepped onto David's floating chair dais and gestured for the Raven Guard commanders and company champions to follow him toward the hall. Lexicanium Ukari, who had been standing with the particular unhurried patience of a Carcharodons psyker who had seen stranger things than this, fell into step without being asked.
A great deal had happened at home while Nolan was away.
The planetary defense sensor grid, a large-scale augur detection array designed to identify and track alien approaches to the planet at range, had been successfully placed into low-Earth orbit with logistical support from regional partners. The array was operational, its various sensor components running without significant issues, covering the orbital approaches that had been entirely unwatched during the Chitauri invasion.
The Space Stone had been deliberately left at the base for the research team to work with. Reed Richards and Doctor Doom, both operating in their capacity as consultants to the Guardians of Terra, had applied it to a problem they had been working on for some time and produced a result. The Time Platform was the outcome: a transit system using the Space Stone's spatial manipulation properties combined with alien technology from the base's existing stores. Its advantages over conventional teleport beacon technology were meaningful. Material and personnel could now move between the base's various installations without the unpredictable failure rates that made standard teleportation a tool of last resort rather than routine logistics. The safety margin was substantially better. The system was still in its trial phase and needed calibration work, but David had indicated that a prototype unit could travel with Nolan when he departed, allowing testing of the platform's compatibility with the Warhammer universe's different physical parameters.
Tony Stark had used the period productively. Working with Reditus, he had launched the preliminary phase of a planetary defense initiative more ambitious than the orbital sensor grid: a lunar base project, with tens of thousands of automatic servo robots transported to the Moon's surface by the Space Stone and set to construction work. The Moon as a defended strategic position was a long-term goal, but the foundation work was underway. Tony had also placed the Cobra-class destroyer currently docked in low-Earth orbit into service as the anchor point for something new. Around it, he had assembled a space station in low orbit: a covert installation capable of supporting Astartes airdrop operations and serving as a gathering point for allied assets. He had named it the Stark Watchtower. It was currently minimally crewed by a small permanent Astartes garrison and not yet formally activated.
After the gene-seeds and equipment had been settled into secure storage, David continued the briefing with what he described as an interesting development.
New York was not a peaceful city at the moment.
The Chitauri invasion's aftermath had produced a political situation that the American government was not managing well. The official emergency response during the attack had been, by any honest assessment, marginal. The actual defense of the city had been conducted by superheroes and by the Guardians of Terra, an organization that the same government had for years classified as a terrorist entity. In the weeks since the invasion, the city's population had been processing that discrepancy with increasing clarity and decreasing patience. Protests had become a sustained feature of city life. The demands that had emerged from those protests centered on a transfer of authority over city security and law enforcement to parties that had demonstrably shown up when it mattered, rather than parties that had demonstrably not.
Current polling placed agreement with the core demand at roughly seventy percent of the city's population.
Some of the more committed advocates had pushed beyond the security question to a symbolic one: if the city was going to formally break from its recent institutional history, perhaps the name should reflect the break. A number of alternatives had circulated through public discussion. One of them had gathered support well out of proportion to any obvious reason. By a considerable margin, the leading preference in informal surveys was an old word with no particular modern currency: Gotham.
If the official concessions came through, and the pressure showed no signs of easing, the former New York City might find itself renamed.