14 [ F series ] Lair of the White Wyrm
We had to stop our road trip for a few hours while I rebuilt the van, cannibalizing some of the components of my armor in order to convert the boy’s beat up ride into something that could handle going off road to avoid the various checkpoints, security posts, and even some hidden cameras that were still sending out satellite images.
Whether anything was still receiving them, let alone if anyone was checking them was questionable, but why risk it?
Before that we had several other stops along the way for food, bathroom breaks, and warmer clothes for the brothers Kochei, so it took us nearly two days to get to our destination, but I didn’t let them pull over to sleep anywhere. “There are four of you to take turns driving, we will not stop.”
I wasn’t taking a turn at the wheel, of course, that was for the help, and I was busy accessing and bypassing that twit Arcade’s firewalls.
Sasah, the planner of the four, had offered me a coat. A size 4x that would have been tight on me even underneath my black blood iron armor, but I declined. “The cold never bothered me anyways.”
Finally, we reached our destination, a place that didn’t have a name as far as I could find, at least not in modern times. This was an area made to be forgotten.
Literally. A tribe of natives from North America had been fleeing someone or something in ages past that scared them so badly they crossed over the Bering straights to Russia, and had even made a deal with Baga Yaga to live here unknown and forgotten.
Whatever had been chasing them either caught up with them, or the witch betrayed them, or both. Or maybe they had just left at some point, but regardless no one had lived here for hundreds of years. But the spells put up by the witch to keep away the idle or wanderers still stood.
I am neither. This day would mark the beginning of my glorious revolution, and it started here.
My four minions got out of their van behind me to stretch and complain as I looked over the snow covered piles of stone, and the cold dark complex built into the stony ridge.
“In the fifties, mass shipments of political prisoners were brought here to dig a secret tunnel large enough to march an army through, all of it underneath the sea to North America, one of those insane plans dreamed up mostly to kill off dissidents while getting some work out of them. When their digging was discovered by his royal highness, Namor the submariner, he pretended to aid their plan, but then fiddled with their maps to loop the digging around and around until it came up nearly in sight of where they had started.”
I turned and grinned at the four men giving me blank looks. “A massive feat of engineering that should have stunned the world, and it was so completely pointless and completely forgotten that it seems so very symbolic of our nation.”
Throwing my arms out I began to pace back and forth in front of my men. “The ones in charge were of course the most worthless of the many political appointees in the early soviet government, which is why they got assigned to Siberia, but you wouldn’t think the prince of an underwater civilization would be all that skilled with surveying and engineering, but that guy always surprises you. And no one ever points out that his name is Roman spelled backwards. Ha! What a guy.”
Pointing off to the north, I laughed again. “And ten years earlier the Japanese had snuck up here and tried to do the same thing. They even made it halfway to Alaska before Namor discovered them and blew them all up. No wonder he was on guard for someone to try it again. That guy really hates undersea tunnels, I’m surprised he’s never gone after the one from England to France. Maybe channels are okay with him, but for some reason, straits are a no no.”
The brothers looked back and forth at each other before Sasha finally cleared his throat and asked. “So boss… why are we here.”
I began walking forward toward the main building. “Magic my minions. We have a huge two and a half mile long underground tunnel that no one even remembers exists, one that wraps around itself over and over again until its tail meets its mouth.”
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
Turning around I threw out my arms. “Ritual circles my dear Brothers Koschei. The larger they are the more powerful they are. Here, protected from the weather we shall build something that will help us rule over all the vast lands of all the Russias.”
The four of them seemed confused, until Fyodor spoke up, “You are talking about a ritual for travel, teleportation. And with an Ouroboros as its base, it will be something that can be used to move people both ways. Send them off somewhere, and then bring them back?”
I pointed at him. “Yes! Ten points for the dour beanpole. And after we build it, we will only use this location only as a relay point. Our other operations will all be elsewhere, and only the five of us will ever know this place even exists.”
