Steel vs Cyborg

by Maru Tamehana (7/5/2019)

(8/5/2019)

Steel picked up the gun. It was meant to siphon off electrical energy – and while that giant magnet was distorting the energy shield, making it vulnerable, maybe he could drain something off. It was the only thing throwing off his battle predictor, something Steel didn't have, besides being completely unprotected. But he was the only one who could shut Cyborg down, while he was fighting whatever internal struggle he was having.

His suit was an armoured titanium plate about 5mm thick, but he couldn't armour up while Cyborg was tracking him. He could see him right through the walls with that infra-red scanner of his.

"Cyborg?" What was going on?

"Hello, Steel." His voice was strange. His cybernetic eye was just a white glow, and the other one barely seemed to recognise him. He seemed to be working on one of the station's major power grids, but Steel didn't recognise what he was doing. And something else – a large object dominating the wall.

Some kind of suit malfunction? Steel didn't know – was that possible? A virus? Darkseid?

"Closer than you think."

He felt a shudder of cold go through him. Answered that.

Steel knew that cannon on his arm had more uses than a Swiss army pocket knife. Cyborg, whatever kind of strange influence he was under, seemed to recognise him as a threat, but not a grave one.

The sonic force blasted him out before he even had time to register the attack, and then the blast doors closed. He was trapped on the other side. There would be no way in, not unarmed as he was.

(*)

Just a few days ago he and Cyborg had been on a Justice League mission to rescue a bunch of people from an OMAC attack, being used in some kind of local coup, part of an overall scheme that had not yet been resolved. They were still below, investigating.

Conspiracy.

The OMAC soldiers had taken up guard in the facility, their blank faceless expressions inscrutable. They were specific weapons developed by the OMAC program, designed to be an extension of a new military force that could overwhelmed any enemy – and even combat the threat of supers.

The government felt that access to alien and advanced technology would be their best bet to counter alien threats – and with the rumoured advent of Apokolips, they wanted to develop their owns soldiers as an answer to the legions of parademons that could be attacking Earth at any time.

Further in.

There were several girls huddled together in the cold concrete confines, hiding from the OMACs. Steel found them and led them out bit by bit to safety. His helmet was configured to pick up any OMAC signatures so long as he was studious about looking for them.

He got them to a Justice League shuttle – two or three OMACs had noticed the disturbance, and with frightening rapidity had moved to cut them off – but Steel was ready. His EMP clamps burst beneath their feet, and they suddenly tumbled, disoriented – and he fired bursts of plasma energy and them as he took off into the air.

He wished he had his hammer – that thing could pack a punch – but he just had to keep them away from the shuttle. One by one he melted them into slag. Cyborg had been right – they were tough and nasty, but enough force could bring them down. Just don't get caught off-guard.

It was his original micro-singularity weapon – it collected mass out of self-perpetuating momentum from angular gravity forces until it hit an impact point sufficient to release it. He had put in fail-safes in case it should ever get out of control, because it could cause incalculable damage to any planetary body. The hammer itself almost indestructible, but at a certain point the gravity forces would destroy it before it could increase mass to the point of say, wiping out a solar system.

It had been an unexpected extreme success of the technology, he had partially foreseen it but never really expected it to work – but it did.

Steve Trevor, man a hundred years out of time, was organising a resistance.

"Thought you had left me behind in my own time, did you?" he said with a wry smile. He hoisted up the large gun, a thousand rounds of explosive bolts a second – some kind of experimental commando rifle he had been tested. His aim was as sharp as ever.

"These things still work like they used to." He paused. "I mean – sort of."

A large empty hole had replaced where the target zone used to be – some small broken debris was still flaking off the "walls", making small ticking sounds as they fell.

"Some test," Diana commented, out of her guise as the ever-famous (and all-too-famous) Wonder Woman.

"Numbers, kid. We're not looking for one-on-one fifty-fifty duels here," although he muttered something else to himself as an aside. "You push up on your enemies, push them together or single them out, and bring them down with the strength of a concentrated force. That's how you keep your kids alive."

She caught the grenade out of the air, and put it down. "You don't say." She put her hands on her hips.

Superman had been working in the Justice League tower – putting the last of the components in their new tracking system. They had been brought in hours ago, just awaiting assembly. Most of the League were on the planet at the same time.

For a moment, Superman stared out the window, looking across hundreds of thousands of miles to the barren surface of Mars with his telescopic vision. The first technicians were disembarking now – the first personnel of the experimental station built there, completed just last week with Superman's help.

He put it through its first test run. In less than one/sixteenth of a second, it had tracked 16 billion individual bits of space dust, debris and fragments, drifting into Earth space. Cyborg had designed and built the computer system himself, and it was performing perfectly – linked into the greater array that maintained the satellite.

