“Want to play rough, kid?” Diana wanted to know. “Let me know when you want that to start.”
“Unghh.”
“Robin, Avia, stop Diana,” Superman said.
Before Avia could say, “Who? Me?” Superman was gone to peel the woman with the camera away from danger and shield her from the explosion that ripped the already restive air of this corner of town.
“Diana.” Red Robin was there first, lightly taking hold of the wrist that Wonder Woman had hauled back to pummel the shattered face of the rogue metahuman Cathedral.
“Don’t you ever dare touch my—” Diana spun to unload her wrath on a man she had known since he was a boy.
Dick Grayson never had felt quite comfortable around the Amazon Princess. Few women and almost no men ever do. But he never before had felt the sensation of the daggers of those ancient eyes in that perfect unlined face. It was unsettling, even for this man who was trained to react to the uncanny and unbelievable before the wonder of it could register.
She was about to pound him, to redirect her anger with the delinquent against the man arrogant enough to question her. And Red Robin could no more stop her than a bird could stop a snake who held it hypnotized by its gaze.
“Princess. Please—” Avia quickly reached the scene but could not think of what to do or say to calm this rage. “Remember your station.” She’d have to settle for that.
Avia had no idea whether it was what she said or the fact that it was a woman’s voice saying it, but Wonder Woman relented. Diana looked surprised, looked at Avia, looked at Red Robin, and-—-with some horror—at her fist.
“It’s all right, Diana,” Red Robin said.
“No, Richard, it’s not.” Diana swept a hand over Red Robin’s hood to pull it back and kiss his forehead. “But thank you for saying it is. And thank you, Avia.” Contrite and ashamed. It was a sight to behold.
Wonder Woman caught an air current back across the street to the building where Superman stood with the old woman and her camera, shielding her from the fire and shrapnel.
Avia said, “Uhh.”
Red Robin did not do much better. He said, “Wow,” touching a hand to his forehead. Avia thought to pull the hood back down over his face.
Diana was still breathing hard when the explosions of the car stopped. Still shielding the woman with his body, Superman extinguished the flames in an exhalation. The woman just clutched at the heavy red cape and shivered despite the waves of heat from the quenched fire.
“Calm down, Diana,” he told his friend. “Take a breath. They’re not evil. They’re kids. Not warriors.”
“They want to act like warriors, do they?” she said. “I’ll show them war.”
“You’re right,” Superman said, solicitously pulling away the woman from his cape and checking her physiology. Just a touch of nervousness, he thought; her blood pressure would go back down when he left. It always did. Maybe Kryptonians had some sort of pheromone, an idle corner of his cerebrum suggested, that stimulated humans’ nervous systems. Then again, maybe there was an easier explanation than that.
“Avia, would you stay with this woman a little while?” Wonder Woman suggested as Superman stood back.
“They seem to have learned little regard for human life,” Superman said to her.
“No they haven’t learned it,” she agreed. “They haven’t learned anything worth knowing. You weren’t here to teach them.”
She lifted up into the sky, and he did not see her for the rest of the day.
As for the four young rogues whose rumble had brought this contingent of the Justice League, it was a split decision: Tyra, Red Tornado, and Phoebus took the tacit pledge and joined the League; Cathedral came awake with a start, began healing as these children did rather quickly, snarled something, and went on his way.
“You will be dealt with,” Superman called after him.
“You really think it’s not catching on?” Avia asked Superman in flight later on, trying to rev up their conversation from earlier in the day. “Our quest, I mean?”
“I don’t know what to think,” he said. “I’ve never been much on this active-leader-type stuff. I’ve always worked alone, really, even with the Batman or…” He trailed off.
“You don’t even know what you’ve accomplished already,” she said, but neither she nor Superman quite understood to what she was referring.
Unfortunately, averting Armageddon was certainly not among those accomplishments.
*
“We’ve had the inquiry we’ve been waiting for,” Bruce Wayne said into the local-address microphone.
