Post by HoM on Mar 28, 2018 15:12:27 GMT -5
Previously, in JUSTICE LEAGUE...
Secrets abound as we draw closer to our seventy-fifth issue!
Last issue, after defeating a horde of AMAZOS, Justice Leaguers AQUAMAN, AQUAWOMAN, BATMAN and HAWKMAN investigated the mysterious prison escape of interstellar and pan-dimensional arms dealer XOTAR, THE WEAPONS MASTER, and found that the Russian prison that had once held him was now a slave camp full of kidnapped men and women!
Meanwhile, the team’s science advisor ANGELA SPICA led CYBORG, FIRESTORM, THE GUARDIAN and MISTER MIRACLE tracked down the villainous mad scientist known as THE ENGINEER to his underground lab in the Nevada Desert, only to be confronted by his bodyguards-- APOLLO and THE MIDNIGHTER!
Finally, BIG BARDA, MAJESTIC and WONDER WOMAN learned the secret history of a mysterious sphere that had existed since the dawn of American existence-- or more accurately, a sphere that contained a pocket dimension! Inside that strange tesseract? Survivors from the fall of Khera, including the love of MAJESTIC’s life, ZANNAH!
With all this in mind, please join us now for the continuing adventures of the JUSTICE LEAGUE--
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With a gasp, Big Barda awoke to the sound of metal being struck in the distance. After a few moments her vision cleared and she looked around, alert to everything around her, well aware that her Mega-Rod was absent from her hand, or hip. It was like someone had amputated a limb, but she could still feel her fingers flexing...
“It’s all right. We’re safe.”
Resting her chin on her knee, Wonder Woman was sitting beside a window, watching the curious alien skies that burned with the light from binary stars in the distance. She knew that the suns couldn’t be real, as they were in an artificial environment, but still... the sight amazed her. She showed no sign of injury.
“Define safe, Your Majesty,” replied Barda, pulling herself up. She felt groggy, like someone had taken her brain for a spin and cast it back into her skull without thought of the consequences.
Diana smiled, casting a glance toward her friend. “Their leader explained that you were shot with a power inhibitor that their people once utilised to prevent damage to equipment during cryo-sleep. They weaponised it. Their arsenal is... vast. And a tad intimidating.”
Barda closed her eyes and remembered. She’d been too slow to react to the ambush they’d walked into, and the last thing she recalled from the moments before her unconsciousness were two sounds-- the distant sound of arrows being released from their bows, and that strange sound of metal driven down upon metal. It was louder now, wherever they were.
“We’re in their ‘temple’. This pocket dimension... the world they’ve built upon it... they call it New Khera, after the home world they lost. It’s a martial society of women reconstituted from the salvage from the colony ship that carried them here. Everything is cobbled together.”
“How long have they been here?” asked Barda. She was uneasy on her feet.
Wonder Woman stood, and crossed the distance between them, supporting her as she regained her bearings. “That’s quite the question. From what Majestros told us, the Kherubim are extremely long-lived.”
“Diana...” pressed Barda.
“...Hundreds of thousands of years, from their estimate. They’ve lost track. They’re ancient, Barda. Like gods incarnate.”
“By the Source... and where’s Majestros now?”
“The Coda, as they’ve taken to calling themselves, are verifying that ‘Lord Majestros’ is who he says he is.”
“And when they do?”
There was a knock at the door to the chambers they’d been placed in, and they looked toward it, curious.
“Come… in?” offered Diana.
A young woman entered, unlike any of the other women they’d met during their short stay in the tesseract bunker. She wore no tattoos on her face, and she was younger than any of the others they’d encountered. Barely out of her teens, barely in her twenties, she had the face of their leader, Zannah, but her eyes were a pale blue, like those of someone they knew… someone they’d fought beside for the better part of nearly two years…
Her voice was soft, and she spoke quietly. “Our Lady Zealot asked me to check in with you while she questions the Lord. Do you… need anything?”
“When can we leave?” asked Barda, bluntly.
“When the Zealot allows it,” she replied, with a smile.
Diana smiled warmly. “Of course, that makes perfect sense. May I ask your name?”
The woman opened her mouth to answer, then quickly replied, “Savant.”
“That’s not really a name though, is it; a zealot is a thing, or a title, not a woman’s name-- she’s Zannah, isn’t she? So, who are you?” said Barda.
Savant was shocked at the audacity of the New God, but a smile crept in. “You speak your mind, when few on New Khera do.”
“Sometimes it gets her in trouble,” said Diana.
Savant shook her head. “Not today. My mother named me Kenesha.”
Barda leaned forward. “And your father…?”
“I… have to go. I’m… I’m late for my shift. If you’re all right, I’ll leave you to it,” she bowed and backed away from the pair, leaving them looking at each other.
“So… I think we both can take a guess who her father is…” offered Barda.
“Perhaps… perhaps…”
Diana’s gaze returned to the window that looked out on the temple’s garden, where a dozen or so female warriors practiced drills with their curved blades, slicing at the air before them like it was their most hated enemy. Kenesha hurried out of the bottom of the tower, and the warriors froze in place, before standing to attention. The young woman waved them off as she headed into another tower, and once she was on her way, the drills continued.
Diana smiled as she rested her chin back on her knee. “A young princess shaped from clay… so, that’s what it was like…”
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In the background of it all, that sound, metal upon metal, continued to ring out. Diana had initially suspected it to be the sound of sword play, but no, she witnessed no blade strike another, and her curiosity began to sting. What was that noise...?
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Without getting a chance to cry out in shock, Mister Miracle was gripped by the front of his costume and sent flying backward into the stairwell the Justice League had descended to enter this dreaded laboratory under the desert. He exhaled with a wheeze, and saw his attacker-- a man who glowed as bright as the sun, his hair white like Izaya-- Scott’s father’s-- scowling down at him.
“Who’re--?” started Miracle.
The light around the man’s head intensified into a halo, and a beam of scolding hot solar energy tore down toward Scott, who rolled onto his side and away from the blast.
“Get back here,” growled his attacker.
“Yeah, sure, one sec, but who are you?”
Mister Miracle blinked away the dots in his field of vision and saw the entirety of the man looming over him. He wore a white costume that hurt to look at-- it was like looking directly at the sun. There was an orange triangle that ran from his shoulders down to his sternum, pointing down, with an empty space as white as the rest of his costume giving way to a simple circle by way of a symbol. When Scott looked away for a second and blinked, all he could see was the man’s silhouette, black in his sightline. It hurt to focus on him, but he had to try--
“I’m Apollo. The Sun King. And I’ve been given my orders.” His body lit up again, ready to unleash another sun-hot torrent, and Mister Miracle immediately knew-- he had to escape!
His body moving impossibly fast considering his size and design, Cyborg ran up behind Apollo and slammed his fists against his back-- and his hands dented upon impact. The solar beam that had once been aimed at Scott was instantly redirected at Victor, and he lost his left arm for his trouble. He pulled himself back, staring at the ground where his cybernetic limb twitched-- when he looked back at Apollo, he received a punch that caved in the mask of his face, and bent his torso back in a way that would have shattered a normal spine with the force.
“Vic!” Angie Spica cried out. She was hunched over Martin Stein and Lorraine Reilly, the now-separate components that made up Firestorm, trying to shield them from their opponents. She still had the metallic tang on her lips where her evil father, the Engineer, had forced her to expel the nanites that regulated her brain chemistry.
Something in Cyborg’s vocal modulator had cracked, so in response all he could manage was a stuttering, “St-st-stay back!” before Apollo continued to dismantle both him and Mister Miracle.
Meanwhile, a few steps away, the Guardian backed up slowly as the Midnighter approached even slower, keeping his shield up. He had eyes on the shurikens that his opponent carried between his fingers, and something in the war computer that ran in his cerebrum was shouting at him to keep up his guard.
“Midnighter? What is that? You’re a supervillain I’ve never heard of before?”
“I’m not a villain. But I’m not a hero either. I’ve been given my orders.”
The Midnighter moved-- how did he move so fast?!-- and threw a punch that would have rattled the Guardian’s jaw bad enough to knock him out. Except, Harper caught the punch before it landed, and the two men were suddenly face to face.
“How did you do that--?” growled the Midnighter.
“A minute ago, you said you ran this fight through your head a million times before you threw that punch? Well, guess what? So did I,” replied the Guardian. He threw a straight punch of his own, only for his opponent to catch his fist in his own hand, after he’d thrown the shurikens at the appropriate pressure points in both of the Guardian’s arms to render them useless. “Oh.”
“This should be interesting,” said the Midnighter.
He slammed his skull against the golden avenger’s own, rattling the Justice Leaguer’s thoughts-- it was something he hadn’t seen coming-- hadn’t predicted via the war computer in his brain.
Dazed, Harper released his enemy and tried pathetically to gain purchase on the man’s arm, but instead the Midnighter slid his hand inside his golden helmet and wrenched it free. He then swung the helm down against Harper’s now exposed face, again and again, the metal making a horrific clanging noise as it bended and wrought against its owner’s head.
“I can see it, you know. The electricity in your brain running something close to my own fight computer. But my talents were built by Henry Bendix, the biggest bastard on Earth. I won this fight before you even turned up. You know why?”
“B-Bendix?” spluttered Harper, through bloodied and split lips.
“Because I’m designed to fight dirty. Biggest. Bastard. On. Earth,” repeated the Midnighter, yanking the Guardian’s shield out of his hands and spinning it around, using it as another flat instrument to inflict pain.
Mister Miracle was thrown across the room and landed in a pile, unconscious. His costume was a singed ruin, and his face was visible through the shredded remains of his mask.
Apollo floated toward the Midnighter, holding a device that pinged at the touch. “He tried activating this.” He handed the device over. “Is it a weapon?”
The Midnighter eyed it up. “A Boom Tube generator. New God technology.”
“He was probably going to send me somewhere nasty.”
“Return the favour?” offered the Midnighter.
“We do as we’re told, and that’s enough,” said Apollo. He took the Boom Tube generator off of his partner and crushed it in his palm. “Now he’s stuck here. Like us.”
Cyborg, one arm scoured off, a leg hanging by a thread of wiring, dragged himself in front of Angie, and raised his still-functioning arm in the configuration of a white-noise cannon. He couldn’t speak, his face mask a crumpled mess, but he was defiant, even now.
“You left one still standing,” noted the Midnighter.
“Easily remedied,” replied Apollo.
The PA system reactivated with a squawk. <No. Leave them. I want to show my failed experiment of a daughter what’s coming next.>
“You heard the man,” said Apollo.
Midnighter shrugged. “Disappointing.”
