Justice League

by Michael Jan Friedman

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  About the Author

  I’ve always wanted to write about J’onn J’onzz, the Martian Manhunter. His tragic loss and brooding nature always held a Shakespearean sort of appeal for me. But I wouldn’t have been able to fulfill my ambition without the efforts of those who gave J’onn life and nurtured him on his journey. Chief among them are editor Whitney Ellsworth, writers Joe Samachson and Jack Miller, and artist Joe Certa, who ripped the Martian Manhunter from the world of his birth and brought him to Earth nearly half a century ago; Justice League producer and overarching presence Rich Fogel, who provided me with the inspiration for this book; Bruce Timm and his horde of talented artists at Warner Bros. Animation, who have left their indelible mark on a new generation of Justice League fans; and my editor, Paul Kupperberg, who has clearly spent too many lonely hours in the Watchtower. —MJF

  J’onn J’onzz, known to the people of Earth as the Martian Manhunter, floated upward around the massive central core of the sophisticated space station called the Watchtower.

  Each time he passed a level, he saw one of his teammates. First it was the super-fast Flash running in circles around him for exercise, a red-and-gold blur to the untrained eye.

  Then it was the winged Thanagarian, Hawkgirl, repairing her energy mace in a high-tech workshop with the help of a handheld laser splicer. And on yet another level, Batman was seated in front of an oversized monitor screen, looking in on Earth’s major cities, one after another.

  Each of J’onn’s teammates was pursuing a different sort of activity. And yet, taken together, their efforts seemed to produce a balance—a harmony—that J’onn found immensely satisfying.

  As he continued to ascend, he reflected on how very comfortable he felt among his fellow Justice Leaguers. He trusted them utterly and completely. But then, several months earlier, they had demonstrated faith in him when no one else on their planet would do so.

  That was how they had repelled a species of alien invaders—the same species that had destroyed J’onn’s Martian people and made him the last of his kind. It was also how he had become a charter member of the team of superpowered heroes called the Justice League.

  A band of people he had never seen before had placed their lives in his unfamiliar hands. And to his great relief, he hadn’t let them down.

  But it wasn’t just a team of which J’onn had become a part. It was a family—the only one he had left, with his wife and daughter taken from him back on Mars.

  And the Watchtower wasn’t just an orbital facility from which the League could monitor threats to humanity. It was now the closest thing J’onn had to a home.

  The majority of the time, he had to share that home with his teammates, and that was perfectly acceptable to him. In fact, he wouldn’t have had it any other way.

  But once in a while, J’onn found himself yearning for the peace and quiet a person could find only in solitude. At such times, he rose to the highest level in the Watchtower, which boasted a transparent observation port in every direction, and looked down on his adopted world.

  That was why he was ascending at that very moment. To be by himself for a little while. To gather his most recent thoughts and observations and reflect on them.

  Stopping in front of the observation port that offered the best view of Earth, J’onn lowered himself onto the metal deck. As his long blue cloak floated down around him, he drew a deep breath. Then he immersed himself in the sight of the curved, cloud-swaddled horizon above him.

  J’onn hadn’t smiled much since the death of his wife and daughter, who had perished along with the rest of his people. But he felt compelled to smile now.

  Earth was different from the planet that had given him birth—blue and green under her gauzy cloud layer, where Mars had been an angry mixture of crimson and dark, sullen orange. And yet, J’onn couldn’t take his eyes off his adopted world.

  What captivated him was her vitality, her vigor, her youth. There was a spirit of optimism on her teeming surface that he had never seen anywhere else, and he had seen any number of worlds since joining the Justice League.

  “Beautiful, isn’t she?”

  Surprised, J’onn turned and saw Wonder Woman alight beside him. The golden eagle she wore as a breastplate glinted in the slanting light of Earth’s sun, though her smile rivaled it for sheer splendor.

  Wonder Woman was the princess of an ancient Amazon civilization that displayed some of the finest art and architecture on the planet. As such, she knew something about earthly beauty.

  “Yes,” J’onn said, “she is.”

  Apparently, he was to be denied his solitude. However, he wouldn’t tell his teammate that she was intruding. The last thing he wanted to do was hurt her feelings, after all her kindnesses to him.

  As Wonder Woman turned to her homeworld, it was reflected in her eyes. “Once,” she said, “when I was a girl, my mother found me admiring a statue of Aphrodite from afar. Taking my hand, she brought me up to the statue and had me walk around it, then run my fingertips along its contours.”

  “Why did she do that?” J’onn wondered.

  “I asked her that very question. She told me that beauty was meant to be admired close-up. Ever since, I have followed my mother’s advice.”

  J’onn absorbed the insight. And he understood why his teammate had chosen to tell her story when she did.

  “You think I should admire Earth close-up,” he said.

  Wonder Woman nodded. “You need to get out more, J’onn. You need to get to know different people, different aspects of earthly culture.”

  He sighed. “The more I know about Earth’s people, the more confused I become.”

