Post by starlord on Aug 23, 2009 21:43:23 GMT -5
Titans Resustance
Issue #30: H.I.V.E. Pt 2
Written by Jay McIntyre
Edited by Brian Burchette
Cover by Jamie Rimmer
Issue #30: H.I.V.E. Pt 2
Written by Jay McIntyre
Edited by Brian Burchette
Cover by Jamie Rimmer
“All the honey a bee gathers during its lifetime doesn't sweeten its sting”
Italian Proverb
“Aerodynamically, the bumble bee shouldn't be able to fly, but the bumble bee doesn't know it so it goes on flying anyway.”
Mary Kay Ash
-1-
Three of the HIVE goons loomed over Supergirl. She had no idea what she thought those devices were, or what they would do to her, but she had had enough.
She had no hatred for humans--they were a fascinating species, in some ways much more alive than her own people--but an individual human life, if that life was not one of those known to her personally, meant nothing to her. Especially if they were trying to treat her as an expendable experimental subject, instead of the reverse being true.
So she focused her gaze on the HIVE soldier looming over her head and unleashed her heat vision.
The burning red lines arched out from her eyes and lanced into his head, boiling his brain in mere seconds. He didn't even have time to scream.
He started to fall on top of her, but she irritably headbutted him away. She could not yet free herself, but she could perform a simple action such as that.
One of the other two had what looked like a tazer. She would make nothing of it if it had not been for the nasty purple energy it was sparking; energy which had hurt her before. The other held some sort of high tech syringe, and it occured to her that they might--just might--have found something they could take a blood sample from her with.
Or perhaps they thought that her body would be more pliable after death.
In any case, she had had more than enough of this, and they were moving towards her with speed.
But not as much speed as she could muster, even in this weakened condition.
She blew frost-cold breath on them, and both of them were frozen in place.
-2-
The Hive Leader had taken all this in, and was aware of the other Titans breaching the base, of course. These pretentious metahumans probably thought they were beaten now; that simple souls armed with high tech weapons was all they were.
Well, they were in for a surprise.
He stabbed an orange button on his console, and unleashed his most special contingency.
-3-
In the deepest bowels of the HIVE base, four tubes lit up.
Inside each was the pinnacle of HIVE genetic engineering. One was from Russia, a strong man capable of flight who could burst into flames; one was an even stronger man, almost mammoth-sized, who could not fly but whose berserker rage was terrible to behold; one was feral female creature whose genetics had been mixed with those of a Panther; and one was a telekinetic who could control the motion of anything with her mind.
The HIVE had found each of them, and subjected them to the experiments that made them what they were. Their old names had been deliberately forgotten; and the HIVE had been cautious to not even give them code names. Code names implied a sense of identity; something to be discouraged. They were simply soldiers of the HIVE. There were plans for more; many more. But the hour of need for them had come sooner than anticipated.
The tubes retracted into the ceiling, and the agents of the HIVE began to awaken.
-4-
Elsewhere in the base, the alarms had alerted another special agent of the HIVE, a man who wielded a trident that could shoot three different kinds of devastating rays, as well as distort his appearance and exact location. He rushed to the central command room as shouts and the clash of battle began to reach him.
-5-
Deriven had gotten the Titans in past the "technomancer defensive hexes"--with, he reluctantly admitted, some difficulty--and now they were racing down a tunnel lined with odd honeycombed walls, lit from within.
"Anybody else slightly freaked out here?" Anarky said.
"Yes," Argent agreed.
"More than slightly," Ravager answered.
Five HIVE soldiers came around the corner, the first opposition they had faced. Ravager, predictably, was the first to strike, cutting an enemy weapon in half.
What she had not expected was the explosion, which knocked her back. She frantically put her hair out. The HIVE soldier was even less fortunate, as the weapon literally blew up in her face.