Cyborg tried to locate the source of the overhead transmission but instead he seized up, some external force taking control of his systems, the nanotechnology in his own body betraying him-- the Engineer had him in his grasp!
“Vic? Vic, what’s happening?” asked Angie.
“C-c-controlling m-mmeeeee,” his vocal systems mangled his voice as he managed to speak.
She swallowed hard as Apollo and the Midnighter approached. Had she walked the Justice League into a trap?
Batman walked slowly through the corridors of the prison, dressed in the stolen uniform of one of the guards they’d knocked out upon arrival. Hawkman lagged behind, skulking at the rear in his own imitable way. They communicated silently via the nanotelepathic link all Justice Leaguers shared, careful not to draw attention to themselves.
{You mentioned before you’d been inside Temho previously... how’d you break in? And how did you break out? I assume this was before you had access to the Door tech?} asked Hawkman.
{You should know by now that we’re capable of anything if we put our mind to it.}
“Thought you’d say something like that,” mumbled Katar.
The security cameras mounted at each junction of the prison’s winding corridors fed footage to the warden’s office. He pointed at the screen where Batman and Hawkman were present, deep in the lower cellblocks. Warden Uygulaan Kuznetsov was a thick man of Turkish descent, born in Udachny, a town whose sole reason for existence was the mining of diamonds.
Udachny translated to ‘Lucky’, or ‘Successful’, but the only luck the warden had ever found was through his own actions, not the luck you had from your birthplace. That was nothing.
It was under a thousand kilometres from his homestead to the nearest port to reach Temho, but he rarely returned. Why would he? The region was frigid, and at least in the prison he oversaw, there was warmth.
“Inspector, do you recognise those two?” he asked in his native Russian.
The inspector was well-built but small, dark hair and scratchy stubble covering his jaw. He was American, here on behalf of their benefactors, and he carried an air of arrogance about him that rubbed Kuznetsov the wrong way. Early in the inspection, the warden’s guest had ordered the cameras to track the pair on the screen, though he had yet to explain why.
“Do you know the origin of your name, Kuznetsov?” asked the inspector.
The warden grimaced. His guest had a tendency to pontificate, which he could not stand. He was here to evaluate the quality of the armaments that Temho had been converted into producing. But to stand in the warden’s own office and go on and on, and to be a westerner as well... he didn’t know hardship. He was tanned. Elitist. He looked down on Uygulaan and his men. “Inspector, please-- those men-- do you know them?”
“Kuznetsov directly points to the occupation of a blacksmith, or ‘kuznets’. As we all know, in the olden days, blacksmiths were a much-needed commodity in every village. Do you come from a line of blacksmiths, Uygulaan?”
The inspector’s Russian was impeccable, but his accent was clipped, noncommittal. His tone was almost disdainful, and the fact that he wasn’t answering Uygulaan’s questions was infuriating to say the least.
“I do not know,” he answered.
“If you were born in the west, you might have been ‘Smith’. Your last name, whilst so extravagant to my Yankee ears, translates to ‘boring’ you know? Heh. A little joke. But even more interesting, you’re from Udachny, correct? ‘Kuznetsov is most commonly used as a last name in the region from Upper Oka to Middle Volga. But we’re over ten thousand miles away from Moscow, so... perhaps your family ran from something, back in the day, before ending up in Udchany?”
The warden grew increasingly impatient, and his eyes kept moving to check on the progress of the two men he’d been ordered to track via the security system. “Do you have a point to this?” he asked.
“...And as a first name, Uygulaan is a variant of Uygun, which is a Yakut name. You have Turkish blood in you, but you know that from looking at your reflection. Uygun means ‘Wealth’. Are you a wealthy man, Uygulaan? A wealthy blacksmith?”
“Only through the business relationship I have with your organisation,” he replied.
“Well, you certainly don’t have a wealth of intelligence in you. You don’t recognise that those two men are not guards on your staff, nor do you realise that they are in fact Justice Leaguers, here to bring this operation down on your head.”
“Ty che, blyad?!” cursed Uygulaan.
“Oh, most definitely. I must take my leave now. If they see me here, then that raises a whole raft of questions I don’t see a point in answering.”
“You can’t leave now-- our deal--!”
“--Was for you to not get caught. I have walked this earth in one form or another for thousands of years, and I still cannot get over the audacity of the human race. You messed up, somehow. You want our help tidying up the mess. Why not try tidying it up yourself? Or do the right thing, and cut your losses-- and your own throat?”
“I will-- I will-- I will tell them everything, you inoplanetyanin piz`da!”
“And that’s why we never bothered installing one of our own in such a lowly position. Because this was always bound to happen.”
The inspector extended his hand toward the warden’s throat, but was a half-metre or so short from reaching it. The warden scoffed, and drew his sidearm, aiming it at the inspector’s head.
“I am sick of taking orders from western--”
The inspector smiled, and from the end of his hand another one seemingly appeared from nowhere-- it was reptilian in nature, but the colouration was off, a vibrant blue instead of any variation of green, the scales almost glowing in the dim light of the warden’s office.
The four- massive clawed digits slapped the gun out of the warden’s hand and then tore his throat out in one brutal motion, leaving him drowning with his ruined windpipe on the floor of where he’d once been the top of the food chain.
The hand fluttered and vanished back into the inspector’s body, and he readjusted his tie. “After all this time, you’d think I’d get tired of seeing the look on their faces. Door.”
A portal formed next to the inspector and he looked down at the gibbering body of the warden.
“Spasibo tebe za vse, huesos.”
He cast a glance at the security footage of the Justice Leaguers, as they entered the armoury. He smiled, and then flipped a switch on the warden’s desk that caused alarms to sound throughout the entire penitentiary. With that, he stepped through the tear in space, and vanished from the crime scene.
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His head aching like only one time before, Majestros awoke in the dark, and immediately panicked. It was the same kind of headache he’d awoken with when he found himself chained up at the bottom of a mountain, a prisoner of Vandal Savage*, unable to move due to the energy-sapping restraints he’d been bound in all that time ago...
“It’s all right, Majestros. You’re just experiencing the after-effects of the power dampener,” came a soothing voice.
It was still dark, he couldn’t see a thing, but he reached up to his face and rubbed his eyes with the balls of his fists. “Power... dampener... Was... was the Justice League a dream? Did... did we make it?”
“No, Majestros. We were betrayed by Imperator. You were cast into the void*. Look at me. Is your vision clearing?”
He did as he was told and blinked in the direction of the voice. As he did so, his vision cleared, and the face of the woman he thought he would never see again became visible. “...Zannah?”
The white-haired woman shook her head. “Not anymore, beloved... I am Zealot.”
He took that information in. He tried to think, tried to process it, the face of his beloved, a few lines here and there to show the time that had passed between them, and in the background, tok tok tok, a noise, like metal clanging upon metal. He shoved that thought away, into the back of his head, and focused: “Zealot? As in... the supreme leader of the Coda?”
“Someone had to lead our sisters into the uncertain future after we rose up against Imperator,” she replied.
Majestros breathed in slowly. The Lady Zannah was his betrothed, before the Daemonite war that engulfed Khera. They had been promised to one another through ancient rite, but the arranged nature of their marriage went out of the window when the hundreds year war began. They were bound by action, baptised in the blood of their devious enemies.
“Stop thinking. You’re thinking,” she said, gripping his chin, drawing his attention firmly back to her. He said nothing at the gesture, remembering the way she used to tease when they walked the grounds of the royal palace, back home. For a lord of war, he had always been a dreamer, always thinking of what was beyond their battle-- not just the next war, but the peace that they fought for.
“What... what happened?” he finally asked.
“Something... terrible.”
“Tell me.”
“It’s... Imperator told me everything once we landed. He explained it all...”
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Zannah vomited purple ichor and wrenched herself forwards, but found that she was bound inside the cryotube she’d been thrown inside before--
“No--”
She remembered-- and thrashed against her restraints-- to no avail--
“--No--! No--!”
She remembered raising her sword in the face of Lord Imperator, the man she thought was an ally, only for the Daemonites he’d allied himself with to fill the room behind him.
“What... what have you done?” she’d asked.
Imperator smiled in the face of her accusation.
“I’ve ensured our people survive. That was the deal brokered. Every pure-blooded Kheran on this ship holds a Daemonite, ready to replicate when we land.”
He disarmed her easily with a simple muscle-tearing twist, the power inhibitor she’d been administered leaving her weak, and her beloved sword fell from her fingers. He held her in place with two fingers and a thumb around her wrist, enough to keep her in agony at his feet.
“I restore genetic purity to our people, and the Daemonites conquer new worlds. Hhm. I’ll enjoy what comes next.”
He’d looked down at Majestros and chuckled at the sight of his old friend, who leaked the purple power inhibitor he’d stabbed him full of moments prior. Imperator gestured toward his twitching body, and then looked toward the Daemonites swarming behind him.
“My friends, put him in a containment pod and let him fall through the rift. Where is--?”
Imperator hesitated, seemingly listening intently to some goings-on elsewhere in the ship. Zannah would later find out that Lord Emp and a Spartan unit had launched themselves out of the ark via an escape pod, casting themselves into the void before they could be sent there against their will-- or in their destruction. He turned back to her.
“Another coward gone. Sleep, my dear Zannah. You’ve got quite a time ahead of you.”
He must have struck her, because that’s all she remembered before waking up in bondage.
“Where-- where-- ?”
“Our new home, Zannah. The seat of my new kingdom.”
His figure obscured by shadow, Imperator was sat before her, grinning.
“You-- betrayed--!”
“I saved the Kherubim, make no mistake about it. I made a pact with the Daemonites so we could live free, here, separate from the world we’ve landed upon. They have the planet, we have this pocket dimension, provided by one of Emp’s tesseract bunkers.”
Zannah took a breath. Her heart was racing. She felt no connection to the ancestral power of her people, and her lips stung with the taste of power inhibitor. She was weak. And yet, she couldn’t help but say it: “You... you coward.”
“And yet here I stand, the saviour of our people. You’re in chains. Emp and Majestros are lost in the hyperspace void. I’ve brokered peace with the Daemonites. Not only that, but I’ve programmed this bubble of time and space to exactly duplicate Khera, Zannah. We can repopulate. We can create a new race of Kherubim.”
Zannah chuckled mockingly. “Don’t-- make-- me-- laugh--!”
Imperator stood abruptly. “After the Daemonites emerged from the Lords they’d been sleeping inside, I gave permission for my fellow warriors to be slaughtered in their sleep. It made our new allies feel safer to know that there was only one male Kherubim left in the universe.”
“You... killed them?” she whispered.
He flashed a smile. “Only your sisters remain, and they’re all sleeping. I want to show you what’s in store for them. I want you to know, that when they awake, this is all they have in store. The act of restoration. And me.”
