Ready
2000
Nine years later
“It is done,” said the time child, appearing out of nothing, “The last one is dead.”
At the epicentre of his command centre, in a cave turned cavern hollowed out beneath the mountains, the tall, imposing figure of Viktor Mentok did not bother to turn around. His eyes stayed focused on the titanic screen in front of him – two stories of ultra-fine LEDs, alive with information and data surging in constantly overlapping waves.
The man they had called the Mindtaker was almost unrecognisable, as was the space around him. The cave he had once huddled in to craft crude armour with simpleton’s tools was now merely one passage into an inner sanctum, a cathedral of polished metal and machines dug straight down through solid rock. Around him neon lighting strips burned, screens flared, and insectoid drones flew in a ceaseless stream of unending robotic work. Gone were the tools stolen from the trunk of a stranger’s car; replaced by labyrinthine production lines, workshops twisting deep into the mountain, adaptable foundries with as many methods for extracting and producing raw materials as they had for using them. Gone was cheap vodka and surviving on scraps – he slept in med-gel luxury and knitted bespoke chemical compounds into any combination he desired. This was not a hideaway, not a refuge, not a cave – the machines inside his sanctum were worth the GDP of several countries, and he had in solid state drives enough stolen digital assets to cause a global stock market collapse. In under nine years, Viktor Mentok had built a city within the stone which hummed with light and movement, and whose every waking moment, every steel inhabitant, was turned to creation, expansion and war.
And then there was Mentok himself. Gone was the gaunt, atrophied prisoner who had been unable to steer a wheel without shaking. Gone was frailty, vulnerability, even age. The man who had once struggled to walk without fainting had been rebuilt into a muscular, steel-eyed general in a suit of shining armour made of metals most mortals couldn’t name. Nine years; nine years of constant robotic rehabilitation and enrichment, the most potent growth and repair hormones one could fabricate, and biomechanical enhancements borne from dreams to bleeding edge. Nothing had been off limits – no improvement too extreme. The evolved Viktor Mentok was ten inches taller, twenty years younger, and connected every second of every day to his city’s eyes and arms. A row of neural implants, drilled directly into his skull, lay long since hidden beneath a head of thick black hair. It turned out the cure for Scarlett’s Syndrome was not to keep one’s thoughts from multiplying, but to conscript them into the management of a million things at once.
The Grandmaster saw through a thousand eyes that were not his own and in a moment filtered through more information than most people processed in their lives.
“What was her name?” he asked the traveller, not indifferent to the answer but inquiring more out of politeness than point.
“Cassandra Atropos.”
“Auspicious.”
“Yes.”
“How did she die?”
“Quickly. Via suicide vest.”
“And now Heydrich turns suspicious.”
“No. He turns impatient.” The child shifted. “Ten years is the limit. From here, he will be prepared to proceed without clairvoyant powers, assuming them unattainable. The same decision he made when he fought Captain Dawn.”
“Walter always was uniquely disappointing,” Viktor murmured, still looking at his screen. Unexpected storm above Taipei. Most likely meteoromancers. Delays in transportation of solar arrays. Eyes twitched and thoughts flicked. Divert more hands.
Even with his back turned, he could see the boy’s head tilt.
“You disliked him,” the child concluded. Mentok shook his head.
“Not disliked, no,” he stated, as his mind whirred with work a thousand miles away, “He was kind and personable. And he had a knack, which not even those closest to him recognised, for moments of such astounding strength and brilliance that it became utterly frustrating to watch them never appear again.” He raised a finger, flipping haptically through a decision tree of computer code. “Imagine you spend your life accompanying a man who never appears anything but ordinary. Then, after ten years, for an instant, he sings in the most perfect, haunting voice imaginable. You’d find yourself bewildered, would you not, and frustrated beyond belief, that all this time he had been holding this potential and never made even the slightest effort to pursue it.”
“Complacency in the face of talent.”
