Batman (22 page)
Authors: Alex Irvine
The mechanical guardian extended an arm.
At the end of it was a lens, starting to glow.
The question mark was blinking very fast.
“All right, I hear you,” Robin said. He jumped up and caught the bottom rung of the ladder leading back up into the roof chute.
* * *
When he came through door number six, the chessboard was empty. No pawns, no king. The original three chessmen were gone. Door number seven was directly across the board.
This was the last thing Robin had expected.
Where was the king? He took a step forward to the next square, ready for anything—but nothing happened. Nothing kept right on happening as he stepped on the second square, and the third, and right on across the board to number seven.
This was the endgame. Everything was coming full circle. His conversation with Batman reinforced it. The murder victims had a common link, and each puzzle they had solved was related to the USB drive and the material it contained.
He took a moment to study the room again, to see if he had missed something, but the other doors were shut. The chamber already seemed to have been forgotten. The Riddler had moved on. It was time for Robin to do so, as well.
Just as it was time to find the king, and discern the meaning of I AM LARVAL. He had a feeling the answer to both of those enigmas might just wait on the other side.
by
Rafael Del Toro
, GothamGazette.com
The body count is climbing, people are scared, parts of Arkham City appear to be exploding for unknown reasons… wait. Let me guess.
Batman’s back, isn’t he?
I’ve heard people say that Gotham City is sick, that it breeds criminals and psychopaths the way other cities breed tech startups and basketball players. I don’t believe that. Nothing about Gotham City was predestined. We choose the kind of city we want to live in, and for some reason we’ve decided it should be a city overrun with lawlessness. We’ve chosen the one shining light of Batman to save us from all the things we’ve decided collectively we can’t fix ourselves.
In other words, we created Batman because he makes things easier on us. If there’s Batman, that means we don’t have to do anything to make Gotham City a better place. If there’s Batman, we have someone to blame when things go wrong—as in, “there’s never a Batman around when you need him.”
He’s someone to cheer when cheering makes us feel better about our own apathy. And that’s a problem.
It’s not Batman’s problem, it’s our problem. No one’s forcing us to have a city full of costumed villains and the occasional stalwart vigilante. We could have a normal city, with normal problems and normal issues. Instead we have Gotham City.
What are we going to do about it?
Today, apparently, nothing. Batman’s chasing the Riddler and someone—possibly Deadshot—is blowing the heads off random people in the street. And all for what? If Batman wasn’t there, what would the Riddler and Deadshot and Clayface and whoever else do? Who would they fight?
Sometimes I think that if Batman decided to move to Miami, the rest of the maniacs would follow him. Who wants to start a petition? We could call it the “Citizens’ Call for a Normal Gotham City.” Would anyone sign it? Who knows? We’re not known for our sense of civic engagement.
Here’s the thing. Everyone’s always talking about how we need Batman. Okay. Let’s go with that idea for a minute. We need Batman.
But why?
That’s something we can only answer ourselves, and at least today, while we’re all glued to our TVs and radios, waiting for the latest about the assassinations… today we’re not going to answer that question.
Apparently we have better things to do.
He opened the door… and saw nothing.
Literally nothing. Just an empty space. Robin pulled out a flashlight and shone the beam through the doorway. He realized that he was looking into the interior of a vertical shaft, its walls painted matte black. It topped off at about twelve feet above the floor level of the chess room, but when he shone the light down, it was lost in the depths without showing a bottom.
About six feet below floor level were old steel frames, with a burned-out electrical box just above them. It appeared as if the frames had once supported a fan, which would make this a ventilation shaft, now capped.
How far down did it go?
The only way to find out was to start rappelling, so he affixed a line to one of the hinges on the door itself, and started to drop down. He had one hundred feet of line in the spool he was using. If the shaft went deeper than that, it would place him a long way below the water table. Nothing over here had been dug that deep when Arkham City—or, for that matter, Wonder City—had originally been built.
