The Tyrant Skies: a Marvel: Untold Novel, page 17
part #6 of Marvel Untold Series
“The hum is nothing,” he said to Parrish. “Ignore it. And tell Manning to start his advance.”
“Yes, sir.”
Hauptmann raised his hand, the metal gleaming in the sun, and he gave the signal to march.
The column moved up the trail. As Hauptmann climbed past the terraces, the hum became louder. He felt it in his teeth. His eyes wanted to water, though they stayed dry. He glanced back at his troops and saw discomfort in their faces. The level of morale displeased him. He hadn’t heard any murmurs about the level of deployment against Latveria. No one said aloud that the war was taking a much larger toll than anyone had expected. But if the thought had crossed his mind, he knew it had occurred to others. And now an insurrection on Wolkenland, the island that should be immune to such a thing. It made no sense to the soldiers that they should be inconvenienced by people they considered subhuman.
A slaughter would help. A good massacre to reestablish the proper order of the world. Hauptmann would feel better. His troops would, too.
If only that hum would stop.
At the terrace with the column’s target estate, the hum seemed to be coming from everywhere, as if the rocks of the ground, the trees along the trail, and the bricks of the estate wall had all become tuning forks. By the time Hauptmann and his troops arrived at the main gate, he could see a faint vibration in his hand. While he waited for breaching charges to be placed on the walls, he had to keep his mouth open so his teeth wouldn’t buzz against each other.
“Sir,” said Parrish. She looked strained from the hum, her brow pinched, a grimace tugging at the corners of her mouth. Down the row, soldiers winced and rubbed at their ears.
Parrish held out a communicator. “The oberleutnant wishes to speak with you.”
Hauptmann took the communicator. He refused to wear an earpiece. Constant chatter was distracting. Juggling communication was the job of a subordinate. “Yes, Manning?” he said.
“Charges are set, sir. But this hum…”
“Ignore it,” said Hauptmann. “If it is an attack, it’s nothing more than an annoyance. Begin the attack in one minute from my count. Starting now.”
He clicked off before Manning could answer, taking his obedience as a given, and tossed the communicator back to Parrish. “One minute!” he called.
The edge of the terrace was narrow. The properties took up almost all the available space. Only about fifteen feet lay between the wall and the edge of the terrace, a sheer, thirty-yard drop. Hauptmann had to pull his troops back left and right of the charges to reach a safe distance.
The minute passed, and explosions shook the terrace and the one above, the blasts going off with near-perfect simultaneity. Hauptmann had ordered that more powerful explosives than necessary be used. He wanted the intimidation factor of the thunder and the fireballs. Let the enemy know that the end had come.
The thunder satisfied him with its magnitude, a roar of wrath, and its echoes still rolled as Hauptmann led the charge through the long breach in the wall. A thousand soldiers stormed into the mansion’s wooded grounds.
The hum grew worse the closer they came to the mansion. The sound stayed low, but the pulse increased in frequency, like a power source ramping up.
The groomed parkland of the mansion ended at a wide garden of gravel paths and knee-height, manicured hedges. A clear run from here to the mansion’s portico and great doors. Hauptmann paused at the edge of the trees and waved the troops forward.
“Open fire!” he ordered. “Kill anything that moves!”
Energy beams and bullets slammed into the mansion’s façade, a massive barrage that would suppress any attempt to return fire from within the mansion. For the first few seconds of the attack, Hauptmann grinned at what he perceived as the success of his strategy. If the slaves had any weapons inside, they weren’t able to use them.
Then his smile faltered. For all the flashes he saw go off in front of the building, there was no damage. No windows broken, no masonry chipped. The mansion remained untouched.
His mind raced, and the explanation that occurred to him explained the hum, too. A force field?
But how…? The houses were not equipped with force fields. The Skull had permitted no defensive technology in the mansions. The residents had to depend on him for protection, and they would never be able to protect themselves from him.
So how…?
No, the how still didn’t matter, all the hows could wait for after the battle.
Hauptmann stayed where he was. He let the charge continue. He would see how strong the force field was, whether it could really stand up to the impact of the massed attack of his soldiers. If they noticed that their fire did nothing, they didn’t show it. They shouted as they ran, creating a human thunder to follow the explosions, and they hurled themselves like a tidal wave at the mansion.
And now, after the thunder of the charges, and the thunder of voices, came the lightning. Terrible, unending, a blinding wall of silver, and the hum turned into a scream of energy, a shriek from a maw the size of the mansion. The sound wave lifted Hauptmann up and threw him back into the trees. Trunks splintered and branches flew in the gale of the scream. Hauptmann slammed into a thicker, stronger trunk and slumped to the ground.
He struggled for breath and covered his eyes. His ears rang, and his head felt like he had been trapped inside a struck cathedral bell. The wind of the shriek ended, and the fiercest glare faded, but the lightning continued, a flashing, convulsing wall that obscured the mansion from view and extended the full width of the estate.
