Nick Fury was not especially interested in the pulse rifle's exact performance. S.H.I.E.L.D. had plenty of advanced technology of its own, and the weapon he had used when sniping Calypso was far more terrifying. Bringing up the pulse rifle now was merely a way to lead into what he really wanted to discuss.
"Weyland is moving too fast. Do you really think humanity is ready to go out into space?"
Bella's tone was light. "Someone has to take the first step. You can never be fully prepared for something like this. Usually, we have to learn to run before we've even learned to walk."
Nick Fury looked at her seriously. "Is that something Tony Stark said?"
Bella denied it immediately. "No. That's what I've learned from raising a child."
Nick Fury answered with a look that plainly said, Something is wrong with you. He might once have considered recruiting Bella, but that idea was now completely gone. Weyland was powerful, and Bella was not nearly as easy to fool as Stark, so he switched to talking about cooperation instead.
"Have you considered what happens if your space exploration program provokes a powerful enemy? What will you use to defend Earth from an alien invasion then?" Nick Fury answered his own question. "You need a wall—a wall that can keep disaster away from ordinary people."
Bella understood him instantly and gave him a suspicious look. "Haven't you already started building a superpowered team? I heard the Security Council allocated eight hundred million dollars to you..."
Nick Fury immediately defended himself. "Only a little over five hundred million actually arrived."
"That should still be enough, shouldn't it? Don't tell me you came here to borrow money from me. I don't have any! Goodbye. Don't let me keep you!"
Bella had already guessed where he was going with this. He probably was not going to ask for money quite that directly, but that was almost certainly what he meant. When Nick Fury said "borrow," the money basically never came back.
She had no idea what kind of equipment the man was carrying, but telepathy failed completely against him, without even the slightest response. Bella could still guess what he wanted. Most likely, he was simply casting a line whether there were fish in the pond or not.
The Security Council had given him eight hundred million. How much of that would actually be spent building the Avengers? Maybe not even eight million!
When you established an organization, the most essential and fundamental expenses were still the basics: clothing, food, housing, and transportation.
What did the Avengers actually have to spend on those things?
For clothing, Iron Man had his own suit, and Thor had his own clothes. Hulk came with his own giant shorts. What did Captain America wear in the first Avengers era? The stage costume he had used for performances during World War II! Not only was the design hideous, it did not provide the slightest bit of protection. For all anyone knew, the thing had been dug out of some museum. Hawkeye and Black Widow wore S.H.I.E.L.D. combat uniforms, which for Nick Fury, the man in charge of S.H.I.E.L.D., was practically zero cost.
Food? Everyone ate Stark's food!
Housing? Everyone lived in Stark Tower!
Transportation? S.H.I.E.L.D. had aircraft!
Counting it all out on her fingers, Bella concluded that Nick Fury could embezzle ninety-nine percent of the budget! Whatever little remained would either be charged to S.H.I.E.L.D. or paid by the filthy-rich Stark. With money moving back and forth through the accounts, Fury might even manage to make a little extra on top.
Bella would never give him money even if she had plenty, much less now, when she was not exactly flush with cash.
She shook her head rapidly from side to side. "I'm broke. I made some bad decisions recently. Everything I sold lost money, and Weyland is very unhappy with me. No money! How about I sell you a few bioengineered humanoids instead?"
Nick Fury calmly shook his head. "No need. I already have bioengineered humanoid technology."
Bella spread her hands. "Then I can't help you."
Having failed to get anything for free, Nick Fury could only make a trade with her. In the end, he exchanged five Quinjets for one thousand of her new M4A1 pulse rifles, five thousand batteries capable of powering ninety-nine shots each, and a large quantity of steel, cement, rubber, and other materials.
"These are also needed to build your superpowered team?" Bella asked, pointing at the steel on the list.
"Of course!" Nick Fury answered with complete conviction. "People with superpowers need somewhere to live too. You can't make everyone sleep out in the wilderness, can you?"
Who are you trying to fool? Bella sneered inwardly. Even a three-year-old knew the Avengers lived in Stark Tower! Fury also wanted an enormous amount of cement. What did he need that much cement for? Were you recruiting superheroes or bricklayers? You weren't seriously going to have Hulk build walls for you, were you?
Nick Fury wanted a huge variety of things, but Weyland's industries covered nearly every field, so it could provide all of them. The Quinjets were genuinely useful, and trading weapons and supplies for five aircraft was not a losing deal for Bella's side.
From mid-March until early May, Bella spent most of her time studying the Darkhold fragments collected from the vampires.
The Darkhold passages inherited by the thirteen vampire clans from the previous owner of the book, Varnae, the great sorcerer of Atlantis, were badly damaged and hopelessly jumbled. One scrap came from here, another from there; many passages plainly did not even belong to the same page. No one knew what those vampires had been thinking. They had swallowed the material whole without understanding it and copied down the entire mess indiscriminately.
Even with Bella's considerable magical attainments, plus the Book of Cagliostro—essentially a Darkhold fanwork—that she had already read, the two together only allowed her to reconstruct perhaps thirty to forty percent of the original Darkhold material.
The book's contents were vast and profound, but the hidden dangers were enormous. Studying it could also draw the attention of Chthon, god of black magic. The author of the Book of Cagliostro had devised several methods of deceiving that gaze, and Bella found them quite enlightening.
Her magical attainment did not undergo any qualitative leap, but her horizons and ways of thinking broadened enormously. The Darkhold's system for circulating magical power stood far above both the Ancient One's path of the Mystic Arts and Bella's own framework of first-circle through ninth-circle spells. It was an entirely different kind of magic, one that could bring calamity, pain, and torment even upon gods who used it, and it touched on the true foundations of the universe itself.
Bella was not yet at the level where she could meddle with the foundations of the universe. Those things were far too distant from her. She could, however, borrow the underlying ideas and gradually refine her own plan for apotheosis.
The Book of Cagliostro recorded a method for splitting the soul. Its author believed that casting spells through those separated soul fragments could effectively resist the Darkhold's corruption.
An ordinary person's soul had limits. Bella's soul, as a demigod, was stronger, but it still had limits. Every fragment cut away meant abandoning some portion of her future potential.
For Bella, cutting apart her soul would be like drinking poison to quench her thirst. She had nowhere near reached the point where she needed to do that.
Even so, the Darkhold's powerful spells were genuinely tempting. Bella estimated that during the process of becoming a god, she would need to use at least three to five of them. With those spells, what had originally been a fifty-percent chance of success could be raised to eighty percent.
She was extremely tempted, but after extensive study, she discovered that no matter how much she altered the methods, their underlying nature never changed. Some backlash rooted in the fundamental source of the magic simply could not be eliminated.