It took only about sixty feet of the line to get to the bottom of the shaft. That wasn’t as far as he’d anticipated, and his light should have revealed something from up above. Something in the paint must have absorbed the beam.
He clicked the flashlight on again as soon as he hit solid ground—damp concrete littered with rusty bits of metal from whatever fans and electrical relays had been ripped out during the renovations. A small metal door set low to the ground was the only way out. Robin opened it, pocketed his light, and crawled through the tight space, quickly coming out into a pitch-dark room that must have been huge, judging from the echoes made by the scrape of his boots on the floor as he stood.
He reached for his flashlight again, but as he put his hand on it the entire room lit up with a series of soft pops. He looked up and it dawned on him that he had come into Wonder City, and, even better…
…the Riddler’s workshop.
Gaslamps glowed at twenty-foot intervals along the walls of the room, which was at least the size of the Batcave. The ceiling arched high overhead, made of brick and cast iron. Old signs and banners advertising Wonder City and its various attractions hung here and there. Some of the walls actually included old storefronts, and most of its floor space was taken up with machines and worktables.
Pieces of mechanical guardians lay in a heap near one table. There didn’t appear to be any intact or active ones.
Embraced in a moment of awe, he walked through the room, seeing the genesis of all the Riddler’s death rooms. Blueprints of the Sionis steel mill and the Flood Control Facility lay on a tabletop alongside a broken neon-tube question mark. Chemical diagrams and disassembled batteries were piled on another table, next to racks of chemistry equipment. Beakers and tubes, centrifuges, jars of chemicals, standing tanks of pure hydrogen and oxygen with the Conundrum Solutions logo overlapping the word
FLAMMABLE
stenciled on their sides. Further along, Robin came to an enclosed lab built behind a storefront.
LEANDRO
’
S LUNCH
said the sign over the door.
Inside, the lab was sterile and white—in stark contrast to the aging steampunk motif of the great room. Gleaming stainless-steel racks held computers and instruments. A small sealed manufacturing chamber contained machinery for printing circuits, as well as other machines Robin didn’t recognize.
He thought of the people the Riddler had murdered, or whose murders he had ordered. An electronics specialist, a nanotech researcher, a software engineer… their work was visible here, even if the results were not.
Back out in the main room, Robin recalled what he could from the last time he’d been in Wonder City. There were a number of ways in and out, or had been, at least. The Riddler might well have sealed or booby-trapped them.
There’s got to be something I’m missing
, Robin mused.
He didn’t put me through all of those death traps just to let me wander back up to the surface.
There had to be another challenge here… somewhere.
He explored each of the storefronts in turn. Most of them were emptied out and falling into ruin, populated by the occasional rat and a wide variety of insect and arachnid life. One store held a small electric blast furnace and metallurgical equipment, while another was shrouded in shadows and completely empty except for a robotic suit standing in a gantry, held in place by a number of mechanical arms.
The suit stood approximately nine feet tall. Its torso hung in two pieces, front and back, next to each other. The limbs were disassembled and suspended in positions that made the whole thing look like an exploded-view diagram. Over it all hung the helmet, a steel dome with a transparent faceplate. The segments appeared to have been retooled from pieces of some mechanical guardians, embellished with the Riddler’s customary touches.
A question mark-shaped control panel built into the floor near the gantry had only a single button—the period at the bottom of the question mark’s reverse curve. It was blinking bright green.
Not exactly subtle, not that I should be surprised.
The sound of running water came from the darkened rear of the room. He walked past the gantry and saw that the floor ended abruptly after eight feet or so. Beyond that was running water, an underground river twelve feet wide, flowing out of a grate in the wall to his left. He couldn’t tell how deep it was, or where it went after it passed under the wall to his right, but he did notice that there was no grate on the downstream side.
Outside, something exploded.
Robin ran out of the store and saw fire engulfing the furthest storefront on the opposite side of the room. Bricks rained down from the ceiling, and the banners nearest to the explosion were burning.
