“Which way to the command deck? Doom will not ask a second time.”
The Imperial stormtrooper kicked feebly in Viktor von Doom’s armoured grip, suspended a foot from the floor by his throat. His blaster lay on the floor beneath him. The faint, darkened smudge on Doom’s armour where the blaster bolt had been deflected was invisible amidst the dozens of other such smudges. Doom’s victim, unable to make more than strangled choking noises, pointed in the direction of a sealed, mag-locked door further down the smoke-filled passageway.
The stormtrooper’s throat snapped with an audible crack and Doom tossed the broken man away. Doom strode down the corridor, arrogant and heedless, his green cape fluttering behind him in his wake. The door he faced was iridium steel, two feet thick and blast-shielded, designed to withstand the impact of batteries of turbolasers. Beneath his mask, Doom’s scarred face twisted in contempt.
“Fools. None may stand against Doom.”
Doom raised a gauntlet and a harrowing beam of power, nova-bright, lanced out against the portal. Metal heated first red-hot, then white and ran in molten streams. Blue arcs of electricy played harmlessly about Doom’s armour as the magnetic shielding of the command deck door overcharged and exploded. Finally, the last barricade against the might of Doom slumped to the floor, sputtering and glowing with heat. Doom crossed the threshold in a swirl of superheated smoke.
A fusillade of blaster fire met Doom as he entered the great, vaulted command deck of the Imperial Super Star Destroyer “Venomous.” Though hardly necessary, Doom triggered his personal shield; the combined blaster fire of entire squads of stormtroopers had not penetrated his armour and the command crew’s sidearms were hardly likely to succeed where the more powerful blaster rifles had failed. Still, Doom would take no chances at his moment of triumph. Too often had he been thwarted just when final victory seemed firmly within his steely fist. His shield aborbed the blaster bolts effortlessly and used the energy to replenish the batteries in Doom’s armour.
“You dare to fire upon Doom? Then perish, dolts!”
Twin, ruby-red, ravaging beams of scintillating power thrust murderously from the eyeholes in Viktor von Doom’s mask, playing across the hapless command officers of the Venomous, reducing them instantly to smouldering dust. The command deck resembled nothing so much as the vaulted and buttressed cathedral of some church dedicated to the worship of science and death. Doom strode down its central aisle, his terrible eyebeams darting back and forth as the officers scrambled desperately for cover, any cover, which might protect them from the wrath of Doom; there was none to be found.
In less than two minutes, Doom stood alone on the central parapet of the command deck. The screams had ceased some time before.
Tiny, snakelike wires whipped from Doom’s gauntlets, integrating themselves into the circuitry of the control panels before him. His first act was to patch himself into the great ship’s communication system.
“Doombots report.”
“Engine room captured,” came the voice of a Doombot, identical to Doom’s own. “Losses to Doombot squad alpha minimal. All resistance neutralized.”
“Weapon control captured. Doombot squad beta at sixty-four percent capacity. Resistance diminishing. Losses within acceptable operational perameters.”
Viktor von Doom allowed himself a moment’s pleasure as he reflected on his victory. When his sensors had detected the great ship entering Earth’s solar system, Doom knew that it represented both danger and opportunity. The sheer scale of the ship of awesome, larger than anything Doom had encountered since the unthinkably gargantuan Worldship of the planet-eating Galactus. The Venomous was a Super Star Destroyer, a ship easily the size of a small continent, and possessing firepower which could wither a world in minutes. Doom had quickly gathered a contingent of every Doombot he could spare and organized an assault on the vessel. Power and might such as this ship must belong to no one save Doom.
Three small, stealthy shuttles had sufficed to get Doom and his doppelganger robots close enough to make entry through its hull. The Super Star Destroyer had a crew of thousands, including a large assault force of battle-hardened stormtroopers; against Doom they had been as wheat before the scythe. And now that his battle armour’s suite of electronics had infiltrated the command systems of the Venomous, the great ship was his. Battle against his Doombots still flickered in places. With a thought, Doom voided those sections of the ship into space. Silence settled over the Venomous.
A red light lit on the command panel before Doom.
It took a few seconds for Doom, unfamiliar with the alien technology, to interpret the meaning of the signal. In that time more red lights ignited on more panels. Doom, frowning now, sent querying commands into the panel. Surely there must be an error. The information he seemed to be receiving could not possibly be correct. On the immense display screen at the apse of the deck’s cathedral first one ship materialized from hyperspace and then another. And another. And another. They appeared faster than even the great mind of Viktor von Doom could count. And still they came, hundreds and then thousands of ships, many of them as large or larger than the Venomous itself, a fleet of such magnitude as to beggar the combined might of the Kree and Skrull empires combined. The stars themselves were eclipsed behind the dark majesty of the Imperial Fleet.
“No! No!” The fist of Doom slammed down upon the steel command panel, smashing it to smoking shards. This could not be! Surely Doom could not be so neatly trapped!
On the screen, a featureless and sinister black mask appeared, glass eyes hidden in the shadow of a smooth black helmet. Heavy, machine-assisted breathing echoed out into the cavernous chamber of the Venomous’ command deck. Lord Vader’s voice, when it came, was as cold and mechanical as any Doombot’s:
“My Master was correct; there was indeed danger in this insignificant system. Surrender or be destroyed. Order will be restored. You are now a prisoner of the Empire.”
[Insert the Imperial March, fade to black.]