Issue #14: "The Kronus Tablet, Conclusion"

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Issue #14: “The Kronus Tablet, Conclusion”
Story by Sam Harrison and Mark Bowers
Written by Mark Bowers
Cover by Roy Flinchum
Edited by John Elbe[/center]

He woke up to hear noises. Loud noises. There were guns firing nearby, grenades exploding, and some German voices, male, shouting. He couldn’t see what was happening; a mass of trees were separating him from whatever battle was going on, while also concealing him from whatever was out there.

Propping himself up on one elbow, a hand against his aching head, he struggled to remember what had happened.

Slowly it came back to him. He was supposed to be Rip Hunter. He was supposed to be a time master, although the way he was piloting the craft, lurching through history, smashing back into his previous self as he careered through time, he’d felt more like a Time Lord. He remembered being flung across the craft, and then there was a crash and flames, and then he was being dragged away, and she was there standing over him, looking after him as he drifted in and out of consciousness.

But where was she now?

Quickly, despite the pain in his leg, he got to his feet, and started pushing branches aside, stumbling toward the noises of battle, and then he saw her, as she tossed aside an oncoming jeep.

“Diana,” he tried to yell, but, with the dryness of his throat, it came out as more of a gravelly whisper. Still, she managed to hear it, and, as he wondered how she’d manage to change to her old outfit, she turned his way.

“No, I’m not Diana,” she replied, with a smile, as she defeated her final attacker. “My name’s Wonder Woman.”

“Hippolyta,” he gasped, as he recognized the woman now facing him.

“That’s right,” said a familiar voice from behind him. “She’s Hippolyta, and I’m Diana.”

“Where have you been?” he asked, staring with relief at his Wonder Woman.

Diana just stared at him, confusion etched on her face. “But you’re...”

“I’m Rip Hunter,” he replied. “I brought you here.”

Diana looked at him in confusion as another figure now joined her through the trees. “But you can’t be Rip Hunter,” she exclaimed, and pointed to the new arrival. “He is.”

Meanwhile, two miles away, another Princess Diana was looking for clarification. Thirty minutes ago, she’d landed back in 1941 with Rip Hunter, searching for the Kronus Tablet, and instead had found her mother, Hippolyta, the Wonder Woman of the time. If it wasn’t bad enough that Rip Hunter had forbade her from telling her mother who she actually was, for fear of corrupting the timeline, she’d now found herself encountering another Rip Hunter.

“So, which of you Rip Hunters is Rip Hunter?” asked Diana, looking between the two men.

“I’m Rip Hunter,” they both insisted in unison.

“I know one way we can find out the truth,” said Hippolyta, joining them. Taking her lasso, she placed her lasso over one of the Rip Hunters, who started sweating as he waited for the inevitable question.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“My name’s Steve Trevor,” he replied.

Diana gasped, as her mother continued her questioning.

“So why are you calling yourself Rip Hunter?”

“It’s a long story,” began Steve Trevor, as he started pulling off his disguise. As he did so, Diana noticed that this Steve Trevor was several decades older than the one she remembered. “I guess it starts here in 1941, when one of your daughter’s enemies-”

“My daughter?” said Hippolyta. “But I haven’t got a daughter.” And then she looked at the lasso of truth, and knew he wasn’t lying, and then over at Diana as realization set in. “But I will have a daughter, won’t I?”

Diana nodded, blinking back her tears, trying to hold back her emotions, just as she had upon first encountering Hippolyta. Meanwhile, the real Rip Hunter just stood there frowning.

“Maybe we should hear the rest of what this impostor has to say,” he suggested.

Steve Trevor looked at the real Rip Hunter, and then over to Hippolyta, who just nodded, turning her attention reluctantly back to him from Diana.

“Well,” continued Steve, “one of Diana’s enemies came back through time to this year and set off actions that would result in her death.”

“Don’t say any more,” commanded Rip Hunter. “They can’t be allowed to know the future.”

“Continue, Steven,” said Hippolyta, ignoring Rip’s protestations.