Another explosion, from the storefront facing the first blast, brought down more of the ceiling and started a fire on the near side of the room. A third detonation annihilated Leandro’s Lunch and collapsed part of the roof. Along with bricks and iron beams, huge chunks of concrete and stone crashed down on the Riddler’s workstations. The chemistry table was crushed by an iron beam, and hydrogen venting from a broken tank caught fire. The secondary detonation of the chemical tanks destroyed a shelf of computers and tools.
Another explosion, from just two storefronts to the right of where Robin was standing, staggered him. He dodged back inside as a piece of concrete the size of a car crashed to the floor and broke into pieces. Flying shards of it shattered the storefront windows.
“
Really
not subtle, Riddler,” he said, hoping the lunatic could hear him. A fifth explosion blew apart the pile of discarded mechanical guardians and started a fire near the corner that led back to the ventilation shaft.
At that point his options had all but disappeared—with the exception of the most obvious. If Robin didn’t climb into the suit, Wonder City was going to fall in on his head. There was no point hesitating and trying to figure out a way to work around it.
He turned and jogged up to the gantry. There were footprint-shaped marks on its floor. Robin pressed the blinking green button and stepped up onto the structure, turning around to place his feet exactly on the marks. He held his arms out in what seemed to be the correct configuration. With a mechanical whine, the machines activated. One arm swung the front torso piece into position, and then Robin was jostled a little as the back torso piece bumped into him. With that, he shrugged himself into position. There was a series of clicks and pings as the pieces locked together.
Next, his arms and legs were encased, to a chorus of continued locking noises. Another explosion brought down most of the roof outside, plunging the room into darkness. The only thing Robin could see was the array of lights on the mechanical arms and the steady glow of the button on the control panel. He felt gauntlets sliding into place over his hands, and when he flexed his fingers he heard the scrape of metal. Then he was lifted into the air and heavy boots snapped into place on his feet.
He looked up and had to suppress a moment of panic as the dark shape of the helmet descended. It slotted into a ring built around the neck of the torso pieces, turning thirty degrees and locking into place.
Outside, the fire had reached the storefront. That provided light by which he could see again, but it also meant that he would soon be roasted inside the suit, or crushed in the final collapse of the ceiling. This part of Wonder City was soon to be rubble.
He wondered if part of Arkham City above was falling into a giant sinkhole. If he lived through the next hour or so, maybe he would swing back by and check.
Air hissed inside the suit, and Robin’s ears popped. It was pressurizing, and he heard dozens of little noises as seals and gaskets lined themselves up. The gantry set him down and almost immediately the floor started to shake. It sounded like a larger collapse was underway outside, but he couldn’t see anything through the blocked windows.
He turned around. The suit moved slowly, deliberately. Robin raised its arms and saw that it had built-in energy weapons like the ones on the guardian that had threatened Harley Quinn.
The Riddler had armed him?
That didn’t seem right.
He couldn’t locate any control or trigger mechanisms.
Behind him, the storefront collapsed. A piece of the ceiling hit the suit on the shoulder, hard enough that it would have killed him if he hadn’t been armored.
It was time to go.
Robin stepped to the edge of the water. He paused one last time, thinking furiously, trying to come up with a better solution.
The floor shook with another collapse.
“Here we go,” Robin said. He stepped out over the water, and let himself fall.
Report.com
Posted by JKB
Wednesday, 2:59 p.m.
Countdown… are we looking at a fifth murder? Or is Batman finally getting a handle on the situation?
He was spotted just a few minutes ago heading toward Burnley. Not a big crime area, it’s more like the kind of place where a tech professional might live. Or someone who did design work, and maybe picked the wrong client.
Sound familiar?
Batman left after meeting with Commissioner Gordon outside the Gotham Casino. What might have transpired inside, we don’t know, but the cops stayed behind after he departed. In a bizarre show of force, they stormed the casino with several SWAT units and the liberal use of tear gas. More on this as we get video from our field reporters.