Minister Faust (23 page)

“KILL THE KING—”

“—and disappear, watchers with slaughtering knives and fingers cruel, into night, to butcher children with parents’ own blades—”

“AND THE KING FALLS, NEVER AGAIN TO GLIMPSE THE MOON, AND DOES NOT FLY LIKE A BIRD, NOR ALIGHT LIKE A BEETLE—”

“Gil, N-Kid, help me out here! Who did or who’s
gonna do
what you’re saying? Who killed Hawk King?”

“Mystery! Mystery wrapped inside enigma, wrapped inside tortilla, wrapped inside light, fluffy nan bread, wrapped inside flaky phyllo pastry!”

“Was it Menton?”

Instantly, Gil and the N-Kid ceased their ranting. Kareem had asked the ultimate question, played his highest face card. Whether or not Hawk King’s death was from natural causes, this question revealed Kareem’s yearning for a pat and simple answer. As an interrogator, he was now at his moment of greatest vulnerability to a mad prisoner’s manipulation.

“Hard to say,” leered the N-Kid, cocking his head. Then, slowly, he said, “Who’s…Menton?”

Kareem’s lips parted, then nearly closed.

“Kot-tam,” he mumbled. “We’re done here.”

“No! No-no-
no
!
Listen,
X-Man-man!” said the N-Kid, kicking the letho-glass with his hooves, ignoring the arc shocks. “Who’s Menton? Who’s Menton? Understand?”

“FOOLED, X-MAN? FOOLED TO DEATH? DEATH TO FOOLS? WHOSE? A PLAN, A PROSPECT, A PROJECT—FOR A NEW HEROIC CENTURY OF DEATH DESCENDS, LIKE THE BULL OF HEAVEN UPON THE WORLD, TRAMPLING TOWERS LIKE GRASS, CRUSHING SKULLS BENEATH ITS HOOVES LIKE GRAPES—”

“Listen, X-Manny-man! Listen!” Kick, arc shock, kick, arc shock. “ ‘Whose?’ Understand?
‘Whose?’
”

Kareem shook his head and pushed himself out of his chair while the electric shocks strobed the room into blinding whiteness. “C’mon, Doc!”

“WHOSE, X-MAN!”
Gil Gamoid plastered his massive palms against the glass, arc-shocking his body into a giant humanoid fireworks display, his rail-spike teeth turned into a panpipe of awful electrical music. “WHOSE MENTON? WHOSE X-MAN? WHOSE MENTON?
WHOSE X-MAN? WHOSE
—”

E
xiting, we found Iron Lass waiting by herself down the corridor, agitatedly stroking her cheek, ear, and neck with an index finger. An insignificant gesture for anyone else, the fidgeting was practically a panic attack for her.

I caught her eyes, but only for a moment before they flickered away. There was dread in the black of her pupils but far more guilt in the whites of her scleras. She’d always been close to the two heroes of Ur-Prime; by some accounts, she’d never forgiven herself for her role in their incarceration.

When I asked Hnossi where all the other F*O*O*Jsters had gone, she said that the Flying Squirrel had ventured into the biocontainment Unit X to interrogate the Devolver, who’d once attempted to devolve Hawk King into a tuna. André and Syndi, on the other hand, had retired to the staff commissary.

With Dr. Wells’s guidance, Kareem, Hnossi, and I proceeded with growing trepidation to Unit Z, what was sometimes called the M-Wing. Past numerous security checkpoints, EEG/EPG monitoring stations and ever more obvious and numerous psidampeners, we descended to the cell-within-a-cell-within-a-cell wherein dwelt the Destroyer.

Passing through multiple metallic bank vault portals and rumbling scanners, beyond anxious armed guards, we arrived at the penultimate chamber. Dr. Wells reviewed with the three of us the psychic safety protocols he’d outlined when I contacted him the previous day, techniques to use in an emergency to stop Menton from terror-shackling our minds. Wells made us sign our final waivers, indicating next of kin and checking off the DNR boxes.

I reminded Kareem that if he wanted to turn back, there was nothing stopping him.

His glare, a costume of bravado and contempt, couldn’t disguise his fear.

“We’re ready,” said Dr. Wells into the wall comm. “Release Unit Z Door 1, code delta-epsilon-alpha-theta.”

