E8: Superman #3

[Spider-Man Beyond]

E8: Superman #3
Don't Ever Call Me Superman! Part 3 of 4

Written by Russell Burlingame (Borntorun)
Edited by Daniel Dyer

Manchester, New Hampshire.

The woman I had been talking to crumpled to the ground—a lifeless, smoking heap, she was the only thing that stood between me and the strange robotic man who’s been calling himself Superman for the last few months.

Prior to this afternoon, I had no idea that he was a lunatic. “Superman” has been chasing down a series of minor explosions all around the world, and had been out of sight for days. One final, massive explosion has crippled Coast City and swamped most of the American West Coast with flooding... When I went there to try and help, I found out that he was either driving the blasts or at the very least making them possible. I also found out it has something to do with a strange alien device that's boring its way into the Earth.

I really hate this cannon-thing.

He blasts me with it again, and I'm reeling. It sends me toppling backwards out of the building—I'm on the eighteenth floor or so—and shards of glass and cement rain down on all the passers-by on the streets below. This guy just keeps coming! It's really hard to stay flying—or even thinking straight—with this jerk constantly on top of me, screaming and killing people. I land, crushing a car beneath me, and intentionally roll off it and onto the street below. Getting my head and arms below the car, I start to lift it, to toss it at him, but I see his face literally mold itself out of the muffler and the car's exhaust system starts to wrap itself around my wrists. It's all I can do to focus my telekinetic powers to blow the mangled vehicle apart—shrapnel clatters to the street all around me and the Cyborg is once again left with a clear shot. He takes it. I reach to cover my head, but the heat and pain of the blast never come. Looking up, I see Supergirl. She's standing there, in front of me, taking the hit, and I can see it's all she can do to keep it together herself as the Cyborg starts to really pour on the heat. I leap past her, grabbing the Cyborg and carrying him skyward with me. Pushing through the pain I'm already in, and all the new pain being inflicted as he jabs me and blasts me with a variety of metal tools and weapons while we fly, I carry him higher and higher, shouting the words, “Coast City!” to Supergirl as I do so.

In orbit around the Earth a moment later, I use my telekinesis to momentarily disassemble the Cyborg's cannon. I smash my fist into his robotic jaw, loosening a handful of parts, and then I grab a handful of the circuits sticking out of his forehead, just above that red, angry-looking robot eye. The light in the eye goes out, but only for a second, before I see the metal in his head literally moving around to repair its damage. I plow into him again, aiming him westward, hoping to hit his giant hole before he can regain control of the situation.

Once we're back in breathable air, I smash my fist into his metal head again.

“Who are you?” I demand, and kick his robot leg as hard as I can. Pieces fly off and fall out somewhere over the American heartland. “What the Hell do you want here?”

The cyborg looks up at me with his sneering eye. “I am a man... trying to save... his family!”

He blasts me again—this time the cannon's not on his arm, or shoulder mounted, like it has been before. Instead it protrudes from his gut, right where I was gripping, and sears skin off my knuckles.

“ENOUGH!” I scream, and slam both fists into his chest. By this point we're past the hole, I've overshot, and he plunges down into the ocean. I try to follow, but can't see where he's gone.

...If I were Superman, I'd have vision powers. They'd come in pretty handy right around now.

Still in pain, my flight path weaving a little crazily, I make my way to the beach, where I hope to meet with Supergirl. The first thing I see, though, is a very angry-looking man dressed like a Roman gladiator, and carrying what appears to be a light saber from Star Wars.

And the hits just keep on comin’.

“I'm gonna ask you once, Devil, before I just start my attack,” the man says. “Can you give me a good reason not to kill the man I saw crawling into, and then out of, a large hole in the world, fighting with Superman the whole time?”

Up closer, his weapon doesn’t look as much like a light saber, though I still think it would serve about the same purpose. About half the length of a broadsword, it’s really intended for close combat—the man’s golden helmet, energy shield and strange-looking metal breastplate all suggest that he’s ready for getting up-close and personal with someone sometime soon. I can’t tell if the anger reflected on his face is for the victims of Superman’s attacks, or if it’s directed at me.

