Justice League of America - Batman: The Stone King (10 page)

Kyle wasn't really afraid, because he knew the ring would protect him from whatever this assailant could do. So he braced himself, ready for the impact. But it never came. Instead, the weird figure spiraled in the air and came to rest, hovering six feet in front of him.

"What's your beef?" Kyle snapped, mentally preparing himself in case he had to go on the offensive.

In answer, the creature's eyes blazed ever more fiercely. They seemed to be spinning, spiraling round and round, dissolving Kyle's will as he felt himself fall under their malevolent influence.

Incredible,
he thought with sudden shock.
This thing is trying to hypnotize me
–
one thing the ring won't defend me against!

He felt as if his mind were turning to jelly, his thoughts drifting away into nothing. His deteriorating willpower was no longer enough to power the ring's efforts to contain the fire.

Almost in a dream, Green Lantern saw the protective shield fade and vanish. At once, flames reignited in a dozen places.

A firefighter screamed as the smoldering ground beneath him flared up in a blast of flame. It was the man's sheer terror that jerked Kyle back to reality.

Instantly, a beam of solid green light flashed from Kyle's ring. But before the hovering figure could take evasive action, the beam slammed into it with the force of a steam hammer.

There was a sudden haze of blue sparks, and the creature plummeted downward. Another beam shot from the ring, grabbing the tumbling figure in a pair of emerald pincers. Green Lantern lowered the body gently to the ground, then turned his attention back to the fire.

Only when he was satisfied that the museum was in no further danger did he return to the prone body propped against the wall.

It was a man in a security guard's uniform, a shaman's mask strapped to his face. The blue light in the eyes had disappeared, and his body was now lifeless.

Carefully, Green Lantern slipped off the mask and looked down at what had been the face of Don Bradley.

The Moon, October 28

The glaring sun cast deep black shadows across the lunar landscape. With no atmosphere to protect the rocky, crater-strewn landscape, the daytime temperature soared. In just twelve hours' time, as lunar night fell, it would plummet to a marrow-freezing hundred degrees below zero.

It was a world that had been dead for more than four billion years. A world hostile to all life-forms. The ideal place for the Justice League to build their base.

The Watchtower rose from the pitted surface like a monstrous artifact left behind by an ancient alien civilization. A wedge of concrete and steel towering to a height of almost a mile, the Tower was the team's official headquarters.

In the spacious penthouse boardroom, the windows were darkened Plexiglas to shut out the sun's torturous heat. Oxygen was provided by a gaseous exchange membrane J'onn J'onzz had built. Artificial gravity was generated deep in the machine rooms under the lunar surface. And the boardroom interior was softly illuminated by light produced from solar panels on the building's sun-facing sides.

Batman had called this extraordinary meeting from his lair in Gotham, then teleported here to preside over it. He sat at the head of the vast conference table, in the convenor's chair, his face grim as he recited the official roll call.

"Wonder Woman. Green Lantern. Flash. Superman." As he read out their names, each hero nodded. "J'onn J'onzz was also requested to attend, but sends his regrets. He's engaged on other business."

"Just us five?" Superman queried. "What about Aquaman? Plastic Man? Zauriel?"

The JLA had around two dozen members and affiliates, but at any one time more than half of them were likely to be involved in their own personal crimefighting endeavors. However, that wasn't why Batman hadn't called them in.

"Each of us seated here was involved in something last night," Gotham's Dark Knight answered. "I had Oracle program everything I knew into her computers. There's a ninety-eight percent chance–virtual certainty–that all of last night's activities were connected."

Once, Oracle had been plain Barbara Gordon, niece of the Gotham City police commissioner. Inspired by Batman, she adopted the guise of Batgirl to fight crime. But the Joker, on one of his psychotic sprees, had put an end to that, leaving Barbara crippled. Now wheelchair-bound, she could no longer physically battle against criminals. Instead, she had turned herself into a high-tech wizard, and her high-powered bank of sophisticated supercomputers lay at the heart of the League's abilities.