“Exactly. He was, in many ways, Caitlin’s perfect opposite. Resoundingly ordinary, with microscopic bursts of brilliance. Whereas she was consistently brilliant, save for momentary flashes of failure. It is hard to say which disappointed me more.”
The child peered questioningly at him. “Did you love her?”
“Who?”
“Caitlin.”
Alone in his cave, Mentok snorted, his eyes never diverting from the screen. “Nothing so crude. She was that rare, thoroughly impressive kind of woman who seems depressingly recurrent throughout history – the one that could have changed the world given a different era, or a different set of chromosomes.”
They lapsed into silence, the void between them filled with hiss and spark and the distant hum of machinery. Mentok’s nose barely registered it, having acclimated to the smell of solder, recycled air and engines many years ago.
“How long?”
“A month. Then he reforms the Legion and strikes out at its head.” The boy’s blue eyes swirled. “There is a protest in Johannesburg which descends into conflict. The Legion puts it down at his command, violently. Then an earthquake in El Salvador, a plague in England, race riots in Bosnia. Each time, the Legion comes to take command; each time he pushes them towards unchecked authority, towards harsher methods of control. In six months, enough of them are bloodied. In ten, he instructs them to take on followers of their own. The cult grows slow, then exponentially. By the time the world summons the courage to stand up to them, the Legion is too vast to be denied. Fanatical. Those not dedicated wholeheartedly to the cause waded too deep in blood to turn back.”
“Then I will save them from that fate,” said Mentok, “Two weeks from now.”
“Your preparations are complete?”
“As they ever will be.”
“Then this is where I leave you.” The time child rose to his feet. “I cannot aid you in this fight.”
For the first time since the child appeared there Mentok turned to face him, his hard features incredulous. “You can foresee his every move. What possible danger does he pose to you?”
“I am confident in my powers,” the traveller stated, “But not so confident that I will risk everything. All it would take is one slip-up, one oversight. I will not risk unleashing this creature across time.”
“Nor should you.” Viktor sighed and dropped his hands by his side. For what felt like the first time in months, despite his newfound vigour, despite the superhuman armour reinforcing his body, he let his shoulder droop. “I forget, sometimes, that this is all just an indulgence. That you have already seen me fail.”
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“I am not infallible. Through I see no way unto it, there remains a chance that I am wrong.”
“I will hold to luck then, as fate buries me in the Earth.” He took a step forward and held out a silver hand. “Thank you, old friend. For everything.”
The time child made no move to take it, and instead fixed Mentok with an icy glare.
“Learn from your mistakes, Mindtaker,” he told him, “Your ruin lays in ruthless means.”
And then without another word he vanished, leaving the Grandmaster alone in his underground city, his hand still outstretched, the spike of the mind-control device a mere speck upon his finger.
*****
He hated the suit.
So gaudy, so shiny. A circus outfit to dazzle fools – no function, all form. Still, he wore it comfortably, this shining skin he’d been forced to live inside. This lumbering, child-like morality. Good and evil. Black and white.
Pathetic.
Klaus Heydrich sat silently at the desk in Captain Dawn’s parlour, still wearing the face of the man he’d destroyed. Before him stood piles of hard copy folders, dossiers on individual Acolytes which he now carefully leafed through. His children. His Acolytes. They all had potential, clay to be moulded, shaped and bent to his will. It wouldn’t be long now – they were young. Eager to please. It was just a question of the right situation, the right motivation, the right push.
His eyes scanned the Ashes’ reports. James Conrad. Leagues of potential – power, certainty, and a demonstrated knack for educative violence. There was a leader to be had in a man like him, a unit commander, once he was whet with an appropriate amount of blood. There was an addiction to true violence, to true dominance, that poured fire into a man’s soul. The negro aspect was suboptimal, if he was being completely honest, but if there was one thing Klaus Heydrich prided himself on it was evolving. He could take a modern view on Übermensch.
The next folder. Natalia Baroque. Now here was an easy convert. Sired in nobility, already possessing indicators of an inherent superiority belief. All he had to provide her with was a taste of true authority, a position where she could glimpse the base animalism of the squalid commoners, and her fists would turn to iron. Tyrants were forged in the face of the rabble.