I stop flying and stand before him—by all appearances, other than flying, I'm nothing special. I don't wear a costume or have armor or weapons. I don't have a mask on and, at the moment, even my clothes are in a pretty sorry state.

“I'm Kon-El. Who I am is kind of hard to explain. I can start with 'That sure ain't Superman.' I suppose it's a bad time to mention that a lot of people are telling me that, in fact, I am. I promise you, I mean you no harm... and that when that robot crazy shows up again, there's going to be trouble. I don't know what's going on, but he said something about wanting to help his family. Superman's family doesn't need any help—I met them. Nice enough folks. But the fact is, they're doing just fine without a robot death machine running out to Kansas for a visit.”

“Kansas?” the armored man asks.

“Sorry. Secret identity stuff. Shouldn't have said that. Probably shouldn't have told you Kon-El either. But I'm kind of frazzled. I haven't slept in a while, and I don't really know what's going on here. I just came to help—are you the guy who was shoveling the streets before?--and the robot Superman guy started trying to blast me out of the sky basically as soon as I got into Coast City's airspace.”

The armored man lowers his weapon, but still looks skeptical. “You sound honest. Still, do not disappoint me—I've got a temper!” He reached to me with his empty hand. “I'm Marcus Aeulis,” he said. “Most here call me the Alpha Centurion. Can't say it's nice to meet you, Kon-El, but I can say that one way or another, this will be resolved tonight. Then maybe you can join me at my favorite bar back in Metropolis for some drinks and we can get to know one another. Assuming I don't have to take your head off first.”

“Hope not.”

Supergirl drifts down from above.

“This one of yours?” the Centurion asks her.

“He didn't look this bad when I left him with his family,” Supergirl tells him, “but yeah—he's one of ours. He's the new Superman.”

“Oh, yes?” Marcus says, and he looks me up and down. “Doesn’t appear up to the task, if you ask me.”

“I've got a cape at home,” I offer, and Marcus chuckles under his breath.

“So what is the situation, my beautiful young one? Do we have an understanding of what caused this? Your Super-Boy here tells me that the ‘official’ Superman is somehow responsible for this carnage.”

“Steel and I have been monitoring the situation from the Fortress,” she answers, “and that does indeed appear to be the case. He's acting fast—he went from being the all-American Superman to being a homicidal maniac in about forty seconds. I think it might be related to the appearance of our young Superman here.”

“Oh, good,” I chime in. I can't imagine anything else—or anything less productive—to say.

Alpha Centurion seems to approach all of this with discipline. As the two of them carry on off to the side, leaving me to my thoughts and recovery, I'm left to wonder what might be happening in that hole. And why it's taken the Cyborg so long to make it out of the water. He can't be dead—it's too easy. He can't--

The hole.

The water.

“Dammit!” I shout, and both Supergirl and the Centurion look at me. “He's down there! In the hole. There's...”

I fly to the edge of the hole and peer down, but I no longer see the river of lava that had occupied the space the last time I saw it. The platform on which I had stood to fight the Cyborg has grown and there now appears to be a massive underground machine of some kind churning and moving. From up here it almost looks like... “...there's an engine!” I finish, shouting back to the beach. “We need to stop it!”

I plunge into the hole, trusting that the others are behind me, and as I start to near the actual mechanism I'm aiming to smash, the hole gives way from rock and water to metal. The metal reaches out, grabs me, and slams me against the wall. The wall grows a dozen hands and grabs me all over, pounding my body.

“GAH!” I holler, incomprehensible and furious, and I reach out with every bit of power my mind can muster to blow apart as large an area as I can. The metal breaks apart at the seams and starts to fall, but is caught and reincorporated by the rest of the mechanism as it goes. I hear a loud banging sound beneath me—The Centurion either doesn’t, or makes no attempt to, fly and it earns him the advantage of speed. He plummets the whole massive distance from the water into the belly of the machine and immediately starts hacking away at things—the energy-sword-thing is alive with some kind of strange orange fire that seems to trail behind his arm as he makes powerful, sweeping movements and excises big pieces of metal from the walls. All of the grabbing, metal arms that had bound me up are succumbing to his brute force. Following his lead, Supergirl and I power through the hall until we're standing on what had been the platform, staring down another metal hallway into what could only be described as the largest engine any of us have ever seen.

