chaos engine trilogy Page 4

  The Emperor nodded, pleased with what he saw. It was an orderly garden, one that quietly reflected the world around it.

  His order. His world.

  “Master?”

  Von Doom turned. Just inside the doorway of the Garden Room stood a skittish, unassuming little man in a charcoal-gray suit. Of average height and build, thinning brown hair plastered across the top of his egg-shaped skull, he had about him the look of a frightened animal normally accustomed to hiding from the predators of the world—a nonentity destined to forever remain in the shadows. The Emperor made no attempt to recall his name.

  “What is it, lackey?” he demanded. “Who are you, to disturb Doom in his hour of contemplation?”

  “I-I m-meant no disrespect, Master,” the man stuttered. Head bowed, eyes lowered, beads of sweat started to form across his brow, but he made no move to wipe them away. “I-It’s just that your military advisers have arrived.”

  “Excellent,” the Emperor said. “Tell them Doom will meet with them in the war room.”

  “Very good, Master.” With a quick bow, clearly overjoyed that he had been given permission to leave, the aide backed away until he had stepped from sight.

  Off to one side, an auburn-haired young woman dressed in a black leather bodysuit—one of a half dozen similarly garbed men and women who skirted the edge of the garden, ever alert for any sign of trouble— touched a hand to a small receiver tucked into her left ear, listened for a few moments, then nodded.

  “Speak, Lancer,” von Doom said.

  Lancer—who normally went by the less dramatic name of Samantha Dunbar—turned to face her liege. “It’s Phillips. They’ve responded to the tip from the Psi Division, and they want to know what they should do now.”

  Von Doom paused, considering his options. “Have the child taken to the Academy. He’ll make a passable future soldier for Ms. Frost to shape.”

  Lancer fell silent. From the corner of his eye, von Doom watched her nervously chew on her bottom lip for a moment.

  “The wife?” she finally asked.

  “She is of no use to Doom,” the monarch replied immediately. “Kill her.”

  Lancer winced, as though she had been struck. It annoyed von Doom that, after all her years of service, this woman, whom he had taken from the Earth of an alternate reality, to whom he had gifted incredible powers, in whom he had given a modicum of trust, could still be so weak. So . . . imperfect.

  He might have to do something about that situation one day. . . .

  “And Paterson?”

  A half smile came to the Emperor’s lips; a contortion of facial muscles that seemed as uncomfortable for him to assume as it was for an observer to look upon. There was no warmth in the expression-only a burning malignancy. “He has seen the elegance and beauty of his Empress—a magnificent sight reserved for Doom, and Doom alone. Let that be the last thing he ever sees.”

  Lancer swallowed, hard. “You want him killed, as well?”

  Von Doom shook his head. “Not at all. He is to be released, unharmed—” he slowly opened the palm of his hand “—after his eyes have been presented to me.”

  Without waiting for an acknowledgment of his commands, the Emperor strode from the garden, knowing that not even Lancer would be foolish enough to consider defying him.

  Truly, it was a good day to be king.

  When Ororo exited the master bedroom—dressed in a flowing burgundy gown that swirled around her long legs, an ornate, black metal tiara holding back her hair—-she was surprised to discover that Paterson was absent from his post outside her door; in his place was another armored guard, one who smartly snapped to attention at her approach. Ororo could immediately tell that it wasn’t her constant companion—the new man’s body language was too stiff, too formal, and his powerfully-built upper torso looked as though it had been crammed into the emerald-hued metal suit.

  Another S.H.I.E.L.D. agent? Perhaps, but more likely than not he was a former “super hero” or “super-villain”—the kind of gaudily-attired individual whose practices had been outlawed by Victor a year after he came into power. The smart ones had registered their powers with the government and joined the Imperial armed forces; the rebellious ones had been eliminated by their own kind, per von Doom’s mandates. As for the majority, most had gone into early “retirement,” never to be seen again. It all worked out in the end, though—no longer would cities be transformed into battlefields by testosterone-driven egotists bent on flexing their overly-developed muscles for all to see, nor would the people of the world live in fear that some madman might one day destroy the planet as an act of revenge for some perceived slight. Nowadays, the only costumed men and women on display for the public were those featured in movies, like the one that had premiered in New York the night before.

