21 [ Fenris] What little girls are made of.

  I wearily sat down on the top of an empty cryogenic pod and wiped my hand down my face at what I was looking at sunk in.

  The red hourglass in a circle symbol on each of the occupied pods was rather distinctive after all.

  Each of the pods had Girls. Little girls... Damaged little girls.

  All right to be fair, most of them were more like teens and young women, but Dr Lyudmila Kudrin’s version of the super soldier formula was as much about keeping these girls young and pretty looking as enhancing their physical abilities. But it couldn’t regrow missing limbs and massive disfiguring wounds to make them pretty again after they somehow got injured, what with the state of cybernetic limbs at the time when they were frozen.

  After all, the Winter Soldier was only used as an assassin after they slapped a metal arm on him, never as an infiltrator.

  And I guess the Red Room saw no purpose in fitting a bunch of damaged women with expensive cybernetic limbs just to use them as combat troops.

  So instead, they froze them, probally moved them around for years since nobody wanted to deal with deciding what to do with them, until they ended up here. Then they just abandoned them.

  Of course, they couldn’t just let the children that they had bought and spent so much time and money training as child soldiers go and have their own lives even after they could find no further use for them.

  The girls still wore the remains of the clothing they had been injured in and looked so young they must have still been in training before they were shoved into these pods without any preparation, with whoever made the call to freeze them only replying on their enhancements to ensure their survival until someone found a reason to thaw them out.

  Where they would be still wounded, in pain, possibly bleeding out, and displaced years or decades from the world they had been familiar with.

  I stared at the far wall beyond the tubes for a long time, before I finally laughed. “Ha! Mine now! My very own Lost Girls, and me their very own Piotr Pan. But without the tights. Ha!”

  No, I would not see these girls as a burden, or something to be thrown away. These are veterans of a war that they were drafted into for a nation not their own. But they are my people now, Russian, and I would treat them as such.

  Standing, I brushed some frost away from the pod of a little blond girl with half her face missing. She reminded me a bit of my youngest daughter from my past life. “I will not make the same mistake with you child. I will fix your body, and then support whatever options you choose for yourself. Work for me, work with me, or go off and find your own fate. Your own life. So swears Papa Fenris.”

  I spend the next few hours ensuring that none of the pods will suddenly fail, or spontaneously revived any of the girls. A few alarms and remote control ensured that no sneaky plot line would go and wake them up before I have prepared for them.

  Only then do I go up to the main level of Fenris’s Hole to find the place much warmer and a legion of robotic duplicates of various heroes and villains, all in costumes years out of date, standing in formation as the Brothers Koshei wandered among them.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  Pavel stood in front of a mohawk sporting Storm bot, and wondered out loud to his brothers, “So, do you think they are, heh, fully functional?”

  Such disrespect. For a moment I considered knocking him across the room, but I ultimately decided it might upset his brothers. Instead, I just decided to set a few more alarms on the door to the room full of frozen teenage girls down below.

  “If you can’t get a real girl we can make a sex worker robot for you later on.” The former mobster jerked around in alarm. “But not in the image of a woman that can blow up your head with lightning. We can make a new one that looks like some composite image of your internet search history, then you can go to town on it. But maybe one without built in weapons.”

  I patted him on the shoulder as I walked past him, perhaps a bit harder than needed as he winced in pain. “But I have other uses for these bots, and the four of you. But for now, find yourselves places to sleep for the night as we have much work in the morning. Ha! So much work. You will weep blood at how hard you will work.”

  My next seven hours were spent first setting up a Doctor Octopus bot to work before flying across Russia at high speed and assembling a teleportation rig around my creche unit. Something that was capable of growing me from a pair of gene samples should be more than capable of repairing a frozen little girl, and I wanted the matrix forge to make various components that I would need beyond what I had already gathered.

  This hole in the ground would not be the final resting place for Doom’s device, but for now, I wanted it close.

  Setting a now tentacle stripped down Hulk, Rhino, Thing, and Colossus bot to carry my birth unit into a secure laboratory, I slowly spun around to give the rest of my new toys a good long look.

  With just me in the room with them, it felt kind of spooky. Like they were all looking at me.

  ‘Ha! What am I now? All shy all of the sudden? Look at me my toy soldiers. It is now time for me to indulge in my favorite hobby from another lifetime.”

  Cracking my knuckles, I grinned at the still half asleep Brothers Koshei emerging from whatever spots they had found to sleep. “So, what do you boys think of getting some combat armor.”

  I gestured at the same four oversized bots I had set to carrying my creche off to its new home. Even stripped down from their disguises the four bots were so large they would end up being more like vehicles for the Brothers to pilot rather than suits. But even after making room for them to ride inside the bots, there was plenty of room for the various weapons systems from the other bots used to simulate various superpowers that I could arm the brothers with.

  But before that, I wanted to put the first of the girl into the crech to start her repairs, and fairly soon I needed to get to work on my ritual circle.

  Which needed a very sharp, durable metal chisel to carve flawless lines into the stone. Adamantium would be best in fact.

  Finding some of the stuff wouldn’t be an issue. Ha! I could just pull off a bank robbery and just go and buy it. But where is the style in that?

  No. I would find someone who had the stuff implanted in them, some Wolverine copycat cheapening his franchise. Then I would rip it off of their body.

  “Now that’s the way to make a debut. Ha!”