Sasha got an odd look in his eyes, so I laughed at him again. “No, I’m not going to kill you after you do all the work in order to keep the location a secret. If nothing else I will need someone to use it to bring me here when I can not use it remotely on my own. I am not some cliché evil overlord who kills his own people for “Failing me one too many times.” If you screw up the jobs I give you, I will just find a job you can handle.”
I narrowed my eyes at them. “For less pay of course.” Then smiled. “But for now, we will check for what we will have to work with. Starting with this secret facility they build here for the most secretive Winter Solider program.”
The building, sitting right between the mouth and tail of the great tunnel, had mostly been stripped out of anything useful when the program had gone down in flames, and like all too many secret bases all across Russia, it had been erased from all records after being stripped of much of its resources.
But not all.
The computers had been removed to destroy all the sensitive information they might have had on them, and the armory had been emptied because everyone can always use more guns, but other things, the workshops, the storage rooms with all their parts, and other supplies, had just not been worth the bother of involving enough people haul it all off.
Mine now.
After peeling back the metal rim of the entry door enough to pry it open we headed into the vast and frozen over internal courtyard and I surveyed my domain.
“The first thing we do…” I said as I turned to my shivering minions. “Is turn on the heat.”
I chuckled at their relieved smiles. “Then we add to our staff.”
There were plenty of supplies here, but it wasn’t like I was going to spend weeks doing a build a bot marathon.
My father had plenty of his toys left around the world.
With the fusion pile fully restored to full working order, and power flowing to the heaters, the lights, and the communication system, it was easy to establish a connection to the communication systems of Doom’s North American base in the Adirondack mountains of the state of New York.
Dear old Dad had actually built a replica of the medieval castle he called home to use as a base of operation while he plotted against Reed Richards and brooded in after each of his defeats. The place had everything he needed for all his schemes as he often spent most of his time there planning his next absurd strike against his college rival instead of doing his job as head of state in his ‘beloved’ Latvaria.
The man had actually spent who knows how much time and resources launching the Baxter building into outer space.
No wonder he had been disposed of so often.
The man had built a time machine there, a mind transferal device, and a heated moat so he could fill it with live crocodiles... in New England.
He had abandoned the place, twice, in a series of hissy fits, and after someone moved into the place he ended up resorting to hiring a lawyer to buy the place out from under the new owner rather than lower himself to fighting Toad of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants who had first turned the place into a Murderworld with Arcade, then into a fairly successful amusement part called Toadworld.
I was so going to get a replica of the gift shop Tee shirt in my size to wear for when Doom showed up again.
He would I knew, it was inevitable.
Of course, most of Doom’s wonderful toys were long gone, looted by the Fantastic Four when they also relocated the crocodiles to a zoo down south, but much of the technology that had been set up by Arcade was still there.
And still under the control of Doom from after he took the place back, and now it and the programs and passwords to access and control it was my inheritance.
Really, I was surprised that Apex over in America hadn’t grabbed everything first, but then he had claimed only the western half of the continent, leaving everything in the East up for grabs.
“Heh, your lack of confidence is my opportunity little brother.”
After a few hours of putting Arcade’s leftover robots to work overseas, I had a one-way teleportation platform to what Fyodor had taken to calling Fafnir’s Hole, which I had allowed because getting to name something can make people care about it.
The platform would burn itself out after a few dozen uses, but for the moment, I had robots, weapons, holographic projectors, and all of Arcade’s other gadgets coming in by the truckload.
More importantly, I had the stuff to make more stuff, and more hands to do the making.
I would have to set the Koschei boys up with some computers and detectors to clear out any surprises the clown Arcade may have left in his tech, or rather his engineer Chamber, but for now, we had a start.
The only remaining concern was figuring out who was in the dozen or so cryogenic chambers that the fusion pile had been keeping powered up. With all the computers gone, the only way for me to find out was to crack them open.
And the only question was, did I want to do so in a way that woke them up, or a way that left me with a bunch of corpses to examine?