Wallace Cykes. Hmm. Heydrich’s eyes narrowed as he read the report on this one. Homosexual. A telepath and a deviant; lazy, lacking ambition. He would not fall in line. But no matter – even the sodomites had their uses. An unfortunate accident, the wrong place at the wrong time, and he would galvanise more fury and passion in death than he ever could have while alive.
He could be key then, to this next one, Giselle Pixus…
CRASH
Suddenly, the window to the left of the Black Death shattered and something hurtled towards his head. Heydrich let out a snarl and in an instant spun – his eyes coming to rest upon the bullet, floating an inch from his face. His eyes narrowed; his telekinetic fist closed. A moment later the bullet huffed, and a puff of white powder shot out from the sides. Heydrich’s telekinetic field remained unbroken, and with a single furious thought he blew the talc-like substance outside. He stepped back, creating a replica, which picked up the ammunition with cautious hands. The clone’s fingers burned where he touched it, a sickening, wrenching heat that ate through him, through his copy’s flesh and bones. A second later, the replica breathed in a mote of residual powder and collapsed in violent spasms, its eyes rolling back into its head. The meat lay on the floor, silent as it convulsed. Heydrich disintegrated it with a wave. Plutonium and some kind of poison, clearly. The Black Death bared his teeth.
And then a moment later his eyes widened as they traced the striations etched into the bullet’s side:
Molotov–Ribbentrop.
And then a set of coordinates.
*****
In a valley of wind and stone, Viktor Mentok stood alone and unarmoured on a small and nameless rise and waited for the man who would kill him. He wore no steel, not the warrior’s battledress; merely a robe, long and flowing, its fabrics fluttering in the breeze and its chest adorned with a symbol of blue, white and red. His hands held at his side, his eyes unblinking. The sky was clear, although in the distance storm clouds gathered.
Mentok stood silent and unmoving, staring with hollow patience at the empty plain stretching out below. Pebbles tumbled. Eddies swirled. Hundreds of miles away, the drone had done its job. Now all there was to do was wait.
He didn’t have to wait long.
He dropped from the sky and onto the barren valley without ceremony or fanfare. A towering figure – pearlescent white, with flowing cape and chest and hands and boots of shining gold. He stopped a moment, twenty feet away, standing in a slight depression, and hesitated – staring up at Mentok with wonder and disbelief.
“Viktor,” Walter Reid whispered. He began slowly forward, a single cautious step. “Is it really you?”
“Please,” spat Mentok, “A modicum of respect.”
Walter’s face froze – and then after a few seconds, he straightened, and his stolen features split into an inhuman grin.
“Candid,” he chuckled, “I like that.”
The figure of Captain Dawn shimmered, and the illusion fell away, revealing the true monster underneath.
Gone was Walter’s full and handsome face, his piercing green eyes, his kind and spacious presence. Gone was the white, the gold, the life-colours. In its place stood a man in black – a sallow-faced, slick‑haired demon, with dull, dead eyes and skin like a porcelain doll. He stood lean and confident in his uniform, his faux-Nazi regalia, silver buttons and jet-black jackboots; unrepentant, unafraid. Staring up at Mentok like a wolf who’d cornered particularly scrumptious prey.
“I have to say old Iwan,” the Black Death mused, “When I woke up this morning this was not how I expected this day to go.” He curled his thin lips, showing Mentok a white, humourless smirk. “How long have you been loose from your cell?”
“Long enough.”
“And here I was thinking I was being merciful,” replied Heydrich, shaking his head in mock disappointment, “You communists never were good at staying in prison.”
He took a slow, deliberate step forward.
“I must admit I was surprised. Disbelieving even. Surely not, I reasoned. Surely there would have been some sign. I was so incredulous, I almost stopped by your cell to make sure of it.” He paused. “What would I have found there, dear Grandmaster? Out of curiosity.”
