Inviolate
Chapter 10
by Scriviner
All rights belong to owners, I make no claim to any of these chars.
Lex stood in the elevator, shifting his weight nervously from foot to foot. The facility wasn't quite that deep, but for some reason their elevator was exceptionally slow.
Now that he was alone, he no longer had to project confidence for the benefit of his hirelings. Lawton and Corben were professionals. They'd take care of their parts. That was simple enough. It was his own part that was beginning to assail him with doubt.
The plan was simple. He'd been under time constraint and frankly, the other two supervillains he'd taken along, while reasonably reliable, were not exactly mental giants. The software now running in Corben's head would override all the closed circuit cameras in the facility to show a loop of an empty hallway. Simultaneously, it would also be sending out alarms to pull any personnel not already incapacitated by Doctor Psycho's fear toxin induced freakout away from the route that Lex would be taking. Between those, the routes should remain clear for Lex himself and for Lawton to plant the multitude of compact bombs Lex had provided him at various load-bearing supports.
Inside of five minutes, the fear toxin feed into the midget would run out, giving the rest of the base's personnel an opportunity to leave, assuming they could register the alarms. Lex didn't need any more unnecessary blood on his hands, but he wasn't going to let any Cadmus Project facility escape unscathed.
Lex dipped a hand into his pocket and began tapping out a couple more commands into his cellphone. The electronics warfare software he had in Metallo had gotten into the Cadmus network deep enough to relay commands to their remote facilities. At Lex's command, every single one of those locations began registering catastrophic containment breaches, requiring the complete evacuation of all personnel and in the cases where it was possible, triggering self-destruct protocols.
He calculated the he would destroy three quarters of all Cadmus facilities within the next hour or so, but what he did in this place was the key. The answers were in the heart of this facility. The spider sat at the center of his web in this place. No matter what happened to those others, this was the one that mattered.
Lex slipped his hand into his coat and felt the cool, comfortingly rough grip of the pistol he wore in an underarm holster. He knew his way around regular guns well enough, but he did not often carry one, finding them crude and imprecise weapons. He didn't have much of a choice this time. As he'd told himself repeatedly, he'd been in a hurry. There were other weapons at his disposal, but nothing that would be as inconspicious nor as effective. Or at least, as effective as this .45 was with the special magazine clip he'd created. That the bullets needed an exceptionally large calibre for the weapon's other functions was somewhat worrisome, but the slide was just barely able to move items of that size through it.
He hoped he would not need it, but things were moving very quickly. He was glad and terrified at once. The chance to confront the mastermind that had warped his life. The chance to ask the questions he wanted answered. His hand tightened on his phone, but the sudden ringing startled him out of his morbid thoughts.
Lex wiped his hand across his bare scalp and held the phone up to his ear. He was underground, inside an elevator and outside of his phone plan's coverage area. He frowned slightly. Perhaps there were limits to what he should apply his technology to, he mused.
"Hello?" Lex asked mildly.
Mercy's voice snarled out of the phone, "Lex, you complete bastard! What did you put in my coffee?"
"Just a mild sedative to keep you out until we'd managed to get over here." Lex replied with a small, pleased smile.
"Why did you leave me behind?" She ground out, her voice silken and dangerous.
"It's going to be pretty dangerous here, Mercy--" Lex started to say, but she interrupted.
"That's why you need me there. I can see you on your peeping doohickey, by the way."
"It targetted my cellphone when you called. I had to leave you behind, Mercy." His voice was soft.
"Why?"
"If I don't make it--"
She snapped at him. "Shut up. I told those two to keep an eye on you!"
"I sent them to do the job I needed them to do." He replied smoothly. "Just like I have a job to do. Just like you have a job to do."
"Lex, my job is to protect you. You aren't letting me do my job." Her frustration was obvious to him even over the phone.
"Your job, Mercy, is to do what I tell you to." Lex snapped. "What I'm telling you to do is to make sure that even if I don't make it, these people stay down."
"What are you saying, Lex?"
"You carry out my will. You make sure my technology gets spread. You make sure they never do this to anyone every again. Make sure the human race gets what it deserves. You're my backup plan in case I don't make it."
"Why wouldn't you think you'd make it?" She asked, almost pleading now.
"Most of the people I've faced were..." his mouth twisted in distaste. "Good men. People who fancied themselves heroes. They had codes of conduct that they followed. They didn't kill if they could avoid it. These men I'm facing now are different. They're ruthless. More ruthless than I am. Cold and brutally calculating. I wouldn't doubt that they would kill me if they could. I don't know if I'll make it out. But I need to face them, do you understand?"