Dinah Lance, in the gymnasium, pointed at Nightstar and asked her to take over the aerobics session. Here the gym consisted of a sixty-foot-high cavern outfitted with trapezes, trampolines, rings, parallel and uneven bars, and inch-thick tumbling mats over an uneven limestone floor. The dominant feature of this landscape was a crevasse across the center of the gym, eighteen feet at its widest point. A dozen colorfully costumed folks—those who had manifested special powers or had undergone genetic tests were metahumans, as Ollie Queen had said, whereas the others were just talented—did aerobics and calisthenics around, over, and inside the great gap in the Earth.
While Superman and Wonder Woman were abroad across the globe with their merry band of world-savers, the Batman’s absence was something no thoughtful observer could miss. That was what Bruce Wayne had counted on. He could be as quiet as he liked as he gathered and trained his alternative force. Those he really wanted to find would inevitably come looking for him as long as he stayed patient. But, with this message from Ibn al Xu’ffasch, Bruce Wayne’s patience was paying off.
Jennie-Lynn Hayden—Jade—the delicately featured lime-skinned daughter of Alan Scott—the Green Lantern—and Harlequin, worked out tumbling and running in place on a flying carpet treadmill generated by her power. The treadmill hovered twelve feet over the crevasse. Obsidian, her brother, solemnly did jumping jacks barefoot on the cavern floor aside the mats, nonstop for a solid three hours. Olivia Queen—Ollie Queen and Dinah Lance’s daughter, who now called herself Black Canary, the name her mother and grandmother both used—maneuvered hoverpads on her feet up among the stalactites and deep into the pit simply by shifting her body weight like a unicycle rider. Wildcat rode the trampolines, occasionally hanging, for however long he could, on extended claws from the cavern roof and then tumbling to catch a wobbly trapeze far below. The teenage girl who called herself Flash—she assumed she was the daughter of the noncommunicative dimension-spanning Wallace West, and so did everyone else—ran laps of the cavern, twelve of them in the last second, and she was slowing down. Darkstar, the son of Donna Troy, the middle-aged woman who once called herself Wonder Girl, tumbled from parallel bars to trampolines over and around the big room, at one point making a tumbling leap over the cleft in the ground and landing on his feet well clear of it. A tall, uncertain-looking man in a trench coat—I could not see into him, but Bruce Wayne called him J’onn—stood in a corner, watching and flickering in and out of phase, as if unsure in what world he belonged. And there were more, a legion of them here in a Batcave better used to solitude.
When Dinah and Ollie Queen arrived, with Ted Kord, on the platform where the Batman kept his elaborate workstation, they found him virtually catatonic.
“Snap out of it, Bruce,” the Green Arrow demanded. “You scare the crap out of me when you do that.”
There was an image on the main computer screen and Bruce was staring at it, analyzing it, trying to see in it something more than there was.
“Who’s that?” Dinah asked. It was the image of a strikingly handsome young man in a business suit, sitting in a big chair among what looked to be a family of ancient European nobles done up in medieval splendor.
“That?”
“Yes, Bruce. What’s wrong?”
“That’s Xu’ffasch,” Wayne said. “His name is Ibn al Xu’ffasch. He runs an international cartel. Makes King Farouk look
like a pauper.”
“He’s so young,” Dinah said. “I’ve never heard of him.”
“You will,” Bruce Wayne said, and studied the picture some more, as if trying to find imperfections among the pixels. “He’s the one who contacted me about a meeting at Luthor’s place. We’re going.”
“The inner circle?” Ted Kord said with some wonder. “Think he’ll let me look at his lab?”
“Oh, for jumping hunchbacks’ sake, Ted, get off it.” Queen blew air. “What’s spooking you about this kid, Bats? Jealous of the bankroll?”
“No,” Wayne said, and tore his gaze from the screen, flipping off the monitor. “No, nothing. Come, we’ve got to study the files on who we’re meeting.”
*
“I said ‘two sugars,’ you ignorant cow,” were the last words Theresa Freed heard before Vandal Savage snapped her neck and left her draped over the back of her desk chair.
I felt a chill wave across the ether as the Spectre bristled, even before I realized that the brute had murdered the girl. My companion had a particular aversion, it seemed, to the black-bearded immortal with the big hands. The frustration was born of his being somehow beyond the Spectre’s reach.
