Daisy wanted to applaud. Surrounded by uniformly solemn faces, she settled for keeping her expression neutral while the councilors put on their performance.
With the position officially on the books, everything shifted into high gear. No competing candidates materialized—an uncontested vote. Daisy Johnson was duly elected as S.H.I.E.L.D.'s first-ever Deputy Director. She'd privately hoped for something like "Executive Deputy Director," but apparently that title didn't exist in this system.
Deputy Director it was.
The responsibilities were sprawling: personnel, finance, base construction, agent training, internal disciplinary matters, external coordination—essentially everything was in her purview. But with a Director still above her, her word wasn't final.
The one concrete advantage: if the Director died or went missing, she stepped up, assumed full Director authority, and kept the organization running.
The Deputy Director position represented the intersection of several factions' competing wishes—a structure that checked Fury's near-unlimited power without disrupting the larger picture, because the leadership still trusted his capabilities too much for anything more drastic.
Daisy was promoted to Level 9 Agent with Level 10 clearance, giving her the authority to mobilize every resource S.H.I.E.L.D. possessed. That was the fundamental distinction between a deputy director and a glorified aide.
All three returned to Washington for a closed-door session on the division of responsibilities.
Daisy wasted no time: she moved that Hammer Industries become S.H.I.E.L.D.'s weapons supplier.
S.H.I.E.L.D.'s budget was a colossal pie, and Fury had always kept the lion's share of financial authority in an iron grip. His longtime partner Pierce had only ever managed to skim from infrastructure projects on the margins. Daisy's weapons-supplier play operated from exactly the same logic.
She wanted a slice of the financial pie.
Mutual benefit, no hidden Hydra agenda attached. Both Directors agreed quickly enough: Stark had exited the weapons market, and Hammer Industries, while not quite the industry leader, was the tallest figure in a fairly short field.
Left hand: Daisy issued Hammer Industries an invitation under S.H.I.E.L.D.'s official letterhead. Right hand: she approved it herself. Done.
As a concession, she provided S.H.I.E.L.D. with the design schematics for Hammer's combat robots. Direct battlefield deployment was tricky—agents operated through infiltration and intelligence, not like a military unit—but stationing a few at headquarters and branch facilities made for excellent gatekeepers and bodyguards.
The work split was essentially unchanged from before: Pierce handled external affairs, taking both the credit and the abuse that came with them, while Fury and Daisy managed actual operations.
"Your clearance is upgraded now. Come to me with questions." Fury bore no resentment about the power-sharing arrangement. The two had always worked well together, and beyond that, a natural compatibility existed between them. As the man who carried the secret burden of being Earth's Man on the Wall, Fury genuinely hoped to develop Daisy further—give himself a chance to breathe.
Pierce kept his smile in place. His Hydra faction was shrinking by the day, and he could see it clearly. Young, capable, and Viper-backed: Daisy was a wall he had no current answer for. He'd wait for his moment.
As Deputy Director, Daisy had her own dedicated office on the top floor of S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters. "Office" was an understatement—it came with a wardrobe room, a private rest suite, and, given that she was a woman, a small vanity room.
A Director-grade combat suit was already being custom-made: seven layers of Kevlar interwoven with an undisclosed alien metal compound, capable of stopping a direct hit from a .45-caliber round and resisting temperatures up to 900 °C (1,652 °F). Fury's iconic trench coat was made from the same material. The science division suggested a matching coat for her. She declined on the grounds of not wanting special treatment—she had no interest in spending her days striding around in a trench coat.
Her assigned suite was nearly 300 square meters (3,230 sq ft): office space upfront, private quarters in the rear, fully outfitted throughout. Quite luxurious.
She shut the door, logged into her Level 10 clearance, and started reading.
The Eternals' genes hadn't fully emerged yet, but their ancillary capabilities were already manifesting. That genetic code had reached its pinnacle over countless millennia—acknowledged and accepted by Earth's various divine pantheons—and even in their nascent state, those genes were amplifying Daisy's capabilities across the board. Dynamic visual acuity, up. Neural processing and information absorption speeds, up. Reading speed, dramatically up.
She could devour entire pages at a single glance. Words flowed into her brain and were analyzed and organized at extraordinary speed.
S.H.I.E.L.D. had 190,000 registered personnel on file: agents, administrative staff, and specialists combined.
Of those, 86,000 were field agents, distributed across more than 200 branch facilities, liaison offices, and contact points worldwide.
Fury was the only Level 10 Agent on record. Level 9 Agents with Level 10 clearance now numbered two: Pierce and Daisy. Approximately 30 Level 8 Agents existed, nearly 80 Level 7 Agents, and Level 6 and below filled out the rest in considerably greater numbers.
S.H.I.E.L.D. didn't run entirely on Council appropriations—it maintained its own revenue streams, regularly seeding emerging industries and collecting substantial returns.
One file showed that S.H.I.E.L.D. held close to ten percent of Stark Industries' shares—a mix of legacy holdings and opportunistic acquisitions made during the stock-price crash. Combined with Stark's own third, the two blocs were more than sufficient to silence the board's restless voices. That was why Stark resented S.H.I.E.L.D. and yet never fully severed the connection: the thick-pursed tycoon couldn't afford to cut ties.
"Ha." The next file made her laugh. S.H.I.E.L.D. also held close to ten percent of Hammer Industries—acquired, obviously from the purchase dates, after she had taken control of the company. Her stake, combined with Justin Hammer's own shares and the portion quietly controlled by S.H.I.E.L.D.'s Hydra contingent, placed her comfortably over a majority. She'd initially worried about doing someone else's work for free; the numbers told a very different story.
The robot soldier program was too narrow—wasteful of Hammer's full production capacity.
She instructed Justin Hammer—an absolute maestro of public relations—to take a meeting at the Pentagon. The upgrade cycle from Nimitz-class to Ford-class aircraft carriers was at a critical juncture; the election and a reshuffling of power structures inside the Defense Department had pushed the timeline back considerably. Her ask was simple: whether by bragging, bluffing, or sheer persistence, she wanted Hammer to walk away with a share of the Ford-class contracts. All of them, if he could manage it.
Public business and private interests handled in a single stroke, Daisy spent the next three days without once leaving her office, emerging only with a splitting headache. Even with her enhanced cognition, that volume of material was exhausting.
She called in her assistant, Mockingbird, and began an agency-wide inspection tour.