"No! I don't!"
"I need to look them in the eyes as I ask my questions. I want my face to be the last thing they see." His voice had turned harsh once more. "I don't want you with me for that, Mercy. I need you to live."
She was silent for so long that Lex almost thought she'd disconnected the call. Her voice was soft and pained. "Damn you, Lex. Why won't you let me protect you?"
He looked up, estimating roughly where Mercy would be standing and where his image would be in the point of view of the slide. He hoped he met her eyes. He wished he could see her expression as he did that. "Because this once, I want to protect you." With that, he hung up the phone and the elevator doors slid open. He knew the flaw in his bashed together programming from this morning but left the slide aimed at his phone even after the call ended. He just hoped she wouldn't be too upset by whatever was to come.
The elevator opened to an empty hallway. Lex walked down it, following the map he had on his phone. He'd plotted the layout from a 3D diagram the slide had rendered of the place. He knew that Director Paul Westfield was in his office, or at least, he had been when Lex had last checked. He wished, and not for the first time since this morning that the slide equipment were not quite so bulky. He had a few ideas for making it more portable, or at least making it remotely accessible, but again, time was the great limitng factor. He was pressed for it. He was in a rush.
He still hadn't cracked the size barrier on what it could transport. Nothing larger than a cubic inch of material at a time. Even a series of massively parallel slides would result in whatever the target was coming out on the other end looking like it had been put through a collander.
Fortunately, even that could be put to good use.
He turned a corner and neared a pair of sealed doors. These doors were the primary access to Westfield's office suite. If he hadn't already departed through the emergency tunnels, then this was the place Lex would be able to find him.
There were yellow and black caution warnings along the top and bottom of the door and it was slightly ajar. The bit of reprogramming that his software in Corben's head had done made certain of that. There was a keypad for access next to it, but that was unimportant compared to the two men in fatigues standing on either side of the door.
The fact that they were standing was a big clue for Lex. It wasn't unusual that there would be those with a resistance to what Doctor Psycho was broadcasting. Even through his own mental shields, Lex could still feel the weakened image of desperately grasping, shadowed feminine terror seeking to knock him out. The doors swung open and another half dozen men poured out, rifles aimed at Luthor. Lex grinned coldly. Either Cadmus had a disproportionately large number of psychically resistant security men, who all just happened to be in this specific corridor where no one should have been, or his suspicions about the puppet master and his minions were correct.
They gave no prompting. No warning, they simply cut loose and began shooting.
Lex ducked back with a wince. A lucky shot had creased his brow, another shot through the cuff of one pant leg, completely missing him. The shot to his head was lucky to have hit at all. Luckier for him that it hadn't taken his head off. The skin was cut and bleeding freely down the side of his face. Lex didn't even feel any pain from the it. Adrenaline, he supposed.
He cursed himself for his stupidity. With one hand he tore open the lowest button on his coat and slapped the large, flat button on his belt buckle. The air around him took on a distorted shimmer. The battery life on his force field was not quite what it could be, but that was no excuse for such carelessness. He could hear the shots ring hollowly outside the field. He stepped forward once more, this time, doing his best to ignore the shots. It was difficult not to flinch from the roar and thunder of the rifles blasting away at him. Kill shots, every one. The men were shooting to kill. It made what he was to do next easier.
He stood before them allowing their shots to be absorbed uselessly by his forcefield. With deliberate contempt, he pulled his own weapon out. The pistol, despite it's size and weight in his hand seemed ludicrously inadequate in the face of their chattering rifles.
The wall behind Lex was pockmarked and pitted by gunshots. He raised his hands, holding the pistol in both hands, as easily and deliberately as though he were at a shooting range. Seeing the gun in his hands and the uselessness of their own gunfire, the men began to pull back behind the door, intent on using the door as cover.
The pistol's muzzle poked out of his forcefield by just a tiny fraction. The barrel was unblocked. A necessary feature to allow one to shoot out of the field. Anything else was an inviation to disaster. He'd seen the results of accidentally shooting from inside the forcefield. Perpetual ricochets until the bullet caught the generator and shut down the field. In the process the hapless test subject in the field was reduced to hamburger.
Chunky hamburger.
It was with that thought in mind that Lex pulled the trigger.
His first shot took one of the security men on his hip. The man dropped to the floor, screaming in pain. That caught the attention of a second man who turned to help him. Lex put one bullet through his chest and a second through his stomach.