Instantly, brutal blue light screamed into our vestibule through the retracting iris door until blue enveloped us, until blue was thick on our tongues like the taste of blood, until blue clogged our nostrils like the stink of gasoline.

We stepped through the circular doorway.

The prisoner was shackled into a massive P-I chair, wires and cathodes and tentacles sucking every psion of phagopsychotic energy from his body. His head was crowned with a specially designed P-I Helmet, its diodes drilled directly into his brain. Despite the chair’s imprisoning purpose, I couldn’t help but notice how much its technological grandeur had turned it into a throne, how much the modified helmet resembled a crown of silvery spikes, the tip of each twinkling like an electric ruby. And so as I looked at him burning in the center of the chamber, an ultraviolet star at the center of an ultrablue nebula, I was forced to remember Milton’s description of the Fallen One who disdained service in heaven for rule in hell.

I’d studied the manifold clinical and mental techniques of this “man” once known as Dr. Napoleon Orator, corresponded with him, even published articles and books about him. But this was the first time I’d ever stood in the presence of the villain who’d murdered ten thousand people in a single, awful day in Las Vegas in 1983: Menton the Destroyer.

My bones felt like eggshells. And I was cold.

“Welcome, Iron Lass,” stage-whispered the Destroyer.

The Valkyrie said nothing in reply.

“It’s been a long, long time,” he continued. “Especially for me. But of course, I have you to thank for my stay here. And I’ve been…longing…to express my gratitude.”

Beside me, Hnossi stiffened, swallowed.

“And at last we meet, Doctor Brain,” he said. “I’ve enjoyed our epistolary conversation over the years, some of which informed my article on therapeutic addiction for the
Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.
”

“Yes, Doctor. Dr. Wells showed it to me. Quite impressive.”

“And you,” he said, his lightbulb eyes flicking onto Kareem. “You must be the uncanny X-Man.”

“That’s right,” said Kareem.

He clearly intended defiance in his voice, but the words stumbled and tripped their way out of his mouth, rendering them almost inaudible.

“So…you’ve ascended to my realm. Supplicants seeking my counsel, obviously.”

“Ve don’t vant your ‘counsel,’ Destroyer,” hissed Iron Lass. “You are not in charche here.
Ve are.
”

The man formerly known as Dr. Orator emitted a sound that was probably supposed to be a chuckle.

It drilled into my skull like a mosquito piercing my eardrum.

Standing for lack of chairs, Hnossi and I watched while Kareem began his interrogation. Painstakingly he waded through Menton’s ominous sarcasm and the events of his criminal career, both the matters of public record and the details sealed in F*O*O*J files.

But Kareem’s self-proclaimed status as the world’s
new
greatest detective soon revealed itself as self-delusion. Throughout his ping-pong evocation of Menton’s life, he mixed up numerous facts, from the number of patients Dr. Orator “treated” at his clinic during the first known year of his criminality to the number of days he subjected Princess Astra and the Supersonic Snail to the unspeakable horrors of his
phagopsychosis.

Yet for reasons surely unfathomable to any human mind, the Destroyer humored Kareem, allowing him to disgorge a steaming puddle of inaccuracies that caused even me a profound sympathetic frustration. Whatever evils Menton had committed, surely the very diabolical brilliance of his villainy merited an investigator’s astute attention, rather than the dithering dilettantism of Kareem’s detection.

“Kareem,” sighed Iron Lass at last, “vhere are you goingk viss ziss?”

He flashed angry eyes at her, his entire body tensing visibly, and immediately resumed his inquiry.

“So lemme get this straight, Destroyer—you’re saying that the only thing that kept you from mind-chewing the entire F*O*O*J in 1983 was the Flying Squirrel’s Hypothalamic Scrambler?”

“Yes, yes, yes,” muttered Dr. Orator, audibly irritated at last. “Why are you wasting my time with such inane queries, you cretinous—”

And then the X-Man clutched his head, releasing a burbling cry and collapsing, as if he’d been struck in the teeth with an ax.

M
enton!”
yelled Iron Lass, her hands instantaneously clutching her eldritch black and white blades.
“In ze name of ze late Princess Astra, I commit you to ze grafe you deservedt twelve years ago—”

“NO!” screamed X-Man.

