“But Wolkenland moved here undetected,” someone called out before he could go on.

  Diffring didn’t mind. The question gave him the segue he wanted to his next point. “Yes, it did,” he said. “That’s pretty impressive, too, isn’t it?” He paused half a beat, long enough for the reporters to think of their questions, but not long enough for them to start asking them. “But why bother? Why should Wolkenland shield itself from view? Because this is more than a mobile island. It’s a home. It’s a sanctuary. It isn’t news to anyone that we now live in a world where privacy is a vanishing resource. On Wolkenland, privacy matters again, and thrives again, because we have the technology to ensure that very thing.”

  “Privacy for whom?” came the question.

  Diffring answered with a self-deprecating grimace. He’d practiced the look for hours before the mirror the night before. The press conference had reached the first of its crucial moments. Diffring had to get all of them right.

  “Well, for me, for one. And for the people like me.”

  “For billionaires.”

  “OK. Yes. Yes, that’s who we are. Don’t get me wrong, now. I’m not looking for sympathy. We’re a pretty fortunate bunch. But I think everyone can understand the need to not live in a fishbowl, if only for a little while.”

  “Isn’t that a nice way of saying you’re trying to avoid scrutiny?”

  Diffring looked in the approximate direction of the question. This was a tougher crowd than he was used to, and he didn’t recognize any of the faces. He’d come to know many of the reporters on the tech and finance beats, and liked to use their names when he answered. But this was the foreign bureaus crowd, the reporters used to traveling far for a story, and from many different countries. Still, he’d expected this, and prepared for it.

  “What you call scrutiny,” he said, “I think the fair-minded might also call persecution. Look, I know the score. It’s easy for people to hate us. I mean, yes, we’re rich. Really rich. Over-the-top rich. And? The world economy depends on us, like it or not. We’re the wealth-creators. Some of us are even super heroes.”

  “On Wolkenland?”

  “No, not here as such. That was just an example, you know, of why you have to be careful of overly wide brush strokes.” Work the self-deprecation again. Hunch up a bit, raise the hands in a don’t look at me shrug. “I mean, I’d love to be a super hero, but…” Flex the bicep, show it lacking. “Yeah, I don’t think that’s me.”

  Wait for the laugh.

  It wasn’t as big as he had hoped. Good enough, though.

  “Kidding aside, though, we’re doing good here. Wolkenland is actively doing good.” He made a little production of looking at his watch. “Yeah, looks like it’s time. Time for me to stop yammering at you and show you something instead.” He stepped down from the podium and started walking toward the fore end of the heliport. “Hope you’re wearing your hiking shoes,” he called out. “Follow me! Follow, follow!”

  He led the reporters off the tarmac to a path carved into the foreboding cliff face that surrounded Wolkenland. There were only a couple of spots that provided any kind of access to the island. One was the heliport, which was a platform that projected out from the cliffs. The other, a mile further along, was the port. Here the cliffs turned inward, forming a deep harbor, one wide enough to permit entry to even the largest cargo ships. A long bank of elevators was there to take passengers up the cliffs, while cranes hung over the peaks, the largest and strongest Diffring had ever seen. They could lift huge pallets of cargo the thousand-foot height up over the peaks and onto the island proper.

  A passenger ship was just pulling in when Diffring and the reporters arrived.

  “Is this part of Wolkenland’s fleet?” a man asked.

  “No,” said Diffring. “Wolkenland doesn’t have any seagoing ships. We don’t need them.”

  “Is there no transport off and on the island?” a woman wanted to know.

  “We find travel by air works fine for our needs,” said Diffring.

  “There’s enough for your whole population?” the journalist pursued. “And what if the island sinks?”

  “We have preparations for every contingency. Believe me, I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t completely convinced it was safe. And we do charter ships as needed.” He gestured at the liner. People filled its decks. “This being a case in point.”

  “More of the one percent?” another reporter asked.

  “On the contrary,” said Diffring. “Refugees.”

  “From where?”

  “From everywhere. From anywhere they have fled, whether driven out by war, famine, persecution, or any other reason. You see, Wolkenland really is a haven. It isn’t just for the rich. It’s for anyone who has lost their home or doesn’t feel at home. We’re a small nation, but we’ll take in as many as we can.”

  “What system of government is welcoming them?” the woman who had been pressing him asked.

  Diffring laughed. “Do we talk about the government of a cruise ship?” The answer was disingenuous, and he knew it.

  “Then who is your captain?”

  “Who’s to say that we have one?” This was one of the important lies to sell. “We’re all the captains of our destiny.”

  The ship’s gangways unfolded and touched the pier. Crowds began to move down them.

  “Shall we head back to the heliport?” Diffring said. “I think these people deserve their privacy, too. Don’t you?”

  •••

  Castle Wolkenland’s panopticon occupied a windowless chamber near the top of the main body of the structure. Screens covered the walls and the slight dome of the ceiling. In the center of the room, a throne sat on a piston that rose and descended on command, just as the throne rotated and tilted, providing the best angle for viewing at a moment’s notice. Controls in the arms of the throne changed the views of any of the screens, flipping to any of Wolkenland’s thousands of surveillance cameras.