Unheeding of the bullets whining around him and bouncing off his field, he walked forward, no longer bothering to aim once his first few bullets had found their targets. The roar of his pistol was terrifyingly loud in the enclosed space of his field. Lex did not flinch. He held his gun in a single hand, firing shot after shot. Peppering the door and the security men with bullets. Once on the move, he missed far more often than he hit, but they were fleeing from him, ducking, seeking cover. His field let him advance with neither fear nor hesitation.
Shots meant to force him to duck were just so much wasted lead. He put bullets in four more of the men, not bothering to check if the wounds were fatal or not. Center mass shots. Simple ones. Most were blunted by the basic body armor the men wore, but the hesitation from taking a hit was enough to give Lex a chance for a more incapacitating shot.
The least injured survivors had taken cover around another corner. He knew he'd gotten one in the shoulder and the other had taken a shot in the meaty part of his thigh.
Lex could see the panic in their eyes every time they tried to get a clear shot at him. He guessed this was why the boyscout enjoyed striding into gunfire. The feeling of awe and terror in others when they realized they couldn't do anything to you.
He knew they were trying to wait him out now. They could keep shooting at him, but Lex was savoring their confusion over a simple fact. Lex had shot several dozen rounds out of a clip that was sized to hold fourteen. He called out to the two men. "If you're waiting for me to run out of bullets, it won't happen. My magazine is modified to create bullets out of thin air. I will always have enough bullets for you. My forcefield is powered by my body heat. If you surrender to me now and take me to Westfield, you may be able to walk... or at least limp... out of here alive."
He gave them a few seconds to consider things, only shooting the occassional bullet into the support columns to keep the men's minds focused on what he could do. He was lying about the gun's magazine, of course. Lex had found that while it was theoretically possible to create a nanoassembler factory small enough to fit into a pistol magazine, it would take upwards of twenty minutes for it to produce a single bullet. Slightly less in highly poluted areas, but it essenatially made any sort of unlimited ammo magazine built around those principles horrifically slow. Lex had gone with the much simpler method of having a small slide portal at the bottom of the magazine feeding from a supply of bullets from his armory. While he didn't exactly have an unlimited amount of ammo, he had more than enough readied to start a small war.
More than enough to handle what was essentially a scaled up and glorified home invasion.
The two men obviously didn't want to give up. They dashed out from behind their cover, emptying their clips into Lex's field. He sighed and shot both men in the chest several times. Luthor walked past them as they collapsed, bleeding onto the ground. He hadn't gotten quite so close to the others. These two were still breathing. Harsh, ragged and pained, but still breathing. Lex didn't expect they would be for much longer, one way or another.
He pulled his pocket square up, dabbing ineffectually at the cut over his right eyebrow. It stung when he touched it, and the blood was just starting to get into his eyes. The fact that it was going to leave a stain on his collar annoyed him more than the men who'd tried to stop him. He came upon an unoccupied desk at the end of the corridor. An office door with a small sign saying, "Paul Westfield, Director" told him that he'd reached his destination.
He wondered idly if he should've felt any remorse about those men he'd just gunned down for doing their jobs. Of course, it was possible they weren't quite men and they were faking, if his suspicions truly did pay off, but he couldn't be certain then and there. They had been in his way, there was no doubt of that. Was he really trying to make himself better or not?
He heard a whimper from the desk and realized that it's occupant, a pretty, curly-haired brunette was in a fetal position, cowering under the table. She appeared to have wet herself. Doctor Psycho truly had outdone himself.
He put a hand on the door knob. Perhaps they could be his last few. Once this was over, it would be over. He didn't think he'd need to be quite so... direct... in the days to come. He might even enjoy being humanity's great benefactor. The paradox in that he could be that while still being a ruthless, murderous bastard puzzled him. Then again, perhaps caring about humanity as a whole did not necessarily mean you had to care about humans as individuals.
That didn't sound right, though. Logically, it did not follow.
He shook his head. Focus, Lex, he admonished himself, You aren't done yet.
He opened the door to find Director Paul Westfield sitting at his desk, leaning back in his chair and grinning a terrible, awful grin. It reminded Lex of Metallo's own attempts at facial expression. A wooden thing that had more in common with a carved mask than a living face.
Lex grinned back, twirling his pistol around one finger. He asked casually. "I'm afraid I didn't have an appointment, but do you think you could slip me in, Paul?"
Behind the desk, the lean, brown-haired man with graying temples rose. "I suppose I could at that, Lex."
"You look good for a dead man, Paul." Lex remarked, closing his fist on his gun's grip to stop it from spinning and aiming it at the man.