“No,” whispered Majestros. He looked at his hands, completely powerless to have done anything to help his betrothed, or the other survivors of his race.
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Zealot turned away from him. “Yes. He wanted to restore the race he himself had devastated. He wanted to turn this pocket dimension into his own personal playground. And so he did. For hundreds of thousands of years, he did.”
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“Where... where is he now?” he asked, his hands balled up into fists.
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“Contained,” she replied.
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He shook his head. “Imperator, of the purest bloodline of all Kherubim, simply contained? Our people grow stronger with age and his family was already the strongest of the old lines. How do you contain a force of nature like that? And-- and-- what is that infernal noise?!”
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Zealot stood and extended a hand to where he knelt “Majestros. You have not been here. You have not experienced what we have. Let me show you how we contain the likes of the Lord Imperator.”
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Apollo dragged Lorraine and Martin, along with Mister Miracle and the Guardian, by the feet into the next chamber of the Engineer’s laboratory. It was an effortless act for the solar-powered superhuman, and he tossed them into a pile at the feet of his master.
Behind him, Cyborg and Angie were being led into the room by the Midnighter. The former was hopping awkwardly, unable to dictate his own movements thanks to the thrall of the Engineer.
The Engineer looked over his shoulder for a split second. He had his back to the gathering of men and women, focusing on a large cylindrical machine that he was currently working on. “Why don’t you kneel, young Victor?”
“Hhhhhhhhhzzzzz” wheezed Victor, doing exactly what he was told.
“Did you really think I wouldn’t be able to hijack the nanotechnology inside you? The folly of youth. Not only can I take over whatever I cast my godly gaze upon, but I’ve programmed the nanites in my plants to adapt to any kind of attack, meaning they’re immune to Firestorm’s transmutations, or anything else you might be able to come up with that will undo their pollination. I’m very excited. Are you?”
“ssssszzzztoppppppp yyyyyyyuuuuu”
“Quiet now. Less talking.” He clicked his fingers and Cyborg made a low wheezing sound as his vocal systems powered down, leaving him mute. The Engineer turned to face his guests, and gestured toward his two. “They are such good boys, don’t you agree, Angela?”
“‘Good boys’? They’re heavies... just henchmen... doing your dirty work,” spat Angie.
“No, they’re next-gen super-soldiers, designed by Henry Bendix, former Weatherman of Stormwatch. He sold them on the black market, and I saw real potential in their abilities, so I snatched them up. They do exactly what they’re told. Programmed to follow my every instruction. For example-- Midnighter: Kill the Guardian.”
The Midnighter shrugged and hefted the Guardian up by the head. He looked at the Engineer and smiled. “Can I break his neck?”
“Whatever,” replied the Engineer, with a shrug.
There was an almighty crack, and the Guardian collapsed to the floor, his eyes wide and his body unmoving.
“Dead,” said the Midnighter.
Angie was speechless. James Harper had been there for her in the face of tragedy-- he’d saved her life when her father first went mad and had become the Engineer-- and now he was dead, the strings of his body cut by a cruel puppeteer.
“The interesting thing about the pair is that Apollo does exactly what he’s told, while the Midnighter likes to colour outside the lines somewhat. He does so enjoy a bit of flair in his work.”
“Why... why are you doing this?”
“I told you before. My garden will pollinate, and the resulting nanite swarm will descend upon Las Vegas, transforming all it touches into my true children. Without weakness. Unlike you... I have to admit, using your nanites to manage your mental illness is fascinating*, but when my children rise up from their new birth place, they’ll be nothing like you. Broken brain chemistries will be a thing of the past.”
“Let’s take a look at you then,” said the Engineer. He gestured at Cyborg, and Victor Stone was yanked from where he had been forced to kneel, his legs bending awkwardly as he stood. He tried to complain, but his vocal processor was jammed, so all he could do was seethe.
“Back in the day, when I was young and idealistic, I worked with your father. I see now that he took some of my original nanotechnology designs and applied them to your... life-support unit. Doesn’t do you any good now, of course. You’re Generation 1, and I’m Generation... infinity. Self-evolving. Self-repairing. You’re just... what are you?”
He clicked his fingers and his captive’s robotic head opened upwards like a trapdoor, revealing the brain that marked the only living part of Victor Stone left in this world.
“Please... please, dad... don’t do this... don’t hurt him...”
“I’m not going to hurt him, Angela. And please, don’t try to play on my emotions. I would think that my attempts to kill you last time we met would be a clear indicator that I’m above such petty, human concerns.”
Angie swallowed, tears welling in her eyes. The nanites in her bloodstream that regulated her emotions, that kept her on an even-keel, had doused her shirt and jeans, so every emotion she had kept in submission, her depression, her fear, her anxiety, bubbled up in an act of cognisant revenge. She sobbed and fell forward, her chapped lips moistened by the nanite soup that had once resided inside her.
“Okay, this is fascinating... I can see the neural inputs that line your cerebrum. And by the looks of it, they were created by the nanites in your body backing up and devouring parts of your brain as they went. You are a specimen, Victor. An absolute specimen. And according to the diagnostic I’m running, you have a battery life of... oh, that’s absolutely fascinating... you could survive a thousand years if you didn’t recharge, and potentially indefinitely if you did charge...*”
“...But I don’t think that’s fair on you, is it? You’re still part-human. You’re still a shade of the man you once were, and a mockery of what I’m trying to achieve in my garden. I don’t think a creature like you has a place in paradise. Join the Guardian.”
Before turning away, the Engineer motioned toward Cyborg, who suddenly experienced the sensation of every single neural relay that had grown in his cerebrum being forcibly severed from what was left of his brain.
“What good is battery life if there’s nothing to power?” posited the Engineer.
Cyborg’s body went into irreversible shutdown, his now-disconnected brain dying instantly. He fell forward with an almighty clunk, the transparent container that held his once-living brain turning grey and becoming fragile as the nanites the Engineer had hanging in the air ate it. There was a crack. Then a shatter. Fluid spilled out and then that was it. Victor Stone was dead.
His armoured chassis began to crumble, and then it turned to dust, only a metal skeleton and some batteries left of what was once a great man and hero.
Angie looked up and her eyes opened wide as the love of her life died. She felt herself go into shock but told herself not to, that she couldn’t afford to, and a minor reaction took place inside her body... a swarm of nanites she’d re-ingested thanks to them swimming back in through her open mouth adjusted her body chemistry... normalised her brain activity...
“Apollo, be a good man and pick that trash up,” said the Engineer.
The superhuman known as Apollo dutifully did as he was told, and hefted the remains of Cyborg over his shoulder. Dust, or the remains of Victor Stone’s cybernetic body, drifted down as he was elevated, and then the solar-powered being looked over to the Engineer for further instruction.
“Sometimes I do wish Bendix had programmed in some improvisational behaviour. Telling them what to do all the time is such a pain. Bring that garbage over here and place it on a chair. I want there to be a reminder of the dark days to usher in the new golden age.”
Apollo did as he was told and placed Cyborg on one of the chairs in the control room, before returning to where Midnighter stood over the body of the Guardian.
“Angela, I think it’s good that you’re here too. After all, you are my first child and greatest disappointment. When my garden’s pollen reaches Las Vegas, my new children will be born. And then it’s only right you die in the afterglow. Shall we begin?”
Before the two Justice Leaguers even got a chance to sabotage the weapons cache in the prison, the alarms went off.
“How did--?” started Hawkman.
Batman shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. Let’s get to work!” They rushed out of the room, and positioned themselves by the cast-iron door. “Ready?”
Katar held up a grenade. “Are you?”
Batman held aloft one of his own. “Go!”
With a nod, the duo pulled their respective pins and threw them into the armoury, and then sealed the door behind them. They rushed away from the ensuing explosion, the materials that could have been used against them in the situation being melted into slag within seconds.
{We’re in position,} said Aquawoman, floating outside. Through subtle manipulation of the waters at the ocean floor, she’d pushed them upwards, creating a displacement that, by virtue of the fact it wasn’t where it was supposed to be, wanted to find a stable position. That was a chaotic thing, and she had control of it-- she’d created and contained a tsunami, and now the catastrophic strength of the water was held in place by her Xebel-born abilities.
Her husband, the King of the Seas, floated beside her, watching in amazement. {You guys should see this… she’s a marvel.}
Batman allowed himself a smile. {I think we can talk them down. If that fails… sink the facility.}
Running through the prison, the duo shed their disguises swiftly, and seconds later arrived back on the walkways above the converted prison-now-factory floor. Still chained to the machines, the hostages were also in the sights of the guards, their weapons armed and ready to execute the loose ends. As they stood there, more guards swarmed the corridors, filling up every available space around the Justice Leaguers with guns aimed directly at them.
Outnumbered.
“Drop your weapons!” barked one of the guards.
“Nyet,” said Hawkman. “You first.”
Definitely not outgunned.
Another guard got brave. “There are dozens of us! Two of you! Submerged in the Laptev Sea! You will die here!”
Katar looked at the Dark Knight. “May I?”
“I insist.”
The Thanagarian grinned. “I have one word for you. Dveri. Sorry! I meant, Doors.”
Below every kidnap victim in the prison, an orange portal opened and swallowed them up, leaving the guards holding them hostage without a single bargaining chip.
“W-we still have you!” said the brave guard.
Hawkman laughed, but Batman shook his head, and took a step forward, a guard’s rifle barrel pushing up against his chest. The Caped Crusader goaded them with his actions, challenged them to take a shot. In perfect Russian, Batman said, “You know who I am. You know what I did the last time I was here. Some of you wear the scars, even now. So, ask yourself... do you want me to demonstrate why some of your comrades have already wet themselves?”
There was an almighty clatter as weapons fell to the floor, and the guards put their hands above their heads. They were on their knees in seconds, completely surrendered to the Justice League.
{I guess you didn’t need us after all,} came the voice of Aquaman.
Batman didn’t reply. {We’ll transfer the prison guards to the holding cells on Laputa, and open communications with the Russian representative at the United Nations. In the interim, contact Steve Trevor at Checkmate. He’s their White King-- head of intelligence. They’re a UN-sanctioned intelligence agency. He can bring in people to oversee interrogation of our prisoners, and the debrief of the kidnap victims we rescued.}
Hawkman looked over to his comrade. “And the prison itself?”
“Evidence. We’ll open a door wide enough to push it through, and dock it to Laputa.”
The Dark Knight gripped the railing that lined the walkway and looked down at the machines. He recognised industrial-sized devices that could theoretically replicate the intricate circuitry required to build Victor Fries’ Freeze Guns, or Mitch Rory’s flamethrowers. Whoever ran this operation was building cargo cult meta-weaponry and utilising Xotar, the Weapons Master, to sell it on… or to distribute it.
“We started today intending to find out who Pathfinder was… but at the end of it all, we just unearthed another mystery,” he mused.
“We’ll figure out who it is. We always do,” replied Hawkman.
“Hopefully before it’s too late…”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t you feel it? Breathing down our necks? Something’s coming. Something big. Something global, maybe even galactic. And we’re being led by our noses down every dirty alleyway and distraction on the way down.”
“…Yeah, well… at least you’re not dying of cancer,” noted Hawkman. Who was.
Batman shot him a look. “Katar…”
The Thanagarian shrugged. “Just saying.”
Four of them stood at the top of the stairwell. It was a dark, ill-lit passage that reminded Big Barda and Wonder Woman of the one they descended to reach the underworld a matter of weeks ago*, but where that staircase was punctuated by a cacophony of silence, this one was soundtracked by the repetitive sound of metal on metal-- tok-- silence-- tok-- silence-- tok-- and as they gazed down into that abyss, the sound grew louder.
“I hope your accommodation was to your liking?” said Zealot.
Majestros stood behind her in silence, contemplating the situation he’d had outlined to him. He’d briefed it to Barda and Diana, and they were horrified, but also understanding of the Coda’s treatment of uninvited guests to the pocket dimension.
“Your hospitality has been exemplary,” started Diana.
“Apart from the deluge of power-dampening arrows,” noted Barda.
Zealot gave a small smile as she led the others down the stairs. As they went, the sound grew louder.
“We don’t like visitors. Imperator dragged a hundred or so humans into the confines of the tesseract bunker a few hundred years ago, and it was… a particularly dark time for us. We treat an incursion as if it is an invasion… at least, that’s what we tried to do. You’re our first.”
“Why haven’t you emerged from the bunker?” asked Barda.
Majestros grimaced. He knew the answer before Zannah spoke it aloud.
She contemplated the question, and then spoke softly. “The tesseract bunker is keyed to the genetic profile of a Kherubim Lord. Not a Lady. Imperator made this cage one that only he could release us from. We kept him alive because… perhaps he could be convinced to release us, given time. Given his punishment. But now that Majestros is here…”
“We could go now. I could release you all,” said Majestros. He glanced down the stairwell. His Zoom Vision couldn’t penetrate the immutable walls, and the only light that was generated was from the small LEDs that lined the walls. “We don’t need to go down here…”
Diana’s brow furrowed. Was Majestros afraid?
“You should see what we did. For all our futures,” said Zealot.
They reached the bottom of the staircase and entered a labyrinthine series of corridors. After a number of twists and turns, with the sound growing louder with every step, they entered a large chamber, where two members of the Coda were at work, swinging the Kherubim equivalent of pick axes at a large shape cloaked in shadow.
Every other second, as regular as the tick of a clock, the sound rang out. Metal on metal, an immense effort into a swing, and then impact. A grunt of effort from those swinging the picks, a grunt of… discomfort? From the shadows. And everyone in the pocket dimension knew the sound, and they feared what would happen if the sound never came again. It became part of the woodwork of the place, and everyone would take their turn…
“We could not kill him. Not for lack of trying, in the heat of the moment. Have you tried murdering a Lord of Khera? The Daemonites made it an art, during the war. They would possess our bodies, and whilst inside, wholly scramble our inner workings, beyond repair. It didn’t matter how old you were, or how pure your bloodline, they made your body a trap, one you could not escape from. I lost my mother to them…” She blinked away the tears of memory, and shook her head to focus on the story she was telling. “It took all our combined might. We lost many lives. But we were able to immobilise him. He… he did something none of us could abide, even after the hundreds of thousands of years… of… of…”
She breathed out, and one of the women swinging the picks looked back at her, concerned. But she couldn’t let herself become distracted. The woman, who bore a striking resemblance to Zannah, resumed her work. She looked like Majestros too. He hadn’t spotted her, or thought to look much closer. Barda noticed young Kenesha, all the same.
“We took him by surprise and cracked his skull open. Have you ever seen a Kherubim Lord heal from blunt trauma to the skull?”
“No...” murmured Majestros. He thought he’d seen worse, during the war. Bodies falling apart as the genetic glue that holds a person together ran thin and loose. Eyes dribbling into ichor in sockets. Teeth falling from mouths as melting tongues flicked uselessly in the soup of a throat. He’d seen so many die. And he’d always survived… always made it through…
“The brains seep back into the skull, as if attracted back in by an immense magnet. We knew we could not kill him, but we could contain him. So, here we are. Containing him. As is our duty. The lone devil of Kherubim.”
Zealot clicked her fingers, and the entire chamber was immediately illuminated by vast LEDs that hadn’t been active before. They encircled a central podium, and then lined the floor outward, like the platform was a sun, and the LED strips the beams of light emanating from its surface. Atop the podium stood two women, swinging their picks down, and hunched over at their feet was a horrible shape of what could have been a man.
“Imperator…” whispered Majestros.
If it was Imperator, he didn’t make a move, or a sound. The bloated shape was hunched over, his limbs secured to the ground by immense metal rods. His grotesquely swollen body was stark naked, apart from the darkened patch at the small of his back that was a hundred different shades of bloody red, wet and dry.
When Majestros looked closer, he could see that the Imperator’s spine was exposed, and the sound-- tok-- silence-- tok-- silence-- tok-- was the impact of the axes on that exposed part of his skeletal structure-- every time the picks landed, his spine was severed, and every moment of silence that followed was filled with healing. Spine severed. Spine healing. Spine severed. Spine healing.
“What... is... this...?” asked Diana.
Zealot was almost detached from the situation, her voice flat and emotionless. “He heals almost immediately. So we focused on one place. The base of his spine. We take it in turns to swing the picks, every second, else he would heal and escape. We cut his spine every moment that he lives. Every member of the Coda has a shift. Every member of the Coda keeps the devil at bay.”
“This is… horrible…” whispered a horrified Wonder Woman.
Barda shook her head. “This is nothing compared to some of the things I witnessed on Apokolips… but it might give Desaad a run for his money. Maybe. Just maybe.”
“He didn’t wake my sisters for a thousand years. It was just me and him and an eternity of torture and humiliation. Once he discovered that I could not bear his child, he woke one of the sleepers after another, and subjected them to the same systematic degradation he put me through, until he’d transformed this tesseract into a rape camp with the surviving members of our race as his victims. He is stronger, faster, more dangerous than any of us. Do you know the funny thing though? The almost… hilarious truth of the matter? After he’d sent you into the void, thinking you dead. After Emp had run. After he’d slaughtered every male Kherubim left alive… after he all but guaranteed that his was the only genetic template our people could use to repopulate… after all that… he’s sterile. He can’t have children. It’s… almost… laughable…”
Diana was speechless, and Barda felt the weight of Zannah’s choices in her chest. There had been horrors on Apokolips. Atrocities. But to see one in the flesh… she wanted to break it. She wanted to kill it. If she saw something evil, she wanted to end its existence, and that’s all that mattered.
“He… discovered something that I’d tried to keep hidden from him. He was going to take the only thing I had left to me. The only thing that made my life worth living. In that moment, I… I did something I never thought I would.”
“You declared yourself Zealot?” offered Majestros.
Diana turned away from the sight of Imperator, and focused her attention on those talking. Barda had yet to take her eyes off the monster in her midst.
“I did. And the Coda rallied around me.”
“What does that mean?” asked Diana.
Zannah tried to find the right words to define something that was accepted as a fact without explanation in her experience. “The Zealot is the leader of the Coda. It’s a… religious position. Mythic in scope. In our history, the Zealot once led the Kherubim’s precursors, the First People, to victory against the Darkness-That-Encroached-Upon-Existence.”
Majestros nodded, remembering his people’s history. “It’s our creation myth, Diana. Similar to Prometheus giving fire to humanity from the gods, the Zealot defeated the Darkness… and the First People became blessed when light shone down for the first time in eternity. Later, through that blessing, they became Kherubim. To announce yourself as Zealot is to… start a holy war. To accept that you are chosen. Blessed. To take a power into yourself that none have since that first and final battle against the Darkness.”
“I don’t understand…”
“He kept us placid by lacing what little sustenance we were allowed with power-dampener. I didn’t eat for a hundred years and after a time, I regained my strength. After I declared myself, I managed to sever his spine with a piece of my shattered sword, but we had to keep… cutting. I did so for a hundred years, as the Coda restructured the tesseract more to our liking. After that, we took on shifts.”
“What did he find out about you?” asked Barda, staring down at Imperator.
“…I was pregnant already. During the Daemonite war, the Council made the decision to genetically engineer all the females on Khera so that if they became pregnant, they had to have the gestation process unlocked for a child to be born. It meant the Coda could keep fighting, no matter what… and also, if they did become pregnant, it wouldn’t stop their contributions to the war effort. When he found out, Imperator was going to terminate the foetus. I couldn’t let that happen.”
“You… were with child?” said Majestros.
“Yes. We were,” Zannah replied, touching his face gently. “Majestros… I don’t want to fight anymore. I’ve fought for so long to keep our universe safe. And now you’re here… we can…”
Across the way, standing over Imperator, Savant watched Zealot reach out toward Majestic. She watched her fingers brush his beard-bristled cheek, and the realisation dawned upon her.
“Father?” she whispered.
She didn’t swing her pick. One second missed. She always was a dreamer.
Realising what had happened, Zealot spun around, the implication of that split-second distraction staggering-- “Kenesha-- no!” she screamed.
Imperator opened his eyes and smiled. His spine had healed. Without a word, he grabbed the Coda warrior standing beside Kenesha by the throat and squeezed, the top of her head exploding in a gory display. He stood, then floated, his horribly obese body on display for all to see. When he spoke, his voice was a low husky growl, the kind of voice that came with not speaking for a thousand years.
“Hello, old friend.”
Majestros grimaced. “Imperator.”
NEXT ISSUE: Stranded in a pocket dimension, the immensely powerful Lord Imperator has arisen, and he’s hungry for revenge! What hope do the combined forces of the Coda and the Justice League have at stopping his rampage? Meanwhile, the Engineer has constructed the perfect endgame for the artificial evolution of the human race, and the Justice League have been picked clean by his bodyguards, Apollo and the Midnighter! With Cyborg and the Guardian already fallen at the villains’ hands, what hope do the others have? FIND OUT NEXT ISSUE!
Secrets abound as we draw closer to our seventy-fifth issue!
