Post by redsycorax on Jan 20, 2019 0:08:55 GMT
On countless Earths in the multiverse, there are haunting tales of human miscalculation and self-immolation during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, when it became theoretically possible to obliterate the human species. On Earth-9, the Atom prevented the full fury of the Cuban War from devastating the Soviet Union and United States, but not before devastation had claimed Cuba itself, Florida and much of Georgia, as well as Washington DC. On Earth-109, the Justice Guild of America did not have the magnitude or scale of capabilities to avert widespread planetary destruction, but their ultimate sacrifice saved some of the denizens of their native Seaboard City. On Earth-964, the deployment and use of cobalt doomsday bombs led to the extinction of the human species as the last Southern Hemisphere survivors succumbed to radiation poisoning in November 1964. On Earth-983, a Soviet defence mainframe malfunction caused the devastation of an unplanned and accidental nuclear holocaust. This is the story of Earth-986 and how its metahumans dealt with the ultimate human nightmare.
President Robert Richards blinked and seemed lost in conversation, as his Vice President, James Forrest, sighed to himself. The amiable Hollywood actor was an excellent frontman and certainly did not lack charisma, but he was in his eighties and his age was starting to tell. Sooner or later, the old man would have to be persuaded to step aside. As it was, he'd panicked in 1983 and had to be restrained from activating the launch codes for nuclear missiles across the United States after the Soviet mainframe malfunction. And the rapidly changing Soviet leadership these days only added to his bewilderment. But worse was to come.
Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev checked the latest data from his KGB hierarchy. The situation was not good. Poland was now in open revolt, the Red Army was losing in Afghanistan and the Islamist contagion was shifting to the Central Asian Soviet republics. He swore softly. Damn old Leonid, anyway. The bastard had been in power far too long. He'd let things slide and in his dotage, he'd blundered into a crisis in Afghanistan that was threatening to escalate and the short tenures of Yuri Andropov and Constantin Chernenko hadn't helped matters at all. Added to which, there was the increasingly provocative behaviour from the United States. The world had come perilously close to a full-fledged nuclear war just after NATO's Able Archer 'tactical exercise' in 1983, with the mainframe malfunction several months later. If it hadn't been for the prompt action of one of the Red Army's frontline officers... he coughed, and a thin tendril of blood landed on his napkin. There were so many theories about what motivated Washington these days- hawkish elements in the US State Department, religious extremists outside the usual Beltway establishment, and that harridan Carpenter in Downing Street.
Magda Richards lit a cigarette as she looked out over the balcony and then inward at the sleeping old man. She was tired of the pretense, tired of the facade that she was content with being his mere decorative adjunct. She was more than that, she'd given up a lucrative legal career to pursue this marriage of convenience. Ah well, it would soon be over, all of this. She sneered contemptuously at the streets across from Pennsylvania Avenue, ground out the cigarette below her heel and walked inside. As she passed a mirror in an unguarded moment, what was reflected back had rows of razor-sharp fangs, claws, slit eyes and a tall, ungainly body. It was not even remotely human. The Dominator ignored the irrelevance of her reflection and clattered down the stairway to care for her 'husband.'
It was a time of change across the metahuman world. Superman and Lois Lane had finally married (albeit in his civilian guise as Clark Kent), Batgirl had retired, Catwoman had reformed, Lex Luthor was dying of cancer, Kandor had been enlarged, Barry and Iris Allen had been reunited in the thirtieth century, the Atom was living permanently in the Microverse, Hal Jordan was now predominantly offworld as his Green Lantern leadership responsibilities took him further away, Hawkman and Hawkwoman were leading the anti-Hyathis rebellion on Thanagar, Supergirl had changed her name to Superwoman, and Nightwing and Starfire were engaged.
But trouble was brewing. In this world, the Challenger space shuttle accident had been deliberate sabotage. In the Philippines, the "People Power" Revolution was stillborn and Ferdinand Marcos ordered the assassination of his rival Corazon Aquino. The archipelago erupted into chaos and civil war, and US bases were invaded and ransacked. Rather than accept that the revolution was the result of Marcos' incompetence, corruption and avarice as well as pathological authoritarian, right-wing zealots within the United States saw 'communism' where none really existed. Reciprocal accusations flew from Soviet hardliners in the Kremlin over the Chernobyl reactor meltdown in the Ukraine later that year- again, where there was no actual 'conspiracy', except for the Dominators subtle machinations in London, Washington and Moscow. And so, no-one was really surprised when Richards and Gorbachev called off their scheduled arms talks. But they had no idea what was to happen next.