“Aerosolised fugu toxin and a neutron bomb.”
“Yes,” the Black Death mused, “I figured as much.”
The two men lapsed into silence, twenty feet apart – the genius on his insignificant high ground, the murderer below. They stared at each other, and the wind blew dust between the hush.
“Well,” the empath said eventually. “Here you have me.” Heydrich spread his arms wide. “Right where you wanted. Now what? I followed your coordinates. Molotov–Ribbentrop. A fond reference to say the least. Are we going to negotiate, Hiwi? Is this a ceasefire?”
On the slight rise behind Mentok, something moved.
“Is that what you want Nemetskiy?” the Russian said coldly, “Peace?”
“Oh, absolutely,” replied Heydrich, his words curdling and rich. He took another step forward. “Of all the ones I knew would come after me, Mindtaker, I thought you alone might sympathise with my goals. We are, after all, both men of science.” Another step. “Men of reason.” Another step. “I always thought their persecution of you was disgraceful. You herd some sheep into utopia, and they cast you aside. Surely, if anyone could understand my struggle, it would be my brother from the north.”
“I was under the impression you sought to rule exclusively.”
“I seek order,” Heydrich drawled, “Betterment. Of these idiot people and their ungrateful means. I think, if we examine it closely, we will see that you and I share very similar ambitions.”
His words ceased, and once again silence descended on the empty valley, swept away by endless wind.
Finally, after a few minutes, Heydrich sighed.
“Yet there is to be no compromise, is there?” he asked simply.
“No,” Mentok replied.
“What is the point of it then? This nattering?”
Viktor Mentok stared at him. “I wanted to see you, Kraut. I wanted to speak to you. Fascist beast, Nazi scum, I wanted to look you in the eyes and promise that I would destroy you, so that when you meet your Untermensch father in Hell you could piss yourselves together remembering who eviscerated his son.”
Heydrich’s eyes narrowed, and all semblance of benevolence dropped from his face. “You forget who you speak to.”
“I forget nothing, Blond Beastling,” Mentok spat, “I know what you are, underneath all your stolen power. Petty boy, frightened child, fat with delusions of grandeur. You are humanity’s greatest failings personified.”
The emptiness behind Mentok moved. The Black Death snarled.
“Your words are as weak as your blood, Communist filth.”
“Look, betrayer,” Mentok snarled, pointing at his chest – the blue triangle, the red and white, “Do you see this flag? Do you recognise these colours?” Smouldering, Heydrich’s eyes fell to Viktor’s chest, and his scowl darkened. “Yes. You know them now, don’t you? Výbor Československého Národního Osvobození. Your father’s killers. They splattered his animal guts across the convertible floor and he whimpered like an infant. Where was your glorious destiny then? Where is your superiority now?”
The Black Death sneered, and his features twisted in feral anger. “You want superiority snow rat? You want glory? After I peel the meat from your eyeballs I’ll burn your Motherland to the ground.”
“Better Nemtsy than you have tried.”
“My ancestors killed your kind in their thousands.”
“And yet still we outmatched you. Sad. The glorious Third Reich, driven ever to conquest, losing the only war it ever fought to a bunch of peasants in the snow.”
“We lost to winter, not to you,” Heydrich snarled. Then in an instant, a shadow fell across his face, and a smile twitched across his thin lips. “And I grow tired of your talk.”
And in an instant, the replica before Mentok vanished and the invisible Heydrich behind him lunged forward and plunged an arm of bladed diamond into the old man’s chest.
Only for it to go straight through and hit nothing.
The hologram wavered, and the image of Viktor Mentok smirked and glanced back to look at the open‑mouthed empath, his hand between his chest.
“And once again, Palka, we choose where you will die.”
And then the hologram vanished, leaving the Black Death alone, staring at a small silver emitter sitting atop a jagged rock – and beneath which lay a white, painted ‘X’.
“Oh,” the Black Death murmured, as the air around him began to vibrate. He looked up.
DDDDDDHHHHHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMM