Reign of the Devourer, page 15
part #4 of Marvel Untold Series
Orloff moved into a larger laboratory in the sub-levels of Castle Doom. She needed the space for the number of researchers and technicians she had under her authority, and for the containment of the urvullak specimens. Since her return, more had been spotted by drones and then captured. The lab was a huge, open area, and one half was taken up by a bank of plexiglass cubicles in which the urvullak were sealed. Orloff and her team examined them by means of robotic arms that reached into each cubicle, and were operated remotely by cybernetic gloves. The precision of the arms was remarkable. They felt like extensions of Orloff’s body, the metal fingers as responsive as her own. She was able to operate on the urvullak as easily as if she were in the cubicles with them. More easily, because the arms were strong, much stronger than the urvullak. Their strength was unnatural, but still limited by what was possible for the matter of bone and flesh.
Her work was grotesque. Her mission was to find the best way of killing these things. Destroying, she had to remind herself. Not killing – they’re already dead. This was a situation where it was necessary to dehumanize the enemy. To see them as people was a mistake, and a good way of falling victim to them. But they had been people. They had loved and feared and hoped, and they were still driven by hunger and loss, and the remnants of human appearance were enough to make what she had to do difficult.
And what she had to do went contrary to everything she had ever sought to achieve in her life. All of her training rebelled against her actions.
How did I get here? she asked herself again and again.
She knew the answer. Part of it lay on slabs in front of the cubicles. The corpses and their obelisk had been moved into this lab too. The project she had begun for Doom had not been abandoned. It was now part of a bigger, more urgent task.
“You have crossed the veil,” Doom had told her before she headed back. “You have experienced the connection between the Devourer and the dead. You are well placed to understand the nature of the link between it and the urvullak, and to learn how to sever it.”
She knew all this and accepted it. Yet the question would not leave her alone. How did I get here?
The initial stages of testing turned her into a butcher – Kariana was right, they’re hard to put down. The only way to stop them physically was to make the body utterly non-viable. Anything less, and the monsters still tried to reach her through the plexiglass, claws gouging scars in the walls of their prisons.
The urvullak were always straining to escape. They howled and scrabbled at the walls, going into a frenzy whenever anyone approached the cells. They never let up, though, even when no one was around. Monitors recorded them constantly, and Orloff checked the footage whenever she came back from a restless nightmare-riven sleep. She was running on fumes. She was surrounded by horrors. But the work needed to be done. She reviewed the recordings too, before ending a shift, watching for anything she might have missed when she was focused on another task, and those images followed her down into another night of gasping dreams.
She was going over the third day’s recordings with Hans Cass, one of her assistants, when she spotted something that worried her. They were looking at the recording of the robot arms removing the spine of an urvullak in an attempt to find a faster way of immobilizing the body.
“What’s that other specimen doing?” said Orloff. “That one, three cubicles over.” It was just at the edge of the frame.
“It’s watching what we’re doing to the other one,” Cass said.
The recording played on. The watching urvullak remained motionless until the spinal column of the other had been removed, and the robotic arms withdrew. Then it resumed scrabbling at the walls again.
“Back up,” Orloff said to Cass. “Show me the footage from just before we started the spine removal.”
Cass did as she asked. The urvullak at the edge of the screen clawed and struggled, consumed by its hunger, until the moment the operation began. Then it stopped as if flash-frozen. The suspension of movement was strange. It made Orloff think of a marionette whose strings had been suddenly yanked upward and then held.
“There must be another actor involved,” Doom had said. A monarch of the urvullak.
Orloff looked back at transparent cells holding a dozen specimens. They were all snarling and throwing themselves at the walls. She stared at their maddened, empty eyes, and thought about another, more knowing gaze behind them.
She sent the footage to Doom. A few minutes later, in her private office off the main lab, she spoke to him over a video communicator. She had the door closed, and a steel blind drawn down over the window to the lab. Nothing could see or hear her.
“I agree with your analysis, doctor,” Doom said. “Our enemy sees through the eyes of her creatures.”
“Her?” Orloff asked.
“I believe our foe is Maleva Krogh,” said Doom. “She is a relic of the old regime who has persistently eluded capture. That the urvullak first appeared in Kroghstein is not a fact that I can believe was a random occurrence. And a message has been left for me by our enemy, a message that embodies the ideology of that accursed clan.”
Krogh. The name grated. It was one her parents had feared. The Kroghs had been a big part of why they had fled Latveria to keep Orloff safe. “I will do what I can to prevent her from learning more,” Orloff said. “We can make the walls between the cells opaque.”
“That may not be enough,” said Doom. “We will subject them to a test.”
He told her what he wanted her to do. It took very little time to set up after she returned to the lab. All the cells except one were plunged into darkness. A flexible arm descended from the ceiling. It held a communications monitor before the cell, so Doom could see how the urvullak responded, and so he would be visible to the creature. He had been emphatic about the need for this detail.
“Approach the subject with a tool you have not used before,” said Doom. “Keep it behind your back.”
“You want me to conceal the tool in such a way that the urvullak knows I’m concealing something,” said Orloff.
“Precisely.”