On November 16, 1986, Magda Richards awoke. She nodded as she detected the levels of mesmerin within her husband's body, and got up and dressed. She released a chemical cloud that was detected by her Dominator associates elsewhere in Washington, and the flash as their bodies responded was detected by Soviet and British satellites in Earth orbit. Dominator sleeper agents within the Soviet Union and United Kingdom responded with their own preparations. In missile bunkers and submarines across the United Kingdom, United States and USSR, their agents steadily put their plan into effect, plunging syringes full of fatal toxin into the arms of those of their colleages they did not control. President Richards eyes flickered awake, with no retinas or pupils visible. Only blackness percolated through his mind as he walked through the White House to the Oval Office, guided by his wife. The guards saw nothing amiss, given messages to and from NORAD in Cheyenne Mountain were jammed by deliberate electromagnetic interference, as was the case with their colleagues elsewhere in the world. At 9.55.06 PM, US President Robert Richards programmed the failsafe codes and then pressed the red button. In Moscow, one of the Soviet Chiefs of Staff got up from the conference table and shot Mikhail Gorbachev and his dovish colleagues around the table at point blank range. Across the world, missiles thundered forth from their silos, much to the amazement and then dawning horror of passers-by who witnessed the events and then realised what they were. Minutes later, early warning radar systems detected the incoming missiles.
As Superman and Supergirl saw the missiles, they changed from their Clark Kent and Linda Danvers identities at once, heading toward the oncoming barrage. In the Soviet Union, the Rocket Red Brigade shot from their own fortress and prepared to intercept the oncoming missiles launched from the United States. The Flash rushed Iris to the Central City JLA teleport chamber, as Green Lantern did the same with Carol Ferris and Lois Lane received a message to do likewise. With their loved ones safe from harm for the time being, Flash, Kid Flash and Green Lantern headed for the missile frontline. Already, Superman and Supergirl were catching some of the incoming missiles, flinging them into deep space before they could reach their targets, while Flash triggered superspeed vortices that sent others into deep space, and Green Lantern nullified the radioactive elements and detonation systems within others. But while they and other metahumans strove valiantly to deflect the oncoming carnage, there were too few of them against 60,000 nuclear weapons. While they could deflect a significant proportion, other weapons got through despite their best efforts. And for the non-metahuman members of the Justice League, Teen Titans and other organisations, there was little or no hope. Gotham City. Ivy Town. Central City. Star City. Coast City. Midway City. Metropolis. New York. One city after another disappeared in a hells cauldron of heat and fire hotter than the innards of the Sun, a modern parallel to the wretched human sacrifices to Moloch and the ancient Aztec gods. Batman, Robin, Batgirl, Black Canary, Green Arrow, all evaporated into memory in the blink of an eye.
As Superman accelerated toward Metropolis to rescue Jimmy Olsen, Perry White and his other former colleagues, he saw the Soviet missile closing on the city, and accelerated to try to prevent its impact. But he could not do so in time and it detonated before he could intercept it. An instant later, Gotham combusted into a blinding storm of heat, light and energy and slammed into Wayne Manor, as well as the Batcave below it. Black Canary's canary cry couldn't save Star City from its fate. Hal Jordan lost his brother, sister in law, nephews and nieces before he could reach Coast City. The Hawkship could only watch as a further bombardment vaporised Midway City.
There were some other, unacknowledged acts of heroism. Zatanna struggled to produce a sanctuary for the world's remaining inhabitants: "Srovivrus shtrae rof detavacxe eb, niarret ranul! Emod llif, erehpsomta eblahtaerb! Raeppa, doof detanimatnocnu! Tropelet ot yetfas, srovivrus!" And with that scale of beneficent magic across the world, the world's strongest sorceress keeled over, having given her life to save the remaining inhabitants of the world below. But the dome was overcrowded and heat and light was at a premium. Her sacrifice had saved millions, but their fate remained uncertain.
