The Tyrant Skies: a Marvel: Untold Novel, page 1
part #6 of Marvel Untold Series
The Tyrant Skies
“We are strong,” the Red Skull said. “But so is Doom. To underestimate him is fatal. I know that. We ruled Latveria once, and we lost it.”
It had been worse than a defeat. It had been a humiliation. The Red Skull and the Exiles had conquered Latveria overnight, but in Doom’s absence. He had returned, and reclaimed his throne with contemptuous ease, and amused himself not just by hurling the Skull and the Exiles back to the island, but by convincing them of the illusion that they had shrunk to six inches in height.
The Red Skull forgave nothing. But for mockery, he reserved a vengeance of a refined and brutal venom.
“Doom must suffer,” the Skull promised. “Exquisitely. He cannot see it yet, but the noose has already closed around his neck.”
More Marvel Untold
The Harrowing of Doom by David Annandale
Reign of the Devourer by David Annandale
Dark Avengers: The Patriot List by David Guymer
Witches Unleashed by Carrie Harris
Sisters of Sorcery by Marsheila Rockwell
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Doctor Doom created by Stan Lee & Jack Kirby
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First published by Aconyte Books in 2023
ISBN 978 1 83908 195 8
Ebook ISBN 978 1 83908 196 5
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Cover art by Fabio Listrani
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For Margaux, always, for all our horizons and everything beyond them.
Cruelty has a Human Heart
And Jealousy a Human Face
Terror, the Human Form Divine
And Secrecy, the Human Dress
The Human Dress, is forged Iron
The Human Form, a fiery Forge
The Human Face, a Furnace seal’d
The Human Heart, its hungry Gorge
William Blake, “A Divine Image”
Prologue
Expect poison from the standing water.
William Blake, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”
The storm began in New York City, on a cloudless July afternoon. In Latveria, where the stars glinted bright with perfect indifference, Doom sensed the first stirrings of the hurricane to come.
In his study in Castle Doom, he sat before two screens and watched an inevitability unfold, frustrated that he could not stop it.
The screens had risen from the surface of his gigantic desk. The dais on which the desk sat had rotated to face the north window in the circular chamber. Fifteen feet high and vaulted, with floor-to-ceiling bookcases on either side of it, the window looked out from the study’s high tower, giving Doom a view of the castle and Doomstadt below. When he looked up from the screens, though, his attention went to the stars. He had rotated the dais several times in the last hour, each time to gaze at the stars from a different point of the compass. The stars stared back, remote, as indifferent to his concerns as the fools on the right-hand screen, the General Assembly of the United Nations going through the motions of a deliberation with a foregone conclusion.
The door to the study opened. Boris entered, bowing his head in apology for the intrusion. “Is there anything my lord requires?” he asked.
Clever old man, Doom thought. He had timed his arrival for the close of deliberations. He knew Doom well and sensed the monarch would require an audience for his anger. Doom wasn’t surprised. Boris had saved him as a child, and had been the sole constant human presence of his life. What might have been presumption in anyone else was the faithful anticipation of need in Boris.
“Come here,” said Doom. “Come and see how easily the duped, the greedy, and the ignorant make the world worse.”
Boris climbed the steps that spiraled around the dais and stood a respectful step behind his master.
Doom tapped the left-hand screen. It showed satellite surveillance footage of a small island. “Here is Wolkenland in the mid-Atlantic,” Doom said. “And here” – he jabbed an accusatory finger to the right, at the General Assembly hall – “are the sheep about to officially recognize the sovereignty of Wolkenland and grant it membership to the United Nations.”
“There is no chance the vote will go against Wolkenland?” Boris asked.
“None,” said Doom. “Latveria will vote no, and a few other nations will join us, I think, but not enough. We need more than a third of the members to vote our way, and it will not happen. The Security Council has recommended Wolkenland’s admission, and has done so unanimously.” Behind his mask, his lips tightened in a grim, contemptuous smile. “How charming to see the great powers of the world agree so congenially to make a grave error.”
“What could have swayed them so?”
“Myopic self-interest,” said Doom. “As ever. The wealth of Wolkenland carries great influence. So, too, do its new citizens, all of whom maintain powerful ties with the nations of their birth.” Doom grunted. “Wolkenland has many ways of ensuring that the other states of this world see only what they wish to see.”
“I know my lord will see what they do not,” said Boris.
Doom shook his head. “No,” he said. “Wolkenland thwarts my gaze.” He gestured at the satellite’s live streaming of the island. “Tell me what you can see of the nation-to-be.”
