Before we get started I really have to give another round of applause to my Awesome Cadre of Reviewers: you guys are the best! I love your comments, your questions, your speculation. A lot of the time it lets me know that I've either gotten the point across, or still need to flesh out an explanation (or the cliffhanger is having the desired effect - mwahahah!). Your feedback is invaluable and appreciated and thoughtful … and fun! Thank you all SO MUCH!
TRANSITION
(Once more, with feeling: Please understand that the Teen Titans, Jump City, Darkseid, Jinx, the H.I.V.E., and all other references to established DC canon belong to someone else [that would be DC]. I do this because it's fun, not because it pays well. Um … that is … unless you count feedback in the form of reviews as payment, which I DO, so actually I guess it DOES pay well … just not in money. -Concolor44)
CHAPTER 25
… not far from the JLA Moonbase, the morning of the day Raven awoke …
Garfield Logan paced the circumference of his prison, turned, paced in the opposite direction, turned, paced clockwise again …
He had awakened here three days ago. Memories of his capture were fleeting, a result of the sedative they'd finally managed to get into his system. Clearly enough did he recollect finding the headquarters of the gang he intended to eliminate. Also Terra's approach, and a little of their conversation. After that … not so much. Glimpses of running men approaching; a feeling as if he were falling; a look of shock and terrible pain on Terra's face. That was about it.
The uncertainty of what happened ate at him, as did worry for what became of Terra. Why did she have to be there? Surely the other Titans forced her. She was still the only real crush he'd ever had, and he didn't want anything bad to happen to her. It was probably Robin's fault; had to be Robin's fault! He had no idea how long he'd been unconscious, and that infuriated him, made him want to lash out. His long tail swished around dangerously.
Looking back at himself, he hissed in disgust. It was a good form, if one had to be stuck in one form, strong and nearly indestructible, but it severely limited his ability to manipulate things. Not that there was anything to manipulate in this God-forsaken force bubble on the fucking Moon, for fuck's sake! Flexing his claws, he took a desultory swipe at the bubble wall. The energy field bulged slightly, and he left no mark. Just like all the other times.
Shortly after waking up, he got to watch as his captors brought him food: a large plate, in its own little energy bubble, holding a couple of slabs of meat (one cooked and one raw) and a selection of bread and vegetables. They placed it just outside his prison, backed off, and fiddled with a control box. The two bubbles merged and the plate slid inside. Curiously, he sniffed it, but then left it alone. He wasn't hungry. He wasn't even sure that this creature ate anything, in the usual sense. Nor had he needed to piss or crap, and a brief examination showed that he seemed to have no orifices to allow either act. But ignoring the plate resulted in its removal later.
Another thing that puzzled him was why they bothered to keep him alive at all. From what he'd picked up over the last couple of months, the FBI wanted him dead. Dead, as in, fed through a wood chipper. Dead, as in, his remains dropped into the sun. Sincerely dead. Obviously someone else had more clout. They'd have to, to get him into this cheery little paradise. He certainly wouldn't be killing any more Earth-based villains, that much was sure.
He discovered that his prison's foundation was some kind of physical substance, rather than a further extension of the force field. He felt pretty sure he could dig his way out if he wanted to. Not that it would do him any good. He did need to breathe, so the nice, hard vacuum that ran to the horizon was a better prison than any physical cell could hope to be.
The pacing stopped. Lying down, facing away from the camera set up outside the dome to monitor his every move, he considered his options again … and found them dreary. Again. He hated that camera. He hated being watched, that is, against his will. He always had. No privacy here, and not even anyone to talk to.
That gave him a sudden thought. He got up, turned, and stared at the camera. Then he prodded the floor a few times. Then he extended one claw and scratched letters into the hard alloy. Finishing his message, he stuck his tongue out at the camera (he couldn't form any obscene gestures with his paws), ambled away a few steps, and flopped back down.
After a few minutes the camera unit extended an arm and moved the recorder up and over the dome, positioning it over the words that Changeling had written. In the Moonbase, one of the technicians looked at the other and said, "He wants a what?"
"A laptop."
####
… in the Rift …
Darkseid turned his back on the dark gore liberally splattered around the torture chamber. "It knows nothing. Kill it."
"Yes, Dread Lord." Desaad – still shaken and suitably chastised from the time he spent in the tormented limbo of his master's eyes – chose a long object from a storage rack, considered the miserable figure hanging from the collection of hooks, and made a short, swift jab into its body just below where the tentacles were attached to its midsection. He twisted it to extend the barbs, and then yanked it back out. The being twitched and mewled in agony for close to a minute before finally bleeding out. Then Desaad motioned to one of his lackeys, who quickly removed the corpse. "Would you like to interrogate another, Dread Lord?"
Darkseid didn't answer. He stood in front of a view-plate showing the small, dark world they had found. It huddled close to its primary, a dim orange-yellow dwarf whose surface was covered with sunspots. The inhabitants had proved useless. They formed what might be thought of as a world-spanning hive mind, except they had free will, to a degree. They were individual enough to carry on limited trade with each other. He studied the planet, noting the many recently-scourged areas, the fires raging everywhere, the poisoned seas. His shock troops had been most thorough. It would be a miracle if the race survived.