Superman could feel the micro-gravity thrusters beneath his feet, the minor alterations in gravitational fields throughout the ship, and they were also functioning properly. No overhauls required.

"How to generate power in a black hole," Steel was thoughtful, looking at it, his hand on his chin in a meditative pose.

Steel had been working on his giant armadillo tank, reinforced bomb-proof armour. It was lookg rather good on the dais under the lights, ready to be worked on by the giant engineering arms and waldoes. Then something happened.

Security lock went down – he needed his phaser rifle. Based on Kryptonian technology, it packed quite a wallop. These were the same weapons, almost, that the Kryptonians had used when invading Earth.

But that was then. And this was now.

(*)

He saw what it was that Cyborg was working on. It was the enormous tachyon predictor that Kara... Power Girl... had built in another dimension and brought it over here. There were irregularities created by the differences in dimensions, but Cyborg had been working to resolve them so it could be used as a defensive device against Darkseid and his time raids.

The battle Superman and Power Girl had had with Darkseid just a few short weeks ago nearly destabilised the satellite out of orbit – a lot of work had to be done to repair it – but Steel insisted on doing it himself. You lose touch with your work, and it could make a crucial difference at crunch-time. And he had brought just the equipment for the job. Not that I objected to Superman helping, he thought to himself. Transporting fifty thousand tonnes of material was a big job for any man.

Steel had made it to a lower level, trying to find another way around – a way to bring Cyborg down. Steel had on his big gravity-harness, it helped him carry the equipment. He lowered the enormous plasma launcher – it might be the only thing with enough kick to disrupt those machines of Cyborg's if not his shield itself.

Times like this is when you needed Superman, he thought, sweat beading on his forehead.

He froze as he recognised a familiar sound. As if out of nowhere, several satellite defense drones appeared!

It seemed Cyborg had activated and taken control of the satellite defenses. His clearance and ability to do that was clearly high than his, his own work on the infrastructure not-withstanding. Cyborg was supposed to have the most impenetrable security known to man – he was partly a living thing, it was the ultimate fail-safe. But something had apparently bypassed that security. It might have been a liability more than a protection.

The drones fired! Steel knew it was a kind of electric pulse, and he couldn't get to cover in time. Just as well he had equipped himself with protection as early as possible, just in case of this. The proton-electron transfer nodes blinked on the straps as the charged flowed through. It had managed to compensate for the disruptive bolt – the insulation was about a centimetre of electron-cancelling foam.

But then he did make it to cover while the drones were still getting a firing solution on him. Usually they would accost a trespasser, identify him, ask him to surrender, that sort of thing – but it seemed that routine had been bypassed. But the drones still retained some kind of delay that gave him a chance to escape the worst of it.

Their weapons weren't supposed to be lethal, but if they built up enough charge and overwhelmed a target, they could be, he knew.

He was panting. He rolled a couple of the spherical EMP bombs out into the centre. There was no way he could out-calculate those tactical droids for a quick-draw aim – but that should confuse them until –

There was the sound of an electrical explosion, and a sudden (honestly quite terrifying) staccato interruption as the droids were suddenly afflicted with a haphazard new life, their programming and mechanics failing.

There was a series of heavy clanks, thuds, and booms, as they fell in remarkably swift succession, almost all at the same time.

Good thing those things weren't shielded for EMPs, Steel thought. And good thing I know these crates like the back of my hand. Just a few short minutes ago he had come across several of his own supplies. The numerical identification was as clear to him as English, he knew which would contain munitions. He didn't employ or allow to be produced lethal weaponry – but he didn't think destroying robots counted. Just equipment.

Soon he made it to the armoury. "Now we're talking." His security clearance was denied like he knew it would be – but he scissored into the access panel with his belt welder, and got into the physical systems. There was a sort of manual release built into it he had left there.

"Got to do this the manual way."

Several minutes later, he was armed and ready. The next stop would be a power suit, and he thought he knew where one might be – even in the disorganised chaos that was the satellite at the moment, still being rebuilt. He needed a fighting machine – he wasn't going to stop Cyborg by talking nice with him.

He made his way through the lower levels where they were keeping the parademon prisoners, under a stasis field to prevent them from utilising their suicide devices. They creeped him out, but they said nothing as he passed.

To be honest, he just came here to confirm to himself that Cyborg wasn't doing something foolish while under this influence, like freeing them to hunt him down.

He didn't think he could use them as allies himself – they'd just do what they would normally do – absolutely loyal to their Darkseid leader – sabotage the satellite or try to kill him or something. Until he could get into a power-suit, he didn't have many options, he was especially vulnerable. And truth be told, he didn't know how well it'd fare him in a confrontation with Cyborg in any case. His chassis was constructed from some of the most advanced alien metals and technology the world had ever seen, and it was undergoing constant improvement. Steel just had his science, his own thinking and ingenuity.