“By the gods,” Alpha Centurion says, “I cannot wait to lay waste to that.”

Just as he makes a run for the engine, the Cyborg appears out of what seems to be nowhere, standing in front of the Centurion.

“NO!” he screams, and throws himself at Marcus. The Centurion’s charge, forwarded by the energy shield he carries, knocks the Cyborg back on his heels, but he stands there with the “S” on his chest smoking from the impact. “No,” he repeats.

“Out of the way, rascal!” Alpha Centurion demands, holding his sword out at the Cyborg’s throat. “What is it you hope to accomplis here?”

“I'm not... what you think,” the Cyborg answers. He looks right at me. “I'm not one of you people. I'm a man. I'm human.”

“You could have fooled me,” says Alpha Centurion.

“No—I am!” demands the Cyborg. “My name is Hank Henshaw. I was involved in the crash of an experimental spacecraft. When Superman failed to come to our rescue, my crewmates—and my wife—were destroyed by the radiation that bombarded us. I was mutated into this—thing. I'm a being of pure energy now, able to inhabit machinery but unable to ever truly recover from my injuries. All I want is to make it not have happened. All I want is to fix everything.”

“So how does killing thousands of innocent people 'fix' anything?” I demand.

“You're the key,” he says. Don't you see? You can do it! I've set up this machine to help you. After blaming Superman for my loss initially, I attached myself to his birthing matrix—the ship that brought him to Earth—and I took off into space. It was there, poring over the Kryptonian history in its computers, that I realized Superman had the power to change everything!”

“How?”

“All you have to do—I wanted Kal-El, but now it's impossible—all you have to do is fly around the planet. Run counter to its spin! You can eventually confound even time itself! Drive the planet backward and stop everything from having happened!” He'sstarting to take on the frantic pace of a man possessed. “I became Superman because Superman needed to do it—he needed to save my wife like he couldn't before! Superman needed to save us all! But now you're here. You can... you can change history—save my family, stop what happened to Kal-El! Think of all the people!”

“Henshaw.” It'sbreaking my heart just to think of how mad he must be to perceive the universe this way. “I can't. No one can. Flying around the world backwards? That can't reverse time. All you'd do is mess with gravity. You'd destroy everything. It wouldn't turn anything back or save anyone—you'd destroy the planet. Kill millions.”

“So you won't help?”

“I... can't.”

The Cyborg's red eye glows bright, and suddenly the floor below us comes to life. Hands grab at my ankles, as well as the Centurion's and Supergirl's. They're grabbing, tearing at our flesh, and they're all charged with some kind of powerful electricity. It's agonizing, but I keep moving forward—moving toward the Cyborg, or his engine.

“You can't stop the future! The future is the past!” Henshaw rants. “When I turn everything back, you won't even exist!”

“Henshaw, you can't do this!”

The engine hums and clicks, and then starts moving. I can see hundreds of gallons of the planet's molten core flowing through the machinery, powering it. It's all I can do to remember that this guy isn't evil, more... deranged.

“The whole of Kryptonian knowledge is buried in this engine,” Henshaw continues. “It's in this computer! It will tell me how to save the world! All I have to do is learn the language....”

I tear myself free of the grabbing hands and fly into the air, only to be blasted out of it by Henshaw's gun. In response, the Centurion swings his blade desperately, taking the cannon off at the elbow. Supergirl disappears from the grip of the hands in a ball of flame, only to reappear behind Henshaw, grabbing at the Cyborg.

“Get him!” she screams.

The Cyborg's metal shell seems to expand, with wires and weapons reaching every which way, hooking into the engine, firing at Supergirl, at me. And then there's a rumbling from above, and light. I look up to see that the engine is doing just what I expected—the Earth is already starting to tear itself apart.

Continued...