"Was that a threat?" Westfield asked casually. Too casually. It was obvious that the telepathic attack was not affecting him at all. In fact, Luthor was beginning to suspect that these individuals weren't even noticing the attack at all. Perhaps they were puzzled by the sudden collapse of everyone else in their facility. Lex filed that piece of data away and continued to aim his weapon.
"Not at all. I'd just heard Dabney Donovan had killed you a few years ago."
"From your spy, Packard no doubt." Westfield sneered cheerfully. "Not at all. The reports of my demise were greatly exagerated. After all I control the greatest single collection of biological and cloning sciences that has ever been assembled. They brought me back."
"Convenient." Lex nodded.
"You certainly thought so when our techniques salvaged you from that sack of cancer cells you used to call your body."
"Touche." Lex gestured idly with his gun. There was a lightness to the atmosphere. As though the men were simply having small talk about business and not a deadly contest of wills. "I imagine you know why I'm here."
Westfield shook his head and shrugged elaborately, "To be perfectly honest, Lex. No clue."
Lex tapped the pistol barrel against his temple. "It has to do with this. It has to do with the year my parents died. The year Superman came to Metropolis." He pointed the gun at Westfield once more, his aim was rock steady. He strode towards the man's desk, coming closer on every word. "It has to do with the phobaline tetrahydrochorate traces in my head and the chain of evidence that I've followed back to Cadmus. Does any of this refresh your memory?" Lex's voice dropped as he spoke, the tone gone cold and hard. He pressed the muzzle of the pistol into the center of Westfield's forehead. "It's about crippling entire generations with mediocrity, you bastard. Explain."
Westfield stared into Lex's eyes. His cold, green eyes. Westfield shook his head elaborately. "I have no idea what you're talking about."
"Too bad." Lex said quietly. He shifted the aim of his gun downward suddenly, no longer aiming at Westfield's forehead, and fired into the man's forearm. Westfield screamed, pulling backwards hard in his chair, blood flowed freely from the wound, staining his suit and covering his hand in blood as he desperately tried to staunch the bleeding. Lex leaped up on the table and kicked the man hard across the jaw, snapping his head back far enough to force the chair to overbalance, spilling Project Cadmus' director onto the floor, blood streaming from his arm and a trickle of blood from his lips.
Lex stood on the man's desk, towering over him. The light behind him throwing his face into shadow and putting a white halo around his shadowed features. "You have more spots for me to shoot, Westfield. Tell me what this is about, or I will take my time exploring every single one of them."
"You're insane, Luthor!" Westfield whimpered. "I've got men, security and cameras--"
"Your men are dead. I killed them on my way here. Your cameras are under my control. This entire facility is set to self-destruct at my word. There will be no body for them to find, you have my word on that. There will be no investigation. No one will know what happened to you. My name will be clean, I will be praised to the high heavens. Your conspiracy will die in flames as I disassemble it." Lex cocked the gun dramatically. He spoke slowly. Deliberately. Menacingly. "There is no carrot. There is only stick. Answer me or die in agony."
The man pleaded desperately. "I don't know anythin--" Lex cut him off once more, this time with a shot that just barely missed Westfield's other arm.
Luthor shifted slightly, waving his free hand near his head as a triumphant smile lit up his face. "You know what? I just had a thought. The PTHC contaminant you've left in our heads? A simple catalytic microscrubber attuned to the chemical lockout should break the chemical contaminants down and produce an accelerated state of neural cross connection." He laughed sharply. "Ten seconds with an aerosol spray and I can not only undo all the damage you people have cause, I'll make everyone on the planet brillant! They'll have to cancel all the reality TV shows!"
Westfield's face darkened at that.
Lex raised an eyebrow, still keeping his gun trained at Westfield. "What? Are you going to miss American Idol?"
"That's not possible." Westfield said flatly.
"Isn't it?" Lex asked with a cheery grin. "All this time and effort you've put into trying to keep mankind down and all it takes is one man with a gun and a bit of imagination to overturn... what is it? Fifty years of work? Sixty?" He shook his head. "I notice you forgot to pretend tha you don't know anything about this."
Westfield didn't answer, at least not in words. His legs, which were still under the desk, kicked up suddenly. The heavy wood splintered under the blow, throwing Lex down from his perch. He landed hard. The forcefield absorbed the impact, saving him from a fractured arm, but it was still like being run over by a car made of pillows. The bad landing knocked all the air out of him. He lost hold of his gun, but fortunately it was still within the field.
He reached for it, trying to keep his pistol from slip-sliding against the inside of the forcefield. He was far too distracted by that act to realize that Westfield had gotten back to his feet. The Cadmus director stamped down hard on Lex's wrist. The field held, but the floor beneath, the cement floor, cracked sharply. His arm was immobilized. Embedded in the material of the floor and pinned there by Westfield's foot.
Lex raised an eyebrow. "Well... it's about time." He looked up, staring at Westfield who no longer seemed to be just another bloated beaurocrat. Lex watched idly as Westfield flexed the arm that had been shot. He opened and closed his hand, as though testing it. The bleeding had stopped and Lex knew then that his guesses were correct. The bullet was still inside that arm. In a normal human it would likely have lodged up against bone and would be agony to move. He doubted that was what Westfield was feeling.
The arrival of the rest of the security men, all still on their own feet, confirmed it for him. They no longer needed to pretend at humanity. The blank expressionless faces said it all. Lex guessed that Westfield must've signaled them somehow and told them the jig was up.
They came at him, the ones who'd taken lethal shots: One walked in missing a good portion of his head. Another had a gaping hole where his heart should have been. Another was limping slightly after having sustained a half dozen wounds through his chest and stomach. He did notice that most of their injuries no longer bled. Even better was that there were no exit wounds to those injuries. They had his bullets in them. Sometimes paranoia paid off.
They surrounded him, grabbing and manhandling him back to his feet as best as they could while being unable to touch him. They kept him pressed in, unable to move, unable to reach his weapon. Inside his field Lex was certain he had them.
Westfield smiled that wooden smile, all teeth and menace. "The problem with a forcefield is that unless you have it anchored, or you have some sort of super strength, you can still be overpowered."
Lex struggled against the grasping hands slipping against his field. He couldn't get leverage nor purchase. This close the bloody, gaping wounds were revealed for what they were. He could see the metallic sheen within. "So I see," he replied.
Westfield smacked Lex harshly on the side of the head. The forcefield took the blow still, but it was still humiliating. "You didn't really think this would work, did you? Coming here with just those two idiots? With barely any weapons? What are you trying to prove?"
"That humans can beat you." Lex replied with a grin.
"Congratulations, Luthor." He replied, "You've proved nothing. Only that you're just as stupidly self-destructive as always. Just like the rest of your kind. You could have been useful. Your intellect is remarkable, but you've proven yourself more trouble than you are worth."
"I tend to do that," Lex said with a smirk. "You made me this way, after all. You have only yourselves to blame."
"I wouldn't be so pleased, Luthor." Westfield replied coldly. "We are going to hollow you out and wear you like a cheap suit. Your name will be a synonym for failure and villany in our hands. Your magnificent mind will be broken down and your neural architecture will be stripped down and retasked to serve as a glorified hard drive. What little will be left of your personality will be nothing more than a tiny voice screaming endlessly for release."
Lex nodded absently, "That's a good one. Very dramatic. I applaud."
"You may mock, but you are not the first to discover our existence. We have been around for a very long time. We defend this planet's status quo. Your species is a weak willed one, prone to excesses that will destroy it."
Lex, to put it mildly was shocked. It was trying to justify itself to him. He suspected that they'd been around humans long enough to learn arrogance, but hadn't realized they'd picked up the bad habit of gloating. Something Lex himself had been all too familiar with. He decided to play along. It wanted dialogue. Hiding for so long as they had, they wanted an audience.
"We aren't children to be coddled. Your interference is neither wanted nor desired." Lex continued to pretend indifference, but this was what he was here for, his two hirelings had served as his distraction, now he was theirs. A glance down at his phone showed him that Lawton and Corben were still hard at work. He almost missed the next part of Westfield's rant. Fortunately he was recording now.
"Your race has been shaped entirely by us. What you are today was through our auspices. What you have achieved we have generously given you." Westfield's voice began to take on animation once more. "When Atlantis lay on the verge of taking to the stars. We were new to our task and overeager. We destroyed it entirely. We showed greater restraint when Rome reached the peak of its Empire building. We led the barbarians that sacked it. When the kingdom of Prester John stood poised to unite the African continent under a single rule and from there the world? We destroyed it so thoroughly it exists only in legend. We are why the Han conquered the Chinese. We are why the Crusades happened. We were in command of the Allied forces that toppled the Third Reich. Your entire race's history of trying to rise above it's station has ever been tempered by our hand striking you down."
Lex flashed a grin, he could not show them his anger. It was too crucial. He had to let them keep believing that he mocked them. That none of what they said affected him, but he could already feel a cold finger of terror touch his heart. He thought they'd only been operating in this century. The possibility had existed that they'd operated earlier, but he hadn't anything to base that supposition on. He kept his voice light and teasing. "Missed out on the whole Industrial revolution then?"