Last issue, after defeating a horde of AMAZOS, Justice Leaguers AQUAMAN, AQUAWOMAN, BATMAN and HAWKMAN investigated the mysterious prison escape of interstellar and pan-dimensional arms dealer XOTAR, THE WEAPONS MASTER, and found that the Russian prison that had once held him was now a slave camp full of kidnapped men and women!
Meanwhile, the team’s science advisor ANGELA SPICA led CYBORG, FIRESTORM, THE GUARDIAN and MISTER MIRACLE tracked down the villainous mad scientist known as THE ENGINEER to his underground lab in the Nevada Desert, only to be confronted by his bodyguards-- APOLLO and THE MIDNIGHTER!
Finally, BIG BARDA, MAJESTIC and WONDER WOMAN learned the secret history of a mysterious sphere that had existed since the dawn of American existence-- or more accurately, a sphere that contained a pocket dimension! Inside that strange tesseract? Survivors from the fall of Khera, including the love of MAJESTIC’s life, ZANNAH!
With all this in mind, please join us now for the continuing adventures of the JUSTICE LEAGUE--
tok
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With a gasp, Big Barda awoke to the sound of metal being struck in the distance. After a few moments her vision cleared and she looked around, alert to everything around her, well aware that her Mega-Rod was absent from her hand, or hip. It was like someone had amputated a limb, but she could still feel her fingers flexing...
“It’s all right. We’re safe.”
Resting her chin on her knee, Wonder Woman was sitting beside a window, watching the curious alien skies that burned with the light from binary stars in the distance. She knew that the suns couldn’t be real, as they were in an artificial environment, but still... the sight amazed her. She showed no sign of injury.
“Define safe, Your Majesty,” replied Barda, pulling herself up. She felt groggy, like someone had taken her brain for a spin and cast it back into her skull without thought of the consequences.
Diana smiled, casting a glance toward her friend. “Their leader explained that you were shot with a power inhibitor that their people once utilised to prevent damage to equipment during cryo-sleep. They weaponised it. Their arsenal is... vast. And a tad intimidating.”
Barda closed her eyes and remembered. She’d been too slow to react to the ambush they’d walked into, and the last thing she recalled from the moments before her unconsciousness were two sounds-- the distant sound of arrows being released from their bows, and that strange sound of metal driven down upon metal. It was louder now, wherever they were.
“We’re in their ‘temple’. This pocket dimension... the world they’ve built upon it... they call it New Khera, after the home world they lost. It’s a martial society of women reconstituted from the salvage from the colony ship that carried them here. Everything is cobbled together.”
“How long have they been here?” asked Barda. She was uneasy on her feet.
Wonder Woman stood, and crossed the distance between them, supporting her as she regained her bearings. “That’s quite the question. From what Majestros told us, the Kherubim are extremely long-lived.”
“Diana...” pressed Barda.
“...Hundreds of thousands of years, from their estimate. They’ve lost track. They’re ancient, Barda. Like gods incarnate.”
“By the Source... and where’s Majestros now?”
“The Coda, as they’ve taken to calling themselves, are verifying that ‘Lord Majestros’ is who he says he is.”
“And when they do?”
There was a knock at the door to the chambers they’d been placed in, and they looked toward it, curious.
“Come… in?” offered Diana.
A young woman entered, unlike any of the other women they’d met during their short stay in the tesseract bunker. She wore no tattoos on her face, and she was younger than any of the others they’d encountered. Barely out of her teens, barely in her twenties, she had the face of their leader, Zannah, but her eyes were a pale blue, like those of someone they knew… someone they’d fought beside for the better part of nearly two years…
Her voice was soft, and she spoke quietly. “Our Lady Zealot asked me to check in with you while she questions the Lord. Do you… need anything?”
“When can we leave?” asked Barda, bluntly.
“When the Zealot allows it,” she replied, with a smile.
Diana smiled warmly. “Of course, that makes perfect sense. May I ask your name?”
The woman opened her mouth to answer, then quickly replied, “Savant.”
“That’s not really a name though, is it; a zealot is a thing, or a title, not a woman’s name-- she’s Zannah, isn’t she? So, who are you?” said Barda.
Savant was shocked at the audacity of the New God, but a smile crept in. “You speak your mind, when few on New Khera do.”
“Sometimes it gets her in trouble,” said Diana.
Savant shook her head. “Not today. My mother named me Kenesha.”
Barda leaned forward. “And your father…?”
“I… have to go. I’m… I’m late for my shift. If you’re all right, I’ll leave you to it,” she bowed and backed away from the pair, leaving them looking at each other.
“So… I think we both can take a guess who her father is…” offered Barda.
“Perhaps… perhaps…”
Diana’s gaze returned to the window that looked out on the temple’s garden, where a dozen or so female warriors practiced drills with their curved blades, slicing at the air before them like it was their most hated enemy. Kenesha hurried out of the bottom of the tower, and the warriors froze in place, before standing to attention. The young woman waved them off as she headed into another tower, and once she was on her way, the drills continued.
Diana smiled as she rested her chin back on her knee. “A young princess shaped from clay… so, that’s what it was like…”
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In the background of it all, that sound, metal upon metal, continued to ring out. Diana had initially suspected it to be the sound of sword play, but no, she witnessed no blade strike another, and her curiosity began to sting. What was that noise...?
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JUSTICE LEAGUE
Issue Seventy-Three: “Temho-Metya”
HoM / FLINCHUM / BOWERS
NEVADA GARDEN:
Without getting a chance to cry out in shock, Mister Miracle was gripped by the front of his costume and sent flying backward into the stairwell the Justice League had descended to enter this dreaded laboratory under the desert. He exhaled with a wheeze, and saw his attacker-- a man who glowed as bright as the sun, his hair white like Izaya-- Scott’s father’s-- scowling down at him.
“Who’re--?” started Miracle.
The light around the man’s head intensified into a halo, and a beam of scolding hot solar energy tore down toward Scott, who rolled onto his side and away from the blast.
“Get back here,” growled his attacker.
“Yeah, sure, one sec, but who are you?”
Mister Miracle blinked away the dots in his field of vision and saw the entirety of the man looming over him. He wore a white costume that hurt to look at-- it was like looking directly at the sun. There was an orange triangle that ran from his shoulders down to his sternum, pointing down, with an empty space as white as the rest of his costume giving way to a simple circle by way of a symbol. When Scott looked away for a second and blinked, all he could see was the man’s silhouette, black in his sightline. It hurt to focus on him, but he had to try--
“I’m Apollo. The Sun King. And I’ve been given my orders.” His body lit up again, ready to unleash another sun-hot torrent, and Mister Miracle immediately knew-- he had to escape!
His body moving impossibly fast considering his size and design, Cyborg ran up behind Apollo and slammed his fists against his back-- and his hands dented upon impact. The solar beam that had once been aimed at Scott was instantly redirected at Victor, and he lost his left arm for his trouble. He pulled himself back, staring at the ground where his cybernetic limb twitched-- when he looked back at Apollo, he received a punch that caved in the mask of his face, and bent his torso back in a way that would have shattered a normal spine with the force.
“Vic!” Angie Spica cried out. She was hunched over Martin Stein and Lorraine Reilly, the now-separate components that made up Firestorm, trying to shield them from their opponents. She still had the metallic tang on her lips where her evil father, the Engineer, had forced her to expel the nanites that regulated her brain chemistry.
Something in Cyborg’s vocal modulator had cracked, so in response all he could manage was a stuttering, “St-st-stay back!” before Apollo continued to dismantle both him and Mister Miracle.
Meanwhile, a few steps away, the Guardian backed up slowly as the Midnighter approached even slower, keeping his shield up. He had eyes on the shurikens that his opponent carried between his fingers, and something in the war computer that ran in his cerebrum was shouting at him to keep up his guard.
“Midnighter? What is that? You’re a supervillain I’ve never heard of before?”
“I’m not a villain. But I’m not a hero either. I’ve been given my orders.”
The Midnighter moved-- how did he move so fast?!-- and threw a punch that would have rattled the Guardian’s jaw bad enough to knock him out. Except, Harper caught the punch before it landed, and the two men were suddenly face to face.
“How did you do that--?” growled the Midnighter.
“A minute ago, you said you ran this fight through your head a million times before you threw that punch? Well, guess what? So did I,” replied the Guardian. He threw a straight punch of his own, only for his opponent to catch his fist in his own hand, after he’d thrown the shurikens at the appropriate pressure points in both of the Guardian’s arms to render them useless. “Oh.”
“This should be interesting,” said the Midnighter.
He slammed his skull against the golden avenger’s own, rattling the Justice Leaguer’s thoughts-- it was something he hadn’t seen coming-- hadn’t predicted via the war computer in his brain.
Dazed, Harper released his enemy and tried pathetically to gain purchase on the man’s arm, but instead the Midnighter slid his hand inside his golden helmet and wrenched it free. He then swung the helm down against Harper’s now exposed face, again and again, the metal making a horrific clanging noise as it bended and wrought against its owner’s head.
“I can see it, you know. The electricity in your brain running something close to my own fight computer. But my talents were built by Henry Bendix, the biggest bastard on Earth. I won this fight before you even turned up. You know why?”
“B-Bendix?” spluttered Harper, through bloodied and split lips.
“Because I’m designed to fight dirty. Biggest. Bastard. On. Earth,” repeated the Midnighter, yanking the Guardian’s shield out of his hands and spinning it around, using it as another flat instrument to inflict pain.
Mister Miracle was thrown across the room and landed in a pile, unconscious. His costume was a singed ruin, and his face was visible through the shredded remains of his mask.
Apollo floated toward the Midnighter, holding a device that pinged at the touch. “He tried activating this.” He handed the device over. “Is it a weapon?”
The Midnighter eyed it up. “A Boom Tube generator. New God technology.”
“He was probably going to send me somewhere nasty.”
“Return the favour?” offered the Midnighter.
“We do as we’re told, and that’s enough,” said Apollo. He took the Boom Tube generator off of his partner and crushed it in his palm. “Now he’s stuck here. Like us.”
Cyborg, one arm scoured off, a leg hanging by a thread of wiring, dragged himself in front of Angie, and raised his still-functioning arm in the configuration of a white-noise cannon. He couldn’t speak, his face mask a crumpled mess, but he was defiant, even now.
“You left one still standing,” noted the Midnighter.
“Easily remedied,” replied Apollo.
The PA system reactivated with a squawk. <No. Leave them. I want to show my failed experiment of a daughter what’s coming next.>
“You heard the man,” said Apollo.
Midnighter shrugged. “Disappointing.”
Cyborg tried to locate the source of the overhead transmission but instead he seized up, some external force taking control of his systems, the nanotechnology in his own body betraying him-- the Engineer had him in his grasp!
