This close, Doom could study the energy and pry its secrets free. It was, as he had expected, far too powerful for him to try to overload and shut down. However, it could be fooled. It would repel him if he tried to break through, and that impact would no doubt alert the Red Skull to his presence. He would be like a fly crashing into a web. But like a web, the field let air through. The Skull would not want his island hermetically sealed.

  Doom completed his scans, then extended his right hand, the gauntlet glowing with shifting spectrums of energy, the aura’s vibration shifting to synchronize itself with the field. Doom made contact. The Wolkenland force field hummed to itself, and did not react. It treated his armor’s force field as part of itself.

  Doom passed through the barrier.

  Wolkenland appeared above him.

  The stars vanished behind the immense platform of floating rock. The night turned sullen red, lit by the energy plumes from mile-wide exhaust pipes. They emerged from the rock at even intervals around the periphery of the island, but there were two closer together at the wider, southern end.

  The stern, Doom thought. His guess looked like it might have been correct.

  He had to adjust his armor’s sensors now, turning off the signal amplification he had been using. There was so much energy surrounding him now that the readings displayed by his mask’s eye shutters resembled images of the sun. Now he had to filter out the exhaust and the shield, whose power he had yet more respect for, since it prevented even the furnaces of Wolkenland’s engines from being perceived from the outside.

  Doom stayed where he was, just inside the embrace of the force field, applying one filter after another until he had a read on a massive core of power, held inside the island toward the stern.

  Would the means to control that power be anywhere near its location? He had to start looking somewhere. This gave him a good target.

  Doom flew upward again, closing with the underside of Wolkenland. He traveled past the rock, staying just fifty feet away, looking for any kind of access point. He saw none. Perhaps the Red Skull had been worried about his threat, too. Perhaps he had tried to protect the underbelly of his monster. A wise and sound strategy.

  Also, a futile one.

  Doom arrived at a point almost directly below what would be the center of the great energy source, an unknown distance straight up. If no door would be granted him, he would create his own.

  Right arm out, as if in a gesture of command, he activated the sonic drill built into the gauntlet. A beam of energy struck the rock. In absolute silence, it bored a tunnel ten feet across through the stone. Doom rose up through the slowly lengthening passage, the conqueror worm burrowing through the Red Skull’s clay.

  Once inside the island, he made all his scans passive. He must not announce his presence prematurely. He knew where he was heading, and the mapping he had been able to do of the interior of the island, rough though it was, would do to get him to his goal.

  Progress was slow. The sonic drill was stealthy, and its stealth in part depended on its almost gentle reshaping of the material being of the island. No dust or other fragments fell away from the island to be detected by sensors. The rock struck by the beam simply ceased to be, and the tunnel appeared as if it had always been a geologic feature at this spot. Doom made himself patient with the thought that slow as the ascent was, every moment of escaping detection would add that much more power to his first real blow when he came to strike.

  After half a mile of ascent, Doom encountered his first conduit. The side of the pipe showed at the edge of the tunnel, the metal sliced by the drill, but not ruptured. Doom would not be a secret much longer, then. Soon now, very soon, he would cause some damage, and somewhere an alarm would sound, and the Red Skull would know he had unwelcome company.

  Doom’s passive scans relied on sounds, heat, vibrations, and variations in electro-magnetic radiation to map the way ahead. Enough readings were coming in now to give him a schematic of the vicinity. After another several yards, he closed in on an access tunnel. Rather than cut into it before he had to, he altered the direction of his dig and moved parallel to the passageway. He was walking now, no longer on a steep climb. He had penetrated deep into the foundations of Wolkenland. The more difficult part of the search was beginning. Close now to the core of Wolkenland’s power, he had to find the command-and-control centers.

  He traveled another hundred yards, tracking the path of the tunnel. It registered as a large one, a good fifteen feet wide, and ran straight for a long distance. A major route, Doom surmised, for the servants of the Red Skull who saw to the proper running of the island. Traveling sternward, he might be fortunate in the tunnel’s destination.

  Then, a few yards later, it came to an end at a T-junction, and Doom’s sensors read two other such intersections only a bit further on to port and starboard. At the same moment, alarms began to wail. Their cries reverberated in the stone, a warning that rang throughout the depths of Wolkenland.

  He is here! Doom could almost hear words in the electronic screams. He could almost hear the fear that lurked behind the need to install the alarms, and the fear they now spread. He smiled tightly. Time at last for the people of Wolkenland to awake from their dream of conquest and cry out at the enormity of their mistake.

  He is here! Here is here!

  Doom is here.

  Every single member of the Red Skull’s attacking force would have known this moment was inevitable. They had struck at Latveria, and his retaliation was certain as death. They must have known, and trembled, even in the deluding embrace of their beliefs. They had known but they had not, Doom was certain, understood. If they had, they would not be here. Even the Red Skull, for all his hate and ambition and pride, could not truly understand.

  He is here! He is here!

  Did the wretches, as they scurried to react to the danger, begin to understand? Did their bravado begin to fail as they realized they were in danger in their fortress, that their concealment had failed and now, a mile above the ground, they were on the defensive?