"We will admit to some carelessness in allowing that to flourish as long as it did. Your tiny mayfly lives mean that you can spread and change so quickly. Our task is to allow you some measure of growth, but to keep you contained to this world. You cannot be allowed to spread."
"You're quick to take credit, but you're already contradicting yourself and you've barely started gloating. The mark of an amateur." Lex chided playfully.
"I apologize, Luthor. I may be somewhat out of practice, after all the last time anyone got as close to this truth as you have was in the fourteenth Century, when a physician learned of our existence and swore to stop us. He is still around, but is little more than a toothless relic who is as apt to do our work for us as oppose us. You know him better as Ra's Al Ghul."
Lex sneered. "This is supposed to impress me? That he's been around this long and you haven't managed to get rid of him speaks immensely towards your competence."
"But there was no need, Luthor. We've neutralized him. He has never suspected that we'd tainted his Lazarus pits. With every dip he grows more and more feverishly insane. He believed that we sought to have mankind under our heel. Do you realize that his plan to destroy the majority of humanity was a ploy to deny us slaves? His ecological posturing is just a way for him to justify it to himself. Seven hundred years of conflict and the best he can hope to accomplish is to take away from us something we do not even want." Westfield leaned in. "We do not need to kill him, Luthor. He is irrelevant now. Just as you shall be."
Luthor shrugged as best he could while still hemmed in by the men. "You've seriously overplayed your hand, Westfield. If that is your name. This sort of preening really should be reserved for when you've won."
"But we have won. Your little rebeliousness is at an end. The status quo is upheld. Mankind shall remain as it is." Westfield's tone, though cool, had grown snide.
"Is that so?" Lex asked, pausing significantly to ensure that his captors heard his next words clearly. He looked Westfield straight in the eye. "Obviously, nothing escapes you."
There was a moment of shocked silence before Westfield frowned slightly, "So you did know?"
Lex smirked, "I suspected. But once I got the files from Waller... well, the clues are obvious once you think about it. The sudden surge in technology in a dozen fields during World War II as you try madly to impose order on what had become the biggest screwup in human history? That was a big one."
Lex's smirk had turned sharklike as he continued. He did so enjoy explaining things to lesser minds. "Most prominently influenced were the biological sciences and robotics. Anachronistic, advanced technology. The two obvious explanations were either aliens of some sort, or time travellers. The actions you took during the war didn't make sense for time travellers. The biological advances all seemed backwards engineered to human physiologies. As though you had access to higher levels of scientific knowledge, but only the vaguest idea on how it applied to a human biology. So you had to have it reduced to first principles and work your way back up from there."
"The allowed you to deduce alien, but for the rest?" Westfield asked, intrigued despite himself.
"The G.I. Robot and Robotman." Lex grinned. "Both products of Project M. Both major advances in robotics and cybernetics that served as the basis for all humanoid robotic designs that followed: the second Robotman, Cyborg, Amazo, Red Tornado... Metallo. Imagine my surprise when I studied all those basic designs and found that the origin of the technology was quite obvious once one knew what markers to look for. Isn't that right, Manhunter?"
Westfield gave Lex another cold smile. His features froze as the human seeming faded from his face. Human skin giving way to a smooth plasticine blue face, with features just ever so slightly off. The now bare scalp and neck were a bright, metallic red. "If you knew this ahead of time, Luthor... why did you--"
"Stage an assault with just two imbiciles and a pistol?" Lex said, now grinning madly. "One imbicile whose robotic body is just close enough to yours to confound the sensors you'd normally use? The other a perfectly normal human who can blend in seemlessly with your other humans at this location?"
Westfield could only stare as Lex continued. "I bet you're having all sorts of trouble finding them right now, aren't you? Lawton should be just about done planting the charges. Corben meanwhile has been datamining your entire database for my personal use. I'm going to have all sorts of fun converting that technology for public consumption."
"You're talking like you're in charge of this situation." Westfield said.
"I am." Lex replied smugly. "The reason why I only took a pistol was because you would have detected energy weapons if you bothered to scan me."
"It's true. You have no other weapons. The only other advanced mechanisms we found on you besides the forcefield was your cell phone and some other sort of short range radio transmitter."
"Not exactly a radio transmitter. It's an RFID interrogator that does spatial plotting before it can transmit an inverse field harmonic localized on the plotted coordinates." Lex replied glibly. "Technically it's a weapon, but I still have my greatest weapon of all." Lex tapped his temple after a brief struggle to free his hand. The motion reoppened the scabbed up wound above his eyebrow which started it bleeding again. "Would you like to see me use it?" He asked slowly.