  From his throne, the Red Skull saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.

  True, he had not constructed Wolkenland with his bare hands. He had not designed its power sources. He had not found the way to fuse its disparate parts together into a functioning whole. None of its technological miracles were his creations. He did not necessarily understand how any given facet of the island worked.

  None of this mattered. He had gathered the people who did understand these things, and who had the skill to make his vision a reality. He had willed Wolkenland into being. Thus, it was his creation.

  Just as he was his own creation. Many decades ago, there might have been someone named Johann Schmidt born into this body. But the Skull had not thought of himself as that person in a long time. Johann Schmidt had been a weak construction, a rough draft of an identity that had simply provided the raw material for the Red Skull. And if Hitler had shaped Schmidt into the Red Skull, then the creation had so long and so greatly surpassed his father that the credit for what he now was belonged to him and him alone.

  Raw material. The true genius was the one who knew how to command it to take its true form.

  The Skull thought a lot about what really constituted genius. More than he would like. Wolkenland should serve, he believed, as a balm for such bitter musings. It manifested his reasoning in the world, because the so-called geniuses who had labored to create it, labored for him. They answered to him. They made what he commanded. His, then, was the supreme genius.

  Any intellect that did not serve him would be destroyed. Wolkenland would see to that, too. Through it, he would see one particular intellect brought low before annihilation.

  Nowhere did he feel the rush of ownership, pride, and control more than in the panopticon. This was his favorite place in the castle, and on the entire island.

  Here, he held Wolkenland in his grasp. He saw everything. He saw the landscape from the perspective of the castle, the interiors of the mansions, the approaches from all sides, and more. He knew every secret, and he could govern every action. This was where his ownership of his creation was at its purest, most concentrated, and most absolute.

  At the moment, he was dividing his attention between Lance Diffring’s press conference and scanning through the operational and propulsion centers of the island. Diffring seemed to be handling his assignment satisfactorily. He had chosen Diffring for his selfishness, as pure and absolute as a flawless diamond. It had led Diffring to a blissfully untroubled embrace of fascism long before he had joined the Skull’s ranks. It also gifted him with a facile plausibility before an audience. He concealed what passed for his true self whenever necessary. He was, the Skull had judged, perfect as the public face of Wolkenland. And Diffring had proven him right. While he spoke, facial recognition software scanned the faces of the reporters, cataloguing who was present, recording every question for the Skull to make notes later of who was hostile, and would be punished in due course.

  More important, and more gratifying, were the reports he was seeing on the aftermath of Wolkenland’s maiden voyage.

  If those reporters only knew, he thought, and grinned tightly behind his crimson mask. If they only knew that Wolkenland had not sailed from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean. It had flown.

  The patchwork creation, the assemblage of so many pieces, his vision, had flown. The years of work and struggle had been rewarded. Wolkenland was a whole, and it flew.

  The idea had come to him on Exile Island, and the largest part of Wolkenland had been excavated from his frequent home. The largest part, but also the most mundane. The crucial elements of Wolkenland had come from Lemuria and Atlantis. To the technology of the sunken cities had been added fragments of the Power Cosmic. There was even, to his immense pride, some recovered essence of a dead Celestial. That one element had required three years of planning, preparation, and gathering of resources to acquire.

  The other great resource he had harvested was brainpower. He needed the scientists, the engineers, the eccentrics, and the dreamers who would turn his will into reality. Some of those he sought embraced his vision readily, falling over themselves in their eagerness to serve. Others had to be forced to fulfill their destiny. Kidnapping, blackmail, torture, enslavement…

  The tried-and-true methods never failed to persuade.

  The other thing he had needed to create Wolkenland was money. A great deal of money. That had been the easiest of all the resources to gather. A population of the ideologues and the willfully ignorant had rushed to become part of the nascent microstate.

  Still, the effort to create Wolkenland in secret had been great, and the years longer. The Red Skull was not a patient man. Obsession and hate gave him the strength to see the project through to completion.

  And Wolkenland was almost complete. There was one more piece to be added to it, and that would be arriving before too many more days had passed.

  On the screens, the press conference ended. The reporters filed into the various crafts that had brought them here, and departed.

  Good.

  When the last of the journalists had gone, the Skull rose from his throne and left the panopticon. He made his way to the central rooftop of the castle, to his private heliport. An armored hovercar waited to take him to the harbor. It was time to greet Wolkenland’s newest residents.

  •••

  The elevators, each capable of transporting fifty people at a time, carried refugees to a warehouse-sized chamber inside the perimeter peaks. Corridors led from it to other destinations on the island, always inside the hills or underground. The entire transfer of refugees took place without any of Wolkenland’s elite residents having to witness it.

  Unless they wished to. Audience galleries on the port and starboard sides of the chamber looked down on the floor. A few dozen spectators had gathered today. The Skull’s reviewing platform jutted out of the fore wall, above the main exit from the chamber, opposite the elevator banks. The refugees would pass beneath them on their way to their fates.