His companions gave no pause to tend to him, but instead they opened fire. This may have been lack of compassion, but it was also tactically wise, as the Titans wouldn't give them an inch
As it was, Green Lantern barely got a shield up in time. Robin passed through it--Lantern had learned that particular trick some time ago now--and Terra sent several chunks of rock through.
This did not go as well as expected. Two of Terra's rocks were destroyed by enemy fire, only one took a HIVE soldier down. The soldier Robin attacked actually managed to parry Robin's quarterstaff with his own rather chunky weapon. This left two of the HIVE able to open fire on Robin directly.
Fortunately a blast from Argent took out one, and Anarky was ready to parry the other. He blocked three times, ducked as the man opened fire (Lantern's shield absorbed that blast).
Robin and Anarky each continued to duel their respective opponents, and they seemed more adept at using their weapons as melee defense than first appeared. Anarky was actually beginning to get worried when Deriven shouted a word of power, and one dropped dead, while a bolt of silver from Argent finished the other.
"Watch the crossfire there, 'Narc," Ravager said, not unkindly. "Not everybody is immune to blasters."
"Sorry," Anarky grumbled.
Robin did a double take. He wanted to have his own critical word with Anarky over that one, but Anarky's apologetic manner caught him off guard. He exchanged glances with Green Lantern and Terra, they noticed too. Ravager only smirked.
They expected another wave of enemies. When they didn't come, Robin frowned. "Too quiet?"
"Movie cliches aside," Lantern said, "You're right."
They looked around the corner of this long, sloping tunnel. There were still plenty of loud blaring alarms, but no further offense at the moment, or at least it so appeared.
But moments later, they realized why; the corridor began to change. Before their amazed eyes it began to rotate; and slabs of metal appeared to smash into it and retract at random. Electric sparks and laser bolts zapped through it at interviews.
"Oh...kay," Ravager said uncertainly.
"Paranoid much?" Anarky asked.
"Yes, very much," Terra agreed.
"Well if they're crazy people hiding in an underground base," said Argent in a perfectly reasonable tone of voice, "Would you expect them to be nice?"
Everyone else paused to blink. Even Deriven. And it was finally the mage who admitted, "That is a very good point."
-6-
Supergirl had suffered more than enough.
She broke her bonds, and slowly and painfully pushed the drill away. Her strength was returning, but not nearly fast enough to suit her.
The HIVE leader withdrew a few steps from her, obviously frightened, but just as obviously still determined.
As she prepared to kill him, she reflected that he and his followers were not really that silly as they seemed. They were fanatics, and in a world ruled by the Markovian Empire, how else would such a paranoid see them except as members of a conspiracy? Not that she felt any pity or empathy for him, of course. But the rational, scientific part of her mind understood very well. In some ways, this scientific cult represented her own people in their insular, self-assured nature....and yes, in herself, in the form of her fanatical quest for knowledge.
All these thoughts passed through her head in less than a second. She focused her gaze on the HIVE leader and was about to unleash her heat vision to slay him as she had one of his minions. But at that moment the trident-wielding operative blasted her.
She saw the blast coming in from the side at the very last second. She began to turn at her superhuman speeds to face it, and so it caught her almost square on. She couldn't identify exactly what form of energy it was; it wasn't the kind of energy based attacks she had experienced before, neither the purple energy that had hurt her previously, nor was it the sort of energy weapon these mad scientists had previously used on her that had incapacitated and weakened her earlier.
What she did know was that it lit up her nervous system with white-hot pain, and likewise caused her to erupt into a white-hot anger that she had not yet felt on this planet.
She flew at him in a blind, animalistic rage. He fired the same ray and another from his trident, but she blasted with her heat vision and his energy met hers. She kept coming, and probably would have killed him right then and there, but the Russian operative arrived at that moment and collided with her.
Knocked aside from her target, she whirled to face him and punched him hard in the face. His head rocked back a little, but his eyes blazed with fire and he exploded flame.
This, of course, only made her more angry.
-7-
The trident-welding operative went to assist the Russian against Supergirl.
"No!" The HIVE leader shouted. "Go assist the others against her allies!"