Hauptmann staggered forward, cautiously now, to the new, ragged edge of the woods. He stopped there, hiding behind a trunk that had been blown apart a few feet above his head. He stared at the grounds littered with incinerated corpses. From a point a few yards ahead of Hauptmann’s position to the energy wall itself, nothing moved. His heart sank, and he couldn’t believe what he saw. The initial burst of the wall had devastated the attacking forces. Closer to the woods, a few figures stirred. A few had regained their feet, and were moving back into the tree line, retreating before he had given the command.
Hauptmann slumped against the trunk. He didn’t have the strength to call a halt. He would be making his own departure soon. The battle here was over. He didn’t know where Parrish was, couldn’t communicate with Manning, but he didn’t have to. He knew the same thing had happened on the other terrace. Only a fraction of the troops he commanded had survived.
He would have to find Parrish, if she lived, or commandeer the communications system of one of the mansions below. He had to tell the Red Skull what had happened. He feared the response, but even more, he feared the mind that had created the wall of lightning.
It couldn’t be Doom. But who else could have done this?
The questions and the impossibilities gathered, terrifying in their implications. Hauptmann tore his mesmerized gaze from the wall and stumbled away from the mansion, pursued by the horror that he might have been seen.
•••
From the rooftop of Lance Diffring’s mansion, Doom observed the energy barriers. Nothing came through. They rose high, a hundred feet beyond the roof, and came together in a tight mesh of cat’s-cradling flashes. He nodded, pleased by his handiwork.
It had been a simple matter to reroute and reshape the power of the houses to his will. The Red Skull had not commanded the creation of a power source for the houses independent of the one that fueled the island’s flight and shields. Why would he when he had an inexhaustible supply of energy? He had not foreseen the possibility that someone in the houses would seek to tap into the power for reasons other than the ones intended.
No. The thought that someone would wish to do that, and would have the skills to make their will a reality, would have been utterly beyond his imagination.
Doom glanced over at the mansion’s helipad, and the craft that sat on it. A poor tactician might try to use that in the hopes of a quick flight to the Red Skull’s castle. Doom had no interest in such an attempt. The path he had marked out was slower, but certain. From the moment Valeria had broken his chains in the mines, every step of his conquest of Wolkenland had unfolded as he had decreed. Even without his armor, and without his sorcery, he felt himself truly becoming Doom once more. A nation trembled before him, as it should.
A large group of the refugees had gathered on the roof. They kept a respectful distance from him, their awestruck eyes going back and forth from the barrier and him.
Valeria had come up with them, and she stepped forward, stopping when she had crossed half the distance. Acting as the bridge between the people and Doom, she said, “What happens next?”
“Next, we advance,” said Doom. He pointed aft, down the corridor created by the two halves of the barrier. “I will make an adjustment, and the power I have harnessed will extend through the estate wall as far as the next mansions on each of the terraces we have taken. I will harness the energy in those houses, and so we will advance, in a tunnel of fire, until we reach the castle. There the battle will be truly met.” He looked past Valeria to the others. “Do you understand what that means?”
“We’re ready,” someone called out, and the others shouted their agreement.
“Better to die in a fight that matters than in the mines,” someone else said.
“Then go below and tell your fellows, and contact the other mansion,” said Doom. “We leave in ten minutes.”
“Who are you?” Chen asked. She gazed up at the flashing vault, and then back at Doom. “How can you do these things? Who are you?”
No need for secrecy any longer. In the mines, and in the early stages of the liberation, when he was vulnerable, he had had to ensure that there had been no chance of the Skull learning that he was free and active. He had told Valeria this, and she had understood. Now, though, the march toward the heart of the Red Skull’s empire had truly begun, and he would realize, sooner or later, the identity of the enemy who faced him. Doom wanted him to realize. He needed the fear and uncertainty that the knowledge would create in the Skull’s mind.
“I am Victor von Doom,” he said. “Lord of Latveria. And for the Red Skull, I am Nemesis.”
Doom. A whisper, and then a murmur among the refugees, the sound of the first stones beginning the rockslide.
“Go now,” said Doom. “Make ready, as I have commanded.”
They left. Valeria stayed on the roof. When she and Doom were alone, she crossed the rest of the distance to him. “They will follow you anywhere now,” she said.
“Yes,” said Doom, unsure why she felt the need to point out the obvious.
“Anywhere,” she repeated, and gave him a pointed look.
Ah. So she thought to inspire caution in him. “They must,” he said. “If they want to be free of the Skull, they must do as I say. Not all will survive. There is no other way. You could not have expected otherwise.”
“No,” Valeria admitted. “I know what we’re up against. And I know that you have done everything you could to ensure their survival.”
Doom said nothing, uncertain how to process this form of praise, unwilling to interrupt its flow.
“When we get there,” Valeria said. “When we get to the castle…” She hesitated.
“The Red Skull’s defenses will be strongest there. He will be at his most powerful, and his most desperate.”
Valeria reached out and touched Doom’s arm. His skin burned where her fingers brushed him. “Are you going to fight him as you are?”
There was worry in her voice, but also hope.
“No,” he said, and he saw her face fall. “Why? Do you wish to see me fail?”
“No!” she said, visibly shocked. “Of course I don’t! I just…” Hesitantly, gently, her touch light as a breeze, she took his hand. “I never thought I’d see you again as you once were.”
