Damian had started formulating a plan before he was even out of costume. While he believed that his father would keep his word in regards to finding some way for him to help with the mission, he was certain that he would be assigned the safest task that the man could think of. Since he was not interested in watching Grayson and Drake's rescue or the potential baddie battle that might follow from a distance, he would have to take matters into his own hands. The adults could talk in their little committee all night long if they wanted, but he was going to get results in the field in the meantime.
It had been tricky. He'd had to put on an act for Pennyworth, who expected him to eat dinner and prepare for bed without arguing. Knowing better than to seem too complacent about being banished to the sumptuous prison of Wayne Manor in the midst of a crisis, he had kept his face sullen while he ate. After making a vehement comment or two about Batman's threat to ground him, he'd felt safe in heading up the stairs. Once there he had set the alarm on his mobile phone to vibrate around the time that he expected the plane to land after flying itself home from the West Coast and tucked it under his pillow. There was no way anyone else would hear it go off unless they were in the room with him, and a little sleep wouldn't hurt his creativity once he got back out to the force field. Besides, he'd smirked as he lay down, real slumber would take the butler off of his guard for sure.
As it turned out, he'd set himself an impossible task. Try as he might to banish all thoughts of Grayson, he couldn't do it. Telling himself that he didn't care about the man was a tactic that had lost its efficacy many months before, so he didn't waste his time with it. Instead he lay staring at the ceiling and dwelling on a dozen unanswerable questions. Was he hurt? If so, who was responsible, and how could he reach them to make them pay? Was Drake taking good enough care of him? He'd better be, his eyes narrowed in the dark. He'd just better be.
Drake...there was another issue all together. Part of Damian still resented him, not only for all of their past clashes but because it was his Christmas present that had gotten Grayson into this force field mess to begin with. At the same time, he didn't imagine that Tim had wanted to be caught in a massive earthquake – not even Drake was that stupid. Furthermore, he knew outright that he wouldn't have wanted Dick to be injured. That, it seemed, was the one thing that they could always agree on; Grayson was not supposed to get hurt.
With that simple truth ringing in his mind, he had finally drifted off. Vague visions like the one he'd seen in the medical bay of the Batplane stalked his subconscious, forcing him to dodge them as best he could. Just as he was beginning to lose the fight, his pillow shook him awake.
For a moment he'd been unable to remember why he was up at such an ungodly hour. Then everything came crashing back, and his resolve firmed anew. I'm coming, Dick, he'd sworn as he swung his legs out of bed silently. Let's just see who your favorite is after I rescue you. His father wouldn't even be able to punish him if he pulled this off successfully, he wagered. If he failed, of course, he was completely screwed, but... But I won't fail. I'll get to him – to both of them – and once I've done that I'll go after whoever's fault the quake was. I'll have this mission wrapped up before the JLA even gets started on it. They won't dare to treat me like a child any more after that.
His goals set, he'd sneaked downstairs. The hard part of his timing was going to be getting back into the cave, grabbing his costume, and snatching the plane, he knew. Pennyworth might have been a civilian, but decades of minding clever, fleet-footed children had turned his ears into precision sneak-detecting instruments. Trying to move past him, especially on a night like this one when his senses were no doubt already on overdrive from his monitoring duties, would be folly. Gambling that he'd have to come upstairs for something at some point, Damian slipped in the shadows of the library and waited.
It didn't take long. Around three o'clock the faintest of whispers sounded in the hall, signifying the opening of the clock. A second later there was a tiny click, followed by soft footsteps. Stealing to the archway that led into the corridor, he watched as the man disappeared towards the kitchen. It must be time for a pot of tea, he smirked. Good. I was getting bored.
With Alfred out of the way, he had been able to snatch his costume from the rack and make his way to the hangar. The plane was automatically refueled every time it landed, so he hadn't needed to worry about that. The much bigger issue was noise, as not even Batman's genius was capable of completely masking the sound of a full-sized jet plane starting underneath the front lawn. While the disturbance was easily explained to those not in the know as being the pipes of an old house, the butler wasn't part of that ignorant group. If anyone would be able to identify the distant rumble as that of the Batplane preparing to take off, it was Alfred.