"Just the one experimental subject against her?" the trident-wielder protested.
The HIVE Leader knew it was a reasonable question, but he was not feeling reasonable at that moment. He was the leader because of his intelligence. (That intelligence and wisdom might not be synonymous was not a thought that had occurred to his mind). His fury blazed, before his
intellect reigned it in. He made a note to torture the fool later. "Leave the tactical decisions to the learned!!" He thundered. "I will assist him against her!" He wielded his own personal weapon, which had even more settings than the trident. "Aid the other operatives against her allies. There are a number of them!"
The trident-wielder shot off without another word, knowing he had pushed his luck as it was.
Was it possible, the Leader wondered? Had the lie become real? Had the Empire done something to infuriate and alienate it's own super powered cadre? He theorized it to be an unlikely, but feasible possibility. That was, after all, one of the reasons they had deliberately purged themselves of their own identities. Not just the meta-human soldiers, either; even the rank and file had been purged of their former selves. Even he and the others amongst the ruling elite had divorced themselves from their past lives, save in terms of intellectual, scientific and academic achievement, and now those abilities only meant something in terms of what they were worth to the HIVE.
Ultimately, of course, it mattered not. They were still a threat to HIVE superiority, just as the Empire was, and so needed to be eliminated. Even if first contact had not been so hostile, they still did not have the indoctrination and commitment necessary for the HIVE.
He put these thought aside and raised his weapon, focused on the battle in front of him. Thus far, Supergirl was battling the Russian with fairly even exchanges. He would fire if she gained the upper hand, or if there was separation between them.
-8-
The Titans thought that bashing their way through the lasers, electricity and whirling, grinding corridor would be easy.
In fact, it took a lot of work.
The hard metals did not stop or repel Green Lantern's ring, exactly; but they were harder to destroy and taking longer than he had anticipated. Even when Argent added her silver blasts, still it was a slow, frustrating process.
Terra began ripping away at the foundations with her own powers, and this helped somewhat. But still, it was a slower and more laborious process than they thought.
Anarky, Robin and Ravager exchanged a glance during all this; it was times like this when they felt like the odd ones out. Even if her entire fleet had been present, Ravager would not have been able to bombard this location effectively.
It was very frustrating.
Eventually, though, they smashed their way through the whirling, frustrating trapped corridor. Coughing and sputtering through the fumes and particle-laden air, they finally advanced. But when they did, they found the mammoth of a man, the panther woman, the telekinetic, and about thirty more HIVE agents wielding their weapons, all waiting for them.
Lantern put up his shield, but they were put entirely on the defensive; none of them could pass beyond it to face the attacks, and Lantern had to concentrate to keep the shield up. Supergirl, of course, could have taken a lot of punishment. But she was trapped somewhere within. Lantern, in particular, was getting worried.
"I'm open to suggestions!" Lantern shouted.
"Let me try to lure them in one at a time," Terra said. She parted her hands, and the rock floor beneath the enemy opened up. Several of them fell into the ditch. The Mammoth-sized man crawled below and rose up inside their shield, as Terra had intended; but the Panther woman and a pair of HIVE soldiers followed after, and the telekinetic opened the rift still wider. Mere seconds later, the trident-wielder arrived.
"Drop the shield and full offensive!" Ravager shouted.
"On a count of three," Robin cautioned, as he and Anarky took on the panther woman, while Terra and Argent faced off against the mammoth-sized man.
"3...2...1..." Lantern turned the shield into a blast of power that knocked back most of the HIVE soldiers and the telekinetic.
For the moment.
-9-
Supergirl did not fly. She merely stayed with the Russian and pounded on him.
He gave as good as he got, occasionally throwing in a fiery explosion, which only served to piss her off.
The HIVE Leader watched anxiously, wanting to blast her but not quite daring. Most of the controls were dead, smashed during the conflict but he set one monitoring computer on record. They would get valuable tactical data out of this, he was certain of that. The HIVE gained knowledge from every experience, and knowledge was the ultimate power.
Supergirl noticed, however, and grabbed the Russian. He erupted in flame again, but she merely grit her teeth and ignored it. Now she did fly, while holding the Russian, meaning to smash into the HIVE Leader. She would have just thrown him, but he might have countered that with his own flight powers. The Leader got out of the way in time, but the computer h had been hoping to record the fight with was destroyed.
Seething in rage, the Leader opened fire on both of them, no longer trying to avoid hitting the Russian. The upside of this meant he was hitting and hurting Supergirl; the downside meant he was injuring his own man as well.
Supergirl shoved the Russian aside and blasted away with heat vision at the Leader. More by luck than skill, he fell back and avoided the scalding gaze of death.
She went to go kill him, but the Russian was on her again, with a flaming kick to the face.
-10-
Ravager whirled into the HIVE agents, her blades a storm of destruction, trying to cut them down in order to reach the trident-wielder. She was about on par with Robin as as a one-on-one duelist, as they had demonstrated on Themyscria, but she had less restraint than him when tearing into a crowd of foes.
Even so, almost all of them managed to parry her spinning berserker strikes. Only one went down, that unfortunate's throat cut. The others trained their weapons on her and prepared to fire.
Lantern shielded her as best he could, while also defending himself from the attacks of the trident-wielder. Willpower was not a problem for him, it never had been; rather, it was a matter of splitting his attention.
So the logical course of action was to go on the offensive. He slammed the trident-wielder back with a glowing green anvil, which caused that worthy to lose control of his weapon; then he began expanding his shield outward, trying to pin the HIVE agents against the walls. This gave Ravager the time and room she needed to confront the rest.
Robin and Anarky ducked and dived the panther woman's razor sharp claws and ruthless ivory fangs. Anarky had scored several direct hits with his electric cattle prod, but the tazer-like strikes only seemed to enrage her further. Robin's clubbing blows to her head with his quarterstaff weren't putting her out, either. Not even slowing her down.
The two vigilantes exchanged a glance; they didn't like each other, and their training was not exactly the same style, but each understood what must be done in these circumstances.
She lunged at them and they dodged aside, grabbed her legs, and slammed her into the rocky floor. Robin then threw a sleeping gas capsule into her face as she rolled over, and Anarky supplemented that by bringing his cattle prod down onto her leg and keeping it there, sustaining the electricity. Finally, she slumped into unconsciousness. Anarky staggered away before the sleeping gas could get him, too.
Ravager was carving a bloody path through the HIVE agents and had reached the trident-wielder, who had recovered his weapon and was shaking off the cobwebs of what Green Lantern had done to him when Ravager came in for the kill. To his credit, he saw her coming and got his trident up in time, but his high-tech toy was nothing against her katanas, forged in Japan, the metal folded hundreds of thousands of times. It broke it in two, a wisp of pink plasma escaping as it did. Having no real courage without his weapon, he turned and ran.
Ravager smirked and went to follow, but the telekinetic, still pinned against the wall by Green Lantern's energy, nevertheless was able to grab Ravager with her mind and hurl her back at the ring-slinger, causing Rose to lose control of her own weapons in the process.
Terra and Argent slammed the behemoth with rocks and shards of silver energy, but he just kept coming, ignoring or enduring what they were doing to him. Terra was beginning to get scared. He tried to reach out and grabbed them both, so Terra opened the ground even wider under his feet. That bought the only a few seconds, before he climbed out and came on again.
Lantern saw this, and decided to use the enemy's own tactics against them; instead of continuing to use his power to pin the telekinetic against the wall, he threw her into the mammoth of a man. It didn't affect him, much, but it did knock him out.
Ravager recovered her katanas; Robin and Anarky helped her to take on the remaining HIVE agents. This freed Green Lantern, in turn, to help Terra and Argent against the behemoth.
"He's not going down!" Terra was beginning to panic.