Fed by a network of orbiting satellites, Oracle's system specialized in trawling through trillions of bits of seemingly random information, searching for underlying patterns and connections. Patterns that would have remained unseen by any individual showed up with startling clarity when exposed to her lightning-fast number crunching.

A monitor screen stood at each occupied place around the table. At Batman's signal, they flared into life, streams of data running down their green-glowing screens.

"Appearance of a mysterious blue light. Three of us faced a human foe who was apparently possessed, while Wonder Woman dealt with a pack of reanimated corpses." Batman enumerated the points of similarity as they lit up on-screen. "Murder and destruction for no obvious reason. All encounters took place within a very limited time frame. Temporary engagement with a super hero, leading to the defeat and disappearance of the foe. Further inexplicable blue lights . . ."

"Your point is made, Batman," the Flash put in, "Can we cut to the bottom line? Has Oracle fingered any particular villain for this?"

"It sounds like one of our more powerful enemies,"

Wonder Woman mused. "Dr. Destiny, maybe? The strange manifestations fit with his power to induce dreams and nightmares."

"Or Brainiac?" Superman suggested. "He certainly has the mental powers to produce last night's effects."

Almost imperceptibly, Batman shook his head. "Not according to the computers. While individual events might point to particular supervillains, the overall pattern does not support that hypothesis."

"I'm sorry, but then, what hypothesis
does it
support?" Superman asked, slightly exasperated.

In reply, Batman nodded toward his own monitor, where the computer bank's conclusions were scrolling down the screen:
Unknown enemy. Unknown power source. Unknown motivation, though testing is indicated.

"Testing?" Green Lantern frowned. "Testing
what,
exactly?"

"Us." Batman's tone seemed to drop even lower than normal. "Whatever our foe was, it targeted the five of us. Not precisely, of course, but every one of its manifestations occurred within a one-mile radius of our presence, as if they were designed to draw us out, engage us in conflict."

"Only to be defeated and disappear?" Superman was skeptical. "Not much of a test."

"That depends on what it wanted to learn," Batman continued, no trace of emotion in his voice. Although Batman had tremendous respect for Superman, it was tempered with caution. Unlike every other member of the League, Batman had no superpowers of any kind. Everything he knew, every skill he possessed, had been won through hard work and determination. It made him extremely wary when dealing with beings whose phenomenal powers were a gift, like Green Lantern, or a confluence of nature, like Superman.

But Batman had no hesitation in calling on their powers whenever it was necessary.

He turned to Green Lantern. "If all of last night's attacks
were
made by one central source, Oracle has been unable to locate it. Perhaps your ring might achieve more success?"

Under his mask, Green Lantern's eyes twinkled. Less than a year ago he had been an unknown, struggling artist. Now, he routinely rubbed shoulders with the greatest heroes on the planet. And his abilities were just as integral to the team's functioning as anyone else's.

Lantern rose to his feet, for a moment swaying under the Watchtower's artificial gravity, which was slightly less than that on Earth. He walked across to the huge electronic map of the planet that dominated one entire wall of the penthouse, and pointed his ring at it. The rest of the world disappeared in a twinkling of electronic lights, to be replaced by an expanded map of the United States.

A needle-thin beam of emerald light lanced from the ring, pointing in turn to each of the heroes' base cities: Gotham City, Metropolis, Keystone City, Boston, New York. A fine tracery of green appeared around each location, expanding and contracting as tendrils shot out seeking to establish connections.

Green Lantern shook his head in wonder, still awed by the power ring's abilities.

The others watched in silence as green lines quickly formed, joined up, split apart, and vanished again. Less than a minute later, a single image was frozen on the map. Lines joined each city to the others, with one finer line–barely noticeable compared with the others–leading back to a single location.

"According to the ring, we have our source." Lantern had turned his back on the map to face the others around the table. "Just outside Gotham City."

"Yes," Batman said emphatically. "It's the last place the five of us gathered together. Remember Gotham Dam?" He paused for a moment, ensuring that he had their attention. "If Lantern's ring is right–"

"And I've never known it to be wrong!" Green Lantern interrupted, grinning.

