Doom reached him and struck him with the baton. The blow and the electrical charge knocked him senseless. He jerked violently, then slumped in his seat.

  Now, finally, the rich and mighty understood the safety of their wealth had abandoned them. For a brief moment, some of them looked as if they were thinking of trying to rush Doom. A few more blows of the shock baton convinced all the others of the wisdom of surrender. They backed up against the right-hand wall, on their knees and cowering. They did not fight when Chen and the others took their jackets and began to rip them, turning them into ropes. They protested, though. Their conviction that the universe must not permit their victimization remained strong. They protested. They shouted. They raged against the perversity of events.

  “You have no right to do this!”

  “And yet I am,” said Doom, standing before them, baton at the ready, while they were bound.

  “Do you know who we are?”

  “Parasites,” said Doom.

  “We did nothing wrong.”

  “You observed, and took pleasure,” said Doom. “You are the willing accomplices of the Red Skull. You have done much.”

  “What are you going to do to us?”

  “Keep you here, for a start,” said Doom. “But I promise you this: your penance has only begun.”

  When their ankles were tied together, and their wrists behind their backs, and they had been relieved of their pass cards, Doom headed back up to the doors. He checked across the way and saw that the binding there, too, was almost complete. Good. Already, the escape from the mines had become tinged with the beginnings of his retaliation. He savored the taste.

  Chen hesitated before following him. “Are we leaving them like this?”

  “Would you prefer to kill them?” Doom asked.

  She shook her head.

  Doom took his small group back down to the entrance to the access corridors, the shouts for help muffled behind feet of stone, rapidly becoming inaudible. Valeria and the others arrived soon after, and Doom took them all back to the main body of the prisoners.

  “The mines are ours,” he announced. “But the way out is not clear yet. That is my task alone.” It was one thing for a group of his new followers to overcome an unarmed collection of the rich, who were just as bereft of training but nowhere near as desperate. He did not want any foolish attempts at combat interfering with his own actions. “You will follow me, but at a distance. When I tell you to stop and wait, you will stop and wait.”

  He did not ask if they had understood. He had been clear enough.

  Doom returned once again to the access door and made his way up the stairs again. He had noticed that the corridor that led to the viewing hall kept going past it, in the direction of the exit. He took that route now, the long file of the liberated extending far behind him.

  Valeria walked with him. “The watchtowers,” she said. “What are you going to do about them? They’ll have snipers. They’ll shoot anyone who isn’t a guard.”

  “They won’t have the chance,” said Doom.

  The corridor was a long one. When another door at last came into sight, Doom held up a hand. “Wait here,” he said.

  He moved to the door and pressed an ear against it. He could just make out voices on the other side. A few, not many. The sounds of a conversation. No one shouting in alarm.

  Doom threw the door open and rushed into the room beyond.

  He had entered the corrugated shack outside the mine’s entrance. It was night, arc lights outside the tunnels shining through the windows. Four guards lounged on folding chairs. They reached for their pistols. Doom spun from guard to guard, lashing out in quick succession, a whirlwind, preventing attacks with initial strikes and electrical shocks, breaking hands and triggering convulsions. He picked up a pistol dropped by a nerveless hand, shot out the lights in the shack, and trained the gun on the outside door.

  He had taken the building in less than ten seconds.

  The door opened. Two guards rushed in. In the light spilling in through the windows, Doom recognized them.

  Pieter and Jerry.

  They had their guns drawn. They squinted in confusion at the darkness and the twitching bodies.

  Doom fired.

  “I kept my promise,” he said.

  He waited another minute. No one else entered the shack. A shot from a beam rifle stabbed through the ceiling. The guard in the watchtower had fired, but he had no target other than the building itself.

  Doom’s eyes had adjusted to the gloom. He could see well enough to take stock of the shack’s inventory. Against the left-hand wall, he found the expected weapons locker. He opened it and took out two of the beam rifles.

  He examined the weapons. They were simple things, basic in their construction. It was child’s play for him to disable their power packs’ safety override. He approached the window and took aim with one of the rifles at the closest leg of the watchtower. He supercharged the rifle and expended its entire energy store in a single shot. The beam struck the leg and melted it away at the base.

  The panicked guard had just started climbing down when Doom unloaded the second rifle’s shot, melting the second leg. The tower collapsed in a chaos of broken metal and wood. Dust blew past the arc lights, turning the area outside the mine into an amber limbo.

  Doom stepped back into the corridor. He summoned the prisoners with a gesture. They used the tools in the shed to remove the manacles and the broken chains. Then Doom led more than a thousand of the Red Skull’s victims into the darkness.

  “You have been refugees, you have been prisoners, and you have been slaves,” Doom told them. “Now you are something new. Now you have become our enemy’s nightmare.”

  Sixteen

  Alvin Gates was the first to notice the impossible, that something had gone awry on Wolkenland. The idea was so contrary to his experience that not only did it take a while for him to be aware of the glitch, he stared at it for another length of time without understanding what he saw.

