Batman (14 page)

Boyle’s law would do the rest.

The plan had one weakness, however. Whereas another man might not know what needed to be done, Batman had been in the Ace Chemical plant before—and often enough to know it well. He knew where the gas mains were, and he had seen the pumping and mixing feeder mechanisms in operation. He could stop the process.

That was why Freeze was depending on his goons.

Make it two weaknesses.

It was time to do something unexpected.

He dropped into a crouch, swept his cape up to cover himself, and smashed a smoke pellet onto the floor about six feet in front of him. Mixing with the mist, the smoke exploded outward into a hemisphere, covering all of Mr. Freeze’s goons. They started firing wildly. A freeze beam crackled as it made contact with Batman’s cape. He shrugged the cape out into its full spread and shot a grapnel line up to the rafters over the main mixing mechanism.

He pulled the trigger and began to ascend.

A quick tap activated his radio.

“Commissioner Gordon,” he said. The voice-recognition software called Gordon.

As he reached the rafters, Batman swung his legs up to lock his feet through the angle created by the roof girders and the crossbeams that supported the light fixtures. With one hand he held his cape out for protection against the barrage of freeze beams. With the other he picked two Batarangs off his Utility Belt.

A bolt holding one of the crossbeams snapped off from the extreme cold, and the beam swung down to clang off the top of a tank housing.

“Batman,”
Gordon said.
“What is it?”

“Tell Gotham Power and Light to shut down operations at the waterfront tanks. Immediately.” Hanging upside down, he located the junction valve where the supercooled holding tank vented into the feeder pipes. He wasn’t going to have long to do this right. Mr. Freeze’s goons were already swinging around to get a better shot at him, and with the Batarangs in one hand he couldn’t shift his cape to shield himself.

“What the hell for?”

“No time to explain,” Batman said. He arched out of the way of a freeze beam that shattered the bulb and fixture of an emergency light. Glass tinkled down to the concrete floor. Pain from his heel made it difficult to keep steady hanging upside down.

He had to move.

Two quick Batarangs broke off the stem of the control valve on the holding tank, and then punched a hole into one of the feeder pipes. Made highly brittle by the temperature of the liquid nitrogen flowing through it, the pipe cracked open.

Gordon was shouting questions.

“Just do it, Commissioner,” Batman snapped. “I’ll be in touch.”

The moment the liquid nitrogen came in contact with room-temperature air, it evaporated.

Explosively.

A twenty-foot section of pipework disintegrated in a detonation that peppered the area with fragments of frozen metal. The goons screamed as they were caught in the blast, and Mr. Freeze crouched down behind the console on the control platform. More liquid nitrogen poured from the broken end of the pipe where it met the holding tank. As it vaporized, the factory floor was covered in a freezing fog.

With the supply interrupted and the feeder pipe vented to the open air, the existing liquid nitrogen would quickly evaporate. Batman hoped it would be quick enough to avoid supercooling the gas in Gotham Power and Light’s tanks. He guessed from Mr. Freeze’s fury that it would.

“Kill him!” Mr. Freeze screamed over the speakers.

The unexpected had yielded success. Freeze thought he had everything under control, but Batman had demonstrated that he wasn’t bound by those rules. Instantly his opponents began to doubt themselves, and that gave him the upper hand.

This was what he and Robin needed to do with the Riddler, but as yet they hadn’t found an opportunity. Thus far Nigma’s gambit was airtight, but the moment would come when they could break open his carefully constructed belief in his own invulnerability. First, however, Batman had to get Robin out of the death room under the mill, and to do that he needed Victor Fries.

The blast had dissipated the smoke, which meant the three remaining combat-ready goons could see Batman again. They started firing just as he let go of the girder and scissored into a glide, aimed for the command platform.

A blast from one of the freeze guns hit his legs just as he was shifting to come in for a landing, encasing them in ice. Instead of dropping into a fighting posture on the platform next to Mr. Freeze, Batman hit hard and collapsed into a roll, crashing into the railing on the far side. He couldn’t stand, and Mr. Freeze turned to bring his own weapon to bear.