"I have seen enough. Their rude telekinetic powers stopped your sensory sphere's transmission. That is all." Turning to leave, he said, "Make for the next one. And I trust you will not waste my time."
####
… elsewhere …
K'Naa spent a great deal of effort following the thoughts of the two human girls that had come to mean so much to her … and was worried sick as a result. She had not expected that the warp journey would knock them out so thoroughly. That made her connection with their minds very tenuous indeed.
It may have been a factor of K'Naa's own unique makeup, or it may be a universal constant among telepathic races, but the speed of thought – pure thought, not the wet-ware mechanics involved in producing it – seemed to be very close to infinite. It was certainly millions of times that of light. K'Naa never questioned the case, having had nothing with which to compare it; she merely accepted that she could access others' thoughts in real time, with no perceptible lag. Of course, since the power behind her mind was several orders of magnitude greater than that of any other telepath that ever lived, psychic interplanetary communication was a moot point for the rest of the galaxy.
But it did take concentration, and the farther away a mind was, the more concentration was required. Thirteen thousand parsecs was a hell of a stretch by any standard, and even with the spiritual alignment they shared, it was difficult. At first she had a steady (if whisper-thin) connection, but it quickly damped until now she could just barely detect dear Rachel, and dear Jinx not at all.
And, although her original, planetary consciousness never slept or needed to, the human facsimile that she had created did require rest. It was currently asleep, so the duality of her present state was drastically reduced. This enabled her to give her whole mind over to the problem of getting back into contact with the girls, and to this she bent her considerable will.
####
… Probst Federal Prison …
Maximum-security prisons all tend to work pretty much the same way. The guards always assume the inmates are armed and treat them as such. The prisoners are separated by type and class and affiliation, so that the Skinheads are never in the yard at the same time as the MS-13 crowd or the Bandidos; the 'mere' career criminals aren't forced to rub shoulders with the truly violent types. In the case of Probst there was yet another level of complexity: they had to separate the super-villains from everyone else.
Fortunately there weren't that many of them (super-villains, that is) and roughly a third of them were either in solitary or in some sort of stasis. The ones with "natural" powers – that is, not mechanically augmented – were fitted with damper collars when not in their cells. The super-villain cellblock was also fully damped. And most of the time this arrangement worked about as well as one could expect.
Of course that didn't mean that they never had "incidents". That would be too much to expect out of any prison population, much less a maximum-security facility. But with few exceptions, the guards and the automated systems were able to quell anything that got more than a little out of hand. They had good procedures and better equipment, and felt as secure as they had any right to be.
Today, though, was destined to be one of the exceptions.
It started during the late-morning exercise period. The guards had a mezzanine with a steel-grating floor some four or five meters off the ground that ran all around the yard. Half a dozen of them would patrol it whenever the prisoners were present. They were armed, naturally, but never drew their weapons unless they were forced to. This group in the yard now was one of the ones they had to watch closely: members of an outlaw motorcycle gang, their particular club insisted that initiates assassinate a member of a rival club to even be considered for membership. Every last individual currently hulking around the yard was in for LWOP … Life WithOut Parole. They held a fierce loyalty to other members of their gang, and a fierce hatred of anything that smacked of law enforcement or civilized society. And to a man they had REAL short tempers.
Things started going south about 11:15 when one of the guards tripped over a loose spot in the mezzanine and fell on his face. On his way down, he managed to catch his other foot in the railing and wrench his knee badly enough that he couldn't stand on it; this brought hoots of derision and several dozen crude curses from the inmates. Two of the guards helped him up and carried him down to the infirmary. In the commotion, no one noticed the tiny pink crackles of what looked like static running along the steel. The three guards that were left remained extra vigilant.
Five minutes later one of the guards moved to lean on the railing in the same spot where the first one fell; it had come loose from the mezzanine floor and shifted under his weight, throwing him off-balance, and he jerked back, grabbing for anything he could reach. In his flailing, he knocked his sidearm loose from its holster. It dropped over the edge to the yard below, and was immediately pounced on by one of the gang-bangers, who pumped several rounds into the guard who had fumbled it. He then turned to aim at one of the others, but the two guards that were left both opened fire on him. There was another general scramble for the gun, another gang member got it, and was himself shot down before he could fire. By that point the guards had reached the door; they ran out, and sounded the General Lockdown.
Tiny, pink sparks began showing up elsewhere.
In the prison kitchen, the cooks were getting everything ready for lunch. Their ovens and stovetops were all propane-fired, but they were always careful to follow procedures and turn everything off if for any reason they couldn't remain in the kitchen. Under Lockdown, they were required to gather with the rest of the Facilities support staff out in the main cafeteria. And it just so happened that when one of the cooks' helpers shut off the stove he was working on, the valve cracked. He didn't notice anything as he hurried out of the kitchen, but propane was leaking steadily into the room. A muted, pink crackle of static ran up the doorframe.
