CVI
Meanwhile at the Pentagon…
He felt like the old codger character in some crazy, late-night sci-fi flick…
A month ago, the Wayne Industries stealth suit that made its wearer invisible had been revolutionary. General Tyrexius Johnson immediately saw the military and espionage applications in that suit. He was sure it was going to be the greatest military breakthrough of his generation.
He was wrong…
Wayne had done much better than that a full ten years before… A weapon that could instantly kill everyone on Earth with one simple command. The 'engine of destruction' he had called it. And it was... Just ask Kahndaq.
And now General Liang had given him an abbreviated briefing on her LexCorp findings… A giant cannon in space that shot a beam backwards in time, dozens of Lex Luthor clones (some of which were over twenty years old), robots that could pass as humans, brain transplant operations, and enough Kryptonite to power Three Mile Island.
Even better was that a giant, red devil called Trigon had descended to now-dead Kahndaq, brought along his demon hoard and immediately demanded a face-to-face with his new Commander-In-Chief and the First Lady; a President who (for all his flaws) he actually liked. To prove he was serious, Trigon had pasted every citizen of Bialya on the face of the moon.
To top it all off, Lex Luthor had eliminated his nine superior officers on a whim, all good men and women. Johnson was now the top general in this madhouse known as the Pentagon while his President was flying to meet the supernatural. Every single nation on the planet had been on Red Alert for hours and he had personally begged most of them not to deploy a nuclear option, especially while his President was en route. One didn't listen.
It was Qurac who had made the fatal mistake.
As Bruce's jet finished its landing in Kahndaq, the hostile neighbor had launched four nuclear missiles; two at the American President and two at Trigon. The War Room become an instant flurry of activity as they could only watch, frantically attempting to alert the President who had only just landed… but with no success. Calls to Big Blue were also unsuccessful.
But all four missiles had disappeared the moment they crossed the border of Kahndaq - only to suddenly reappear over the capital of Qurac. The American President had been spared, but it had cost a nation dearly. Estimates put the initial death toll at three hundred thousand dead in the resulting explosion. But that wasn't the worst. It had taken the Lab team ten minutes to figure out where the rest of Qurac had gone… They had fallen into the middle of the Persian Gulf from two miles up. There had been no survivors.
No other nations had mentioned a nuclear option since then.
General Johnson had finally been able to reach the First Armored Division, to inform them they had just avoided certain death. He was less than elated however when Captain Thomas Bradley informed him that the President who was supposed to accompany them had been absconded by Big Blue and that Talia al Ghul had just been kidnapped by 'six men in ninja costumes, wearing flight suits'…
Intelligence had tracked Big Blue and President Wayne to a rooftop in Shiruta where satellite imagery showed two more individuals just 'pop in'. But this party wasn't over. Two more men just appeared after Big Blue had taken off into the sky. And then everyone left except one.
It had taken them a moment to establish the identity of Barbara Gordon who had driven the President across the dark streets of Shiruta on the back of a motorcycle, away from Trigon. Johnson had tried to reach either of them by wi-screen several times, but the signal was very hit and miss. And then they headed directly into a congregation of people where no people should have been.
But now, in the middle of the War Room, some screen-jockey Corporal was telling him that Bruce Wayne, the man they had somehow managed to keep track of this entire time, the leader of the free world, had disappeared… General Johnson had done such a fine job keeping composed up to this point.
"Are you actually telling me that you've lost the President, Corporal? The third President this country has seen in as many days and now you're saying that Military Intelligence doesn't even know where he is?!"
"I'm sorry, General Johnson… There's a lot of interference in Kahndaq… Hold on… He's back! He's in the… Wayne Data Center in Kahndaq… about eleven hundred yards from his last known location."
"So President Wayne just traveled over half-a-mile in 2 seconds then?"
"Ahhhh…. Yes sir."
"…Where's Big Blue?"
"Still on his way back from the Sun, sir."
"That doesn't really answer my question, Corporal."
"Sorry General. He's been incredibly difficult to track since he left our atmosphere heading towards the Sun. He maxed out at over three hundred million miles per hour. We've had to use extrapolation software and light trails to calculate even a projected whereabouts."
"So Big Blue left Kahndaq, flew around the Sun and is now traveling back towards Earth?"
"Yes Sir."
"And do we know where he intends on landing?"
"No Sir… But at current velocity, it won't matter. The lab has calculated that when he does impact, it will be an extinction event."
"An extinction event for whom exactly?"
"Everyone, General… Big Blue will impact with enough force to knock the Earth off its axis..."
"Goddammit, what's his ETA?"
"Just under one minute, Sir…"
"…Excuse me, General Johnson?" Another interruption.
"Yes, Captain Walters, what is it? Another sign of the Apocalypse?"
"No Sir. We're getting a strange visual four miles south of Big Red…"
"Fine… Let's bring it onscreen."
"Yes, sir!"
"… What the… Are those… supermodels?"
"We're not sure, General... They're all female and dressed in what appears to be ancient Grecian armor. They've been hacking their way through the demons on a collision course with Big Red for close to an hour now. They're doing quite well actually."
"Well, that's just fantastic… I'll call off those seventy Abrams tanks we've got rolling in from the west if these ladies have the situation under control. But according to Corporal End-Of-The-World over here, it won't matter in about forty seconds!"
"Sir…Big Blue seems to be decelerating…"
"Well, that's good news at least. Maybe he spotted the supermodels..."
"He's still coming in very fast…"
"Just how fast?"
"If he maintains current deceleration… he'll be traveling roughly sixty-five million miles per hour when he hits our atmosphere."
"Damn! That is fast…What's that compared to light speed?"
"About… one-tenth, Sir."
"So will that cause an extinction event?"
"The Lab says… Probably not, Sir. But it will be at least the equivalent of a one hundred megaton explosion."
"Just like the Cold War days…"
"Excuse me, Sir?"
"Forget it Corporal, you're too young to remember. And the President is still in a well-fortified Data Center?"
"Yes, sir."
"I need someone to calculate the odds of that building surviving if a 100 megaton explosion occurred with Big Red as point zero. I have a pretty good idea of what our Boy in Blue is up to now and why Wayne headed the opposite direction…"
"… The Lab says that they will need some time to get the building specs…"
"Forget I asked. Just how far away is that building from Big Red, Corporal?"
"… Two hundred, twenty-four miles, Sir."
"Alright… that'll be far enough. They must have coordinated a new attack plan on that rooftop. Let's just hope Wayne and Big Blue know what they're doing…"
At that moment, thousands of miles away in Kahndaq, the first light of dawn crested across the cold sands…
The War Room went suddenly dark… quiet.
Where one hundred wi-screens had illuminated the briefing room only a second before, they had now vanished…
Someone in the War Room coughed…