“Vic? Vic, what’s happening?” asked Angie.
“C-c-controlling m-mmeeeee,” his vocal systems mangled his voice as he managed to speak.
She swallowed hard as Apollo and the Midnighter approached. Had she walked the Justice League into a trap?
TEMHO-METYA:
Batman walked slowly through the corridors of the prison, dressed in the stolen uniform of one of the guards they’d knocked out upon arrival. Hawkman lagged behind, skulking at the rear in his own imitable way. They communicated silently via the nanotelepathic link all Justice Leaguers shared, careful not to draw attention to themselves.
{You mentioned before you’d been inside Temho previously... how’d you break in? And how did you break out? I assume this was before you had access to the Door tech?} asked Hawkman.
{You should know by now that we’re capable of anything if we put our mind to it.}
“Thought you’d say something like that,” mumbled Katar.
The security cameras mounted at each junction of the prison’s winding corridors fed footage to the warden’s office. He pointed at the screen where Batman and Hawkman were present, deep in the lower cellblocks. Warden Uygulaan Kuznetsov was a thick man of Turkish descent, born in Udachny, a town whose sole reason for existence was the mining of diamonds.
Udachny translated to ‘Lucky’, or ‘Successful’, but the only luck the warden had ever found was through his own actions, not the luck you had from your birthplace. That was nothing.
It was under a thousand kilometres from his homestead to the nearest port to reach Temho, but he rarely returned. Why would he? The region was frigid, and at least in the prison he oversaw, there was warmth.
“Inspector, do you recognise those two?” he asked in his native Russian.
The inspector was well-built but small, dark hair and scratchy stubble covering his jaw. He was American, here on behalf of their benefactors, and he carried an air of arrogance about him that rubbed Kuznetsov the wrong way. Early in the inspection, the warden’s guest had ordered the cameras to track the pair on the screen, though he had yet to explain why.
“Do you know the origin of your name, Kuznetsov?” asked the inspector.
The warden grimaced. His guest had a tendency to pontificate, which he could not stand. He was here to evaluate the quality of the armaments that Temho had been converted into producing. But to stand in the warden’s own office and go on and on, and to be a westerner as well... he didn’t know hardship. He was tanned. Elitist. He looked down on Uygulaan and his men. “Inspector, please-- those men-- do you know them?”
“Kuznetsov directly points to the occupation of a blacksmith, or ‘kuznets’. As we all know, in the olden days, blacksmiths were a much-needed commodity in every village. Do you come from a line of blacksmiths, Uygulaan?”
The inspector’s Russian was impeccable, but his accent was clipped, noncommittal. His tone was almost disdainful, and the fact that he wasn’t answering Uygulaan’s questions was infuriating to say the least.
“I do not know,” he answered.
“If you were born in the west, you might have been ‘Smith’. Your last name, whilst so extravagant to my Yankee ears, translates to ‘boring’ you know? Heh. A little joke. But even more interesting, you’re from Udachny, correct? ‘Kuznetsov is most commonly used as a last name in the region from Upper Oka to Middle Volga. But we’re over ten thousand miles away from Moscow, so... perhaps your family ran from something, back in the day, before ending up in Udchany?”
The warden grew increasingly impatient, and his eyes kept moving to check on the progress of the two men he’d been ordered to track via the security system. “Do you have a point to this?” he asked.
“...And as a first name, Uygulaan is a variant of Uygun, which is a Yakut name. You have Turkish blood in you, but you know that from looking at your reflection. Uygun means ‘Wealth’. Are you a wealthy man, Uygulaan? A wealthy blacksmith?”
“Only through the business relationship I have with your organisation,” he replied.
“Well, you certainly don’t have a wealth of intelligence in you. You don’t recognise that those two men are not guards on your staff, nor do you realise that they are in fact Justice Leaguers, here to bring this operation down on your head.”
“Ty che, blyad?!” cursed Uygulaan.
“Oh, most definitely. I must take my leave now. If they see me here, then that raises a whole raft of questions I don’t see a point in answering.”
“You can’t leave now-- our deal--!”
“--Was for you to not get caught. I have walked this earth in one form or another for thousands of years, and I still cannot get over the audacity of the human race. You messed up, somehow. You want our help tidying up the mess. Why not try tidying it up yourself? Or do the right thing, and cut your losses-- and your own throat?”
“I will-- I will-- I will tell them everything, you inoplanetyanin piz`da!”
“And that’s why we never bothered installing one of our own in such a lowly position. Because this was always bound to happen.”
The inspector extended his hand toward the warden’s throat, but was a half-metre or so short from reaching it. The warden scoffed, and drew his sidearm, aiming it at the inspector’s head.
“I am sick of taking orders from western--”
The inspector smiled, and from the end of his hand another one seemingly appeared from nowhere-- it was reptilian in nature, but the colouration was off, a vibrant blue instead of any variation of green, the scales almost glowing in the dim light of the warden’s office.
The four- massive clawed digits slapped the gun out of the warden’s hand and then tore his throat out in one brutal motion, leaving him drowning with his ruined windpipe on the floor of where he’d once been the top of the food chain.
The hand fluttered and vanished back into the inspector’s body, and he readjusted his tie. “After all this time, you’d think I’d get tired of seeing the look on their faces. Door.”
A portal formed next to the inspector and he looked down at the gibbering body of the warden.
“Spasibo tebe za vse, huesos.”
He cast a glance at the security footage of the Justice Leaguers, as they entered the armoury. He smiled, and then flipped a switch on the warden’s desk that caused alarms to sound throughout the entire penitentiary. With that, he stepped through the tear in space, and vanished from the crime scene.
NEW KHERA:
tok
tok
His head aching like only one time before, Majestros awoke in the dark, and immediately panicked. It was the same kind of headache he’d awoken with when he found himself chained up at the bottom of a mountain, a prisoner of Vandal Savage*, unable to move due to the energy-sapping restraints he’d been bound in all that time ago...
*Justice League #45
It was still dark, he couldn’t see a thing, but he reached up to his face and rubbed his eyes with the balls of his fists. “Power... dampener... Was... was the Justice League a dream? Did... did we make it?”
“No, Majestros. We were betrayed by Imperator. You were cast into the void*. Look at me. Is your vision clearing?”
*Justice League #47
He did as he was told and blinked in the direction of the voice. As he did so, his vision cleared, and the face of the woman he thought he would never see again became visible. “...Zannah?”
The white-haired woman shook her head. “Not anymore, beloved... I am Zealot.”
He took that information in. He tried to think, tried to process it, the face of his beloved, a few lines here and there to show the time that had passed between them, and in the background, tok tok tok, a noise, like metal clanging upon metal. He shoved that thought away, into the back of his head, and focused: “Zealot? As in... the supreme leader of the Coda?”
“Someone had to lead our sisters into the uncertain future after we rose up against Imperator,” she replied.
Majestros breathed in slowly. The Lady Zannah was his betrothed, before the Daemonite war that engulfed Khera. They had been promised to one another through ancient rite, but the arranged nature of their marriage went out of the window when the hundreds year war began. They were bound by action, baptised in the blood of their devious enemies.
“Stop thinking. You’re thinking,” she said, gripping his chin, drawing his attention firmly back to her. He said nothing at the gesture, remembering the way she used to tease when they walked the grounds of the royal palace, back home. For a lord of war, he had always been a dreamer, always thinking of what was beyond their battle-- not just the next war, but the peace that they fought for.
“What... what happened?” he finally asked.
“Something... terrible.”
“Tell me.”
“It’s... Imperator told me everything once we landed. He explained it all...”
tok
tok
THE BEGINNING:
Zannah vomited purple ichor and wrenched herself forwards, but found that she was bound inside the cryotube she’d been thrown inside before--
“No--”
She remembered-- and thrashed against her restraints-- to no avail--
“--No--! No--!”
She remembered raising her sword in the face of Lord Imperator, the man she thought was an ally, only for the Daemonites he’d allied himself with to fill the room behind him.
“What... what have you done?” she’d asked.
Imperator smiled in the face of her accusation.
“I’ve ensured our people survive. That was the deal brokered. Every pure-blooded Kheran on this ship holds a Daemonite, ready to replicate when we land.”
He disarmed her easily with a simple muscle-tearing twist, the power inhibitor she’d been administered leaving her weak, and her beloved sword fell from her fingers. He held her in place with two fingers and a thumb around her wrist, enough to keep her in agony at his feet.
“I restore genetic purity to our people, and the Daemonites conquer new worlds. Hhm. I’ll enjoy what comes next.”
He’d looked down at Majestros and chuckled at the sight of his old friend, who leaked the purple power inhibitor he’d stabbed him full of moments prior. Imperator gestured toward his twitching body, and then looked toward the Daemonites swarming behind him.
“My friends, put him in a containment pod and let him fall through the rift. Where is--?”
Imperator hesitated, seemingly listening intently to some goings-on elsewhere in the ship. Zannah would later find out that Lord Emp and a Spartan unit had launched themselves out of the ark via an escape pod, casting themselves into the void before they could be sent there against their will-- or in their destruction. He turned back to her.
“Another coward gone. Sleep, my dear Zannah. You’ve got quite a time ahead of you.”
He must have struck her, because that’s all she remembered before waking up in bondage.
“Where-- where-- ?”
“Our new home, Zannah. The seat of my new kingdom.”
His figure obscured by shadow, Imperator was sat before her, grinning.
“You-- betrayed--!”
“I saved the Kherubim, make no mistake about it. I made a pact with the Daemonites so we could live free, here, separate from the world we’ve landed upon. They have the planet, we have this pocket dimension, provided by one of Emp’s tesseract bunkers.”
Zannah took a breath. Her heart was racing. She felt no connection to the ancestral power of her people, and her lips stung with the taste of power inhibitor. She was weak. And yet, she couldn’t help but say it: “You... you coward.”
“And yet here I stand, the saviour of our people. You’re in chains. Emp and Majestros are lost in the hyperspace void. I’ve brokered peace with the Daemonites. Not only that, but I’ve programmed this bubble of time and space to exactly duplicate Khera, Zannah. We can repopulate. We can create a new race of Kherubim.”
Zannah chuckled mockingly. “Don’t-- make-- me-- laugh--!”
Imperator stood abruptly. “After the Daemonites emerged from the Lords they’d been sleeping inside, I gave permission for my fellow warriors to be slaughtered in their sleep. It made our new allies feel safer to know that there was only one male Kherubim left in the universe.”
“You... killed them?” she whispered.
He flashed a smile. “Only your sisters remain, and they’re all sleeping. I want to show you what’s in store for them. I want you to know, that when they awake, this is all they have in store. The act of restoration. And me.”