In the southeast guard tower, at 11:25, the surveillance system monitors turned a weird shade of fuchsia and then simply stopped working. The frantic staff sent for the maintenance crew.
Guards all over the prison used small electric carts to get around in the huge place. Two of them were high-tailing it to their Lockdown rendezvous point when suddenly all four tires broke into pieces. At the same time, everything else in the prison that was made of rubber became unreasonably brittle.
At 11:40, the circuit holding the doors shut in Cell Block H-1 failed. They all pulled open most of the way until the back-up circuit took over and reclosed them. Two inmates got their hands closed in the doors and had to go to the infirmary. Six minutes later the same thing happened in Cell Block H-3, and five more inmates needed the nurse. Word passed quickly, so when the doors to H-2 started opening, every last man was able to slip out free and clear.
Now, the Cell Block policy was very different from the exercise yard policy. Since all the doors could be controlled individually, occupancy was first-in-first-out. That meant a random mix of types and affiliations on the Block. Almost as soon as the men were in the corridor, a fight broke out. Then another. Then two more. Then there was a general donnybrook involving all forty prisoners. More than half of them were dead inside two minutes. Those left were all non-enemies to the extent that they could call a truce and start trying to figure a way out of the prison.
The warden assigned a guard to watch the controls for all the doors so that he could execute a manual override if any more circuits failed; he was very busy for the next hour. Lunch was postponed for the duration of the crisis.
Around 12:30, something backed up the drains in one of the shower rooms while at the same time, oddly, an old pipe in the wet-wall burst. There was a drain that should have conducted any leaks in that wall to the main sewer, but, it too was inexplicably blocked. The water, now enthusiastically shooting out around three of the sinks, was dammed in the room by a tight door, and filled it half a meter deep before finding and enlarging a crack in the tile under a window. It poured down inside that wall, falling all the way to the sub-basement, where it began leaking into an air-handling junction.
By 12:40 the maintenance people had found the root problem with the tower monitors and got them back on line. They were packing up their equipment when the entire tower went dark … except for several muted trails of pink static here and there.
The sub-basement air-handling junction led over to a bank of electrical panels. Since Lockdown was underway, the two techs normally on duty were in a different room. They weren't there to witness the brief shower of sparks – some of them pink – that preceded the main power breaker tripping …
… but then, after a lull of no more than a few milliseconds, the UPS kicked in and turned on the generator. Strangely, though, it so happened that the way the secondary system was designed had an exploitable flaw in the distribution network. One of the chillers was supposed to be wired three-phase but was only receiving power through two of them. That made the unit's compressor overheat after only a few minutes, and the chiller shut off …
… which sent a signal to the alarm system. Ordinarily the techs would have been all over the problem, fixing the cryogenic unit before anything else came apart. But this time, since the alarm system was already disabled (and the techs weren't even in the room) nothing was done. After several minutes the temperature in the tank climbed high enough that the unit hit a pre-determined limit, and so to prevent the death of the person in the tank – coincidentally, a nineteen-year-old girl with pink hair – the control automatically initiated the Restore sequence. This meant that, in a few hours, the occupant of the tank would wake up, dizzy, disoriented, and with a killer headache.
Out in front of the prison, at 13:00 sharp, a tall flagpole bearing state and national banners creaked, swayed in the wind, and fell over.
The small sub-armory in the northeast guard tower contained five canisters of tear gas. At 13:20 they all blew simultaneously, emptying the tower.
A few minutes later the exercise yard mezzanine finally gave way completely. The gang-bangers were all sitting against the wall when the whole thing fell to the ground, crushing seven of them to death and seriously injuring the rest. Because of Lockdown, two of them would die from their wounds before any help could arrive.
In the warden's office, at a quarter of three, a fire started in his wastebasket. He, suspecting a bomb, instantly grabbed it up and gave it a heave out his window. His office was on the top floor of Central Tower One, and overlooked all the common areas of the prison. The flaming basket arced out and down, down, down to the roof of E Building. E Building is where the cafeteria is housed; the cafeteria whose kitchen had been filling with propane for the past two hours, and now contained enough of the potent gas that it was leaking out of every crack. The wastebasket hit the roof and bounced, flinging burning bits of paper everywhere. One of them happened to cross the path of a dense stream of leaking propane …
In the sub-basement, huddled in a worried mass, the technicians all flinched at a dull HHRRRUMP that vibrated the ground and shook a light rain of dust down on them from the overhead pipes.
In the room next door, Jinx was still officially in hibernation. Her heart did not move – yet – nor did her eyes flicker or her chest rise and fall. She was a corpsicle, to all outward intents. But tiny pink fires raced everywhere, across the control panel, the tank, the floor, walls, and ceiling. They were short, and so fast you'd miss them if you blinked, but they were there. The hex energy bled off her body constantly and always had. The problem now is that she has never before had so much hex energy to work with, or so finely-tuned a body to handle it. As K'Naa knew, more than just her spirit had to change for her to be able to handle the warp field.
A lot more.