  “They confuse me sometimes too,” the Amazon confessed. “But that’s no reason to avoid them. Sometimes the path of wisdom leads through the forest of confusion.”

  J’onn looked at her askance. “Did your mother teach you that as well?”

  Wonder Woman blushed—something that didn’t happen very often. “Actually,” she said, “I got it from a fortune cookie in a Chinese restaurant. But when you think about it, it makes sense.”

  J’onn nodded. Maybe it did at that. “I’ll plan on going down to the surface sometime soon,” he promised.

  “No time like the present,” said his teammate, her blue eyes sparkling beneath her golden tiara. “You see, I’ve been invited to attend—”

  “The opening-night performance of a new play in downtown Metropolis. It’s called All in Good Time. And you were wondering if I would join you.”

  Wonder Woman looked reproachful. “You’ve really got to stop doing that.”

  “My apologies,” J’onn said. As a telepath—someone who could read minds—he sometimes found it difficult not to state people’s thoughts before they put them into words. “It’s a generous offer. I just have one question.”

  “What’s that?”

  He shrugged. “What’s a play?”

  Freddy Doherty took a sip of his diet soda, sat back in his flexible-backed chair, and checked the big, double-tiered bank of security monitors that half surrounded him.

  The monitors showed him almost every square inch of Sirius Labs, the building in which he worked as a security guard. But then, Sirius had all kinds of top-secret government projects going on inside its gray concrete walls, and guys like Freddy always had to be on the lookout for spies.

  Not that anyone had ever tried to slip into the pla
ce and steal information. However, there was always the possibility that someone would try.

  Freddy checked his monitors the same way he always did: from upper left to upper right, then from lower right to lower left. When he was done, he started all over again.

  But all he saw was the moon rising over a manicured green hill, or a squirrel flitting from tree branch to tree branch, or a flight of birds alighting to peck for worms. Nothing the least bit out of the ordinary.

  That was good, Freddy told himself. It meant that all of Sirius’s secret projects were safe from prying eyes.

  Just as he thought that, he caught something out of the corner of his eye: a flicker of movement on one of his monitor screens. But when he turned to get a better look, nothing was there. The screen was empty.

  “That’s weird,” he muttered.

  He could have sworn he had seen something snakelike slither up a corner of the building. But snakes weren’t that quick, and they didn’t slither up concrete surfaces.

  Freddy laughed at himself. I guess I’m letting my imagination get the best of me.

  Then one of the other monitors drew his attention. But it wasn’t anything even vaguely snakelike that had caught his eye this time. It was a strange, blotchy dark spot in the corner of the screen.

  Camera must be on the blink, Freddy thought, and reached for the phone to alert Sirius’s maintenance office.

  By then, the spot on the screen had begun to spread. Slowly but surely, it crowded out the image of the building’s moonlit northwest corner.

  “Definitely got to call maintenance,” Freddy said out loud—just before he saw the same kind of blotch appear on the next screen over.

  What in blazes was going on? Was it some kind of computer virus? And if it was, could all the other computer-driven systems in the building catch it?

  Sweating freely now, Freddy cut short his call to maintenance and put in a call to the director of Sirius instead. She was probably in bed already, but she would want to know that something was wrong.

  Unfortunately, that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon, because just as Freddy finished punching in the number, the telephone line went dead.

  And whatever had afflicted the first two screens was spreading like crazy. In fact, half the screens in the monitor bank had developed dark spots. And they were all growing, obscuring the views the monitors were meant to provide.

  Freddy swallowed. Not good, he thought, fighting off panic. Not good at all.

  He unclipped his walkie-talkie from his epaulet and pressed the button that activated it. “Doherty here,” he said, addressing his fellow security officers, who were scattered around the building. “We’ve got a problem. Code red.”

  But no one answered him—not Monteleone, not Bierbaum, and not Swenson. His intercom was stone-cold silent.

  “Oh my gosh,” Freddy groaned.

  It was then, as the last of the monitors displayed the beginnings of a dark blotch, that he saw something more than encroaching darkness. He glimpsed a face. . . .

  The face of a guy wearing a black top hat, the kind of thing somebody might have worn to the opera a hundred years ago. As Freddy looked on, the guy grinned at him.

  Then the darkness filled that last monitor screen like a sinister black tide, and the grinning face of the guy in the hat disappeared along with everything else.

  And Freddy Doherty had an awful, stomach-churning feeling that Sirius’s top-secret projects weren’t going to stay secret much longer.

  J’onn looked around at the audience in the Manojlovich Theater. Despite there being a Martian in their midst, they seemed very much at ease.

  But then, J’onn had used his alien power of metamorphosis to take on the appearance of a middle-aged human male, complete with a mole, a slightly receding hairline, and a paunch that hung over his belt.

  His companion, on the other hand, was easier to identify. With her statuesque height, her long jet-black hair, and her striking good looks, Wonder Woman stood out in the crowd. It only helped a little that she had worn a skirt and sweater combination over her red-and-blue Amazonian garb.