Struggling to get up, he barked into his wrist comm, “All F*O*O*Jsters: emergency evacuate! Repeat: emergency evacuate!”

“Vunce I strike down ziss Loki-bastardt, Kareem, z’emerchency vill be over—”

“There’s no time—Asteroid Zed’s about to be—”

Suddenly I collided with the bulkhead. Everything was sideways, then upside down, and sound exploded in my head like a locomotive’s engine, wheels, and whistle screeching all at once. Even Menton howled, his lightbulb eyes blazing blue horror. Kareem reached up, yanked on the upside-down door-release without effect.

Iron Lass sliced through the foot-thick steel of the iris door as if it were made of aluminum foil.

“Kareem—get Doktor Brain to safety!”

Kareem grabbed me, helping me up and through the ravaged doorway. Iron Lass howled, “Miscreant!” and everything around me burned into agonizing blue supremacy while Kareem pulled me along the up-ended corridor.

And then the angle of gravity shifted again and we plummeted.

“Pillow!”
yelled Kareem, falling, and just before the impact could grind our bones to pebbles, we slammed into the soft embrace of a ten-foot-thick black cushion.

While sirens squealed and flashed, Kareem yanked me along behind him. Guards and technicians were yelling and dashing all around us along the ceilings-turned-floors while prisoners screamed from their inverted cells. Kareem was pouring out smoke, but before I could ask him if he were on fire, I saw a dark cloud spilling from his mouth like a legion of black-flies in a breeze. Muttering over and over to himself, Kareem suddenly stopped and yelled into his wrist comm, “F*O*O*J squad! Come in! What’s happening to the Asteroid?”

“Kareem!”
crackled Syndi’s voice. “Thank God it’s you! Are you all right?”

“I’m all right, Syndi! You okay?”

“Yes, I think so—”

“What’s happening?”

“They’re telling me the Asteroid’s been, like, hit or attacked or something! They’re trying to evacuate, but—oh God, no!”

“What?”

“The Space Elevator’s been destroyed, Kareem!” she said. “We’re trapped up here!”

“All F*O*O*J units!”
yelled the comm voice of the Flying Squirrel. “Converge on…on the Crystal Module, forthwith!”

“Squirrel, what’s going—”

“I said ‘forthwith,’ you missionary-boiling grunter!
Forthwith!
”

Kareem resumed his muttered whisperings while pulling me behind him, and I finally heard what he had been saying.
“Find! Find! Find!”
he chanted, and for the first time I saw what the smoke was composed of: tiny logoids, none larger than a snowflake, and each one must certainly have read
find.

The cloud dispersed itself into the walls, floor, and ceiling, while the explosions grew louder by the second.

X-Man scrambled up the tiers of a shelf bolted into the wall until he came eye-to-screen with an upside-down display. After punching keys, he jumped down and yelled, “Follow me!”

We raced toward the Crystal Module through the madness of evacuating personnel, sirens, flashing lights, and the overlapping overhead voices announcing the double-doom of Asteroid Zed:

Facility breach on tiers ten,—Lockdown breach! The prisoners—nine, eight, seven! Rupture—are escaping! Lockdown breach!—and vacuum protocols! The prisoners are escaping!

Staff and prisoners trampled one another in the strobe-lit race for life-pods, while screaming and the stench of charcoaled meat meant that inmates had begun exacting vengeance from their guards.

My heart hammered kettledrums in my ears, but Kareem didn’t even slow down, yanking me into the stairwell and down to the sixth story—the last unbreached tier of the tower—where we scrambled into the spherical observatory called the Crystal Module. Iron Lass ran in behind us. André and Syndi had already donned void suits, and through her helmet Syndi beamed at my arrival while looking at Kareem.

And then Mr. Piltdown burst in, pointing what looked like a personal cannon right at us, and yelled “Close your eyes!”

We heard an explosion.

Kareem, Hnossi, and I were knocked over and bubbled inside a canvassy-aluminum sack hiss-filling with air and choking with the reek of gunpowder. Through the bubble’s porthole I saw Mr. Piltdown press a button on his belt, and then the Crystal Module’s outer wall disintegrated into flaming shards before belching out into space.

We were all sucked out into the void like Pinocchio into the belly of Monstro the whale.