Wayne of Gotham (3 page)

“Solved another one, eh, copper?”

Batman turned at once.

Scarface was talking to him.

“You missed the mark, flatfoot.” The dummy's mouth moved as it spoke, the dead eyes fixed on Batman. “Lettin' the big fish get away. I'm the brains of this operation, and you're just pickin' up the crumbs. But then, you never did see straight.”

It's a device. Audio player coupled to actuators. But it's aimed at me. This whole thing was to deliver a message … but what's the message and who's it from
?

“Take your folks, fer instance! Salt of the earth! Saints of Gotham! So sad that some crazed hood gunned 'em down in Crime Alley.” The dummy's head shifted back and forth. “That's the way they told it to you—a nice bedtime story so you could sleep at night in your nice warm bed in Bristol.”

Batman froze.

Whoever is behind this knows who I am.

Scarface shook his wooden head violently from side to side. “But you're a big boy now, aren't you? You have new toys to play with, so maybe you don't need fairy tales anymore. Maybe you can wake up and know that all saints pay a price and that their souls ain't always clean. I'm gonna throw a party, just for you. Do you think you're old enough to come?”

The dummy suddenly stopped moving.

It was only then that Batman noticed the card held in the dummy's hand. He would take the dummy with him along with any of the audio equipment. It would not do to have those words replayed during any subsequent police investigation.

But first he reached down with his gloved hand and picked up the offered card. To his eye it was a standard size, blank on the back with a single line of text on the front.

“
You are invited.
”

Batcave / Wayne Manor / Bristol / 5:51 a.m. / Present Day

Batman opened the gull-wing door of the Batmobile, gripped the titanium frame, and tried to stand up. His legs shook under him but held as he painfully rose out of the low-slung seat. He had exhausted the capacitors for the Batsuit's power in Spellbinder's Fun House, which was on Amusement Mile, on the north shore of the Newtown District. Normally he would have recharged the Batsuit during his return using the vehicle's onboard power, but it had been too short a trip from Newtown under the Kane Memorial Bridge and into Bristol. So now the Batsuit hung on him as extra weight that his aching body was struggling to support.

He slowly rose to his feet next to the car, tapping the release points at the base of his cowl in sequence. The smooth collar fitted to his neck loosened and he pulled the cowl off with urgent vehemence. His dark hair exploded outward at odd angles, sweat dripping down off his brow. The mask was off, and he was Bruce again, breathing a little harder than he would like and staring down at the cowl in his hand as though it were a part of him removed. He reached up, rubbing the back of his gloved hand across the prominent stubble on his face. The new Batsuit worked well, but it could be improved.

Everything needs to be improved. It's not right. Not yet.

Bruce looked back at the Batmobile.

Batmobile … what a joke.
It was a name that the Gotham press had given his specialized vehicle when he had first appeared in one. It defied their classifications of standard transportation systems, and so they slapped a name on it that they could handle: the Batmobile. In truth, there had been many different Batmobiles at his disposal down through the years, some specialized and some made obsolete by the passage of time and technology. One of his favorites was a heavily converted 1955 Lincoln Futura. It had been his father's car originally, and Bruce had managed to salvage it from the junkyard just in time. He had spent years working on the car. He never used it, but he liked the look. Most of the vehicles were more practical, designed for the specific requirements of the time, and nearly all were in a constant state of rebuild and upgrade. Many were easily recognizable as a Batmobile—their bodies sweeping into the ubiquitous sculpted and scalloped fins that somehow always made it into his designs. The models from the 1980s were muscular, built around jet engines or enormous power plants that screamed in the night. He had been younger then and relished the power under his hands. As the Batmobiles evolved, they were becoming subtler if not less muscular, with stealth technologies incorporated into their brute strength.

The current version was, as always, an improvement over the last. Gotham was largely an island severed from the continent by the Gotham River. That meant there were only a handful of bridges connecting the boroughs of the city proper to the outside world, many of them a commuter's nightmare during drive time.

Bruce flashed a rueful smile. The image of a Batmobile—black fins, menacing angles, and screaming engine—crawling along across the Trigate Bridge while stuck in traffic was laughable.

Justice must be swift … and sure … and final.

So this particular incarnation of the Batmobile was a modification he knew as TS8c. It had started from a military scout vehicle frame. He had married it to a modified aircraft power plant and a custom-engineered combined gearbox and differential. It normally ran on RP-1 kerosene rocket fuel—relatively common and easy to obtain. Keeping the sound dampened from the screaming, high-torque engine had been a major problem that was solved, in part, with a secondary electric drive system when distances away from the power conduits were short and stealth was required. There were also four sets of modified RCS rocket motors mounted on gimbals—each shrouded by the vehicle's shell and drawing on the same RP-1 rocket fuel used for the drive engine—that could give him some control over the vehicle's attitude should it become airborne. There were also four downsized PAM-D solid-rocket boosters fixed to the back of the frame in a cluster. He could use those one at a time in case he needed a significant push. The deployable weapons hard-points were specifically designed to allow for different load-outs depending on what Batman considered to be required for the mission at the time. The cockpit had its own layer of passive armor, while the shell of the car used an active armor similar to his own Batsuit—not only protecting the control, weapons, drive, and sensor systems, as well as the Caped Crusader himself, but also allowing the exterior shape of the vehicle to shift. It could find its own aerodynamically optimized shape at high speeds or could modify its look at lower speeds simply to confuse his prey in the middle of pursuit. There were no windows in the vehicle at all, and no lights—the driver depended entirely on an array of cameras, radar, and sonar sensors to give him a picture of his surroundings. However, as the exterior surface could become alternately polished or dull from one plane to the next, it could impersonate the look of smoked glass found in more common vehicles—temporarily blending in with traffic when necessary.

