Reign of the Devourer: A Marvel: Untold Novel (Marvel Untold) by David Annandale

Author:David Annandale [Annandale, David]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: science fiction, superheroes, Marvel
Publisher: Aconyte
Published: 2022-01-18T00:00:00+00:00

Fourteen

Orloff moved into a larger laboratory in the sub-levels of Castle Doom. She needed the space for the number of researchers and technicians she had under her authority, and for the containment of the urvullak specimens. Since her return, more had been spotted by drones and then captured. The lab was a huge, open area, and one half was taken up by a bank of plexiglass cubicles in which the urvullak were sealed. Orloff and her team examined them by means of robotic arms that reached into each cubicle, and were operated remotely by cybernetic gloves. The precision of the arms was remarkable. They felt like extensions of Orloff’s body, the metal fingers as responsive as her own. She was able to operate on the urvullak as easily as if she were in the cubicles with them. More easily, because the arms were strong, much stronger than the urvullak. Their strength was unnatural, but still limited by what was possible for the matter of bone and flesh.

Her work was grotesque. Her mission was to find the best way of killing these things. Destroying, she had to remind herself. Not killing – they’re already dead. This was a situation where it was necessary to dehumanize the enemy. To see them as people was a mistake, and a good way of falling victim to them. But they had been people. They had loved and feared and hoped, and they were still driven by hunger and loss, and the remnants of human appearance were enough to make what she had to do difficult.

And what she had to do went contrary to everything she had ever sought to achieve in her life. All of her training rebelled against her actions.

How did I get here? she asked herself again and again.

She knew the answer. Part of it lay on slabs in front of the cubicles. The corpses and their obelisk had been moved into this lab too. The project she had begun for Doom had not been abandoned. It was now part of a bigger, more urgent task.

“You have crossed the veil,” Doom had told her before she headed back. “You have experienced the connection between the Devourer and the dead. You are well placed to understand the nature of the link between it and the urvullak, and to learn how to sever it.”

She knew all this and accepted it. Yet the question would not leave her alone. How did I get here?

The initial stages of testing turned her into a butcher – Kariana was right, they’re hard to put down. The only way to stop them physically was to make the body utterly non-viable. Anything less, and the monsters still tried to reach her through the plexiglass, claws gouging scars in the walls of their prisons.

The urvullak were always straining to escape. They howled and scrabbled at the walls, going into a frenzy whenever anyone approached the cells. They never let up, though, even when no one was around. Monitors recorded them constantly, and Orloff checked the footage whenever she came back from a restless nightmare-riven sleep.

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