Justice League

by Michael Jan Friedman

  Just to be certain, he glanced again at the tiny screen of his palm-sized computer. It showed him the joint between the plates as plain as day.

  “Yes,” Luthor confirmed, “right there. Cut away!”

  “Whatever you say,” Star Sapphire replied.

  It was a testament to her power that she could maintain her life-preserving bubble around the Injustice Gang and still project a scalpel-thin beam into the joint.

  There was no scream of tortured metal as the purple force emission cut into it. After all, noise didn’t carry in the vacuum of space. And even if it did, Star Sapphire’s bubble would have filtered it out.

  But that didn’t mean that her beam wasn’t doing the job. Luthor saw it descend ever so gradually, making a cut about three feet long before it was done.

  But it took a while. A good deal longer than Luthor had imagined, in fact.

  “You’re slowing down,” the Shade told Star Sapphire.

  The look she turned on him could have melted iron. “You think that was easy, Shade? It wasn’t just the blinking metal I had to deal with. It was the invisible energy barrier reinforcing it.”

  “Enough,” Luthor told Star Sapphire. He glanced disapprovingly at the Shade. “I appreciate your efforts, even if no one else does.”

  Besides, they weren’t in a hurry.

  The Justice League was running all over Metropolis, attending to the chaos Luthor had created there. He had seen their shuttle leave the Watchtower from his secret headquarters back on Earth.

  So if Star Sapphire had taken some extra time, it wasn’t a big deal. For a change, they had a surplus.

  “Grundy’s turn,” growled the giant.

  And indeed, it was.

  Pressing her force bubble up against the Watchtower, Star Sapphire turned it into something more closely resembling a dome. That enabled Grundy to dig the tips of his enormous fingers into the incision she had made.

  “There goes your manicure,” Copperhead snickered.

  “Shut up,” said Grundy.

  His lips pulling back ferociously from his teeth, he dug his feet in and hauled with all his strength. And little by little, the skin of the Watchtower began to peel back.

  Like Star Sapphire’s work, Grundy’s proceeded at a snail’s pace. But when he was done, there was a gap big enough for even him to wriggle through—assuming he didn’t mind losing a few layers of bone-white skin in the process.

  “Good work,” Luthor told the giant. He turned to Copperhead and jerked a thumb at the opening. “You first.”

  Copperhead grumbled about it, but he slithered inside. Luthor waited to see if his hireling ran into anything they couldn’t handle. But after a moment, he heard “All clear.”

  Luthor couldn’t remember a pair of words that had ever sounded sweeter to him. Grinning in anticipation of what was to come, he followed Copperhead through the hole.

  Once again, he thought as he looked around at the place, he was in the stronghold of his enemy. It was an exhilarating feeling, to say the least.

  And they didn’t have to worry about the air supply leaving through the opening they had made. The Watchtower was programmed to plug the gap with an emergency force field.

  Now, thought Luthor, all they had to do was find out where the League had stowed the neutralizer. . . .

  John Stewart had never seen such a dangerous mess of circling planes as he saw in the moonlit sky over Metropolis International.

  Then again, with all the city’s power cut off, the airport’s traffic controllers had no radar to tell them about incoming flights. That left the pilots of those planes on their own.

  The fortunate few that still had fuel left for airports in other cities. But the flights coming in from Europe and Latin America didn’t have enough in their tanks to exercise that option.

  That put them in a bind. All that circling was making their fuel situation go from bad to worse. But their pilots were reluctant to attempt a landing, afraid that some other pilot might decide to do the same thing at the same time.

  Luckily, help had arrived—not just the Green Lantern, but Superman as well. While their teammates had dispersed to address other problems in the darkened city, John and the Man of Steel had rocketed to the airport.

  John knew what to do, too. After all, he had communicated with ships out in space. He could use the same tricks to communicate with these pilots.

  Picking a plane at random, he used his ring to create a series of huge green letters in front of it. They spelled out a message: Follow My Light. Then, darting underneath the plane and matching its speed, John aimed his ring at the maze of tarmac below and sent out a wide, intense beam of green radiance.

  It was broad enough and bright enough for the pilot to see where he was going. Taking advantage of it, he extended his landing gear and began his descent.

  And just in time, too. The Green Lantern could hear the sputter of the plane’s engines as they dipped into the last of its fuel supplies.

  He stayed with the aircraft until it touched down on the runway. Then he ascended again to escort the next plane to safety.

  But before he got very far, he saw a sight that made his blood freeze in his veins. One of the other planes had gone into a dive and was plummeting toward the traffic-control tower—which was still staffed with a full complement of employees.

  John had no time to waste. Using the power of his ring at full throttle, he sped toward the helpless aircraft.

  It’s going to be close, he told himself. And even if he did reach the plane in time, he was going to have a devil of a time pulling it out of its dive.

  Then, inexplicably, he saw the plane start to nose up. A fraction of a second before it would have crashed into the tarmac, it leveled off somehow.

  And just as if it had never been in trouble in the first place, it made a perfect landing. John would have called it a miracle, except he was beginning to suspect that the plane had had some help.