Although, he did admit, he got to study from the best. If only he had one of those Kryptonian war machines, but little chance that Superman left one of those up here. 22,300 miles above Earth.

Also, despite the threat, he didn't want to be the one responsible for destroying Cyborg. The guy was just a kid, really, and brave. Whatever it was – they could fix it – if Steel could just get Cyborg pacified and under some equipment. Operating the equipment in this satellite shouldn't be a problem, he had designed and supplied half of it himself.

He found it, his last power-suit still in the satellite – it was in a back-up hub – but without power or Natasha's help he needed to load it on manually.

He had spent hours developing the musculature necessary to move the power-assist armature by himself. He was pumping irons in here twice a week – it was actually pretty cool to share a gym with the Justice League. He thought he was already pretty strong, (and he was – not that he was boastful), but in order to make these work, it required even more physical strength, simply for the stamina. Muscle and steel, that's what they should have called it. But every day he was working it down, until less and less physical work was required.

Bit by bit, he assembled it.

He remembered when he had first shown it to the others.

"I built this when I was just first starting out, before I had developed most of the assist systems, so it's a – " he grunted "a lot harder to move than my latest designs."

"And now Uncle John's the only one that can move it."

At last he had got into his suit and powered up. "Now this is more like it," he said with a glad grin, looking at his fist as he clenched it.

He was attacked again, about three corridors later. The spheres absorbed the fire and then reflected it – instantly destroying the droids with their own weapons. He grabbed one of the gauss rocket launchers and held off a few more from behind cover – and after the noise of battle had ceased, he was alone to continue on.

His suit was generating an ion field to disrupt electronics, cameras and drones – but it was only partly effective. He had accessed the computer system to shut down all the cameras and door securities he could.

They were all on local feeds, so accessing them would be difficult even for Cyborg, he'd had to do it manually or take time to pull off one of his wizardries.

The only thing he might not be able to out-calculate is an omni-directional blast – but I'm not sure how to deliver it. In this suit I can defend myself, but... I dunno...

C'mon John, you've tackled Kryptonians in this thing – there has to be a way...

The strange soldiers stalked closer. Cyborg had reprogrammed a number of OMAC soldiers that had attacked the tower, and they had here for safe-keeping. Not so safe as it turned out.

Titanium shell around a plasma field containing a black hole. The near-infinite gravities could be used to provide a motor of almost unimaginable power output. Any mass entering the event horizon would be accelerated to near light-speed, attaining incredible proportion mass and kinetic energy.

He fired it.

The OMACs were sucked way into a micro-singularity that warped the space around them to Steel's eyes – then it expended itself and flickered out before it could do damage to the station itself.

With his power-suit he simply blasted his way into the command centre where Cyborg was – there was no time to lose.

About two minutes he had accessed the systems using his onboard computer and set it so an immense charge built up and blasted through the system Cyborg was working on, and blasted Cyborg with 10 million volts of energy. There was just a spark and flare. Steel knew enough about Cyborg's systems to know his biological half would be unharmed – but it would sure do a doozy to his electric and cybernetic systems, even with all their failsafes designed to protect Cyborg. He was hoping it'd knock him right out – but no such luck.

But he was obviously crippled when Steel came blasting through the door with his plasma cannon.

He shoved his hand into the wall with a thunk and screech as his duridium coated power-arm twisted against metal, and pulled out one of the power terminals, disconnecting it. Cyborg could draw energy from almost any system, and even space itself, based partially on Steel's own designs when he had created his suit and hammer weapon system.

The shoulders clamped as he tackled, locking Cyborg in place, using their auto-method – he had fooled Superman with it once, and now it seemed he could do the same to Cyborg.

Firing his thrusters on maximum, they crashed through the wall – headed for the generator.

Cyborg reacted instantly, and fired his jets wildly in multiple directions. It was only thanks to Steel's own navigation systems that he kept on track... barely...

Let's see whose computer system is stronger, he said to himself, in one of those fateful moments. Cyborg's systems seemed virtually infinite – but he had built these suit systems to do one thing, and one thing only – now was time to see if it paid off.

His momentum proved too great – and they crashed into the barrier together. The unstoppable met the unstoppable.

Soon it was done. He got the emergency shut-down set in while Cyborg was still trying to recover from the attack, an emergency measure which Cyborg had left in here in case of an emergency. He got the thing shoved in – it was done – he gasped in relief. Cyborg would be back to his old self. Soon the Justice League would get the signal and return. Then they could get Cyborg on a table and find out what was wrong with him.

Now all he had to wonder about was what Cyborg was doing, and what it could mean for the future, he puzzled.

The tachyon predictor glittered in the dark, like the diodes on Cyborg's cybernetic skull.

THE END