  Gates was on the graveyard shift of the security detail. He sat on a swivel chair that didn’t quite lean back far enough to be good for napping, in a circular room whose curved walls were covered with screens and banks of status lights. A miniature, diluted version of the Red Skull’s panopticon, it did not serve to observe everything that happened in Wolkenland. That was the Skull’s exclusive purview. The room simply scanned for signs of anything happening that shouldn’t be. That had never happened once since Gates had joined the Skull’s army. Especially not at 3am, when nothing happened at all on the island.

  Bored, sleepy, Gates passed the hours surfing online, trolling, and frothing in comment sections. Eventually, fatigue made even that boring. He glanced up at the clock, hoping it had moved forward more than he knew it had, and his eye happened to catch a sensor flashing red. He tapped the light as if that would make it behave. He couldn’t yet take on the idea of a warning.

  The red kept blinking.

  Finally, he understood that the blinking meant something. He flipped through the thick binder on the workspace beneath the screens and sensors, and found what this light meant. The guards at the mines had not done their hourly check-in. All they had to do, Gates knew, was flip a switch on their console, and the code white confirmation would be done. Really not too much to ask.

  He sighed, and sent them a prompt from his terminal, then went back to his browser tabs. Ten minutes later, the light still blinked, and it was really starting to irritate him. Even when he turned his back to it, he could feel it winking away behind his head.

  Muttering under his breath, Gates picked up his phone and called the mines.

  No answer.

  He let the phone ring and ring. Inconsiderate jerks were asleep. If he had to be awake and miserable, then so did they.

  No answer.

  When he finally hung up, he felt the first pangs of uncertainty. He’d done what his training had covered. That should have taken care of the problem. The fact that it hadn’t left him adrift. His chest tightened. In the Skull’s army, there were no more questions. All the answers were there. Gates was confirmed as one of the genetically chosen, and all the right people were blamed as was right. No more questions. But now he didn’t have an answer. Now, he was required to do something, for the first time, on Wolkenland.

  But what?

  There was something. Only he didn’t like the idea. He should call his supervisor. Only that would mean waking her up.

  The security shifts had become more skeletal since Doom had been captured and the invasion of Latveria had entered a more intensive phase. Wolkenland required boots on the ground below. In the sky, the island floated serene and impregnable now that the great enemy had been defeated. Invisible, it could strike but could not be attacked. The prisoners were helpless, and the paying inhabitants of Wolkenland were unlikely in the extreme to take action against its, and their, interests. Security watches, especially in the dead of night, were not supposed to be much more than a formality. Bottom-rank unfortunates like Gates had to sit in the monitoring station and do nothing for hours. Superiors, like Madeleine Rhodes, were nominally on call, but slept through the night in the expectation of nothing happening. Rhodes had made it perfectly clear to Gates that he better not disturb her without a very good reason.

  Did this count? One flashing light?

  One flashing light and no communication at all with the mines.

  Gates wrestled with the temptation to ignore the light and pretend he had never seen it, or that it only began in the last few minutes of his shift, by which time it would be proper morning. He defeated it with the realization that the punishment he might receive over raising a false alarm would be as nothing compared to what would happen if he ignored a real problem.

  So he picked up the phone again and called Rhodes.

  “What?” she answered, anger muddied by sleep.

  “Sorry to wake you, unterwachtmeister,” said Gates.

  “Is this an emergency?” she asked before he could get any further.

  “No. At least, I don’t think so.”

  “Then why am I awake?” The anger became clear and dangerous.

  Gates swallowed hard before finding the courage to tell her.

  •••

  Madeleine Rhodes arrived at the monitoring station out of breath. She had run all the way from her quarters. She burst through the door, and a terrified Gates leapt out of his chair and retreated to the far side of the room. The red light reached out to her, its blinking sinking into her vision like a claw.

  “Still nothing?” she asked Gates, hoping against hope that all had sorted itself in the last few minutes and she could climb down.

  “Nothing,” Gates confirmed. “I tried calling again.”

  Rhodes chewed her lip. Procedure called for her to send a flyover of drones, and a unit of guards. The drones weren’t a problem. She could dispatch them with a few keystrokes.

  Or she should have been able to.

  Rhodes frowned. “You haven’t sent any surveillance flights there, have you?”

  “There was a scheduled flight supposed to go over about an hour ago.”

  Rhodes checked the monitors. Those were the units she was trying to order. “Where are they?”

  “I don’t know.”

  They weren’t responding. They had gone as silent as the mines.

  Rhodes called up their last transmissions. Their feeds appeared on the screens above the terminal. Empty landscapes went by in the bleached monochrome of night vision. Nothing unusual appeared. Then the images broke up and ended.

  “Oh,” said Gates. “That’s not right, is it?”

  Rhodes gave him a glare of contempt that shut him up. Soft man in a hard uniform, thinking he was something. He would never rise in the Red Skull’s army. Not like the truly hardened.

  Only she didn’t feel hardened, not right now, and Gates was right. None of this was normal.