"Argent," Lantern said, "Use your powers to augment mine, now!"
He snapped a bubble around the mammoth, and Argent surrounded that with her own silver energy, strengthening it. Terra took the hint and added a rock layer.
Slowly, Lantern withdrew the oxygen from the bubble. "Even that mindless monstrosity must need to breathe," he said with satisfaction.
And while the giant of a man could indeed last much longer than a normal person without fresh air, that timeframe was not infinite. Slowly, his struggles subsided.
Ravager looked around, idly dabbing at a bloody scratch on her cheek. That had been a brutal marathon session, but it was finally over.
Are we done?" Terra breathed wonderingly.
"Um, no," Anarky said. "Supegirl."
Lantern cursed and led them on.
-11-
The HIVE Leader watched in horror, no longer trying to participate, as he saw Supergirl pounding the Russian down. They had roughly equal strength and he also judged their stamina to be approximately equal, but apparently she had a much higher tolerance for pain. Indeed, it seemed to motivate her. He wished he could say the same about his own soldiers.
What a pity they had not been able to get some kind of genetic sample from her; it would've proven invaluable. Alas, that had proven impossible. A glowing green light announced the coming of Green Lantern, and the HIVE Leader knew the cause had been lost. It was shocking, and barely conceivable, but they had been defeated.
But the HIVE prepared for all contingencies, even this one. The consoles had been destroyed, so he cycled open a hole in the floor manually with a small handle. This took a few seconds, but the Titans were focused on the Russian and Supergirl.
He dropped through the hole and slid down a short chute, to a room with several small high speed one-man submarines waiting in their launch-tubes...and a teleporter.
The trident-wielder had gotten there ahead of him, only without his weapon, and looking scared to death what the Leader would do to him.
But now was not the time for recriminations or discipline. "This has been a disaster on all fronts," the Leader said. "We must regroup and rebuild. Take the teleporter to one of the safe houses in North America. I will take one of the personal submersibles to one of our pacific island bases.....and destroy the base behind us."
The other man grinned, fairly leapt onto the teleporter, and was gone in a flash of orange. The Leader keyed in a self destruct code on a console, and scrambled into the fastest escape boat.
-12-
Supergirl already had the advantage on the Russian; Lantern alone could have helped her finish the job. With the entire team it was no contest at all.
The boys were staring at her. "Um...you okay?" Lantern finally managed to ask.
"My nervous system has experienced several new kinds of pain, but I'll recover soon enough," she assured them. Then she frowned. "Why are you staring at me like that?"
"Cuz most of your costume is burnt off, hon." Ravager smirked. Terra blushed.
"Is it?" Supergirl looked down. "Oh. I see. Well, similarities with human anatomy have never concerned me. It is merely inconvenient. Certainly our species are not compatible enough for sexuality to be a concern."
Ravager smirked. "Best...putdown line....evarrrr."
"Well, we should get you out of here anyway," Robin said. "After we find out what they--"
Deriven whirled. "Lantern, shield us all, now! Complete surround shielding!"
Lantern didn't argue, he snapped the shield into place....as the base exploded around them.
There was a long pause.
"Great, just great!" Ravager seethed.
"I do believe that puts paid to investigation," Supergirl said, recovering her own equilibrium. "Let's get out of here."
-Epilogue-
Fifteen hours later, Pyotr Zhukov sifted through the rubble of the HIVE base, aided and abetted by Rocket Men. He had still been based out of London since the vampire incident, but traveled at need; and now, at last, it seemed he had something worthwhile to report to the Empress.
The Titans had taken out the two garrisons, no surprise there, but that clearly had not been their primary objective.
"A scientific cabal," he mused. "Another opposition group to the Empire. Her Highness will not be pleased. Yet, apparently they were hostile to the Titans as well. That is interesting. And most interesting of all..."
He turned to where the Rocket Men had laid out the still-breathing bodies of the Russian and then panther woman from the debris.
"...we may get something tangible out of this whole mess."
End