  Fortunately, they had given their entrance some thought, waiting until the house lights were dimming before they took their seats. And now that it was dark in the theater, they could forget about themselves and give their entire attention to what was on the stage.

  At that point, the only thing J’onn could make out was a mock-up of a stone platform with a low wall running around it. It appeared to be part of a medieval castle, such as he had seen in his adventures with the League.

  Beyond the platform stood a backdrop of painted stars. However, they seemed dull and lifeless, not the way stars were supposed to look at all.

  And there weren’t any people on the stage. Not even one.

  J’onn leaned toward Wonder Woman and whispered, “This isn’t what you described. Are you certain we’re in the right place?”

  She patted him on the hand. “Be patient.”

  Sure enough, a woman came to stand on the darkened stage. Then the lights came up, giving brilliant life to the stars, and a man walked out to join her.

  Both of them had gray hair and were advanced in age. Crossing to a bench that had been placed on the platform, they sat down and gazed at the night sky.

  The man then slipped a small paper-wrapped box from his pants pocket—the kind of box in which humans often enclosed gifts. Because of the angle at which he was seated, the audience could see the box, but the woman couldn’t.

  Suddenly, J’onn was drowned in a wave of emotion—not from those on the stage, but from the people sitting-around him in the audience. Wincing, he blocked it out.

  His Martian ability to gain access to the minds of others came in handy sometimes. However, it also meant that people’s thoughts and feelings could intrude on his own at any time, whether he desired them to or not.

  Refocusing his attention on the stage, he watched the gray-haired pair talk about what their lives had been like since they met. They recalled good times and bad, and their expressions changed in accordance with each recollection.

  J’onn listened as intently as he could, determined to enjoy what Wonder Woman had described as “live theater.” However, as the evening progressed, he discovered something that seemed rather odd to him.

  The people on the stage weren’t as happy or sad or angry as they claimed to be. For reasons that escaped him, they were just acting as if they were caught up in those emotions.

  J’onn looked around. It didn’t seem to bother anyone that the pair on the stage weren’t what they seemed. But then, he reminded himself, there weren’t any other telepaths in the theater. Maybe the rest of the audience couldn’t see through these two the way he did.

  The elderly couple continued to speak with each other for some time, their reactions running the gamut—at least, on the surface. Underneath, they were completely under control. Finally they left the stage, the lights came back on in the audience, and everyone got up to stretch.

  Wonder Woman turned to him. “So?” she asked cheerfully. “What do you think?”

  J’onn tried to be diplomatic. “It’s . . . interesting,” he told her. “Quite interesting.”

  His companion looked disappointed. “You don’t like it.”

  His feelings exposed, he heaved a sigh. “It’s not that. It’s just . . .”

  “What?” she prompted.

  “I’m confused by it,” J’onn admitted. He gestured in the direction of the stage. “Those people aren’t feeling real emotions. They’re just pretending.”

  “That’s the whole point,” Wonder Woman told him patiently. “They’re actors, remember? They’re showing us what it would be like to be the characters they’re portraying.”

  J’onn recalled her mentioning something to that effect, but it was only now that he fully appreciated the concept. Still, he felt that he was missing something.

  “If the characters presented to us aren’t real, what are we suppose
d to gain by listening to them? It all seems so.. .” He searched for the right word. “Pointless.”

  “Pointless?” Wonder Woman echoed.

  She had already started to respond to his charge when he heard a familiar voice in his ear—that of Batman, Gotham City’s mysterious costumed crime fighter. “We’ve got a problem,” it said, “at Sirius Labs.”

  Sirius was a high-security, classified research facility run by the United States government. J’onn had never seen the place, but he knew the kind of scientific strides that had been made there over the last few years.

  “What kind of problem?” asked Wonder Woman, who had heard Batman’s alert through the high-tech Justice League communicator in her ear.

  “A break-in,” Batman told them. “The police are on their way—but they may be out of their league. This looks like the work of some old friends of ours—the Injustice Gang.”

  J’onn and his teammates had clashed with the Injustice Gang before. Made up of some of the most sinister and deadly criminals on Earth, it had come close to destroying the League the first time they met—and if two of the Gang’s members hadn’t turned traitor, it might have succeeded.

  “We’re on our way,” he said.

  “So am I. Batman out.”

  Wonder Woman turned to J’onn and jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “Let’s go.”

  “Right behind you,” he said, following his teammate into the aisle that led out of the theater.

  He was eager to come to grips with the Injustice Gang. But then, he understood the concept of a super-criminal. He knew how to deal with it. . . .

  Unlike what he had seen at the theater.

  Lex Luthor felt a certain rush of satisfaction as he watched his attractive, dark-haired underling attack the northern wall of Sirius Labs with a violet energy bolt.

  But then, Star Sapphire wasn’t just any hired criminal. The jewel she wore in her M-shaped mask could emit a beam of uncanny force and precision—enough to slice up a diamond, shred an armored tank, or, as in this case, poke a hole through foot-thick, reinforced concrete.