It did nominally look like a “mobile,” Bruce admitted but, that, too, was something of an illusion, because the wheels on the vehicle were not solely designed to operate on streets. Bridges were choke points too easily cut off by civilian traffic or the misguided vigilance of the Gotham City Police Department. So for the last year, Gotham Power and Light had been upgrading—thanks to the influence of a number of Wayne Industries subcontractors—power, water, and sewer systems throughout the Gotham network. The real purpose had been to install rapid access points at key locations throughout the city where the TS8c could turn a corner and vanish from the street, the suspension shifting the wheel positions as the vehicle plunged down abandoned subway tunnels, utilities-access conduits, or even main subway lines, if traffic permitted. His favorite system involved a pair of rail clamps that could extend upward out of the front and rear of the vehicle and attach themselves around the specially designed power conduits that ran the length of each of the Gotham bridges. The variable suspension could then rise upward against the bottom of the bridge structure as though it were an upside-down road, allowing him to cross the river beneath the bridges unimpeded, while above him the snarled traffic contended with the occasional roadblocks set to catch him.

Bruce walked slowly to the test bench. It was set on the walkway that partially surrounded the turntable on which the car now rested. He set down his cowl, leaned against the bench, and took in several deep, painful breaths. He looked down into the glossy surface, his reflection staring back at him.

I was young once … or was I? I don't remember being young. The face is still strong but there are more lines in it than I remember. Dusk to dawn, fall to spring … Did the wheel of the years turn and I never noticed? There are no seasons in this cavern tomb where my soul resides. Does Gotham exist in an eternal rain-soaked night, or do I only see it that way
?

Bruce turned around, leaning back against the bench. The Batmobile was resting in the center of the turntable. The original entrance to the cavern was flanked now by six dark tunnels—four black maws on the left and two more on the right—that led away down into the forgotten veins beneath Gotham. Older models of his vehicles had once exited through the waterfall beyond the natural access, careening through the night-shrouded woods and onto the back roads of Bristol Township, with the forbidding silhouette of the city just beyond the riverbanks, calling him back toward Crime Alley. Calling him on to the chase once more. He used to relish driving through the cleansing water of the falls—a ritual baptism that sanctified his quest.

Time changes everything. Time changes nothing.

Bruce listened to the falling of the water echoing toward him down the cavern's natural exit. The gentle green of the surrounding forest on his estate lay beyond. It was a different world.

The tunnels are better than the water. Not perfect … but better.

“Master Bruce!”

The irritatingly familiar voice echoed down through the industrial platforms, suspension rods, and turnbuckles throughout the cave. Bruce closed his eyes, considering for a moment whether he would simply not answer, but thought better of it.

“On the vehicle platform, Alfred,” he called back. The noise of his former butler's clattering hard-soled shoes on the metal platform grating sounded like the jabbing of an ice pick. “This version of the TS8 performed well tonight.”

“It should, considering what the components cost,” came the echoing reply. “Mr. Fox wanted me to mention that there may have been some cost overruns—”

“Don't sweat the ledger, Alfred,” Bruce chuckled. “It's not in your job description.”

“My job description, as you put it, has always been a bit nebulous,” Alfred responded, stepping lightly from the metal staircase on the far side of the vehicle turntable. He was a tall, slender man with an anachronistic thin mustache and a mane of white hair combed straight back. Alfred Pennyworth moved in his exquisitely tailored Collezioni charcoal pinstripe suit with an agile confidence that belied his years. He spoke with an upper-crust British accent that had a hint of London about it despite the fact he had been largely raised on the Wayne Estate and only visited London occasionally. His father, Jarvis Pennyworth, had been the family retainer, as such men were so quaintly called during the time of Bruce's grandfather. The accent, it seemed, came with the family business. To Bruce, the Pennyworths had simply come with the house, like the grounds or the furniture. They had always been there, although to Bruce, Alfred had become the only breathing link to his own past … the only family that he knew.

Family relationships can be complicated.

“What is it, Alfred?” Bruce sighed. “Why are you bothering me?”

“There are matters that require your attention, Master Bruce, and I had hoped …”

“Don't call me that,” Bruce snapped.

“But, sir, I've always …”

“Just how the hell old do I look to you?” Bruce raged.

“We both know your age well enough, sir, and you will be yet another year older this coming February 19,” Alfred said with his nerves suddenly placed on ice.

How long have I been running this mad race? Has it really been that long
?

Bruce raised his head, the vertebrae in his neck cracking as he did. “I'm the president of the largest multinational corporation based in the United States, and you still talk to me like I'm wearing short pants. You would never have talked to my father this way.”

The words fell between them.

“You are not your father, Master Bruce,” Alfred said.

“So you never fail to remind me,” Bruce replied, shaking his head as he stood upright and stretched. “I don't suppose you have come this far below your station just to polish the brass?”

“No, sir,” Alfred responded in his best businessman tones. “As you so eloquently put it yourself, you
are
the head of the largest multinational corporation in the United States … although perhaps not for long.”