  But it was only after the plane had rolled to a halt that John saw a red-and-blue streak emerge from under it and return to the moonlit heavens.

  He smiled to himself. Even a Green Lantern had to tip his hat to Superman.

  Superman guided the plane down until it could land on its own. Then he soared back into the heavens to find yet another aircraft in need of his help.

  He didn’t know how many more of them were up there, but he knew he had to work quickly. He was determined not to lose even a single life to Luthor’s handiwork.

  What bothered him was that he didn’t know why Luthor had sabotaged the city’s power grid. It couldn’t just have been out of spite. There had to be a reason. . . .

  Just then, he heard a voice in his ear. “Superman, this is J’onn.”

  J’onn wasn’t in the habit of calling just to say hello. Obviously, something important had come up.

  “The Injustice Gang has invaded our headquarters,” the Martian Manhunter continued. “They are moving through it even as I speak.”

  Superman’s jaw clenched. The Injustice Gang—in the Watchtower? He saw now why Luthor had knocked out Metropolis’s power: as a diversion, to get the League to leave its headquarters undefended, so the Injustice Gang could steal the neutralizer.

  And it had worked.

  If Luthor got his hands on the neutralizer, it would be disastrous—for the League especially. But the Man of Steel couldn’t put the welfare of himself or his teammates before that of everyone in Metropolis.

  He wished he could go back and help J’onn. But he couldn’t. Thanks to Luthor, he had work to do.

  “But don’t worry,” said J’onn, as calm as ever. “I’ve worked out a plan to stall Luthor and his team until you return.”

  And he ended the communication.

  The Kryptonian sighed. His Martian colleague was facing terrible odds. And yet, he hadn’t complained. He had made what he was facing sound like just another day at the office.

  But the Watchtower wasn’t just any office—and the Inju
stice Gang was a little tougher than most competition.

  Superman vowed to get back to the Watchtower as soon as he possibly could. In the meantime, he just hoped J’onn knew what he was doing.

  Still seated at the workstation in his quarters, J’onn used the Watchtower’s internal sensor network to track the spread of Luthor’s team.

  He could see them as individual colored dots, each one following its own distinct path through the facility. Some were moving faster than others, of course, Copperhead being capable of covering a lot more ground than Grundy was.

  However, it appeared to J’onn that each of his adversaries knew precisely where he or she was going. Obviously, Luthor had learned something of the Watchtower from his previous visit and was using the information to good advantage.

  What was more, it made sense for them to split up. The Watchtower was a large facility, and they didn’t have an infinite amount of time to conduct their search.

  Last time Luthor’s team invaded Justice League headquarters, J’onn had met them head-on in the shuttle bay and been given reason to regret it. This time, he had decided, he would handle the problem a little differently.

  He would wait until they were isolated from one another and deal with them one at a time. And he would do so in a way that would give them all reason for concern.

  J’onn decided to begin his campaign with the most powerful member of the Injustice Gang—the mysterious woman known as Star Sapphire. As it happened, she was also the easiest to identify by virtue of her powerful energy signature.

  Apparently, she was headed for the League’s trophy room, where J’onn and his colleagues stored artifacts they had accumulated in their travels—some of them extremely valuable. It was a logical place for Star Sapphire to look for the neutralizer.

  It wasn’t anywhere near the trophy room, of course. But the villainess had no way of knowing that.

  Rendering himself immaterial, J’onn descended a couple of levels and entered the wall of the trophy room. Then he breached it with his face ever so slightly, just enough to allow himself to see out of it.

  Star Sapphire hadn’t yet entered the room. The League’s trophies, ranging from a bust of the demon Etrigan to a replica of Aquaman’s exquisite Atlantean scepter, were the room’s only occupants.

  Just then, J’onn saw the trophy room’s door start to slide open, revealing a fierce purple glow in the corridor beyond. Star Sapphire, he thought.

  The glow came from the gemstone that the villainess wore on her masked forehead. J’onn didn’t have any idea how the gem worked, but it made Star Sapphire as powerful as any adversary he had ever faced.

  He had even seen her do some damage to Superman. If she could bring down the Man of Steel, J’onn didn’t expect to fare very well against her.

  But he could think of one teammate who might. . . .

  Withdrawing his face into the concealment offered by the wall, he waited a second for Star Sapphire to go by. Then he stepped out where she would notice him. But he didn’t look like the being called the Martian Manhunter—not anymore.

  Now he looked like the scarlet-and-gold Flash—the product of a weird, one-in-a-million interaction between a rack of chemicals and a midsummer lightning bolt.

  Catching sight of him, Star Sapphire whirled in midair. “You!” she exclaimed. “I thought you were in Metropolis!”

  J’onn didn’t have any trouble recreating Flash’s devil-may-care grin. The speedster’s speech pattern was a little more difficult. “Do I look like I’m in Metropolis? Or do I look like I’m here in the everlovin’ flesh?”

  “What you look like,” she said, “is a man who’s about to be pulverized by a very high-intensity energy beam.” The words were barely out of her mouth before she tried to spear J’onn with a shaft of violet fury.

  But he was ready for it. In fact, he had been hoping Star Sapphire would use her gem on him, because it would give him a chance to further convince her that she was dealing with the super-fast Flash.