  “Your Majesty,” the guard said, equally as stiff, through the speaker in his helmet. There was a heavy Japanese accent to his voice.

  “I do not see Agent Paterson,” Ororo said. “Can you tell me why he is not at his post, Agent. . . ?”

  Eyes front, back ramrod straight, the guard hesitated for a brief moment before responding. “Kenuichio Harada, Your Majesty. Agent Paterson was ... called away.”

  “By whom?”

  Again, a hesitation. “By the Emperor, Your Majesty.”

  Ororo frowned. She didn’t know which she found more annoying: the fact that Victor would call away her personal bodyguard without telling her, or the way in which this new guard seemed to be hiding something.

  “And why was that?” she pressed.

  “I-I do not know, Your Majesty,” Harada replied. Ororo could almost see the sweat pouring down his face inside the helmet as he fought to remain composed. “I was merely told to take his place until further notice . . . and to notify you that the members of the Emperor’s council have arrived. They will be meeting with him in the war room.”

  Ororo arched an eyebrow. All right, then—if she was going to learn anything, she would have to ask Victor directly ... but later.

  She turned on her heel. “Very well, Agent Harada, come along. I have duties of my own to which I must attend today. I shall speak with my husband when he next makes himself available.” Head held high, Ororo strode down the hallway, bound for the private elevator that would take her to the ground floor.

  Like a well-trained dog, the metal-garbed bodyguard hurried from his post and fell into step behind his mistress.

  As the Empress made her way downstairs, her husband’s war council was already convening.

  Constructed in a sub-sub-basement of the mansion, the war room was a two-level, block-long bunker constructed of adamantium, the hardest, strongest metal on Earth. The lighting was intentionally kept low, so that the dozens of technicians and systems operators working there could concentrate solely on the monitors and computer stations at which they sat, processing data collected by the Langley, Virginia-based Psi Division—formerly the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency—and the hundreds of international agents around the world who kept the peace established by the Emperor a decade ago. There was no camaraderie here, no gentle buzz of office chatter, no personal items adorning the work areas; the only buzzing came from the banks of computers that lined the walls of the upper level, the only personal item belonged to the Emperor: a large, round, marble table adorned with the coat-of-arms of Latveria, sitting in the center of the lower level.

  Seated around this table were two men and three women of widely diverse backgrounds—so diverse, in fact, that it would normally have been impossible to imagine them gathered in the same room, had it not been for the man who had brought them together.

  First, there was Dorma, the Minister of Defense. A blue-skinned, red-haired amazon clad in green-and-gold battle armor that revealed far more of her body than it concealed, she was the former queen of Atlantis, hailing from the same parallel Earth on which von Doom had found Lancer. As a denizen of the ocean, Dorma could not survive long above water, so a clear
plastic mask covered her nose and mouth, constantly recycling the sea water contained in her lungs. Her strength was as impressive as her temper was short—each fearful to behold, especially in the heat of battle, when her bloodlust would often build to such levels that she would become possessed by what in Norse legend was called a “berserker rage”: a mindless, relentless, savage attack that would not end until the last of her enemies had been eliminated, and her desire for blood had at last been sated. Though there were times when she thought of von Doom as a weak man—why create alliances with former enemies when it was far easier to kill them and then take possession of what they had owned?—she respected him ... and his power. The Emperor, she knew, was not afraid to dirty his hands by personally slaying anyone foolish enough to challenge his rule, as the Wizard, and Attuma, and the Master had learned. And his Psi Division allowed him to know of any future attacks before they developed beyond the planning stage, as so many others had discovered over the years—before they died.

  Dorma was also well aware that, should the day come when she might attempt to cross swords with von Doom, there was no certainty that she would be the victor, for though she might find a way to best the Emperor, there was still his wife to contend with .. . and she commanded the elements. A difficult problem to consider, but Dorma had always enjoyed a challenge. . . .