NOW:
“No,” whispered Majestros. He looked at his hands, completely powerless to have done anything to help his betrothed, or the other survivors of his race.
tok
Zealot turned away from him. “Yes. He wanted to restore the race he himself had devastated. He wanted to turn this pocket dimension into his own personal playground. And so he did. For hundreds of thousands of years, he did.”
tok
“Where... where is he now?” he asked, his hands balled up into fists.
tok
“Contained,” she replied.
tok
He shook his head. “Imperator, of the purest bloodline of all Kherubim, simply contained? Our people grow stronger with age and his family was already the strongest of the old lines. How do you contain a force of nature like that? And-- and-- what is that infernal noise?!”
tok
Zealot stood and extended a hand to where he knelt “Majestros. You have not been here. You have not experienced what we have. Let me show you how we contain the likes of the Lord Imperator.”
tok
tok
tok
NEVADA GARDEN:
Apollo dragged Lorraine and Martin, along with Mister Miracle and the Guardian, by the feet into the next chamber of the Engineer’s laboratory. It was an effortless act for the solar-powered superhuman, and he tossed them into a pile at the feet of his master.
Behind him, Cyborg and Angie were being led into the room by the Midnighter. The former was hopping awkwardly, unable to dictate his own movements thanks to the thrall of the Engineer.
The Engineer looked over his shoulder for a split second. He had his back to the gathering of men and women, focusing on a large cylindrical machine that he was currently working on. “Why don’t you kneel, young Victor?”
“Hhhhhhhhhzzzzz” wheezed Victor, doing exactly what he was told.
“Did you really think I wouldn’t be able to hijack the nanotechnology inside you? The folly of youth. Not only can I take over whatever I cast my godly gaze upon, but I’ve programmed the nanites in my plants to adapt to any kind of attack, meaning they’re immune to Firestorm’s transmutations, or anything else you might be able to come up with that will undo their pollination. I’m very excited. Are you?”
“ssssszzzztoppppppp yyyyyyyuuuuu”
“Quiet now. Less talking.” He clicked his fingers and Cyborg made a low wheezing sound as his vocal systems powered down, leaving him mute. The Engineer turned to face his guests, and gestured toward his two. “They are such good boys, don’t you agree, Angela?”
“‘Good boys’? They’re heavies... just henchmen... doing your dirty work,” spat Angie.
“No, they’re next-gen super-soldiers, designed by Henry Bendix, former Weatherman of Stormwatch. He sold them on the black market, and I saw real potential in their abilities, so I snatched them up. They do exactly what they’re told. Programmed to follow my every instruction. For example-- Midnighter: Kill the Guardian.”
The Midnighter shrugged and hefted the Guardian up by the head. He looked at the Engineer and smiled. “Can I break his neck?”
“Whatever,” replied the Engineer, with a shrug.
There was an almighty crack, and the Guardian collapsed to the floor, his eyes wide and his body unmoving.
“Dead,” said the Midnighter.
Angie was speechless. James Harper had been there for her in the face of tragedy-- he’d saved her life when her father first went mad and had become the Engineer-- and now he was dead, the strings of his body cut by a cruel puppeteer.
“The interesting thing about the pair is that Apollo does exactly what he’s told, while the Midnighter likes to colour outside the lines somewhat. He does so enjoy a bit of flair in his work.”
“Why... why are you doing this?”
“I told you before. My garden will pollinate, and the resulting nanite swarm will descend upon Las Vegas, transforming all it touches into my true children. Without weakness. Unlike you... I have to admit, using your nanites to manage your mental illness is fascinating*, but when my children rise up from their new birth place, they’ll be nothing like you. Broken brain chemistries will be a thing of the past.”
*As discovered in Justice League #56
“Let’s take a look at you then,” said the Engineer. He gestured at Cyborg, and Victor Stone was yanked from where he had been forced to kneel, his legs bending awkwardly as he stood. He tried to complain, but his vocal processor was jammed, so all he could do was seethe.
“Back in the day, when I was young and idealistic, I worked with your father. I see now that he took some of my original nanotechnology designs and applied them to your... life-support unit. Doesn’t do you any good now, of course. You’re Generation 1, and I’m Generation... infinity. Self-evolving. Self-repairing. You’re just... what are you?”
He clicked his fingers and his captive’s robotic head opened upwards like a trapdoor, revealing the brain that marked the only living part of Victor Stone left in this world.
“Please... please, dad... don’t do this... don’t hurt him...”
“I’m not going to hurt him, Angela. And please, don’t try to play on my emotions. I would think that my attempts to kill you last time we met would be a clear indicator that I’m above such petty, human concerns.”
Angie swallowed, tears welling in her eyes. The nanites in her bloodstream that regulated her emotions, that kept her on an even-keel, had doused her shirt and jeans, so every emotion she had kept in submission, her depression, her fear, her anxiety, bubbled up in an act of cognisant revenge. She sobbed and fell forward, her chapped lips moistened by the nanite soup that had once resided inside her.
“Okay, this is fascinating... I can see the neural inputs that line your cerebrum. And by the looks of it, they were created by the nanites in your body backing up and devouring parts of your brain as they went. You are a specimen, Victor. An absolute specimen. And according to the diagnostic I’m running, you have a battery life of... oh, that’s absolutely fascinating... you could survive a thousand years if you didn’t recharge, and potentially indefinitely if you did charge...*”
*Revealed in Justice League #67
“...But I don’t think that’s fair on you, is it? You’re still part-human. You’re still a shade of the man you once were, and a mockery of what I’m trying to achieve in my garden. I don’t think a creature like you has a place in paradise. Join the Guardian.”
Before turning away, the Engineer motioned toward Cyborg, who suddenly experienced the sensation of every single neural relay that had grown in his cerebrum being forcibly severed from what was left of his brain.
“What good is battery life if there’s nothing to power?” posited the Engineer.
Cyborg’s body went into irreversible shutdown, his now-disconnected brain dying instantly. He fell forward with an almighty clunk, the transparent container that held his once-living brain turning grey and becoming fragile as the nanites the Engineer had hanging in the air ate it. There was a crack. Then a shatter. Fluid spilled out and then that was it. Victor Stone was dead.
His armoured chassis began to crumble, and then it turned to dust, only a metal skeleton and some batteries left of what was once a great man and hero.
Angie looked up and her eyes opened wide as the love of her life died. She felt herself go into shock but told herself not to, that she couldn’t afford to, and a minor reaction took place inside her body... a swarm of nanites she’d re-ingested thanks to them swimming back in through her open mouth adjusted her body chemistry... normalised her brain activity...
“Apollo, be a good man and pick that trash up,” said the Engineer.
The superhuman known as Apollo dutifully did as he was told, and hefted the remains of Cyborg over his shoulder. Dust, or the remains of Victor Stone’s cybernetic body, drifted down as he was elevated, and then the solar-powered being looked over to the Engineer for further instruction.
“Sometimes I do wish Bendix had programmed in some improvisational behaviour. Telling them what to do all the time is such a pain. Bring that garbage over here and place it on a chair. I want there to be a reminder of the dark days to usher in the new golden age.”
Apollo did as he was told and placed Cyborg on one of the chairs in the control room, before returning to where Midnighter stood over the body of the Guardian.
“Angela, I think it’s good that you’re here too. After all, you are my first child and greatest disappointment. When my garden’s pollen reaches Las Vegas, my new children will be born. And then it’s only right you die in the afterglow. Shall we begin?”
TEMHO-METYA:
Before the two Justice Leaguers even got a chance to sabotage the weapons cache in the prison, the alarms went off.
“How did--?” started Hawkman.
Batman shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. Let’s get to work!” They rushed out of the room, and positioned themselves by the cast-iron door. “Ready?”
Katar held up a grenade. “Are you?”
Batman held aloft one of his own. “Go!”
With a nod, the duo pulled their respective pins and threw them into the armoury, and then sealed the door behind them. They rushed away from the ensuing explosion, the materials that could have been used against them in the situation being melted into slag within seconds.
{We’re in position,} said Aquawoman, floating outside. Through subtle manipulation of the waters at the ocean floor, she’d pushed them upwards, creating a displacement that, by virtue of the fact it wasn’t where it was supposed to be, wanted to find a stable position. That was a chaotic thing, and she had control of it-- she’d created and contained a tsunami, and now the catastrophic strength of the water was held in place by her Xebel-born abilities.
Her husband, the King of the Seas, floated beside her, watching in amazement. {You guys should see this… she’s a marvel.}
Batman allowed himself a smile. {I think we can talk them down. If that fails… sink the facility.}
Running through the prison, the duo shed their disguises swiftly, and seconds later arrived back on the walkways above the converted prison-now-factory floor. Still chained to the machines, the hostages were also in the sights of the guards, their weapons armed and ready to execute the loose ends. As they stood there, more guards swarmed the corridors, filling up every available space around the Justice Leaguers with guns aimed directly at them.
Outnumbered.
“Drop your weapons!” barked one of the guards.
“Nyet,” said Hawkman. “You first.”
Definitely not outgunned.
Another guard got brave. “There are dozens of us! Two of you! Submerged in the Laptev Sea! You will die here!”
Katar looked at the Dark Knight. “May I?”
“I insist.”
The Thanagarian grinned. “I have one word for you. Dveri. Sorry! I meant, Doors.”
Below every kidnap victim in the prison, an orange portal opened and swallowed them up, leaving the guards holding them hostage without a single bargaining chip.
“W-we still have you!” said the brave guard.
Hawkman laughed, but Batman shook his head, and took a step forward, a guard’s rifle barrel pushing up against his chest. The Caped Crusader goaded them with his actions, challenged them to take a shot. In perfect Russian, Batman said, “You know who I am. You know what I did the last time I was here. Some of you wear the scars, even now. So, ask yourself... do you want me to demonstrate why some of your comrades have already wet themselves?”
There was an almighty clatter as weapons fell to the floor, and the guards put their hands above their heads. They were on their knees in seconds, completely surrendered to the Justice League.
{I guess you didn’t need us after all,} came the voice of Aquaman.
Batman didn’t reply. {We’ll transfer the prison guards to the holding cells on Laputa, and open communications with the Russian representative at the United Nations. In the interim, contact Steve Trevor at Checkmate. He’s their White King-- head of intelligence. They’re a UN-sanctioned intelligence agency. He can bring in people to oversee interrogation of our prisoners, and the debrief of the kidnap victims we rescued.}
Hawkman looked over to his comrade. “And the prison itself?”
“Evidence. We’ll open a door wide enough to push it through, and dock it to Laputa.”