But Batman still had the use of his upper body. He threw a Batarang that struck Freeze’s arm, deflecting his aim. The freeze gun laid a layer of frost over a bank of gauges.

Batman thrust his legs against the railing, breaking off some of the ice. Freeze fired again, and Batman heaved himself up and out of the way. The steel railing crackled as the freeze beam instantly dropped its temperature by two hundred degrees.

His next kick shattered it entirely, and freed one of his legs. He planted that foot and shoved himself into a lunge, tackling his opponent. As they both slammed down to the floor, the remaining goons were shouting and coming closer. Yet they couldn’t fire without hitting both Batman and their boss.

Freeze’s voice boomed over the speakers.

“Fire, fools! You can’t hurt me!”

Batman knew that if they were caught in the field of fire, he would be frozen solid and Mr. Freeze would be largely unaffected. His containment suit was designed to handle extreme cold. Yet there was one thing Batman could do, inspired by Mr. Freeze’s own plan. He freed one arm and found his explosive gel, then sprayed a thick coat directly over Mr. Freeze’s helmet. As the gel coated the face mask, a look of fearful understanding appeared on his opponent’s face.

If struck by a beam, the gel would be supercooled, and what would happen as it warmed? Exactly the same thing that would happen to the natural gas in Gotham Power and Light’s holding tanks. The explosion might not kill Freeze, but exposure to ambient temperatures would.

A beam hit both of them at waist level.

“Stop! Don’t fire!” Mr. Freeze screamed—so loudly that some of the speakers overloaded and spat electronic noise. Another freeze beam crackled across his shoulders and the back of his helmet before the goons got the message.

Batman flexed his legs, cracking off the rest of the ice coating. His heel was killing him. Then he braced his hands on Mr. Freeze’s shoulders and pushed, breaking himself free from the grip of the refrigeration suit. Cautiously the henchmen began to climb the stairs, weapons leveled but silent.

“Let’s talk, Victor,” he said. “You tell me what you’ve been doing for the Riddler, and your climate control stays intact.”

“Stay back! Weapons down!” Mr. Freeze waved at his minions.

They backed down the stairs.

* * *

“I do this all for Nora. Only for Nora.”

Victor Fries peered through his helmet, looking defeated. The gel was still there, as an insurance policy. The goons had discarded their weapons, though they didn’t look happy about it. Batman didn’t care.

“You were going to blow up part of the riverfront for Nora? Spare me,” he said. “And your deal with the Riddler had a clause in it you didn’t know about. He may have told you I was coming, but he was the one who led me to you in the first place. He’s killing the people who helped him build his death rooms, and he’s pointing me toward the ones he doesn’t think he can kill himself.”

“Mr. Nigma and I have an arrangement,” Mr. Freeze said, regaining some of his dignity. “Haven’t you and I worked out a mutually beneficial arrangement in the past? That should be considered a valid precedent.”

There was truth in that. Mr. Freeze had helped find a serum that would counteract the blood toxins that eventually killed the Joker. It hadn’t stopped him, however, from betraying their “arrangement,” and Batman wasn’t in a mood to re-establish diplomatic relations.

He didn’t have time.

“Conundrum Solutions—that’s what the two of you built,” he said. “But what were you producing for him?”

“Part of our arrangement is secrecy,” Freeze replied smoothly. “Surely you understand, Batman. Having been party to a similar agreement in the past, how can you expect me to violate my contract with Mr. Nigma?”

Instead of responding, Batman brandished a Batarang. “Other than a violent temperature change, you know what else sets off that explosive gel?” he asked, but he didn’t wait for an answer. “A sharp impact.”

“No! There’s no need for that,” Freeze said quickly. “In exchange for the use of this facility, Mr. Nigma asked me to redesign a certain type of battery. Two batteries.”

“For what purpose?”

“He wished them to function both as power supply and explosive. All batteries are capable of exploding. What I did was demonstrate to him how two kinds of batteries could be used together to create a
controlled
detonation.”

“Why does he want exploding batteries?”