"The source of all last night's misfortunes is here," Batman finished, "in the stepped pyramid uncovered by the dam burst."

Dark clouds scudded across the night sky, blocking out the moon's light.

It was well after midnight, but the lights of the surveying teams working on the remains of the Gotham Dam still burned. The dam had provided water for most of western Gotham, and the electricity generated by its giant turbines brought heat and light to almost a million people. It needed to be up and running again as fast as possible.

A half mile away, the truncated pyramid was a black, undifferentiated mass protruding from the scoured valley side. Following Robert Mills's tragic death, and Peter Glaston's disappearance, the Gotham Police Department had closed off the entire site for forensic analysis. Though Commissioner Gordon himself had spearheaded the investigation, his inquiries led precisely nowhere.

All they could suppose was that Glaston had suffered some sort of mental breakdown, murdered his tutor, and then fled–taking Professor Mills's heart with him. A photograph and a description of Glaston had been sent to every police force in the state, but so far there hadn't been a single sighting.

In deference to Professor Mills, the university authorities had abruptly canceled all further excavation. The murder attracted the worst type of publicity they could get, and the university's president was worried that it might affect future funding levels. Better to withdraw from the public eye–for a while, at least. The pyramid was potentially the single most important find ever uncovered in North America, and it merited long and indepth study. The digging teams would return, but only when the furor had died away.

Now, the pyramid was deserted and lifeless, hardly even visible beneath the foreboding sky. Had anyone been watching, they'd have seen a flash of light from the flattened summit, ten times brighter than the cloud-obscured moon.

As the light from their teleportation device died away, the five Justice League heroes found themselves standing atop the pyramid. The Flash breathed a quiet sigh of relief; every time he used the teleporter he remembered the movie about the fly and the man whose disassembled molecules had become jumbled up beyond repair. Still, even he couldn't run from the moon to Earth.

"It feels barren–empty," Wonder Woman pointed out. "Not at all what you'd expect if it's the nexus of me energies we encountered last night."

"Use your telescopic vision," Batman told Superman. "Check out the whole site."

The others waited as the Man of Steel stood, swiveled a few degrees every second or two, his gaze directed down at the structure beneath their feet.

Superman had been conceived on the distant planet Krypton, a world circling a giant red sun that was slowly dying. When the energies at Krypton's core threatened to destroy the planet, the scientist Jor-El built a rocket to carry his unborn son to safety.

So Kal-El, who would come to be known as Superman, had come to Earth, where the radiation of its much younger and more active yellow sun resulted in many of his godlike superpowers.

"There's one small interior chamber," Superman announced at last, "and that's it. The rest of the pyramid is of solid construction, alternating layers of granite and chalk." He studiously avoided meeting Batman's gaze as he went on. "Looks like we may be here on a wild-goose chase."

The words were barely out of his mouth when the small plateau beneath their feet started to shudder and shake.

"Fall back to the edge!" Batman called out.

The center of the summit had begun to heave violently. Either a very localized earthquake . . . or something was trying to burst its way through from the interior.

"Lantern, see if your ring can tell us what's going on here," Batman shouted.

"But there's nothing in there," Superman said, puzzled.

"Nothing tangible, maybe," Green Lantern agreed, "but it would seem there's some kind of unusual energy configuration. Might take me a few minutes to find out more–"

But he didn't have those few minutes. With a roar like crashing storm waves, the center of the plateau erupted in a fountain of rock and debris that shot fifty feet in the air before falling back on the League.

"I'll try to contain it!" As he spoke, Lantern's ring sent out a stream of energy that coalesced into a dome-shape, a smaller version of the trick he'd used last night to subdue the blaze at the museum.

The violent eruption stopped, but only briefly. As if it had been conserving itself, the energy again surged upward, blasting into Green Lantern's capping dome with such force that the dome was blown aside. The Emerald Guardian himself was knocked off his feet.