“I can see its contours,” said Boris. “It appears to rise to a higher elevation at its southern end. I see what I think are structures, but it is hard to tell from this distance.”
“That is correct,” said Doom. “There is very little else beyond dimensions to be noted here.” Wolkenland was an elongated oval, narrowing considerably at either end. It was about fifty miles long, and just over twenty at its widest point. “Now see what happens when we approach.”
Doom tapped the screen. The Latverian satellite, which he had retasked to a geostationary orbit over Wolkenland, zoomed in on the island. The satellite’s lenses were powerful enough to zero in on a single blade of grass. But the screen showed only a gray, formless, pixelated mass.
“Wolkenland has jamming technology the equal of any I have encountered,” Doom said. “Its masters do not want to be seen. Yet there is much talk of transparency, and those lies have gone unchallenged by the Security Council. I will say this for Wolkenland, though. It has been very transparent about at least one of its purposes. It is a haven, Boris, a haven for the ultra-rich, where they can be free of all taxation and other vexatious laws.”
“Was that transparency sufficient, then, for the Security Council?”
“It evidently was. A misleading honesty, Boris. For if that was the sum total of Wolkenland’s purpose, why would it need so formidable a shield against prying eyes? No, there is more at work. I have looked into this Lance Diffring, who presents himself as chief executive officer of the island. He is a puppet, not a leader. He is a buffoon for the cameras, a fiction of convenience. There is someone else behind him who chooses not to be seen. There is a deeper reason why Wolkenland seeks to be recognized by the United Nations. The reason is hidden from me, and Doom does not permit anything to be hidden from him.”
He pulled the satellite’s perspective back so the entire island became visible and in focus again. Then he returned his attention back to the General Assembly. The deliberations were over. Latveria’s ambassador had made her objections known. The voting had begun. Doom watched in silence. Boris, knowing his place, remained perfectly still.
When the results were announced, they were as Doom had predicted. Only a rough dozen nations voted against the island’s recognition. The resolution passed, and Wolkenland became the newest member of the United Nations.
The moment the results were announced, the island vanished.
Boris stifled a gasp.
Doom’s mood darkened. He stared at the empty ocean where Wolkenland had been. He began a full instrument scan of the area, but already knew he would find nothing.
This is dangerous.
The conviction came to him, certain as night, though he could not divine the nature or the direction of the threat.
The storm had begun.
Part I
I was angry with my friend;
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe;
I told it not, my wrath did grow.
And I waterd it in fears,
Night & morning with my tears:
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles.
And it grew both day and night.
Till it bore an apple bright.
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine.
And into my garden stole,
When the night had veild the pole;
In the morning glad I see;
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.
William Blake, “A Poison Tree”
One
Maybe he shouldn’t be wearing a tie.
It was time to go. The media from around the globe had gathered on the tarmac of the heliport. The reporters had been kept waiting long enough to sharpen their appetites for answers even more, and it had them stirring and restless. He should be on his way now to address them and, through them, the world. The moment was crucial, for him and for Wolkenland.
But the tie could ruin things.
“A tie, yay or nay?” he called out.
“You’ll sort it out,” Addyson, his wife, answered from down the hall.
Lance Diffring ducked back into the en suite bathroom. He looked again at the tie he had just spent fifteen minutes picking out, and at the image he was about to present.
Diffring had years of experience with public appearances, selling projects, or even just concepts of projects. His company, Fusionomics, nominally specialized in tech developments in fields ranging from clean energy sources to disposable rocket engines.
In practice, only a handful of its projects had ever actually come into being. That didn’t matter. What Fusionomics did well was provide flashy-sounding investment opportunities that the right people got into, and then out of, early and fast, leaving the endlessly renewable ocean of the gullible to arrive too late and be left holding shares of vaporware.
Diffring was the face of Fusionomics. He had perfected the persona of the approachable billionaire, the man to imagine (but only imagine) having a beer with. The social media poster, but not the socially concerned citizen, not the troll. He was the good side of money, the reason why really, let’s be honest, can I be frank? there should be no such concept as obscene wealth.
The reality, yes. He lived it. Just the concept of obscenity. Do away with that.
Eyes wide and caring, face lightly freckled with innocence, light brown hair kept short so he could make a show of not paying attention to it. He still had, in his forties, the excited glow of youth. He was his own best product.
Today, though, he would be selling more than himself, more than Fusionomics. For the first time that he could remember, he would be answerable to a higher authority.
And so the question of the tie. He had opted for the more formal look, a change in visual tone in keeping with his new role.