  Rhodes called up another flight of drones and rerouted them to the mines. It would be another half-hour before they arrived. Sending actual personnel to the mines presented a problem. The guard unit posted there was the largest number in that region of Wolkenland. Those guards were the ones who would have been sent to deal with problems elsewhere. The mines going dark was not a contingency in the realm of the imaginable.

  It had to be something stupid, simple, unimportant.

  But meanwhile, the nearest guards would take even longer to reach the mines than the drones.

  Rhodes hesitated over her options. She could wait until the new overflight told them something concrete. Or she could push the panic button before they knew anything at all.

  She did not want to be seen to be the one who waited too long.

  So she kicked the problem higher up the chain.

  •••

  Caleb Mueller, the Red Skull’s major-domo, experienced his own bout of hesitation when the news of the mines’ silence landed in his lap. Outside the Skull’s bedchamber, he cursed silently that the final decision should be his.

  Really, though, there wasn’t a decision, was there? He just didn’t want to be the decapitated messenger.

  Mueller took a breath, straightened, knocked on the door, and opened it.

  The Red Skull’s chamber occupied a curved protrusion at the top of the castle’s keep, the frown of a heavy brow. A shell-proof panoramic window took up the entire exterior wall. It looked forward on the island, giving the master of Wolkenland an unmatched perspective of his domain. The panopticon allowed him to peer into the very grain of the island. Here, he could look at the island as a whole, gaze down upon it as a god.

  Conscious of the power of that view, and that it did not belong to him, Mueller carefully kept his gaze averted from the window, even with the Red Skull asleep. He crossed the marble floor to the immense bed. He coughed politely. The Skull did not stir.

  “Your pardon, leader,” Mueller said. “I’m sorry to wake you, but something has happened.”

  •••

  The Red Skull jerked awake to the words something has happened. He shot out of bed, adrenaline coursing through his veins. His body responded to the emergency before his head could clear of sleep. He grabbed the pistol on the side table and, still in his bedclothes, sprinted from the room, Mueller at his heels.

  Something has happened.

  Mueller was calling out something, but the Skull didn’t hear him through the panicked pounding of blood in his ears. Only one thing could have happened to warrant waking him up. The impossible had occurred. Doom had broken loose.

  The minute it took the Skull to rush down the halls and take the lift down to the power chamber was an eternity of terror. When he arrived, and saw Doom still caught in the shifting energy streams of the Power Cosmic, he had trouble processing the good news. Properly awake at last, he verified that this was no illusion. As he saw every day, the readings of ethereal agony continued uninterrupted across the screens.

  The Red Skull turned to Mueller. The major-domo had turned red in the face, and was panting hard. The Skull pointed at Doom. “What do you see there?”

  “Our enemy, my leader.”

  “He isn’t free, is he?”

  “No.”

  “His freedom would have justified waking me. Nothing else.”

  “I am very sorry, my leader.”

  “You most certainly are,” the Red Skull said, and shot Mueller in the forehead.

  The Skull stepped over the corpse and headed back to his chambers. He would have to give some thought to a suitable replacement for the major-domo. Until tonight, Mueller had done his job well. But he had seen the Red Skull vulnerable and afraid. That was unforgivable and why he had to die.

  The Skull dressed and took the private hall that led from his quarters to the panopticon. Doom hadn’t escaped, but Mueller had been concerned enough to make a grievous error of judgment. Best to look into the problem and deal with it. The Skull wasn’t going to get back to sleep now.

  In the panopticon, he saw the security alerts, and read through the reports. He frowned. He didn’t like silence from the mines. He couldn’t imagine anything serious being behind the anomaly, because with Doom in his control, nothing could be serious.

  Then the drone flights Rhodes had dispatched arrived at the mines. The Skull stared at the images of the fallen watchtower. He grunted in disbelief.

  Then more reports came in, of more monitoring cameras and sensors going dark, no longer just at the mines, but in locations where the Skull placed real importance in ensuring that nothing ever went wrong.

  The homes of his wealthy clients.

  The Skull ordered that Hauptmann be woken. Time for the Exile to earn his keep.

  •••

  The journey from the mines to the starboard mansions went smoothly, as if the universe were repenting for its rebellion and had begun to refashion itself to conform to Doom’s will. A thousand people found the energy to move swiftly over the barren earth around the mines, and then through the woods that separated that region from the residential sector of Wolkenland. They did not encounter any guards. The flying island slept, secure in its arrogance, and did not know that poison moved through its veins.

  Doom distributed the first real weapons to his army before beginning the march. There had still been a few beam rifles in the guards’ shack. He kept one for himself, and gave the other three to the refugees who stepped forward to say that they had some experience with firearms. A small step, and not enough to take on a concerted attack. Doom would change the balance soon enough if the universe obeyed him.

  It did.

  The only threat he had to deal with before they came out on the other side of the forest was a drone flight. He had expected something of the sort, and had kept close eyes on the night sky as he led his followers between the hills, sticking to the deeper darkness beside the slopes.

  The red lights on the noses of the drones were dim, easy to miss, and Doom would have, if he hadn’t been so alert. He caught the dimness because it moved, and it moved in a formation. Three faint hints of red. Three faint targets.

 

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