Frank Castle's induction into the Inquisitor role was a beginning rather than an outcome. The title and the assignment were settled. The practical preparation was not.
Combat capability was the smallest part of the problem. Frank was, by any reasonable metric, at the upper limit of what an unaugmented human being could be in terms of weapons proficiency, tactical awareness, and violence of action. But the world he was being asked to operate in now was populated with individuals whose capabilities existed well outside what a baseline human could handle with firearms and training alone.
He needed the super-soldier serum. He needed power armor, designed specifically for his role rather than borrowed from a different operational context. He also needed a functional understanding of law: the theory and the practice, sufficiently developed that his judgments in the field had a coherent framework behind them rather than pure individual discretion.
The last requirement was where David's execution betrayed its sense of humor.
Frank had survived three brainwashing procedures through sheer willpower. He had looked at criminals in a neighborhood or a city and calculated without flinching what they deserved. He had done none of those things with his eyes wide and his composure visibly threatened. When David moved a stack of legal texts in front of him, half a foot thick before accounting for the supplementary materials, Frank's expression underwent a transformation that the worst gangster he had ever encountered had never managed to produce.
When David clarified that the stack was a catalogue rather than the actual documentation, Frank reportedly considered whether the holding cell had been such a bad arrangement after all.
Nolan intervened before the situation resolved itself in an unproductive direction. The full corpus of applicable Imperial law and local human legal tradition would be processed, filtered, and compiled by David into a working regulatory framework relevant to the areas of operation.
That framework would then be loaded into the storage of the Machine Spirit Procellas. Each Inquisitor's power armor would maintain a live connection to Procellas, which served two purposes simultaneously: it allowed Procellas to monitor each Inquisitor's operational decisions and flag significant deviations, providing an institutional check on the kind of unconstrained behavior that the Imperium's own Inquisitors had made legendary for entirely the wrong reasons. And it replaced the need for the Inquisitor to carry legal expertise in their own head. Frank would face criminals and complex cases. Procellas would handle the documentation.
The serum procedure was completed without incident. Frank Castle with super-soldier augmentation was a different calculation than Frank Castle without it, and the difference was visible.
Nolan assigned two Raven Guard company champions to run his subsequent training program, and supplemented that program with something more specific: heavy combat servitors reconfigured from Reditus's stock, each one carrying the superpowers of processed criminals, giving Frank a controlled environment to develop experience against metahuman opponents before he encountered them under actual field conditions.
In the brief interval of calm that followed, Nolan went to the Antarctic facility's launch infrastructure and extracted the second domestic spacecraft from the simulator: a Sword-class frigate, now sitting in lunar orbit alongside the Chitauri mothership that Reed Richards and Doctor Doom were currently dissecting. The two of them were deep in the hyperdrive research, and interrupting that work for no good reason was counterproductive. Nolan left them to it.
The potential value of what they were investigating was not small. A hyperdrive system that functioned in the Warhammer universe, even partially, even as a supplement to existing Warp navigation rather than a replacement for it, would address two of the most fundamental constraints on the Imperium's strategic capacity.
Warp travel was slow, unpredictable, and lethal at a statistical rate that any sane civilization would have considered unacceptable. Warp communication was slow to the point of institutional dysfunction across any distance worth discussing. Even partial solutions to either problem would change what the Imperium could do and how fast it could do it. Nolan held no optimism that the introduction of this technology would be smooth or peaceful: the Mechanicus alone would generate a political crisis of considerable size. But the long-term benefit was worth the short-term chaos.
He was in the process of planning a simulator run, the kind of intensive surgical simulation he had been deferring for weeks, when David found him.
"My lord. Natasha has sent intelligence. It arrived with a priority flag."
Nolan put the throne coin away.
"She's been quiet for a while. Let's hear it."
David's optical lights shifted slightly.
"My lord, before I begin, I should ask: as someone raised in this world, are you familiar with the concept of mutants?"
The word produced a brief pause in Nolan's processing. He knew mutants in the sense that anyone with deep knowledge of the Marvel universe knew them, but when he searched his actual memories of growing up in this world, the concept was entirely absent. No news coverage, no cultural reference, no documented history. As though the word had never existed here.
"David. Tell me what you're about to tell me."
"Natasha re-entered the Soviet Union by extracting a former associate of hers, a man named Alexei Shostakov, the individual known as the Red Guardian. She has been embedded there for an extended period, operating under cover. What she found is the product of months of accumulated intelligence, cross-referenced against material our Assassin network extracted from S.H.I.E.L.D.'s sealed archive."
David paused in the particular way that indicated the next thing being said carried more weight than the previous things.
"Mutants are real. They began appearing in this world in the 1960s: individuals born with genetic variations that produce extraordinary abilities, not created through experimentation but occurring naturally. They understand themselves as a branch of human evolution. They call themselves mutants."
"If that were the extent of it, the situation would be straightforward. Our own world has no shortage of unusual individuals, and the Guardians of Terra's policy on such matters is clear: if they stand on the side of humanity, the question of their biology is secondary."
"The complication is what happened to them."
David continued. The 1960s had produced mutants, and the response from ordinary human populations had been fear and persecution. The American government had, by the mid-1980s, moved from ad-hoc suppression to something more systematic: a coordinated program distributing agents through food and air supplies that suppressed or degraded the expression of the mutant gene. The program had run for years. By the time it concluded, the mutant population had been reduced to near-extinction. David assessed that the intervening period had included large-scale armed conflict between mutants and the institutional forces arrayed against them, though the documentation was heavily fragmented.
Then something reversed the trajectory.
One of the two principal leaders of the surviving mutant community, described in the intelligence as a powerful telepath with the theoretical capacity to access and alter the minds of every living human being simultaneously, had made a decision. To protect the continuation of the mutant population from further persecution, this individual had performed a global psychic operation: a complete deletion of the concept of mutants from human memory, worldwide. Not the suppression of the information but the removal of the neural architecture that held it. Paper documents and obsolete storage media retained residual data. Human minds did not.
After the deletion, the surviving mutants had consolidated. They had used their combined abilities to embed themselves in the one major power where the collapse of the old order had created openings: the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Where the Soviet system had been moving toward disintegration, mutant intervention had stabilized it. The Soviet Union had not collapsed. It had been saved, deliberately, by individuals with abilities that no conventional opposition could have countered, and in exchange they had become its governing class.
"The Soviet Union, as it currently presents itself to the United Nations Security Council, is a conventional state actor," David said. "What it actually is, by Natasha's assessment and my own analysis, is the first nation-state exclusively controlled by mutants. It has been, quietly, for approximately thirty years."
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