The launch of the Plutonian Ship was a major event. With nearly a thousand uploaded individuals aboard, the Plutonian was the first cost-effective intra-solar mining operations for the planet. Uploaded volunteered for the free energy and power budget, the Plutonian was much larger ship than my initial dingy and it would serve prospecting and mining palladium which it would then be able to sell to Tony Stark and Ivan Vanko, who were starting to put real strain on the palladium supply here on earth. Mostly, it was gathering drones who could be supervised for human usage.

Tony's new element was more stable, but it still worked from a palladium base. Vanko didn't bother with trying to replicate (and I wish this was named something else) Badassitium, since the toxicity levels of even melting palladium are not super high.

Eventually, the hope was that Plutonian Fleet would replace all terrestrial mining efforts. With Pym Particle extraction down to a fourth of its initial production costs, we were drawing ever closer to a world of nearly free transport of goods. The fleet would be able to conduct extraction and delivery What that meant, in effect, was that I was preparing to nuke yet another form of extraction industry here on earth. I still needed to deal with the domestic fallout of the last one.

Particularly, I needed to deal with the Sheikh, who had gotten the raw end of our energy transformation. Boo-hoo for the terrorist funding high official, but so it goes when you're leading a global syndicalist conspiracy.

The Office for International Research and Development provided a useful meeting locale, an air-conditioned base in Saudi Arabia where I was in theory supposed to be and where the Sheikh held substantial influence. It made sense for me to meet with him here, in the sleek new office we'd built with "local labor" that was almost certainly coerced in one fashion or another.

"Mr. Trent," he said, shaking my hand and sitting across from me. He was a middle-aged man with a goatee and an average Mediterranean complexion and he had enough blood on his hands to fill a swimming pool. "Are we going to be able to sort out these mass movements?"

The petro-states in the Middle East were having a rough time right now. Funding had gone down, authoritarianism had gone up, and the populace was still angry as hell. The Sheikh had prepared for the energy demand plummet to some degree - The American and Swiss banks had helped him move a remarkable amount of oil wealth around into a profitable financial portfolio. But while the returns on the portfolio were propping him up, they weren't doing anything useful in terms of protecting the regimes of which he was a benefactor and associate. The world here had experienced a first Arab Spring and it was really getting to a second one, because the first one had mostly produced violent repression.

In order to have a long term solution, you had to shore up the fundamental problem - The governments in the Middle East sucked and most of their promise to their populace was security, threats, and artificially low tax rates through the exploitation of oil wealth. That wasn't a viable formula at this point in the game.

"No," I said bluntly, pouring him a cup of coffee. "Ultimately, the existing regimes are going to fall. There's nothing for that at this point - There's no cure. Energy demand is being replaced at about a 3% per annum internationally, and that number is growing. The United States is already energy self-sufficient, Europe is divorcing itself from Russia, India, China, and the East Asian sphere are either buying from me or Australia. I cannot lay my hands upon the global market and cohere it to my will."

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"Mr. Trent, I hope you understand that it was for your plan's sake that I undertook these risks. I expect to be rewarded."

A promise that Pierce had made on my behalf and now I had to find some way to keep. It was not a wonderful situation by my lights. The Sheikh doesn't have anything left to offer Hydra - If it were up to me, I would simply dispose of him and find a more compliant, secularized military office from Egypt or Pakistan to replace him on the council. But the Sheikh was a head and, however useless he was in pragmatic terms, if I wanted to maintain my position he was valuable to me.

"We're redirecting some funds your way, of course, but it seems unlikely that the KSA and your other allies will remain as they are. I don't need to tell you how catastrophic Baron von Strucker's failure to see the score on this matter were. But you can be an essential linch pin in our plans for the beginning of the transitionary system."

"Transitionary system?"

In full honesty, this was just a polite way to sideline him. The Sheikh himself lacked the sort of professionalism I needed in a new crop of Hydra heads. "Since the failure of Project Insight," since I aborted the slower but still coming program and stowed its revolutionary potential analysis for further study, "We've had to settle on a slower moving unification. What we need now is a voice inside of the existing authority system to call for help from your local Defense Team."

"What good will the GDT do?"

"Nothing, initially, but they will help provide a new locus for the discontented forces - We've already seen a conservative coalition in Sokovia, supported by old-school oligarchs," with their most egregious members purged, of course, "and the implicit recommendation of defense team members." SWORD had successfully redirected much nationalist and militarist support by providing the teams that are the basis of Earth's actual security and the support staff that carries them on its back. I wasn't one hundred percent confident that the teams could handle a Thanos style invasion, but we were in a vastly superior position to pre-2012 status - We could deploy almost two thousand super soldiers into any field, anywhere, in a few minutes. "But they're not winning. We can do better for candidates you support, using our government contacts to erase competitive dissent while providing an apparently independent conservative force space to agitate. You would then be at the head of a new movement in the Middle East, the humanist, internationalist leader for the Western press to fawn over." More like 'a voice of' a movement, but something that could at least resemble the prominence he had obtained through wheeling and dealing among the Sunni nations of the Middle East. "If it succeeds, it will be a blueprint for all our actions in the larger world."

The Sheikh nodded his head, "That's acceptable."