“How should I know?” Mr. Freeze said. “And more to the point, why should I care? There are samples in the crate there.” He pointed.

“Have one of your men bring them here,” Batman said.

Mr. Freeze nodded and one of his henchmen brought over two objects. One was a rectangular brick, similar to a laptop battery, but larger. The other was also rectangular, but featured terminals more like the standard nine-volt battery commonly used in small electronics. It, too, was larger than normal, and neither bore any manufacturer’s mark.

“I discovered a method of creating a chain reaction using a linkage between the lithium-ion type and the lead-acid variety. Overcharging one leads to excessive heat. Overcharging the other leads to the off-gassing of hydrogen and oxygen.”

Excess heat in a confined space, combined with free hydrogen and oxygen, created the near certainty of an explosion—especially if whoever controlled the process introduced a spark or a flame into the interaction.

“You disappoint me, Fries,” Batman muttered. “I thought you were better than the average villain, but you’re little more than a paid weapons master.”

“You are in no position to judge me, Batman,” Freeze responded, his expression as unreadable as ever. “I have Nora to consider.”

Batman looked around. “I don’t see Nora.”

“And you will not see her,” Freeze said. “She is safe… as long as my arrangement with Mr. Nigma continues.”

“You might want to reconsider that deal,” Batman said. “Like I said, the Riddler’s been eliminating the people he worked with on his project under the steel mill. He led me to Killer Croc. Now he led me to you. Your loyalty might prove to have been misplaced.”

“I have only my own intuition to rely upon, Batman.” Freeze drew himself up and spoke in a sober and proud tone. “My own motivations. You have reasons for doing what you do, and so do I.”

“Don’t compare yourself to me, Freeze,” Batman said. “Nora’s condition is tragic, and I sympathize, but you could conduct your research without getting your hands dirty.”

“And you could remove your mask, reveal your true identity to all of Gotham City, yet you do not. You like being the feared stranger, the Dark Knight who spreads terror. You are hardly in a position to judge.”

“Psychoanalyze someone else, Freeze.” The clock was ticking. “What happened after you developed those batteries for the Riddler?”

“I sent him the designs and got to work on my own project. A superb show it would have been, Batman. Fire born from cold. If only you had minded your own business…”

“That
is
my business, Victor—ruining yours,” Batman said. “Now you’re going to give me a chemistry lesson. Fast.”

* * *

Minutes later Batman was on his way back across the floor. Behind him, on the control platform, Mr. Freeze and his men were securely bound with electrical cables Batman had ripped out of the consoles. He called Commissioner Gordon to see how the investigation into the murder victims was progressing.

“Your friend Oracle is something else,”
Gordon said.
“He tracked down a connection we hadn’t seen.”

“Yes, he’s very good,” Batman agreed without correcting the commissioner. What Gordon didn’t know wouldn’t hurt Barbara. “What did he find?”

“A company called Conundrum Solutions,”
Gordon said.
“All of the victims made multiple calls to a number traceable to that company, and they made them all within the space of the same few days, just last week.”

“Another clue,” Batman said.

“And a pretty big one,”
Gordon said.
“We’re working with the major cellular carriers to find out who else was in contact with Conundrum during the same time frame. So far we have two more numbers, and we’re tracking down the people who own them. They have to be warned.”

“Yes, and quickly,” Batman agreed. “Commissioner, when you find out who those people are, bring them in, but don’t tell them why. There’s too much about this trail of breadcrumbs we don’t know yet. They may be able to shed some light, as long as we can keep them alive.”

“Understood,”
Gordon replied.
“Gotham Power and Light want to know when they can power up again.”

Behind Batman, liquid nitrogen was still evaporating out of the broken pipe, but slowly now, in trails of vapor that curled lazily out over the floor. Automatic shutoff valves had sealed all the circulating systems and feeder pipes that led out of the factory, which meant that the power company’s mains would be able to equalize their pressure again without the threat of a disaster.

“It should be all right now,” he said, then added, “You should send officers to Ace Chemical. Mr. Freeze needs a ride.”