“Well, when Diana entered that chronosphere and never came back, I spent years trying to find out what had happened to her and who had taken her. With the full force of the DEO behind me, I still only managed to scratch at the truth. All I knew was that Rip Hunter here was involved, and there were various soldiers’ accounts of two Wonder Woman together in Germany on this day, along with reports of an explosion in the sky and...” Steve struggled against the lasso’s power, not wanting to reveal the truth, “... and an outline of what appeared to be Diana burned into the ground.”

He looked over at Diana’s face, saw her struggling to come to terms with the information, and wished that she’d been spared the news of her possible fate.

“So, how did you get back here?” asked Rip, oblivious of his companion’s distress.

“Well, the DEO knew far more than you can imagine,” Steve answered. “In 2041, at 7 p.m., I intercepted you, stole your chronosphere, and took your place to bring Diana here. Unfortunately, I crashed the chronosphere and...”

“You fool!” yelled Rip. “What makes you think you can interfere with time? You can’t know the consequences... Wait, you said you crashed the chronosphere?!”

Steve nodded. “Yeah, but Diana dragged me away.”

“I didn’t,” said Diana. “But you’ve changed time, haven’t you? Brought another me with you?”

Rip would have taken the time to lecture Diana about the paradoxes of time travel, but he was too busy lecturing Steve. “If the main drive of the chronosphere’s been harmed then, until it finally fades away, other times, places could be bleeding into this one; things that have happened, things that might happen, thing that never will happen.”

At which point, Rip’s lecture was curtailed by some extremely loud footsteps, followed by a Tyrannosaurus Rex bursting out from between the trees.

While Hippolyta removed the lasso from Steve, Diana dodged the T. Rex’s salivating mouth as it lunged for her.

“This is what happens when you mess with time?” yelled Rip to Steve, over the dinosaur’s roars, as Hippolyta leaped on to the fearsome beast, wrapping her lasso around its neck. “Also, now that you’ve stopped me from traveling back here with Diana, you’ve changed time. It will only be a moment before the ripples of time catch up with the two of us and erase-”

At which point Steve saw Rip fade away in front of them, while Hippolyta, now riding on the back of the dinosaur, saw Diana, who’d just punched the Dinosaur in its jaw, fade from her view.

“No!!!” screamed Hippolyta, as she saw her newfound daughter disappear, not noticing the dinosaur lurching back, its brain finally registering the blow from Diana.

Fortunately, as Hippolyta fell to the floor, the dinosaur about to fall on top of her, a familiar figure stood there, bracing herself to catch the now-unconscious beast.

“I heard all the noise and rushed over,” said Diana, looking down at a shocked Hippolyta.

“I have twins?” sputtered Hippolyta, trying to make sense of things. “Or can you turn invisible?”

“No, this is the Diana I brought back,” explained Steve Trevor, walking over to them.

“Steve?!” said a surprised Diana, almost dropping her dinosaur. “Why did you take off that disguise? And why are you so old?”

“You knew it was a disguise?” he asked, and she nodded in confirmation. He could disguise his face, but he couldn’t fully disguise the voice and the body language that she knew so well.

“It’s best you don’t know his reasons, child,” said Hippolyta, removing her lasso from the dinosaur’s neck, as Diana set it down on the ground.

Diana looked at her mother quizzically, but decided there were more important matters at hand.

“Doctor Poison told me about her master plan,” explained Diana. “She then threatened to kill all of the soldiers with her toxins if I attempted to stop her.”

“Princess Maru’s involved?” exclaimed Hippolyta. “I knew that the Nazis had a secret weapon – that’s why I’m here - but if she’s involved, who knows what poisons she’s brewed up.”

“No, this is her granddaughter,” explained Diana. “She’s giving the Nazis plans for an atomic weapon that will help them win the war.”

“They’ve got an atomic bomb?” interrupted Steve Trevor. That tied in with what he already knew, and he wished it didn’t.

“Yes,” said Diana. “It’s in a fortress five miles south, but it’s heavily guarded, and Poison said it will be departing for its destination before we can ever battle our way in.”