“I don’t know what you mean. That past is gone, along with its face.”
“I think you do,” she said softly.
Maybe he did. And with her hand in his, he wanted to understand. He wanted the past, some part of it at least, to live on. Memories rushed in. No, stronger than memories, visions of the past, vivid as now and poignant as yesterday. Visions of the days of happiness with Valeria, the happiness stolen from the darkness of Vladimir’s reign, the idylls in the midst of struggle. The happiness he had abandoned when he left Latveria, that in truth he had already begun to abandon when he committed himself to the path of anger and vengeance, the path that had saved Latveria, would save it again, and would yet save the world.
She held his hand, and he wanted so very much to believe that he did not have to give up this new memory, this present, that it could continue into the future, that he did not have to let go of her hand.
He would let himself want that, at least a bit longer. He would give himself that hope. But for now, the moment had to end. They had torn it from another darkness, another struggle, and the darkness would only be patient with them for a short time. The war would not wait long.
Wouldn’t it wait, though, another few minutes? Wouldn’t it wait for him to say words that might do more than prolong the moment? They might turn it into a reparation, a bridge from the past to the present, and a foundation from the present to the future.
No, he could not indulge. He must focus on the war. If he let indulgence have its way, and took his eye off the prosecution of the war, he could still lose. Victory and defeat balanced on a dagger point. If the Skull won, that would sound the death toll for so much.
And Valeria had died because of him in a great many universes.
“I cannot fight the Red Skull as I am,” said Doom. “Not if I would be victorious. I am incomplete. The Skull has the greatest part of me imprisoned.”
“Not the greatest part,” Valeria said.
This was not the time to argue the point. “The most powerful part, then,” he said. “I am a fragment of myself, Valeria. The Red Skull holds half my being imprisoned. It must be freed if I am to defeat it.”
“How will you free it?”
“I won’t,” said Doom. “The Skull will.”
“Why would he do that?”
“Because of his fear. In the end, that is what governs his actions, and so it will now. Because he fears me, he will free me.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Neither will the Red Skull, until it is too late.”
Nineteen
The Red Skull already knew the bad news when he heard from Hauptmann. On his throne in the panopticon, he saw the readings, and the drone pictures. The mansion had vanished from the grid, then vanished from sight but reappeared on the sensors with a vengeance. An energy firestorm marched with gradual implacability in the direction of the castle.
And the bad news kept coming. What should have been the final conquest of Doomstadt had faltered. The messages from the commanders in the field were panicked, fragmentary, many of them ending in a final scream of terror and pain. Something was killing his paratroopers in midair and targeting his troops on the ground. They were dying without ever being in battle. They died as if the Skull had commanded it, as if a mirror version of himself were engaging in a remote-control rampage, eliminating his own forces out of sheer perversity.
He couldn’t understand what was happening. He had Doom, he had absolute control over Wolkenland, and he could attack Latveria anywhere, at any time, with virtually no warning. How then could it be that Wolkenland appeared to be under attack on two fronts? As if the truth of the situation were precisely reversed, and Doom had launched a dual assault on the Red Skull.
The Skull had multiple screens showing him Doom in the portal trap, and the readings of ethereal, multi-dimensional agony. He had to keep looking at Doom to reassure himself of his prisoner’s presence. He had already gone to the power chamber twice this morning to confirm with his own eyes that all was well. He couldn’t afford that luxury any longer, with the situations spiraling out of control. He glared at the image of Doom, knowing the chaos would please him, grateful at least that he could deny Doom that small grain of comfort.
“Suffer, Doom,” the Skull snarled. “Whatever happens, all you know is suffering. And if, somehow, the events of this universe pass before you, then you’ll see that it doesn’t matter how Latveria defends itself. I haven’t done anywhere close to my worst.”
Thinking about what he had in reserve made him feel better. He didn’t believe he would have to use what the probe had returned from Jupiter’s orbit. But knowing he controlled the endgame, no matter what, helped.
Hauptmann’s call only added to his frustration, though.
“You had a simple task,” the Skull told Hauptmann when he came on the line, cutting him off before he could speak. “You failed to subdue unarmed slaves with a greater number of armed troops. What good are you, exactly?”
“There was nothing I could do.”
“You could have done what I ordered.”
“I tried!”
The Skull said nothing, waiting for Hauptmann to realize how pathetic he sounded.
“That energy attack wiped out my command,” the Exile continued, oblivious to shame, pleading for sympathy. Such an embarrassment. The Skull debated shooting Hauptmann when he next saw the man. “How could I attack without an army?”
“And you had no warning of the imminence of such an attack?” the Skull asked. He had seen drone footage of the disaster. He had heard, after the fact, the building hum.
This time Hauptmann stayed quiet.
“I see,” said the Skull. “And did you attempt to do anything other than march your troops into oblivion?”
Another long silence. Finally, peevish, Hauptmann said, “That isn’t what’s important.”
The audacity stunned the Skull. Iron-Hand would never have dared say that in his presence. “Is that so?” he said, voice tight with menace. Think carefully about how next you greet me, Hauptmann. “Then tell me what is important.”