  Yes, those things must be true. They could not be human and not feel terror at his coming.

  Because he was Doom, and not even Hell was safe from him.

  He swung to his right, and the sonic drill blasted through the stone that separated his tunnel from the passage. Rock vanished, and with it ended the prologue of the war.

  Doom stepped out into a corridor of rock walls and metal floor. The alarms screamed in terror. To his left, from the stern, where the corridor turned sharply after fifty feet, came the sound of running boots.

  Doom turned to face his foes, and to teach them, in their final moments, how little they knew before now of terror.

  Nine

  The Red Skull’s troops charged around the corner. They carried automatic rifles, and they opened fire the moment they saw Doom.

  The bullets bounced off his armor, ricocheting around the hall. He hit back with concussive blasts from his gauntlets. The energy bolts slammed through the troops with torpedo impact, flattening them. Doom never slowed. He took the turn quickly and blasted another twenty troops down in the next leg of the hall. Thirty yards on, a junction waited. The direction Doom needed would be to the left, still heading to stern. But he also needed to leave the main pathways.

  These first responses from the enemy were negligible, barely worth his time. But once the Skull and his servants had a strong fix on his position, the attacks would become much more powerful. The Skull was here because he believed he could defeat Doom. The power that made Wolkenland fly and kept it hidden could also provide the energy for formidable weapons. Doom did not have the luxury of pitting his strength against theirs. If he failed, then Wolkenland would conquer Latveria.

  The troops had come at him with little organization or discipline. They were off-balance, trying to adapt to the sudden threat of his presence. He had the advantage for the moment, and must push forward as hard and fast as possible to maintain it.

  No alternate routes off this corridor. The sound of a larger concentration of troops approaching the junction. A risk to take that route, then, but one he chose, favoring speed this time. If there were no alternatives, he would have to forge his own route again.

  At the last second before he reached the junction, a moment of caution made him turn on his force field instead of rounding the intersection with a pair of concussive blasts. So, when the energy beam hit him with the power to take out a tank regiment, the explosion threw him into the wall behind, but did not incinerate him inside his armor. The blast filled the corridor with a violence of crimson and silver, a thunder clash of warring light. The bolt left the corridor wider, the walls sheared symmetrically, severed conduits jetting steam into the passage.

  Doom lunged out of the cratered wall. The blow had been so powerful, his force field needed to recharge for a few seconds before it could protect him from another such hit. At the end of the hall, the Skull’s soldiers readied the cannon to fire again. The weapon had a huge, squat barrel, more than four feet wide. More than its size, what Doom registered in the suspended moment before either he or the enemy could attack was the cannon’s age, and the inhuman designs that twined around it.

  Lemurian, he thought, and learned that much more about the Skull’s resources. Wolkenland itself showed the Skull had access to inhuman sources of power. Now Doom knew at least some of that power came from an ancient civilization that had believed it had the strength to challenge gods, and wasn’t far wrong. Doom filed the knowledge away, found his bearings, decided on his strategy, and took action, all before the troops had finished drawing a breath after the weapon’s first bolt.

  Doom hit back using sorcery, giving his armor the chance to rebuild its energy. He launched a mystical blast straight into the mouth of the cannon. For the space of the troops’ quiver of fear, nothing seemed to happen. Then, in their foolishness and terror they activated the cannon. The damaged weapon exploded, its energy unleashed and uncontrolled. The eye-searing explosion destroyed that end of the corridor, and Doom’s force field had already recharged enough to protect him from the undirected energy of the blast. Molten rock flowed down from the ceiling and in from the walls, hissing as it covered the wreckage and carbonized bodies.

  The enemy had mobilized heavy weapons more quickly than Doom had expected. He had to remember that the Skull would have trained them for exactly this scenario. Wolkenland had been constructed for this purpose above all others. The Skull wanted Latveria beneath his heel first, above all other nations. It was more than a matter of strategy, a matter of wanting Latveria and its technological storehouses. It was a matter of pride, of a humiliation avenged.

  A personal war.

  For Doom, too.

  He turned the sonic drill on the wall to his right, punched through the remaining stone, and came out into a smaller, parallel corridor. A few yards up, on the port side, he found a utility door. He wrenched it from its hinges, and found himself in a narrow access passage, cramped beside huge clusters of pipes.

  Perfect.

  He hurried down the passage, still heading to stern, and went deep into the maze of conduits and shafts that fed energy, water, and air to the foundations of Wolkenland. Now, briefly, he would hide as the island had over Latveria, an invisible destroyer.

  He would also give the Red Skull and his soldiers things to chase and fear.

  He removed a small metallic case from his belt. He set it on the floor and touched a button that was the only feature on its black, matte face. One side slid open, and the contents emerged. The case combined the technology of his molecular projector and the Doombots. Released from the containment field of the case, a dozen miniature Doombots, each about eight inches high, appeared to materialize out of thin air. They did not have all the capabilities of their full-sized models, but they would serve his needs. Their AI had enough autonomy for them to carry out their missions.

  The Red Skull’s troops were about to learn that they were fighting a war on multiple fronts.