In a bunker somewhere on the East Coast, Magda Richards stared levelly at James Forrest:
"With the president's death, I am now the President of the United States."
Magda shook her head: "That is, assuming that you survive until an infrastructure is set in place, James. Now!" And with that, the other Dominators within the bunker abandoned the facade of their former shapes and with sharpened claws, started to tear the legitimate heirs of US civil and military authority apart. Within three minutes, the screams and cries of slaughter diminished to moaning and keening and then silence, as the former First Lady stood amidst the blood, entrails and dead meat in their path. She let loose an ululation of triumph as the invasion force leader. In Britain, former Prime Minister Hannah Carpenter sat, her head in her hands, after receiving news about the renamed Survival League's refusal to rescue the Earth's political leaders from the charnel house of their own manufacture. As she mourned her husband and children, she had no way of knowing that the shelter's integrity had been compromised already and that within a fortnight, she and her other Conservative Cabinet ministers would have died from the consequences of radiation poisoning, rendering any escape from the agonies of those who had perished in the Soviet nuclear attack on the United Kingdom illusory. While Mikhail Gorbachev had predeceased the Soviet Chiefs of Staff who had overthrown him, the Dominator massacre there was similarly thorough and diligent. They had no time to savour their cold victory either.
But with Earth's Survival League prevented from interstellar intervention and missions, their own Dominion fell victim to an incursion from Starro the Conqueror. It had happened a matter of months before the orchestrated nuclear holocaust had consumed Earth and when the Dominator installations received the news that they would receive no reinforcements, they realised that they had fallen into a trap of their own making. As radioactivity began to seep into their usurped bunkers, the Dominators turned on each other, until only the former Magda Richards was left. She turned her eyes to the Moon and cursed it.
On the moon, the Survival League met, with memorials to Batman, Zatanna, Batgirl, Robin, Black Canary, Green Arrow and Aquaman now before them. Starfire had managed to get Nightwing to the Hawkship, which dropped them to the Sanctuary that now covered most of the former Mare Imbrium. However, despite Zatanna's foresight and diligence, there was only limited food left, and while an atmosphere could be created from carbanaceous chondrite asteroids, that provided an insurmountable obstacle. Paradise Island and the Fortress of Solitude were safe, encased in protective inertron bubbles that shielded their inhabitants from radiation as they rose from the irradiated, dying, desolate planet below. And so, the Survival League mourned. In the microverse, the Atom had survived, but there was nothing for him to return to. Nightwing clung to Starfire as they traversed the graves of Batman, Batgirl and Robin. Barry and Iris Allen, Hal Jordan and Carol Ferris laid flowers in memory of their fallen cities and comrades in arms. Atlantis was nothing more than debris, the result of blind, capricious and malignant fate and a stray US nuclear missile which had fallen well short of its Eastern European target, but which had obliterated neutral Tritonis and Posiedonis instead. Lois and Clark rocked backward and forward as she comforted him, sick at heart at the deaths of Jimmy Olsen, Lucy Lane and Perry White, and Batman. Not as connected to her civilian life as Linda Danvers, Supergirl conferenced with the Kryptonian minds in Kandor about ways to circumvent what might become the delayed immolation of the entire human race.
Superman and Supergirl wanted to construct a starship to transport the survivors to the nearest habitable but uninhabited planetary system, the seven worlds that orbited Tau Ceti ten light years away. Its second, third and fourth planets, Hesperus, Phosphorus and Amphiluche, were all habitable prospects and any one might have done. However, it turned out to be advanced Amazon interdimensional science and technology that found possible salvation for Earth 986's survivors first- as it detected two other Earths in deadly peril, and one that could provide the resources and living space that they now so desperately needed. And in return for their rescue, Earth 948's Per Degaton proposed a faustian solution to the grateful members of the Survival League of America...
THE END
TO BE CONTINUED
President Robert Richards blinked and seemed lost in conversation, as his Vice President, James Forrest, sighed to himself. The amiable Hollywood actor was an excellent frontman and certainly did not lack charisma, but he was in his eighties and his age was starting to tell. Sooner or later, the old man would have to be persuaded to step aside. As it was, he'd panicked in 1983 and had to be restrained from activating the launch codes for nuclear missiles across the United States after the Soviet mainframe malfunction. And the rapidly changing Soviet leadership these days only added to his bewilderment. But worse was to come.
Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev checked the latest data from his KGB hierarchy. The situation was not good. Poland was now in open revolt, the Red Army was losing in Afghanistan and the Islamist contagion was shifting to the Central Asian Soviet republics. He swore softly. Damn old Leonid, anyway. The bastard had been in power far too long. He'd let things slide and in his dotage, he'd blundered into a crisis in Afghanistan that was threatening to escalate and the short tenures of Yuri Andropov and Constantin Chernenko hadn't helped matters at all. Added to which, there was the increasingly provocative behaviour from the United States. The world had come perilously close to a full-fledged nuclear war just after NATO's Able Archer 'tactical exercise' in 1983, with the mainframe malfunction several months later. If it hadn't been for the prompt action of one of the Red Army's frontline officers... he coughed, and a thin tendril of blood landed on his napkin. There were so many theories about what motivated Washington these days- hawkish elements in the US State Department, religious extremists outside the usual Beltway establishment, and that harridan Carpenter in Downing Street.
Magda Richards lit a cigarette as she looked out over the balcony and then inward at the sleeping old man. She was tired of the pretense, tired of the facade that she was content with being his mere decorative adjunct. She was more than that, she'd given up a lucrative legal career to pursue this marriage of convenience. Ah well, it would soon be over, all of this. She sneered contemptuously at the streets across from Pennsylvania Avenue, ground out the cigarette below her heel and walked inside. As she passed a mirror in an unguarded moment, what was reflected back had rows of razor-sharp fangs, claws, slit eyes and a tall, ungainly body. It was not even remotely human. The Dominator ignored the irrelevance of her reflection and clattered down the stairway to care for her 'husband.'
It was a time of change across the metahuman world. Superman and Lois Lane had finally married (albeit in his civilian guise as Clark Kent), Batgirl had retired, Catwoman had reformed, Lex Luthor was dying of cancer, Kandor had been enlarged, Barry and Iris Allen had been reunited in the thirtieth century, the Atom was living permanently in the Microverse, Hal Jordan was now predominantly offworld as his Green Lantern leadership responsibilities took him further away, Hawkman and Hawkwoman were leading the anti-Hyathis rebellion on Thanagar, Supergirl had changed her name to Superwoman, and Nightwing and Starfire were engaged.
But trouble was brewing. In this world, the Challenger space shuttle accident had been deliberate sabotage. In the Philippines, the "People Power" Revolution was stillborn and Ferdinand Marcos ordered the assassination of his rival Corazon Aquino. The archipelago erupted into chaos and civil war, and US bases were invaded and ransacked. Rather than accept that the revolution was the result of Marcos' incompetence, corruption and avarice as well as pathological authoritarian, right-wing zealots within the United States saw 'communism' where none really existed. Reciprocal accusations flew from Soviet hardliners in the Kremlin over the Chernobyl reactor meltdown in the Ukraine later that year- again, where there was no actual 'conspiracy', except for the Dominators subtle machinations in London, Washington and Moscow. And so, no-one was really surprised when Richards and Gorbachev called off their scheduled arms talks. But they had no idea what was to happen next.
On November 16, 1986, Magda Richards awoke. She nodded as she detected the levels of mesmerin within her husband's body, and got up and dressed. She released a chemical cloud that was detected by her Dominator associates elsewhere in Washington, and the flash as their bodies responded was detected by Soviet and British satellites in Earth orbit. Dominator sleeper agents within the Soviet Union and United Kingdom responded with their own preparations. In missile bunkers and submarines across the United Kingdom, United States and USSR, their agents steadily put their plan into effect, plunging syringes full of fatal toxin into the arms of those of their colleages they did not control. President Richards eyes flickered awake, with no retinas or pupils visible. Only blackness percolated through his mind as he walked through the White House to the Oval Office, guided by his wife. The guards saw nothing amiss, given messages to and from NORAD in Cheyenne Mountain were jammed by deliberate electromagnetic interference, as was the case with their colleagues elsewhere in the world. At 9.55.06 PM, US President Robert Richards programmed the failsafe codes and then pressed the red button. In Moscow, one of the Soviet Chiefs of Staff got up from the conference table and shot Mikhail Gorbachev and his dovish colleagues around the table at point blank range. Across the world, missiles thundered forth from their silos, much to the amazement and then dawning horror of passers-by who witnessed the events and then realised what they were. Minutes later, early warning radar systems detected the incoming missiles.