Steve looked at the two Wonder Women before him. He knew that they could battle their way into anywhere in time, but only just in time, and that would no doubt just lead to Diana’s sacrifice as before. He wasn’t going to let that happen again.

“Where’s its destination?” he asked. “America? England?”

“Themyscira,” replied Diana

“We have to get to it,” said Hippolyta. “I’ll contact the Society. Just in case we fail.”

“No, we’re not going to fail,” said Steve Trevor, “we’ve just got to find the fastest possible way to that fortress.”

Hippolyta took her lasso in her hand and smiled. “First we need the biggest bucket of water we can find.”

While he could hear bullets ricocheting off bracelets nearby, Steve Trevor’s elderly demeanor, attire and knowledge of the German language enabled him to pass for one of the many inventors who’d been working around the clock on Doctor Poison’s designs.

Walking into a busy workroom, with blackboards covering the walls, he saw a masked figure standing there, shouting out orders in German.

“Where is the weapon now?” he asked the figure, hoping his German was as good as he thought it was.

The figure turned around to look at him and her black lips curled up into a smile.

“Follow me,” she said, beckoning him away.

Diana rushed through the corridors, bullets bouncing from her bracelets, methodically working her way through the massive fortress, as if going through a maze, when suddenly she saw it standing there: A large plane, with soldiers loading a large bomb onto it. Bright lights above illuminated everything, making an unlit torch on the wall seem superfluous.

This is just too easy, she thought, and then a figure came running at her, and the next thing she knew she been knocked down to the ground.

“What are you doing?” she asked the woman standing over her.

“What I have to,” said Hippolyta, gritting her teeth, as she threw a punch towards her daughter. “Please don’t make this any harder than it has to be.”

“Diana, are you okay?” he said, taking her in his arms.

“I’m fine,” she said, getting to her feet and shaking the dust from her hair. She then marched back into the room.

“Take this,” she said, knocking Hippolyta to the ground.

Hippolyta leapt back to her feet, grabbed Diana’s arm and threw her across the room.

Steve Trevor put his arm on Hippolyta’s shoulder to stop her, and the way she glanced back at him made him think that this was a fatal error.

“What are you two doing?” he asked.

“Providing a distraction,” she whispered, as Steve looked down at the soldiers below looking up. “If one of us tries to get near that bomb,” she explained, as she flung her lasso at Diana, “then they might start to activate it, Diana will attempt to fly away with it, and history will end up repeating itself.” As she talked, she dragged Diana towards her.

“So, how long are you going to be able to distract them?” he asked.

“Hopefully, long enough for you to steal that aircraft with the bomb inside it. You do know how to... ugh... operate one of those things, don’t you?” she asked, as Diana slammed her body to the ground.

“Trust me,” he said, dropping the baggage he was carrying, along with the Tablet. “Diana, you’ll need to use this Tablet to return to the future with Doctor Poison.”

“But you’ll be stuck here,” said Diana, pretending to strangle Hippolyta.

“Trust me. Please.”

Diana looked at Steve, and saw the look in his elderly eyes.

“I do trust you,” she said.

“Well, don’t worry about me. I’ll be okay,” he said, hating that his last ever words to her were a lie.

And with that, he slipped into the watching crowd, and made his way toward the waiting plane.

It was almost an hour later and Steve Trevor realized that Doctor Poison hadn’t been lying about the pain. Back in Germany, Hippolyta and Diana would be tidying up the fortress, removing all records of that atomic weapon, while he... well, he was expendable.

His adventures with Wonder Woman were going to end in the same way that they’d begun, with him piloting a plane going into the ocean. The only difference was that this time he was taking a bomb that could change world history with him. As he plummeted towards the water below, he knew that somewhere in some future Diana would be returning to a young Steve Trevor; a Steve Trevor who’d never spend sleepless nights wondering about what could have been, and would never pine for the loss of his soul mate. A Steve Trevor who’d hopefully be as happy in his future years, as this Steve Trevor finally was now.

He’d wiped out his lonely past, and soon time would catch up with him. As the plane entered the watery depths, he finally got washed away by the ripples of time and, as he faded away, he smiled and said one word:

“Diana”