The Manhunters as one, realized that he was about to strike back somehow. They had let him keep his force field up as a gesture of contempt, Lex knew. Arrogance always had a way of biting one in the ass. Lex knew that from bitter experience. He also knew it was very difficult to shut up a person when they were inside such a force field. "On Bang. Locus Lex. Radius two meters." He called out.
He was certain the Manhunter's probing sensors would notice the radio signal pulsed out from what they incorrectly identified as a radio. The signal queried his immediate vicinity for the RFID tags embedded in the bullets that were in turn, now embedded in the Manhunters. The large caliber rounds were only just barely large enough to hold the passive transmission tags. His equipment noted the positions of every bullet within the defined radius and waited almost eagerly for Lex to give the word.
Before Lex could draw in a second breath for the activation command over a dozen blue fingered Manhunter fists struck his defenses with unearthly coordination. Each blow was at a precise point, with just the right amount of force to tax his physical force field to its limits. It collapsed with an electronic whimper.
His unheld gun clattered to the ground, no longer contained by his field.
Lex couldn't even spare a breath to curse as a blow struck him in the gut, knocking the wind out of him. A second caught him across the jaw rocking his head back and sending his ears ringing. He blacked out for a moment, but not long, as he could feel other blows strike him. One was behind him holding him up. Out of his field. Out of breath. Out of time.
He tried to say the command, but he'd been reduced to inarticulate screaming by the blows. He felt a rib give way. Then two. Finally, through the blows, he sobbed it more than said it, but it was clear enough for the voice activated equipment to register the word. "Bang."
The Manhunters surrounding him began falling apart. Massive gaping holes opened around their bodies where the bullets had been lodged. Packed in tight as they were, the spherical voids overlapped between bodies, such that a single sphere took bites out of up to three or more of them. Lex had dropped to his knees, surrounded by metallic dust and still twitching isolated Manhunter body parts.
He grinned around his pain. Blood was coming out of the corner of his mouth opposite the wound on his brow and the bruises on his face were beginning to purple. His suit was a total loss now and not even the most assiduous dry cleaning would ever make it acceptable again.
The Manhunter that had played the role of Westfield didn't hesitate. It charged forward intending to finish Lex off. One human. One broken human could not possibly stand against one of them. No man escapes the Manhunters.
Lex took one tortured lungful of air after another. He could barely open one eye, the one that he could see out of noted Westfield rushing for him. He groped in the dust around him and just as the ersatz human would have struck at him, he whispered, "Bang."
The hand that Westfield would have hit him with dissolved into a pile of drifting dust, leaving the machine with a stump that ended in its upper arm.
Before it could move its other arm into position, before it could even truly register its surprise, Lex's hand rose up out of the dust, with a death grip on his pistol. There was no time to aim, no time at all for subtlety, but he would need the Manhunter's head. In a curious bit of anthropomorphism, their primary memory modules were kept where the human brains would be. If it had been anything but a machine Lex would have hesitated. Perhaps fatally. But he could salvage its head. Its memories. He would get all his answers.
Lex rose to one knee and shot three times. The first veered wide, his blurry vision and a single, shaky hand making it difficult to aim. The shock of pain from the recoil travelled up to his shoulder and lingered. He grappled with the gun, bringing his other hand up to hold it steady. The second shot struck true, just below where the navel would be on a human. Just a little above the crotch. The third shot took the Manhunter at its chest, high, right and almost to the shoulder.
It staggered, taking a step back at the roar and the flash of his weapon, from the impact of those massive slugs burying themselves into its metallic body. Its eyes widened in surprise as it reached out for Lex, seeking to choke him, reaching out to keep him from talking.
Lex spoke with crisp finality and much satisfaction, through his pain. "Bang."
The spheres of negated matter enveloped its lower waist and most of its neck and shoulder. Its arm and both legs fell away, only loosely connected by the now scattering dust. There was a puff of smoke and the stench of ozone on top of everything else. That was probably the disintegrator giving up the ghost. It had done its work admirably.
Luthor dropped the gun into his pants pocket, letting it slip free of his nerveless fingers. He half-crawled, half-staggered to Westfield's almost disconnected head. It had lost a good portion of its lower jaw on the left side and a thin sliver of metal still connected it to rest of the body. Lex stamped down hard on the connection, before tearing the unevenly cut head away. He clutched it to his chest tightly. Or as tightly as he could with his broken ribs.