  Almost a quarter of a second before the beam reached him, J’onn went immaterial and dropped through the floor. But his adversary couldn’t see that. All she could see was that her energy assault had missed its target and struck the wall behind him instead.

  Moving quickly, J’onn dipped underneath the thick metal floor and rose through it on the other side of the room. Then, still simulating the Flash’s appearance, he became solid again, creating the illusion that he had actually run there faster than the eye could follow.

  Star Sapphire’s head snapped in his direction and she muttered something out of frustration. After all, she thought she was dealing with an enemy who could move faster than her bludgeoning energy blasts.

  Little did she know how wrong she was—and the last thing J’onn wanted to do was reveal the truth to her.

  “I hope you kept the receipt for that sapphire,” he quipped. “I think it’s defective.”

  “Do shut up!” the villainess snarled. Then she shot another sizzling purple beam at him.

  But before it could slam J’onn senseless, he plummeted through the floor again. And again he came up elsewhere in the room, a good-natured smirk on his face.

  “I hate to cut this short,” he told Star Sapphire, “but it’s movie night here at the Watchtower, and Batman gets grumpy when I’m late.”

  With a cry of rage, his opponent unleashed yet another blast in his direction. Avoiding it as he had the others, J’onn stayed beneath the level of the floor this time.

  But with the power of his mind, he sensed Star Sapphire’s presence above him. She stayed there for a moment or two, probably trying to figure out if the Flash was still anywhere near her.

  Then she spoke aloud, no doubt into a comm link similar to the kind used by the Justice League. “Luthor? Are you there?”

  J’onn could hear the mastermind’s response in Star Sapphire’s mind: “What is it?”

  “This place isn’t as empty as you said it would be. The Flash is still here.”

  J’onn felt a pang of accomplishment. His masquerade had been every bit as effective as he had hoped.

  “Impossible,” said Luthor, his voice laced with disdain. “He went down to Metropolis with the others.”

  “Did you see him go down?” asked Star Sapphire. “I mean the Flash, specifically?”

  “Of course not. But why would he stay?”

  “When you see him,” said Star Sapphire, “you can ask him. I would have done it myself, but our encounter was a bit too brief. He just ran circles around me and then took off.”

  There was a pause in the conversation. It seemed to J’onn that Luthor was absorbing what he had heard, wrapping his mind around it.

  “Keep looking for the neutralizer,” he said at last, no longer quite so dismissive. “I’ll get back to you.”

  “You do that,” said Star Sapphire. Then she started blasting away at the room’s built-in titanium lockers, determined to examine their contents.

  If J’onn had had any doubts that Luthor was after the neutralizer, he had them no longer. But he couldn’t linger there—not if he was going to succeed with his plan.

  For now, Luthor and his henchmen thought there was only one hero defending the Watchtower. But if all went as J’onn hoped it would, they would soon think there were two heroes.

  Then three. And then the entire Justice League.

  With that purpose before him, J’onn cast his mind like a net over the Watchtower, scanning it in search of another invader.

  The Flash had visited Metropolis many times before, but he had never seen it quite like this.

  Every building in the city was dark and dead-looking. The streetlights had all been deprived of life as well. Even Metropolis’s bridges looked like the stiffened corpses of colossal insects.

  There were only two sources of light: the ghostly glow of the moon and the stabbing brilliance of automobile headlights, reflected in store windows and the metal bodies of other cars.

  The Flash ha
d never seen so many cars. The streets were choked with them, their drivers striving desperately to get somewhere despite the loss of power to the traffic-control grid. An occasional motorist was still honking his horn out of frustration, though most people seemed to have accepted their fates. In fact, some had abandoned their vehicles altogether.

  He was weaving among them, headed for the heart of Metropolis to see what emergencies he could find, when he heard a disturbing report on a car radio.

  As quickly as he was moving, it wasn’t easy for him to catch more than a few words. But he overheard enough to know what the problem was and where to find it. Changing direction so quickly that he melted the asphalt beneath his feet, he sped toward a commuter railway hub just north of downtown.

  When the Flash got there, he saw that the radio report had been right on the money—unfortunately. Skidding to a halt, he surveyed the damage.

  Nasty, he thought with a shudder.

  With the city’s Luthor-induced power outage plunging rail lines into confusion, two big commuter trains had collided head-on. Luckily, they seemed to have stopped in time to avoid destroying each other.

  However, both head cars had been damaged and derailed. And on both sides of the darkened tracks, armies of passengers were being treated for their injuries by a mere handful of paramedics.

  Approaching one of them, the Flash said, “I’m here to help. What can I do?”

  The paramedic, a woman with long red hair tied into a ponytail, didn’t seem surprised to see a costumed hero. But then, this was Metropolis.

  She looked around at all the crash victims and heaved a sigh. “Some of these people need to be treated in a hospital. But traffic’s backed up so badly, we can’t get our ambulances through.”

  “Say no more,” the Flash told her. “I’m your man.”

  The paramedic didn’t look any happier for his announcement. “You don’t understand. I’m talking about a lot of people. Dozens of them.”