  Possessing the ability to absorb kinetic energy—thus making him virtually indestructible in any fight—Sebastian Shaw was the Emperor’s expert on Earth’s mutant population ... not that he thought of himself as just another child of the atom, though. Bom into a poor family in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Shaw was the Horatio Alger of mutantkind, pulling himself up by his bootstraps from the depths of poverty to become a millionaire by age twenty, then parlaying that fortune into the creation of Shaw Industries, a multinational corporation contracted by the pre-von Doom U.S. government for the development of cutting-edge weaponry. Though there was no real need for a munitions designer— for, after all, who could create weapons superior to those built by Doom himself?—it was Shaw’s contacts in the mutant communities scattered around the globe that made him invaluable to the Emperor. Often, they had provided better information about any superpowered dissenters among them than that gathered by S.H.I.E.L.D., especially when it came to the doings of the man who called himself Magneto; over the years, they had tipped off Shaw to the fugitive’s various plots to strike against the government, which were then nipped in the bud by the Avengers, or even by von Doom himself.

  Except for that one instance, in Paris, of course.

  Strangely, though, there had been no reports about the “Master of Magnetism” for some time now....

  Industrialist Anthony Stark originally made a name for himself as a weapons manufacturer for the United States government long before von Doom had taken power, or Shaw Industries had signed its first contract with the military. Unlike Shaw or the Emperor, though, he had been bom into money, which seemed to naturally result in Stark’s eventual transformation into a millionaire playboy, jetting around the world, dining at the finest restaurants, dating the most beautiful women. These days, when he wasn’t overseeing the work performed by his company, Stark Solutions, he was von Doom’s expert on the super hero community, having overseen the formation of the Avengers just before the Emperor’s rise to power; he had even gone so far as to donate the Stark family mansion on New York’s Fifth Avenue to the group as their headquarters. Because of his involvement with this team of “Earth’s Mightiest Heroes,” it was the millionaire industrialist’s job to keep the Emperor apprised of all government-sanctioned super hero activities, and to make him aware of any new superpowered individuals who might pop up; in a world in which radioactivity seemed to trigger a recessive gene in some unsuspecting man or woman every other day of the week—and who knew what even sitting too close to a TV set might do?—it was only a matter of time before that person got up the nerve to sew together a formfitting costume of some eye-catching hue and parade around in public to demonstrate their powers—illegally, of course.

  Oddly enough, though it was the kind of work one would expect to see performed by a flunky, interviewing these new “Marvels” was a job that Stark actually enjoyed. Then again, considering his handsome, Errol Flynn-like features, and the fact that nine out of every ten new “super heroines” were young, pretty, and had the kind of perfect figure made for skintight spandex, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that “growing up” to become the CEO of a worldwide corporation had done nothing to affect the playboy’s charm ... or his libido.

  And speaking of sexual drives . . .

  As the director of S.H.I.E.L.D., Viper was the expert on international espionage, having been the leader of Hydra for a few years before switching her loyalties to von Doom—and then helping him to destroy the organization. A combination of femme fatale and superspy, she was the living embodiment of the type of woman Hollywood movies once referred to as “the bad girl”: clad in an emerald-hued latex jumpsuit and opera-length gloves that seemed spray painted on her, she was tall and sleek, with flowing, jet-black tresses that cascaded over her right eye in a Veronica Lake coiffure, and the kind of smoldering, high-cheekboned Asian features that one would expect to find on the cover of a fashion magazine. It was widely known that if Viper couldn’t use her “feminine wiles” to obtain information, she wouldn’t hesitate to kill to get what she wanted. No one trusted her, not even von Doom, for anyone willing to switch sides so quickly in order to rise to a higher position of power could only be biding their time until their next upwardly mobile strike. The downside to such a situation, though, was that von Doom could have her killed at any time once he no longer needed her services, either by his own hand—the Mandarin’s rings weren’t just for show, after all—or by ordering her own agents to do the deed. She could easily name a dozen men and women under her direct command who wouldn’t hesitate to complete that assignment, though none had been stupid enough to move against her . . . yet.