  The miniature Doombots raced off into the maze of Wolkenland’s nervous system, traveling paths Doom could not, entering regions beyond his reach. Their optic sensors relayed what they saw to him, and he split his attention between his surroundings and those of his avatars. As the bots traveled, their scans updated Doom’s maps, and his knowledge of Wolkenland deepened moment by moment.

  Minutes after he released the miniatures, they began to spread fear through the tunnels. Doom moved carefully, letting the Doombots be the exposed blades of his attack, keeping himself invisible for as long as he could.

  The Doombots relayed gratifying scenes of mayhem and panic. A soldier looked up just in time to see a Doombot drop out of an overhead ventilation grill. He recoiled, colliding with his comrades. They stared, confused, for a precious, fatal moment, and the Doombot hit them with concussive blasts. They all went down but one, the soldier who had first seen the Doombot. Terrified, he broke and ran a fraction of a second before the blasts felled the other soldiers. Doom let the man go to become a useful vector of panic and disorder. The soldier sprinted, screaming, back down the hall. He vanished from the Doombot’s perspective.

  Doom saw him again a minute later, when he ran into two equally terrified survivors of another encounter, these ones still pursued by the miniature as it followed its purpose of causing maximum disruption. The men screamed, realizing the attacks came from multiple directions. A concussive blast took another down, and the remaining two took off, running back to the nearest intersection and then splitting off down different tunnels, their howls spreading the news of the invader who was everywhere.

  Doom laughed. He had had precious little reason to of late. But the panic he beheld gave him the satisfaction he had been denied since the first bombing.

  Another Doombot burst out of a conduit into a secondary control chamber. It took out the technicians in a matter of seconds, then plugged itself into the port of one of the consoles. Data about the heating and water of this sector of Wolkenland flowed from the consoles to Doom. He scanned the information, saw the possibilities, and sent a command back to the Doombot.

  The lights went out across the sector, and valves opened, spewing steam into the corridors. A squad of soldiers stormed into the control room a few moments later, heavily armed now with energy weapons. They came in firing, and their combined attack destroyed the Doombot. It also turned all the workstations to melted slag, and the room filled with the smoke of burning electricals, the last data sent by the Doombot before its sensors cut out.

  Doom didn’t need any further data from that quarter. He had seen, and he had commanded, and the virus the Doombot had injected into the network now circulated beyond the systems of the demolished chamber, havoc spreading in widening ripples.

  Soldiers destroyed another Doombot, and when its feed cut out, Doom moved faster. He had a clearer sense of where he was, and where he had to go. Strategy dictated that he get there before the diversionary attacks all ended. He no longer had to focus as much attention on the data streams of the bots.

  He found the passages large enough to accommodate him without difficulty. He moved through the veins of Wolkenland as if it were his own creation, readying his blow that would kill the beast.

  •••

  In the panopticon, the Red Skull watched the storm of chaos gather in strength, and move closer to Wolkenland’s power hall. He shivered from the clash of waves of anger, of triumph, of eagerness, and of fear. Doom had come, as the Skull had wanted, as he had planned. But Doom had come on his own terms, and the Skull knew too well what happened to plans that came into contact with Doom.

  But not this plan, though, not this time. After today, he would never know fear because of Doom again.

  A miniature Doombot appeared at a junction. It looked up at the surveillance lenses, and then the screen went dark. The Skull squeezed a fist tight in fury, more at the sight of the Doombot than at the loss of vision in that spot. It was the size of the Doombots that enraged him. He had seen the same sick anger on Hauptmann’s face when the first of the tiny figures had appeared. He had sent the Exile from the panopticon then. He didn’t want to see a mirror of his own emotions. He would see this crucial moment through alone.

  He ground his teeth. Doom had deployed those weapons as a calculated insult. He had so many devices at his disposal, so many ways he could wage war, but he had chosen these. Their perfectly human movements gave them an uncanny quality that unnerved his troops. But their diminutive stature was the blow that struck home. They were a reminder of how the Skull and the Exiles had left Latveria. Doom had sent them back to Exile Island, defeated and hypnotized into believing he had shrunk them into tiny dolls.

  I will do this to you again.

  Doom’s message. His threat. His vow to make the superior humans feel small. The Red Skull saw the ideological tactic behind the insult. He saw the psychological purpose. And it didn’t matter. The simple reminder of what had been done reopened the wound. The Skull felt the humiliation again, and if Doom subjected him to the same hypnotic gas as before, he would experience the ego-smashing blow just as acutely as before. His rational mind would abandon the knowledge that his senses lied, and plunge him into the trauma of the illusion.

  Doom could do these things and worse. When he had been on the ground, miles away from Skull, it had been easy to revel in the expectation of vengeance. Now the day had come, and exultation was within reach. Doom would fall. Wolkenland would destroy him.

  But for now, Doom traveled freely. He had the initiative.

  And he had a target.

  “You know where you must go,” the Skull muttered. “And you know that I am expecting you.”

  The Skull had had enough of expectations.

  “Let us end this, Doom.”

  He ordered even more reinforcements than he had already sent to the doors of the power hall. The appointed stage for their conflict.

  “Let us end this,” he said again. Then he made his promise. “I will end you.”