He wasn't certain how, but he found himself leaning against one wall, almost out of the office. The shaking and the sound of a distant explosion had snapped him back awake. He knew there was no way he would be able to make it out on his own. He fished around in his pockets for his phone, only to find smashed bits of electronics. "Well, that's just lovely," he slurred. It was either the swelling of his jaw or the possible concussion that was doing it to him.
Outside the office the alarms were reaching a swelling crescendo of… well… alarm. The sound pierced his ears and his already aching head. He muttered around his pained jaw, "I'm about ready to go into shock now. Anytime now."
He could hear distant explosions and realized belatedly that enough time had passed and Lawton was already detonating. He felt the entire facility shake and a rumbling roar rattled his already badly abused body. "Walk it off… come on… you've gone ten rounds with a guy who can lift aircraft carriers. This is nothing…" He muttered encouragingly to himself.
He stumbled around the corner where the elevators and the emergency stairs were and found to his horror that the entire corridor was already closed off by rubble. He stared stupidly at the rubble choked hallway. The micro-bombs he'd given Lawton were primed to detonate in sequence and if he'd followed maps Lex had given him, the entire place would be coming down on his head very, very soon.
He smiled weakly. "Careless. Very careless. Passing out messed up your time table, so where's your exit strategy, Lex?" He leaned his back heavily against the wall and allowed himself to slide down it. He really was going to die down here. His cell phone was modern art. His force field was shorted out and the disintegrator had given its all. The gun and the magazine both still worked, but there was no way he could fit into the tiny slide portal aperture. He could try shooting the rubble, but without the disintegration functions it would be a useless gesture.
Sitting, with his back to the wall, he was hairsbreadth away from simply allowing himself to go unconscious. He was going to die anyway; he may as well do it comfortably in his sleep, right? His eyes were half shut and the dusty air beginning to smell clearer and sweeter to his muddled senses when a black shadow flitted into his field of view.
He caught a whiff of oiled leather and jasmine as the shadow closed in on him. He grunted wincing as even that slight movement caused his broken ribs to grind against each other. "Psycho must still be transmitting." Lex smiled up blearily at the apparition. The angel of death had come to take him? It was definitely feminine, though faceless. Where eyes and other features should have been was stitchery on the blank, black face.
If this was how Doctor Psycho saw Waller, then frankly, the little man needed serious psychiatric help. Lex had to admit though… the feminine curves were absolutely stunning. Or at least the silhouette was. His eyes were bleary enough, but he could still distinguish at least that much… whatever it was it had something golden in outline across it's chest… something winged and vaguely familiar.
It leaned in close and whispered, "I'm here for you."
Lex smiled back, breathing calmly. The pain seemed to leave his body at her words, or perhaps he was finally going into shock. "Good," he murmured.
O-O-O-O
Mercy was on the phone and absolutely furious. The last she'd seen of Lex were those… things punching their way through his force field. His phone must have gotten destroyed at that point because the image on the slide had wavered and faded. She had Corben on the line and the slide showed her that he was currently in the van, driving away from where Lex was. Dimly, she could see Lawton behind him. The back of the van was open and he'd tied himself down with bungee cord and was shooting at someone behind them.
"What do you think you're doing?" She roared at him.
"Making our get away." Corben said calmly. Half his human face was gone revealing the metallic endoskeleton beneath as well as a single the green glowing eye. He had a phone in his head, she remembered which explained why he didn't need to hold anything up to his head and why his lips didn't move while he talked to her.
"Why are you leaving without Lex?!"
"We haven't had a chance to find him, okay? Their security guys were tougher than expected… then there were these cloned cyborg dinosaur thing—"
"Stop making excuses and go back to get him!"
"No can do, lady." He twisted the wheel sharply to the right and Mercy realized belatedly that he'd been driving on the wrong side of the road this whole time, at least based on what she could see from the windows. Behind him, Lawton continued to shoot at the Cadmus security types that were giving chase. They were mounted on what looked like cyborg horses. He was alternating yelling defiantly at them and cussing colorfully and continuously.
"Why not?" It was practically a sob. She wished she could run down there herself, but there was no way she could make it in time.
The image showed Lawton flinch suddenly and grab at the doors to close them. From the vague audio, Mercy could hear a rumble then a deep, bass explosion. The interior of the van began to tilt crazily, rolling over and over. The image finally settled to a stop with Metallo upside down in his seat and an unconscious Floyd dangling from his bungee ties.
There was a long silence before Corben finally spoke again. "Because the damn bombs just leveled the place."
END