A mistake. That would send the wrong signals. That look could be read as if he were moving away from Fusionomics, or, worse, that the informal Diffring had been a lie all along.
No. He’d been trying to fix what hadn’t been broken. He was letting his awe of Wolkenland, and the adventure he had become part of, get in the way of his skills.
He knew what he was doing. He had the billions to prove that. All he had to do was let the Lance Diffring magic shine.
He went back to the bedroom and sauntered into a walk-in closet twenty feet deep, pulling off the tie. He kept the slacks but took off the dress shirt and replaced it with a polo shirt, one without a monogram.
There. That was better. He felt more like himself.
In the bedroom again, he paused to look out the window. This is what I’m working for. His mansion rested midway up the terraced hill that ran the length of the starboard side of the island.
Starboard, he told himself. He had to remember that. Wouldn’t look good to get his directions wrong when he spoke. He had become used to thinking of his hillside as being on the east side, which it had been when he had first moved to Wolkenland. But the island was no longer in the mid-Atlantic. It was in the Mediterranean, and its orientation had turned ninety degrees from what it had been.
Bow and stern, port and starboard. Think of Wolkenland as a ship. He could do that.
Another terraced hill faced his on the port side, a twin slope of greenery and mansions. Between the hills was the promenade, twenty-five miles of formal gardens, parkland, fountains, and statues. Diffring looked at the statues now, marble colossi a hundred feet tall, representations of muscular perfection and achievement.
He smiled. The statues were not aspirational for the residents of Wolkenland. They were mirrors.
In the center of the promenade, surrounded by fountains, stood the neo-classical council hall, modeled on the Parthenon. Its name was a formality, at least in practice. It existed to give the residents of Wolkenland an outlet for their egos, a place for them to meet in splendor and play at governance, even though they might as well host Snakes and Ladders tournaments for all the impact their deliberations would have. To date, there had only been three gatherings there, all of them ceremonial rituals of self-congratulation to mark various milestones as Wolkenland achieved completion and became fully operational.
Diffring didn’t know much about how Wolkenland had been constructed. He didn’t have to. Not his concern. In one of their meetings, though, the Skull had raved triumphantly about weaving the seamless from the patchwork. Whatever that meant, whatever the patchwork components were, Diffring had to hand it to the Skull. Wolkenland was a magnificent whole, a product rather than a sum of its parts.
He stepped into the personal elevator next to the bedroom door. It took him to the mansion’s rooftop landing pad and the waiting hovercar. The pilot, clad in the black uniform of Wolkenland’s security forces, nodded respectfully as Diffring settled into the passenger seat. The canopy settled smoothly down over him, and the hovercar’s near-silent antigrav engines lifted them into the air.
The sleek, stubby-winged car rose to the height of the jagged peaks that lined the entire perimeter of Wolkenland. Before the car crossed their line and began its descent, Diffring looked sternward, to the harsh, treeless plateau and the castle. Dark, hard, unforgiving, the castle was a brooding mass, a skull porcupined with turrets and spires. The contrast between the castle and the verdant paradise of the mansions made Diffring’s stomach clench. He guessed that effect was deliberate. He should be used to it by now. All the same, he tended to keep the blinds drawn over his mansion’s stern-facing windows.
Then the hovercar dropped below the peaks, and the castle passed out of sight. Diffring looked down toward the starboard heliport, and his assembled audience.
He grinned. A big crowd. This was going to be good.
Five minutes later, he mounted the podium that had been erected on the tarmac. It put him ten feet above the scrum. He appreciated the utilitarian look of the podium. Nothing fancy, nothing grand. The goal today was to reassure, not intimidate. Diffring congratulated himself on his final choice of attire. He and the podium were a good fit.
He waved at the reporters, the cell phones, and the television cameras. “Hi everyone,” he said. “My name’s Lance Diffring–” like anyone watching wouldn’t know, but a touch of the humble never hurt “–and I’m here to welcome you to Wolkenland. And maybe answer a few questions while I’m at it.” He grinned. “Because I’m guessing you might have a few.”
They did, and they all started asking them at once. Diffring laughed, let the cacophony go on for a few moments, then raised his hands to ask for quiet.
“Please,” he said, “please.” When the surf roar of shouts receded, he said, “Let me try to cover some main points for you first.” He smiled again at an expectant world. “Let’s start with this: what is Wolkenland, and how did it get here? In a nutshell, Wolkenland is an island, but it’s also a ship. As solid as the land feels under your feet, we are, in fact, floating. Pretty impressive, right? How does it all work? That, I have to admit, is beyond me. Some geniuses put this all together, and that’s good enough for me.”
