The base hall was well lit and very quiet. The four Raven Guard company commanders and company champions stood in the shadows at the edges of the room like armored statues, default posture for warriors who had been assigned guard duty.
David had suggested, once, that they might want to rest after the transit. The suggestion had not produced a visible response. The suggestion had been made again and had received the same result.
Nolan spoke from his seat at the metal round table, and the Raven Guard followed the servo robot guide out of the hall without comment, presumably because a Primarch's instruction carried different weight than an ancient thinking machine's.
After that, David began the broader briefing while Nolan ate and worked through the accumulated documents.
The general picture was not a comfortable one.
Across the regions of the world where Nolan's influence and the Guardians of Terra's operations could be felt most directly, the social situation had been deteriorating in ways that firepower alone was not addressing. The Chitauri invasion had been the visible crisis, but what it had accelerated was a slower and more pervasive one: a global anxiety about the future that was making people at every level of society behave differently than they had before. Those with sufficient resources were quietly stockpiling supplies and researching defensible locations. Those without resources were operating in an environment where the old constraints on behavior had become less binding as the old certainties about stability had eroded.
Crime in Europe and Oceania, the regions most directly within the Guardians of Terra's operational reach, had risen sharply. Not incrementally: sharply. The number and severity of incidents had exceeded David's projections, which was itself notable.
Superheroes formally attached to the Inquisition and independent heroes working alongside them had intensified their responses accordingly, and the intensification had achieved results but had also produced its own problems. Sustained high-pressure enforcement raised antagonism between populations and the systems enforcing order, and that antagonism, combined with the general stress of the current period, had turned out to have an unexpected side effect: it was significantly accelerating the rate at which latent superpowers were being triggered.
The Lamenters were encountering superpowered individuals with greater frequency, and the range of abilities was sufficiently unpredictable that even Astartes were occasionally being caught off-guard.
"Reditus alone has processed more than a company's worth of serious offenders into heavy combat servitors," David said. "Those are the cases where the individuals possessed rare enough abilities that execution seemed wasteful. The straightforward cases were handled on the spot by the Astartes."
Nolan had stopped chewing at some point during this. He picked up one of the documents from the table and turned it to find the heading. Then he looked at David.
"David. What exactly is the Inquisitor Plan?"
David's eye-lights shifted. "My lord, I should mention that this is the direct continuation of the Mobile Hive City Plan. You don't need to search for the files; let me explain it as a whole."
He began from the foundational problem.
The pattern of social disorder, David explained, was not primarily a problem of bad individuals. The bad individuals were a symptom. The deeper cause was that large portions of the population lacked the resources to absorb the disruption that the current period was producing. When the world changed rapidly and unpredictably, people with financial cushions and rational planning habits could adapt. People without those things could not, and the resulting desperation expressed itself in ways that enforcement could address one incident at a time but could not solve at scale. Repression could suppress the expression of the problem. It could not eliminate the problem.
The inspiration, David said, had come from an unexpected direction. Reditus, during one of his occasional visits to the base hall, had muttered that the superpowered criminals were harder to manage than the populations of hive cities. The complaint was delivered as a grievance. David had processed it as a solution.
Hive cities were what the Imperium did with enormous concentrated populations in constrained environments. They worked, in the brutal and pragmatic sense that they kept people fed, housed, and functionally productive, and they kept the underlying social pressure from expressing itself in ways that couldn't be contained. The key variables were stability and purpose: people who had a reliable supply of food and a defined role in a functioning system caused fewer problems than people who had neither.
The mobile component was Reditus's contribution to the concept's second iteration. Each mobile hive unit, in the design David was proposing, was modular: a self-contained habitation and production platform with independent mobility, capable of combining with other units or separating from them depending on circumstances. The modularity had military applications if the situation ever required them, including the integration of long-range weapons systems into the combined structures, but those applications were deliberately secondary. The primary function was habitation and food security for the population housed within.
Nolan set down the document he had been holding and finished chewing.
"Assume it works. Assume we successfully bring enough people under the mobile hive system to stabilize the situation. The resource cost of feeding and housing that population doesn't disappear. Before we're in a position to expand into space and access off-world resources, the ongoing consumption represents a real draw on what we have."
"My lord," David said, "we are not operating a charitable institution. The young and able-bodied who enter the mobile hive system will have limited options and will understand they are limited. They can work within the system and receive guaranteed rations and stable housing. They can remain in the deteriorating external environment and accept the consequences of that choice over time. For the elderly, the sick, and those genuinely unable to work, the resource cost of basic support is manageable and the stability benefit justifies it."
He continued: the production capacity of the mobile hives would be structured deliberately. Automated servo robot clusters were more efficient, but during the stabilization period, using human labor on production lines served a dual purpose: it absorbed the population's energy and created the sense of purposeful contribution that was psychologically essential to stable social behavior. Each hive unit would receive production line allocations based on its population size. The lines would produce components for ships and vehicles and other infrastructure. Security would be maintained by distributing the production so that no single area produced anything that could be assembled into a functional system by the people manufacturing its parts. Final assembly would remain with the servo robot clusters.
Nolan picked up the Inquisitor Plan document again and looked at David.
"Continue. The hive plan addresses livelihood. The Inquisitor Plan addresses something else."
"The sense of security," David said. "Astartes patrols establish order through capability. They are effective, but they cannot be everywhere, and the Lamenters in particular are not designed for long-term static garrison duty. They are warriors who need to be available for actual combat operations. Mortal agents fill some of the gap, but agents enforcing order are bureaucratic and inconsistent. What the population responds to most directly is not an enforcement system. It is a figure."
He paused.
"A single identifiable individual who embodies accountability, who cannot be influenced or bought, who operates without procedural constraint, and whose presence in an area is understood by everyone in that area to mean that serious wrongdoing will be addressed with immediate and certain consequences. Judge, jury, and executioner, visibly and without apology. That figure produces a stabilizing effect on a population that institutional enforcement cannot replicate."
"I have a candidate," David said. "A middle-aged man. Former military. Currently operating independently with considerable effectiveness. He has a deep and functional hatred of serious criminal activity and no particular attachment to due process limitations when the evidence is unambiguous." He paused. "He is known as the Punisher."
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