Orloff picked up a vibro-trepanner and walked toward the cell. The urvullak lunged against the wall, drooling in rage and hunger. When she was almost at the plexiglass wall, the creature stopped with a jerk. It shuffled to one side, head cocked, its dead eyes moving as if trying to see past her, to what she was hiding.
“Remain still,” said Doom. “Do not let it see.”
The urvullak looked up at the screen. It stared at Doom for a long moment, and then, as if a grip on its body had been let go, it went back to its futile attempts to attack Orloff.
“I have seen what I need to know,” said Doom.
When Orloff was back in her office, he went on. “The situation is clear. What any of the urvullak knows, their leader knows. I felt her gaze just now, when the wretch faced the monitor. She knew what we were doing, and why. When the urvullak looked at my image, that was a boast. Maleva Krogh defies me, and wants me to know it.” Doom spoke with steely, cold fury. Orloff thought she heard an undercurrent of concern, too, and that disturbed her.
“I can see if I can find a way to block the connection between Krogh and her urvullak,” said Orloff.
“If you discover that in the process of learning how best to destroy them, then that is well. But destruction is your priority, and your task is more urgent than ever. The urvullak cannot stand before me, but I cannot be everywhere. We need weapons for the Guard. You are in a race against our enemy. She will know much of what you learn. You must ensure that her knowledge becomes irrelevant. Have you tried connecting yourself to the urvullak by means of the helmet?”
The change in subject was so abrupt, it took Orloff a few moments to catch up with Doom’s question. “No,” she said. It was something she had been preparing to do.
“Then do so,” said Doom. “Today.”
“I haven’t finished working out all the needed modifications yet.”
“You have completed the work on some.”
“Yes.”
“Then begin your tests. What happens will tell you what the other needed changes are. Circumstances have altered since you last used the helmet, doctor.”
“They have,” she admitted. The thought of using the helmet on an urvullak terrified her as much as it intrigued her. To link her mind to one of them…
“Do what you must,” said Doom. “I command it.”
She bowed her head. Defiance was more even more frightening.
•••
In the command center of the dig site, Doom killed the communications link and looked out at the pyramid suspended above the shaft.
I am getting the measure of your threat, Krogh, and you are careless in your arrogance. You should not have left that taunt for me. It amounted to your signature.
It was the writing in charcoal that made him certain she was the queen of the urvullak. The past has returned. Latveria is mine. That maniacal obsession with the old order was the sign of the Kroghs and was one of the reasons she had remained high on his list of members of Fortunov’s resistance to track down. Her escape from her family’s destruction was a loose end that had gnawed at him, as her terrorist attacks had gnawed at the peace of Latveria, for more than fifteen years. That she was the queen now seemed an inevitable working of events.
No. It was not fate. It was a consequence of unfinished business. And now he knew who he faced.
To identify the enemy is to have them in one’s sights.
Maybe. But the more Doom learned of the threat, the more he realized, to his fury, there was too much he didn’t know.
He had entered into this project so that he might know all. The proliferation of unknowns was an insult.
He was in his quarters here instead of down in the cavern, going over the pyramid’s sensors and their readings, trying to find what he had missed, because there had to be something. If his precautions were working, there could not be as strong a link between Krogh and the Devourer as there clearly was.
There had been psychic energy leaking out, but not to this level. If he was wrong, why hadn’t the pyramid activated? The Destroyer was still sealed in its vault. Zargo felt its presence, though he could not see it.
Doom went over the geologic and psychic scans again, ones taken before and during the operations on the wall down below. The vault of the Destroyer was a spherical blank spot on all of them. Is that the shape of prison? Perhaps. The exposed portion of the wall had a slight curve. But that could also be a zone of indiscernibility, concealing the true shape and dimensions of the vault. Either way, the area covered by the pyramid was greater than the diameter of the blank spot.
Yet energy is escaping, whether I detect it or not. How? Krogh has a link to the Devourer. I will find it and break it. I must.
He couldn’t understand how the link could have been established. He still believed what he had said to Orloff and Verlak. The spikes that had escaped were not powerful enough to have created the urvullak. And the protective circle he had created in the cavern reinforced the containment.
Unless…
Driven by uneasy inspiration, he left his quarters and flew down the shaft to the cavern. At the wall, two more immense drills had been set up and were awaiting his command to recommence the work. He had called another halt after receiving the message from Orloff.
He found Zargo in his usual position, just outside the protective circle. “Read the wall again,” he said.
Zargo obeyed. He closed his eyes, and his face went slack, his consciousness descending into the rock. He returned to himself in less than a minute and opened his eyes. “What I can see remains the same,” he said. “I can’t see the Devourer. The wall blocks me. But I can sense how you’ve weakened it. I can’t see the barrier, but I can see the crack in it, if that makes sense.”
“It does,” said Doom. “How do you approach the barrier?”
“It’s hard to explain.”
“Your awareness has a direction, though?”
“Yes,” said Zargo. “It’s almost like I’m swimming through the earth, until the wall stops me.”
“Change your approach,” Doom told him. “Go deeper, then come at the vault from below.”