  The Red Skull made a point of coming here on days that the big ships arrived, bringing hundreds of new arrivals to the island. He came to enjoy the double shock that hit the refugees. The first came as they spilled out of the elevators and saw the Red Skull. People stumbled in surprise. Some cried out in horror. Others began to weep. All of them started to realize the depth of the deception that had been worked on them, and to feel the violent death of all their hope.

  The second shock came moments after, reinforcing the first with action. Officers of Wolkenland’s black-clad security forces surrounded the refugees as they moved into the chamber, and slapped manacles on them, attaching them to a chain that threaded between their legs.

  Fifty people in each elevator, a hundred to each chain. The arithmetic of oppression, for the satisfaction of the Skull.

  He stood with a wide stance, arms clasped behind his back. He remained silent and motionless until all the passengers had arrived and been shackled. Then he spoke, hidden receivers picking up his voice and amplifying it across the space.

  “Insects,” he said. “That is what you are. Maggots squirming in the flesh of society. You have no place. That is why you are here. You are the rejected, and the ejected. You have no value, and you had the arrogance to come to Wolkenland expecting the welcome and the handout. You will receive our justice instead. The world has no use for you. But we do.”

  He let the last sentence hang in the air, a threatening spur to their imaginations. Then the guards led them away, out of the chamber and to the dark places of Wolkenland.

  In the galleries, the audience applauded.

  •••

  Six weeks later, the final piece arrived. Retrieving this piece had been the first part of the project that the Red Skull initiated, but it had taken the longest to complete. After five years, the probe he had sent to low orbit over Jupiter returned.

  On the roof of the castle, beyond the Skull’s heliport, was another flat, circular area, a wider one. An hour after sunset, the Skull walked to its edge and looked up. A bright glow in the clouds became the flare of retro-rockets as the probe descended, the thunder of its engines rolling across the sea. The reinforced steel of the landing zone, ten feet thick, split into four wedges. With a heavy grind, they pulled back, and the probe, not much larger than the fuselage of a small, private plane, descended into the castle. The landing hatch closed again, and the Skull hurried back inside, descending to the launch and recovery bay.

  The team had already removed the cargo and transferred it to a stasis tank. At the base of the probe, the project’s leader, Greta Thorne, watched as her subordinates rolled the tank away.

  “Well?” the Skull asked. “Is it viable?”

  “It is,” said Thorne.

  “And it will respond to the procedure?”

  “It should. The results of the preliminary scans are what we expected. Of course, we won’t know definitively unless we go ahead with the procedure.”

  “Don’t,” said the Skull. “Not unless I give the order.” He would not risk any ambiguity on this matter.

  “Of course.” Thorne gave a brisk nod but looked disappointed. She wasn’t just willing to cross lines. She lived for the thrill of transgressing them. That made her valuable to the Skull, but it also meant he had to keep her on a short rein. There were contingency measures he did not want deployed unless he had no other choice.

  “What about the exoskeleton?” Thorne’s other project had begun as a thought experiment by the Skull. Its use wasn’t something he planned on, either. It would defeat the purpose of everything else on Wolkenland. But he wanted all possibilities explored.

  Thorne frowned at a transgression that had eluded her grasp. “None of the results satisfy me,” she said. “Too much instability. That isn’t unexpected, given what we’re working with, but the problems remain intractable. We will continue to press forward if you wish, of course.”

  “But you are not optimistic.”

  “Given enough time, everything is possible.”

  The Skull nodded. Every task for Thorne became an obsession. If it involved something terrible, it also became a passion. The exoskeleton could wait, though. The Skull had less faith in its success than Thorne. What the probe had brought back was much better. He looked at the stasis tank. “This is your first priority.”

  “If you need it, the specimen will be ready.”

  “Good,” said the Skull. “Then we are ready.” He tapped the communicator on his wrist, opening a channel to the control centers of Wolkenland.

  “Security, all shields and cloaking systems active,” he commanded. “Engine room, signal lift-off.

  “Navigation, set course for Latveria.”

  Two

  Wolkenland had disappeared from the Mediterranean in September. It was now October, and Doom had been unable to find any trace of the island.

  The failure frustrated him, as all failures did. They ate at the back of his mind during the day, and eroded his sleep. Failure, large or small, should be foreign to him in a well-ordered universe. But failure, in one form or another, endlessly dogged his steps. Even on this day, which celebrated a triumph, though the victory disguised another failure.

  He had tried to push thoughts of Wolkenland away a week ago. No evidence pointed to the island being a threat to Latveria specifically. He had watched the press conference, unimpressed with Lance Diffring’s lies, and especially mistrustful of the show of humanitarianism.

  He had also learned nothing useful. The care with which the conference had been stage-managed, showing the world’s cameras nothing of the island, while delivering all the right, reassuring phrases, was all the proof he needed that Wolkenland had much to hide. But did that make it a threat to Latveria specifically? No reason to think so.