  Still, she counted herself lucky whenever she thought about that ugly encounter with von Doom six months ago, when she had to report to him that her best agents had lost track of Magneto just outside of Marrakesh. Then, he had merely settled for crippling her, using just a fraction of the power contained in his armor to shatter every bone in her right hand.

  Even after it was surgically repaired, she would never have full use of the hand again, and she was constantly reminded of that fact—and the penalty for failing the Emperor—every time a cold spell swept through the capital. There never seemed to be enough painkillers to dull the ache in her bones ... or her mind.

  Finally, there was Wanda Maximoff. Although bom a mutant, gifted with a probability-altering ability that gave the appearance that she could perform incredible feats of magic—at least, that had been her initial understanding of her powers—she was not one of Shaw’s subordinates. Instead, having studied various forms of magic under the tutelage of an ancient witch named Agatha Harkness, Wanda had been appointed von Doom’s adviser on all things supernatural. Not to be overlooked, of course, was the fact that she was the daughter of the Emperor’s longtime enemy, Magneto, which meant that she could always provide some insight into her father’s habits . . . and weaknesses. Though she was just as attractive as the S.H.I.E.L.D. director, with a bounty of curly, reddish-brown hair framing somewhat angular features, Wanda preferred to dress far more conservatively than the other women, opting for a dark-blue jacket and matching full-length dress. A dozen charm bracelets encircled her left wrist, each gold chain adorned with trinkets of various shapes and sizes—astrological signs, mystical symbols, even a tiny toy animal or three—and a pair of gold hoops hung from her ears. Though she and her brother, Pietro, were essentially gypsies like von Doom, born in the mountains of eastern Europe, Wanda carried herself with the air of a noblewoman, tending more often than not to look down her nose at the savage Dorma and the over-sexed Viper. Clearly, she felt superior to them both . . . and, perhaps, to Stark an
d Shaw, as well.

  Five individuals. Brought together once more at the Emperor’s command, they sat and waited for their monarch to appear.

  And waited.

  And waited.

  Arms held above her head, Viper yawned and arched her back, stretching with an almost feline grace over the top of the plush leather chair in which she sat. It was an unnecessary, overly dramatic gesture to smooth out a kink in her back, but it had the desired effect she’d wanted, causing both Stark and Shaw to openly stare at the way the low lighting of the war room played off the colorful rubber material of her jumpsuit.

  Dorma grunted, annoyed by the men’s idiotic gaping. “Children ...” she huffed.

  Across from her, Wanda frowned and rolled her eyes, disgusted more by Viper’s sex kitten act than the attention it was getting. “Oh, please . . .” she muttered.

  Viper eased back to a more natural sitting position and, rolling her head to one side, turned to look at Wanda. The director sneered, bright white teeth forming a shark-like smile; it looked even more disturbing set against the bright green of her lipstick.

  “Feeling a bit outclassed, Wanda?” she purred, with a haughtiness that women always found downright infuriating, but men found incredibly sexy. “Maybe if you dressed less like a peasant and more like you did in the old days, you’d have men reacting to you the same way.” The smile widened. “I’ve seen the pictures of you back when you were

  Daddy’s Little Girl, you and big brother Pietro helping him with his plans to take over the world. Did he really approve of that whole swimsuit-and-body stocking look, or was that just a simple case of a teenaged girl rebelling against her father by dressing provocatively?” “If it were, at least I grew out of that phase,” Wanda replied evenly. Viper laughed—a sharp, mocking sound without any trace of warmth. “I’m certain Daddy must be very pleased . . . wherever he may be.”

  Wanda glared heatedly at the raven-tressed woman, then glanced at her left hand, which was suddenly aglow; unconsciously, she had formed one of her “hex-spheres.” She stared for a few moments at the chaos energy dancing around the tips of her fingers, then casually waved her hand in a dismissive motion.