The Dark Knight gripped the railing that lined the walkway and looked down at the machines. He recognised industrial-sized devices that could theoretically replicate the intricate circuitry required to build Victor Fries’ Freeze Guns, or Mitch Rory’s flamethrowers. Whoever ran this operation was building cargo cult meta-weaponry and utilising Xotar, the Weapons Master, to sell it on… or to distribute it.
“We started today intending to find out who Pathfinder was… but at the end of it all, we just unearthed another mystery,” he mused.
“We’ll figure out who it is. We always do,” replied Hawkman.
“Hopefully before it’s too late…”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t you feel it? Breathing down our necks? Something’s coming. Something big. Something global, maybe even galactic. And we’re being led by our noses down every dirty alleyway and distraction on the way down.”
“…Yeah, well… at least you’re not dying of cancer,” noted Hawkman. Who was.
Batman shot him a look. “Katar…”
The Thanagarian shrugged. “Just saying.”
NEW KHERA:
Four of them stood at the top of the stairwell. It was a dark, ill-lit passage that reminded Big Barda and Wonder Woman of the one they descended to reach the underworld a matter of weeks ago*, but where that staircase was punctuated by a cacophony of silence, this one was soundtracked by the repetitive sound of metal on metal-- tok-- silence-- tok-- silence-- tok-- and as they gazed down into that abyss, the sound grew louder.
*Justice League #67-70
“I hope your accommodation was to your liking?” said Zealot.
Majestros stood behind her in silence, contemplating the situation he’d had outlined to him. He’d briefed it to Barda and Diana, and they were horrified, but also understanding of the Coda’s treatment of uninvited guests to the pocket dimension.
“Your hospitality has been exemplary,” started Diana.
“Apart from the deluge of power-dampening arrows,” noted Barda.
Zealot gave a small smile as she led the others down the stairs. As they went, the sound grew louder.
“We don’t like visitors. Imperator dragged a hundred or so humans into the confines of the tesseract bunker a few hundred years ago, and it was… a particularly dark time for us. We treat an incursion as if it is an invasion… at least, that’s what we tried to do. You’re our first.”
“Why haven’t you emerged from the bunker?” asked Barda.
Majestros grimaced. He knew the answer before Zannah spoke it aloud.
She contemplated the question, and then spoke softly. “The tesseract bunker is keyed to the genetic profile of a Kherubim Lord. Not a Lady. Imperator made this cage one that only he could release us from. We kept him alive because… perhaps he could be convinced to release us, given time. Given his punishment. But now that Majestros is here…”
“We could go now. I could release you all,” said Majestros. He glanced down the stairwell. His Zoom Vision couldn’t penetrate the immutable walls, and the only light that was generated was from the small LEDs that lined the walls. “We don’t need to go down here…”
Diana’s brow furrowed. Was Majestros afraid?
“You should see what we did. For all our futures,” said Zealot.
They reached the bottom of the staircase and entered a labyrinthine series of corridors. After a number of twists and turns, with the sound growing louder with every step, they entered a large chamber, where two members of the Coda were at work, swinging the Kherubim equivalent of pick axes at a large shape cloaked in shadow.
Every other second, as regular as the tick of a clock, the sound rang out. Metal on metal, an immense effort into a swing, and then impact. A grunt of effort from those swinging the picks, a grunt of… discomfort? From the shadows. And everyone in the pocket dimension knew the sound, and they feared what would happen if the sound never came again. It became part of the woodwork of the place, and everyone would take their turn…
“We could not kill him. Not for lack of trying, in the heat of the moment. Have you tried murdering a Lord of Khera? The Daemonites made it an art, during the war. They would possess our bodies, and whilst inside, wholly scramble our inner workings, beyond repair. It didn’t matter how old you were, or how pure your bloodline, they made your body a trap, one you could not escape from. I lost my mother to them…” She blinked away the tears of memory, and shook her head to focus on the story she was telling. “It took all our combined might. We lost many lives. But we were able to immobilise him. He… he did something none of us could abide, even after the hundreds of thousands of years… of… of…”
She breathed out, and one of the women swinging the picks looked back at her, concerned. But she couldn’t let herself become distracted. The woman, who bore a striking resemblance to Zannah, resumed her work. She looked like Majestros too. He hadn’t spotted her, or thought to look much closer. Barda noticed young Kenesha, all the same.
“We took him by surprise and cracked his skull open. Have you ever seen a Kherubim Lord heal from blunt trauma to the skull?”
“No...” murmured Majestros. He thought he’d seen worse, during the war. Bodies falling apart as the genetic glue that holds a person together ran thin and loose. Eyes dribbling into ichor in sockets. Teeth falling from mouths as melting tongues flicked uselessly in the soup of a throat. He’d seen so many die. And he’d always survived… always made it through…
“The brains seep back into the skull, as if attracted back in by an immense magnet. We knew we could not kill him, but we could contain him. So, here we are. Containing him. As is our duty. The lone devil of Kherubim.”
Zealot clicked her fingers, and the entire chamber was immediately illuminated by vast LEDs that hadn’t been active before. They encircled a central podium, and then lined the floor outward, like the platform was a sun, and the LED strips the beams of light emanating from its surface. Atop the podium stood two women, swinging their picks down, and hunched over at their feet was a horrible shape of what could have been a man.
“Imperator…” whispered Majestros.
If it was Imperator, he didn’t make a move, or a sound. The bloated shape was hunched over, his limbs secured to the ground by immense metal rods. His grotesquely swollen body was stark naked, apart from the darkened patch at the small of his back that was a hundred different shades of bloody red, wet and dry.
When Majestros looked closer, he could see that the Imperator’s spine was exposed, and the sound-- tok-- silence-- tok-- silence-- tok-- was the impact of the axes on that exposed part of his skeletal structure-- every time the picks landed, his spine was severed, and every moment of silence that followed was filled with healing. Spine severed. Spine healing. Spine severed. Spine healing.
“What... is... this...?” asked Diana.
Zealot was almost detached from the situation, her voice flat and emotionless. “He heals almost immediately. So we focused on one place. The base of his spine. We take it in turns to swing the picks, every second, else he would heal and escape. We cut his spine every moment that he lives. Every member of the Coda has a shift. Every member of the Coda keeps the devil at bay.”
“This is… horrible…” whispered a horrified Wonder Woman.
Barda shook her head. “This is nothing compared to some of the things I witnessed on Apokolips… but it might give Desaad a run for his money. Maybe. Just maybe.”
“He didn’t wake my sisters for a thousand years. It was just me and him and an eternity of torture and humiliation. Once he discovered that I could not bear his child, he woke one of the sleepers after another, and subjected them to the same systematic degradation he put me through, until he’d transformed this tesseract into a rape camp with the surviving members of our race as his victims. He is stronger, faster, more dangerous than any of us. Do you know the funny thing though? The almost… hilarious truth of the matter? After he’d sent you into the void, thinking you dead. After Emp had run. After he’d slaughtered every male Kherubim left alive… after he all but guaranteed that his was the only genetic template our people could use to repopulate… after all that… he’s sterile. He can’t have children. It’s… almost… laughable…”
Diana was speechless, and Barda felt the weight of Zannah’s choices in her chest. There had been horrors on Apokolips. Atrocities. But to see one in the flesh… she wanted to break it. She wanted to kill it. If she saw something evil, she wanted to end its existence, and that’s all that mattered.
“He… discovered something that I’d tried to keep hidden from him. He was going to take the only thing I had left to me. The only thing that made my life worth living. In that moment, I… I did something I never thought I would.”
“You declared yourself Zealot?” offered Majestros.
Diana turned away from the sight of Imperator, and focused her attention on those talking. Barda had yet to take her eyes off the monster in her midst.
“I did. And the Coda rallied around me.”
“What does that mean?” asked Diana.
Zannah tried to find the right words to define something that was accepted as a fact without explanation in her experience. “The Zealot is the leader of the Coda. It’s a… religious position. Mythic in scope. In our history, the Zealot once led the Kherubim’s precursors, the First People, to victory against the Darkness-That-Encroached-Upon-Existence.”
Majestros nodded, remembering his people’s history. “It’s our creation myth, Diana. Similar to Prometheus giving fire to humanity from the gods, the Zealot defeated the Darkness… and the First People became blessed when light shone down for the first time in eternity. Later, through that blessing, they became Kherubim. To announce yourself as Zealot is to… start a holy war. To accept that you are chosen. Blessed. To take a power into yourself that none have since that first and final battle against the Darkness.”
“I don’t understand…”
“He kept us placid by lacing what little sustenance we were allowed with power-dampener. I didn’t eat for a hundred years and after a time, I regained my strength. After I declared myself, I managed to sever his spine with a piece of my shattered sword, but we had to keep… cutting. I did so for a hundred years, as the Coda restructured the tesseract more to our liking. After that, we took on shifts.”
“What did he find out about you?” asked Barda, staring down at Imperator.
“…I was pregnant already. During the Daemonite war, the Council made the decision to genetically engineer all the females on Khera so that if they became pregnant, they had to have the gestation process unlocked for a child to be born. It meant the Coda could keep fighting, no matter what… and also, if they did become pregnant, it wouldn’t stop their contributions to the war effort. When he found out, Imperator was going to terminate the foetus. I couldn’t let that happen.”
“You… were with child?” said Majestros.
“Yes. We were,” Zannah replied, touching his face gently. “Majestros… I don’t want to fight anymore. I’ve fought for so long to keep our universe safe. And now you’re here… we can…”
Across the way, standing over Imperator, Savant watched Zealot reach out toward Majestic. She watched her fingers brush his beard-bristled cheek, and the realisation dawned upon her.
“Father?” she whispered.
She didn’t swing her pick. One second missed. She always was a dreamer.
Realising what had happened, Zealot spun around, the implication of that split-second distraction staggering-- “Kenesha-- no!” she screamed.
Imperator opened his eyes and smiled. His spine had healed. Without a word, he grabbed the Coda warrior standing beside Kenesha by the throat and squeezed, the top of her head exploding in a gory display. He stood, then floated, his horribly obese body on display for all to see. When he spoke, his voice was a low husky growl, the kind of voice that came with not speaking for a thousand years.
“Hello, old friend.”
Majestros grimaced. “Imperator.”
NEXT ISSUE: Stranded in a pocket dimension, the immensely powerful Lord Imperator has arisen, and he’s hungry for revenge! What hope do the combined forces of the Coda and the Justice League have at stopping his rampage? Meanwhile, the Engineer has constructed the perfect endgame for the artificial evolution of the human race, and the Justice League have been picked clean by his bodyguards, Apollo and the Midnighter! With Cyborg and the Guardian already fallen at the villains’ hands, what hope do the others have? FIND OUT NEXT ISSUE!