“What is this?” Lex Luthor demanded as he stepped out the door into his reception area.
Luthor found three people in the room, including one deceased: Vandal Savage, King of Spades, and his late receptionist.
“I’m sorry,” King said, taking his cigarette from his mouth and looking around for an ashtray. He reflexively flipped through a deck of cards he kept in a pocket and he dropped his ash into a fruit bowl. “Would you prefer I didn’t smoke? It’s so out of fashion these days.”
The phone rang. Luthor stomped over to the desk and picked up the receiver as he felt Theresa’s carotid for a pulse. “Executive suite. Hello.” There was no pulse. Luthor realized he had not answered a phone in years unless he’d known already who was on the line. For a moment, in his anger with Savage and King, he forgot the necessary vocabulary. “No, excuse me, we’re not taking calls,” and he hung up.
“I just had her trained,” Luthor said, turning to his guests. “Did you do this, King?”
“No, I did,” Savage said, stirring his coffee with a spoon and mingling a sip of it with the bite of strawberry in his mouth. “Why?”
“Do you know how hard it is to find someone who can handle—” and the phone rang again. Luthor picked up the receiver, looked around, and hung it up again. “Savage, my employees represent me. When you assault or abuse—or kill—them, that is a direct challenge to my personal integrity. Do you understand that?”
For a moment Vandal Savage appeared amused, then covered it up. “I’m sure I can replace the employee. I didn’t think.”
“I assume one could interpret that as an apology,” Luthor said. “Come on in. Everyone else is here. Good thing too,” he muttered, “or there’d be no one to open the door.”
King of Spades, with his cigarette and his deck of cards, and Vandal Savage, with his sweetened coffee and a handful of strawberries, followed Luthor through the hallway door and into the conference room at the corner of the building. Savage was, by his own reckoning, roughly fifty thousand years old. He had to be: He was Cro-Magnon, not Homo sapiens. He was of a relatively successful race of early humans who had lived in southeastern Europe, Asia Minor, and north Africa in the dark times when most of that land was covered still with sheets of permafrost.
The chieftain of a Cro-Magnon tribe calling themselves the Blood People, living on what became the Balkan Peninsula, Vandar Adg had been a bully and a ruffian fifty thousand years in the past. One day a fireball had fallen from the sky, bathing him in a gene-altering collection of chemicals and stimuli and sending him into a coma. In the course of his elaborate tribal funeral, Vandar had sat up and resumed his duties as chief. Despite the death of his people, he continued to live, growing in strength until superhuman and growing in knowledge until brilliant. The only area where he’d not grown was in character. Once, in Rome, he’d assumed the name Julius Caesar, risen to rule, and, having grown bored, contrived his own death. Once, in Mongolia, he’d become a man named Genghis Khan and laid down an empire across the steppes of Asia and Europe. He’d founded the Bavarian Illuminati and the Sumerian Empire. He’d ruled Egypt in the fourth dynasty as the Pharaoh Khafre. As the Nazi Chief of Field Counterintelligence in the Second World War, he’d nearly insinuated himself into the position of American Secretary of War until Alan Scott, the first Earth-based Green Lantern, upended his plan. Through the centuries he’d stood on the backs of the conquered and at the side of the conquerors. And now he’d slaughtered an innocent woman not because she made a minor error, but because her employer had stocked the small cube-shaped pellets of sugar in his coffee room instead of the larger rectangular ones.
“One would suppose that in all those years of life,” the Spectre said, “this creature would have grown a hope of Heaven.”
My wraith companion was growing a sense of philosophy. Encouraging.
The King of Spades was better than Vandal Savage only because he was younger, but he was immortal as well, as he’d learned scant decades ago. He’d had time to grow his new mentor’s savagery—or outgrow it. King of Spades—Starly King, actually—was the surviving member of the Royal Flush Gang whose rank as second-in-command came as a result of his name. They were a group of teenagers who’d banded together to take over their neighborhood. Years later all five members had been incarcerated at Belle Rêve Prison when Magog and the Justice Battalion vaporized it and everything within a mile of it. Only King had survived: He had been on a work leave that day, raking leaves in the big playground of a public school on President’s Day weekend. King had thanked Lady Luck that Magog did not take off on public school holidays and, after a suitable period in hiding, had retrieved the gang’s considerable stash of gems, precious metals, and bearer bonds from the hollow cornerstone of the southernmost piling of the Long Island Sound Bridge in Orient Point.
