Captain America's recovery would take time. The matter was classified at the highest level—those present were sworn to silence, no records of any kind.
"Get back to your school," Fury told Coulson, voice clipped. "I'll have an assignment for you later. You're done here." Coulson's emotions were written all over his face—he'd go back to headquarters and someone would notice within five minutes. Fury read him instantly and cut it off at the source.
He was gentler with Sharon, though not by much. "Don't tell Peggy Carter. Not yet." Sharon nodded and accepted the order.
Then Fury turned to Daisy. He had a headache coming on.
This particular subordinate had a gift for stirring things up. She'd been sent on a simple surveillance assignment and somehow come back with Captain America. He genuinely didn't know what to do with her—except keep her occupied.
On the flight back, he asked: "How much output can your arc reactor deliver? Could it lift an aircraft carrier into the sky?"
So they're already looking at helicarriers. Daisy ran the numbers. "The cold fusion reactor can run continuously for fifty years. Power output sits between one hundred and two hundred megawatts, with adjustable draw—peak output in half an hour would be enough to power all of New York City for twenty years. That said, lifting a carrier is more than just a power problem. Raw thrust alone won't do it."
Fury was quiet for a few seconds. "Our Quinjets already have vertical take-off and landing capability. Wakanda has agreed to supply turbine engine technology. The issue is we don't have Vibranium to power it—we'd need workarounds."
This time Daisy took longer to think. She ran through a hundred variables in her head, then slowly shook her head. "It's going to be difficult. A carrier's just too massive—the propulsion system alone would be a nightmare to engineer..."
"If I handed you the retrofit project, could you deliver?"
Retrofit project. The words landed in Daisy's brain and instantly rearranged themselves into: retrofit budget.
Budget. That beautiful, pulse-quickening word. She happened to know Nick Fury was sitting on a very large pool of discretionary funds.
She was broke. She'd bought the beachfront villa and immediately decided she also needed a yacht. Bought the yacht and now felt the pull of a private jet. Then there was day-to-day spending, clothes, ammunition wear, training facility upkeep, property tax every year, Lorna's tuition fees—add it all up and being rich was genuinely exhausting.
She wasn't like Stark—Stark was actually rich. A whole corporation behind him, revenue and expenses in proportion. She was rich on paper: a small company that ran hot and cold, income perpetually failing to keep pace with outflow.
The moment a big contract appeared on the horizon, her eyes lit up.
Some of the trickier variables weren't impossible to solve with enough supercomputer time—just slow. Danger could run optimization passes on the architecture. And Professor Charles's Blackbird had VTOL too; she could use it as an engineering reference.
The lazy little voice in her head that had been complaining about difficulty got body-slammed by the industrious little voice that smelled money.
"...Actually, thinking it through, it might not be impossible," she said, scratching the back of her head.
Fury's expression said: I know exactly what you're doing and I don't care. He was perfectly satisfied with this response.
A subordinate who skimmed a little off the top was manageable. High ability, slight moral flexibility—that was a useful combination. What made him nervous was the alternative: someone brilliant and incorruptible, driven by lofty ideals. That type was genuinely dangerous. Once they decided something was worth doing, the damage they could cause dwarfed anything a greedy subordinate might cost him—ten thousand times over. You never knew what someone like that was quietly enduring, or what they'd ultimately decide was worth burning everything down for.
"I want your design proposal on my desk as soon as possible," Fury said, and the conversation was over.
Back at her villa, Daisy sat down with Danger and started calculating. The reactor she'd built for Obadiah had been scaled-down—almost all the parameters reduced by a third to achieve miniaturization. That version, even the original blueprint it was based on, was completely inadequate for this application. She needed a macro-scale arc reactor. An entirely new design.
The upside was that the last build had left her with a strong command of the core values, and this time she had Danger to run simulation after simulation. No need to brute-force anything with her powers. More variables, yes—but also significantly better reliability and stability.
Three days straight with no sleep. She emerged with a thick stack of final schematics and went to find Fury.
He'd been clever about it—S.H.I.E.L.D. wasn't exactly short on scientists, and he'd turned the whole thing into something like an open tender, soliciting design proposals from across the organization.
He had his moves. Daisy had hers.
Most senior agents came up through combat. Even administrative veterans like Sitwell and Victoria Hand had transferred in from field operations. Scientists with genuine depth were rare at that level, and the ones who existed were specialists—heads down in their own research, not focused on nuclear energy systems.
As for the Science Division's academics, Daisy was a Level 7 agent. She didn't even have to try. She could hold her own with Pentagon generals, and she'd been butting heads with Victoria Hand long enough that her name carried real weight inside the organization.
Hill fed her the intelligence. Mockingbird went around waving Daisy's name like a weapon, and the few researchers who'd been considering competing thought better of it and quietly backed out.
None of them were in Howard Stark's league to begin with. Their own proposals were half-formed at best. Designing a functional reactor from nothing in a matter of days, under pressure, while Daisy's reputation hung over the room? Every last one of them folded.
No competition.
Fury took her blueprints and studied them. Daisy smiled to herself. If you can actually read those, I'll eat the whole stack.
He couldn't. Seventy-two hours of nonstop work by Daisy and Danger had produced something that would give Tony Stark pause. Fury stared at the numbers until his eye went blurry—he knew she'd been playing politics behind the scenes, but he only cared about results.
"Good," he said finally. "Very good."
They went down to the weapons modification facility beneath headquarters. Daisy needed to build a physical prototype first; once the reactor passed testing and hit theoretical spec, it could be installed on the carrier.
"I'll skip the introductions—you already know him." Fury gestured to the project lead. "Dr. William Ginter Riva."
Daisy blinked.
The short man with the receding hairline standing in front of her—that was Obadiah's guy?
The old scientist didn't seem at all put off by her agent status. He smiled warmly. "Miss Johnson. Working together again—I'm genuinely pleased."
Daisy glanced at Fury. Is 'recruit the enemy's scientists' just standard S.H.I.E.L.D. operating procedure?
But he was a known quantity. That counted for something.
"Let's get started," she said.