Still, he had to risk it. With any luck the man would tell himself that the craft's proper owner had summoned it, and wouldn't look any further into things. Grinding his teeth and counting on the power of assumption to watch his back, he had climbed into the cockpit and fired up the engines.
They seemed so much louder than usual, and he cursed them quietly while the hangar's hatch opened. A minute later he was gone, his ears popping as he rose into the night-black sky. He'd been far from safe despite his growing distance from the house – all it would take was the push of a few buttons in the cave to override his control and direct his transport back home – but he tried not to think about it. He'd gotten this far, so surely he would be able to go all the way.
That fragile certainty had held until now, several hours after his mad dash out of Gotham. Upon reaching the force field he had begun throwing every sort of test and tactic that the plane was capable of at the invisible barrier, running back through the things they'd already tried and adding new combinations as he went. He had found that he could, in fact, use magnification to see the ground below better, but it did him no good. Batman had been correct when he'd pointed out that there were seven-hundred-odd square miles of wilderness down there and that no one person could adequately search so much area from a thousand feet overhead. Useless, he slumped back in the pilot's chair. Absolutely fucking useless.
After a long minute of frustrated seething, an idea popped into his head. Something had to be maintaining the force field, and the odds were good that it was on the inside. What was the point of an impermeable shield if you weren't going to stand behind it, after all? If that was the case, then there was a chance that the barrier would be weaker either directly above the power source or at the furthest distance from it. Batman had said that the dome measured about thirty miles across, and that put him roughly ten miles from the center of it. Re-energized, he straightened and grabbed the yoke. Okay, he smirked as he turned the plane around, the game's back on.
He saw his target before he was upon it, a tall, periscoping structure jutting up from the jagged earth below. There was no telling from his distance how it had gotten there or who had activated it – it seemed like a safe bet that it hadn't been there before the quake, since it was the sort of eyesore that was generally frowned upon inside national parks – but then he didn't particularly care. In his eyes it was what had to be causing the force field, and therefore the only thing he wanted to know about it was how to destroy it.
Time was running short, and he knew it. All it would take was for Pennyworth to go into his bedroom to wake him for his flight to be discovered, and the morning was further advanced in Gotham than it was here. He didn't have the luxury of trying all of his previous tactics against the field's core, so he jumped straight to the most powerful thing in the Batplane's arsenal; straight artillery.
While they were very rarely used and far from being his father's favorite characteristic of the aircraft, the half-dozen missiles that were kept locked and loaded at all times were a staple of the jet's offensive package. One never knew when it might be necessary to cause an explosion or take out a bridge or a building in order to keep a much greater evil than mere property damage from advancing; this way they were always prepared for those moments. He hadn't been allowed to fire one before, but he'd been instructed in how to do so, and that was enough. Lining up his shot – let's see this just bounce off – he bit down nervously on the insides of his cheeks and pulled the trigger.
The missile exploded directly atop the silver pole he'd been aiming for. The resulting racket was painful, but he cheered anyway. That had to have done the trick, he thought. Nothing could take a blast like that at such short range and stay standing...
"...No," he whispered a second later, his eyes widening as he stared down at the blast zone. A few pieces of shrapnel lay glittering in the morning light, but they were only the remnants of the rocket he'd fired. The tower mere feet – bare inches, perhaps – below the metallic shards was completely untouched, protected by its invisible cloak. "No!" he denied again, kicking the dash. "No, goddamn it, that had to work! Aaaugh!"
Enraged, he doubled his firepower and launched two shots simultaneously. "Damn iiiit!" he shrieked when they, too, did nothing. "This doesn't make any fucking sense! Something has to work!" Dropping back into his seat, he squeezed his balled fists tightly against his throbbing temples and began to rock back and forth. "There has to be a way to get down there. There just…there just has to be..."
Grayson...I'm trying, I swear I'm trying…I'm sorry…