Lex Luthor was not a prejudiced man, he fancied. If you controlled assets in excess of fifty million dollars and you did not make yourself an enemy, he considered you his equal. That was why Vandal Savage and the King of Spades were here. In the conference room were the others: Lord Naga, the leader of India’s Cobra Cult; Ibn al Xu’ffasch, the young hegemon of the shadow empire consolidated by his grandfather Rā’s al Ghūl, who once was the Batman’s greatest enemy; Selina Kyle, once the Catwoman; and Selina’s companion, a small but unsettlingly cute little old man named Edward Nigma, who’d spent most of his years serving time for crimes committed in the identity of the Riddler. He looked unrelentingly dignified, yet smiled constantly for no apparent reason. Nigma was the odd duck here. Luthor needed Ms. Kyle, whose immense cosmetics firm was not only a gold mine but a valuable avenue to billions of devoted consumers all over the world, and she’d come on the condition Nigma came with her. Nigma was merely an accessory, a fashion declaration like armor or tattoos.
“We call ourselves the ‘Mankind Liberation Front,’ ” Luthor said, introducing King and Savage around. “Our newest members.”
“As is Eddie,” Selina Kyle said.
“Who, I remind everyone,” Luthor said, “is here solely as a courtesy to Ms. Kyle.”
“And isn’t it a very gracious one, Lex?” added the smiling Nigma.
“Simmer down, Eddie,” Selina whispered to her companion, and everyone else pretended they did not hear it.
“Gentlemen,” Luthor began, “status reports. Xu’ffasch, how stand medical attention and disaster relief for the refugees from Kansas?”
“Delayed,” the crisp young man responded. “According to my monitoring operations they’re backed up for weeks.”
“Splendid,” Luthor said.
“Why is that splendid?” Nigma interjected, and looked around at the silence. “If I may ask?”
Luthor exhaled.
“Because, dear Edward,” Selina said, “the metahuma
n community have made a tacit declaration of their primary commitment to the reclamation of the survivors and the salvaging of the real estate. To the degree that they fail, it is to our advantage.”
“Ah, isn’t that perceptive?”
Selina leaned over to Nigma, and everyone supposed it was to tighten his tether. Rather, it was to point surreptitiously at Xu’ffasch and tell Nigma, “He’s the one. The son.” Nigma’s response was to put a hand to his chest and catch his breath. For a moment he could do nothing but stare at Xu’ffasch.
“Lord Naga,” Luthor continued, “what resources do we have to allocate to ordnance dispersal this quarter?”
“We have recruited another sixscore vigilantes since our initiation of counterpropaganda to the Justice League campaign,” the cult leader offered. “With the Arkham Asylum and Belle Rêve Prison survivors, along with ourselves and our various hangers-on and affinity groups, we are now responsible for eight percent of the identified superhuman population. There’s an updated spreadsheet in your database.”
“Excellent,” Luthor said as he slid back a panel at his end of the big table, punched a few buttons, and studied what he saw. He slid back the panel and again he said, “Excellent. Selina, what are your projections of—”
“I wonder—” Nigma interrupted again, pausing for the requisite indulgent silence. “If you’ll pardon the question, why your esteemed selves find it necessary not only to impede the reestablishment of public services for the suffering, but to arm metahumans as well? Where exactly does the ‘Mankind Liberation’ part of this concern come in? Did I miss something?”
“Selina,” Luthor suggested, getting down to the ring of his cigar, “for your own good, keep a tighter leash on your guest.”
Selina Kyle put a hand on Nigma’s thigh and glared at Luthor, but it was the King of Spades who answered.
“I had a similar concern,” King said. “Am I correct in assuming that our little MLF has embraced the tactic of raising the stakes rather than relaxing them?”
Kingdom Come Page 16