Zargo obeyed. When he opened his eyes, he looked puzzled.
“What is it?” said Doom.
“I saw the crack again,” said Zargo. “The same one, in the same configuration. As if I had come in straight from our position again.”
“The same crack,” Doom muttered.
“I don’t understand. What does it mean?”
“It means,” said Doom, “that we are weakening the vault on all sides at the same time. The fissure created here is not a break in a specific portion of the vault. It is a crack in the totality of its being. The Devourer is still contained, but not entirely.” His protective circle was shoring up the vault here, but not elsewhere. The flaw extended around the sphere, but not the protection. He didn’t know why. The reasons were unimportant, though. What mattered was his response.
Excavate on all sides? Extend the protective ring into a true circle around the vault?
He dismissed the idea. It would take too long. He had bought Latveria some time with the destruction of the infected villages. Orloff might get them a bit more if she was successful in her research. Not enough time – the urvullak were loose and were spreading. He had to cut Krogh off from the Devourer. He had to claim it and its power for himself.
“It might not be too late to undo the damage,” said Zargo.
Doom looked at him sharply. “What?” he snarled.
Zargo winced, and plunged on. “We must stop while there’s still time. Seal the Devourer up again, more fully than before. Seal it forever.”
“What lies beyond that wall is mine,” Doom said. “Once I claim it, the danger will be over. Destroying the urvullak will be a simple matter.” I will know all.
“But if it should escape…” Zargo protested.
“It will not,” said Doom. The words were a vow to himself. “This is not the moment to hesitate, or to stop the work, or to reverse it. We must break through that wall with all speed. There will be a short period during which the danger will increase, and then it will end utterly.” The power will be mine. All doubts, and all uncertainties, will cease. I will have that prize. I will smash through that wall.
“My lord,” said Zargo, “if I could only make you see…”
Doom held up a hand. “It is you who does not see. Since you will not, you must be silent.”
Zargo bowed his head.
Doom spent the next hour preparing the drills. He was having to alter his approach to breaking through the wall. Be accursed, Krogh, for forcing me to deal with you. He could not stay and control every step of the breaking of the wall. So, he had no choice but to embed powerful enchantments into the adamantium drill heads. This way, the double attack on the wall would continue in his absence. It would involve the application of blunt force, though. There would be less control. There would be even greater risks.
No matter. The greater risk lies in tarrying. Defeat lies in turning away. Zargo was a fool to believe sealing up the vault again would end the threat of the urvullak. The prison had always been imperfect. The Devourer had always been reaching out. It had always been feeding on the memories of the dead.
He finished the work, then stepped back to see how the great machines would function in his absence.
“Begin,” he commanded.
The drills lumbered forward on their heavy treads, behemoths approaching a castle gate. The heads spun up, surrounded by a piercing violet nimbus. They dug into the wall, and its black substance seemed to scream.
The cavern shook. The tremors were deep, as if the entire world vibrated in pain.
“Good,” said Doom.
Fifteen
Late at night, in his quarters, Doom consulted the latest reports from Verlak. People were continuing to go missing. And more villages had fallen silent, ones beyond the boundary of the zone Doom had tried to purge. The urvullak were advancing. He was sure he had slowed them down, but it was hard to see what difference he had made. If I had not acted, the deluge would already be upon us.
Maybe. The tide was rising fast all the same.
He squeezed the arms of his seat in anger. They cracked.
On the screen in front of him, he called up a map of the region and plotted the pattern of urvullak activity, suspected or confirmed. Krogh’s army was about to spread into the lowlands of Latveria, pouring out of the Carpathians like a river of rats. They were about to take their first city, Doomsburg, just beyond the mountains and a hundred miles north of Doomstadt.
No. You will not have Doomsburg, Krogh. You will not take it, and I will not destroy it. This will be your first true defeat.
He opened a communications channel to the command center of Castle Doom. He spoke to Verlak, and explained what must be done.
•••
Dawn broke over Doomsburg with the shrieking blasts of the evacuation warnings. Doom arrived with the first of the siren wails. He flew around the perimeter of the town, watching the streets fill with frightened citizens, all of them making their way south. Squadrons of drones had maintained surveillance of Doomsburg and its surroundings throughout the night. They had picked up no sign of urvullak activity, though Doom did not count on that absence being good news. All it took was a single one of the creatures to reach the city without being seen, and the drones, no matter how many of them there were, could not see everywhere at once. The sight of the population on the move was a good sign, though. Those citizens were still human, still alive. Doomsburg had not fallen yet.
South of the city, flights of heavy transport aircraft arrived, carrying enormous slabs of a prefab structure. Big as freighters, with four engines on each wing, the transports reached a wide, level area a mile south of the town. They rotated their engines to the perpendicular, hovered in place, then slowly descended with their cargo hanging beneath them from huge chains. They came down slowly, in a formation so precise that the segments came together, the building assembling itself as if out of thin air. Automatic mechanisms sealed walls together and welded seams. The last portions to descend were the eight wedges of a shallow dome. Before the first of the citizens of Doomsburg were halfway to the site, an arena of black iron had risen before them, its doors open and waiting.