As Superman and Supergirl saw the missiles, they changed from their Clark Kent and Linda Danvers identities at once, heading toward the oncoming barrage. In the Soviet Union, the Rocket Red Brigade shot from their own fortress and prepared to intercept the oncoming missiles launched from the United States. The Flash rushed Iris to the Central City JLA teleport chamber, as Green Lantern did the same with Carol Ferris and Lois Lane received a message to do likewise. With their loved ones safe from harm for the time being, Flash, Kid Flash and Green Lantern headed for the missile frontline. Already, Superman and Supergirl were catching some of the incoming missiles, flinging them into deep space before they could reach their targets, while Flash triggered superspeed vortices that sent others into deep space, and Green Lantern nullified the radioactive elements and detonation systems within others. But while they and other metahumans strove valiantly to deflect the oncoming carnage, there were too few of them against 60,000 nuclear weapons. While they could deflect a significant proportion, other weapons got through despite their best efforts. And for the non-metahuman members of the Justice League, Teen Titans and other organisations, there was little or no hope. Gotham City. Ivy Town. Central City. Star City. Coast City. Midway City. Metropolis. New York. One city after another disappeared in a hells cauldron of heat and fire hotter than the innards of the Sun, a modern parallel to the wretched human sacrifices to Moloch and the ancient Aztec gods. Batman, Robin, Batgirl, Black Canary, Green Arrow, all evaporated into memory in the blink of an eye.
As Superman accelerated toward Metropolis to rescue Jimmy Olsen, Perry White and his other former colleagues, he saw the Soviet missile closing on the city, and accelerated to try to prevent its impact. But he could not do so in time and it detonated before he could intercept it. An instant later, Gotham combusted into a blinding storm of heat, light and energy and slammed into Wayne Manor, as well as the Batcave below it. Black Canary's canary cry couldn't save Star City from its fate. Hal Jordan lost his brother, sister in law, nephews and nieces before he could reach Coast City. The Hawkship could only watch as a further bombardment vaporised Midway City.
There were some other, unacknowledged acts of heroism. Zatanna struggled to produce a sanctuary for the world's remaining inhabitants: "Srovivrus shtrae rof detavacxe eb, niarret ranul! Emod llif, erehpsomta eblahtaerb! Raeppa, doof detanimatnocnu! Tropelet ot yetfas, srovivrus!" And with that scale of beneficent magic across the world, the world's strongest sorceress keeled over, having given her life to save the remaining inhabitants of the world below. But the dome was overcrowded and heat and light was at a premium. Her sacrifice had saved millions, but their fate remained uncertain.
In a bunker somewhere on the East Coast, Magda Richards stared levelly at James Forrest:
"With the president's death, I am now the President of the United States."
Magda shook her head: "That is, assuming that you survive until an infrastructure is set in place, James. Now!" And with that, the other Dominators within the bunker abandoned the facade of their former shapes and with sharpened claws, started to tear the legitimate heirs of US civil and military authority apart. Within three minutes, the screams and cries of slaughter diminished to moaning and keening and then silence, as the former First Lady stood amidst the blood, entrails and dead meat in their path. She let loose an ululation of triumph as the invasion force leader. In Britain, former Prime Minister Hannah Carpenter sat, her head in her hands, after receiving news about the renamed Survival League's refusal to rescue the Earth's political leaders from the charnel house of their own manufacture. As she mourned her husband and children, she had no way of knowing that the shelter's integrity had been compromised already and that within a fortnight, she and her other Conservative Cabinet ministers would have died from the consequences of radiation poisoning, rendering any escape from the agonies of those who had perished in the Soviet nuclear attack on the United Kingdom illusory. While Mikhail Gorbachev had predeceased the Soviet Chiefs of Staff who had overthrown him, the Dominator massacre there was similarly thorough and diligent. They had no time to savour their cold victory either.
But with Earth's Survival League prevented from interstellar intervention and missions, their own Dominion fell victim to an incursion from Starro the Conqueror. It had happened a matter of months before the orchestrated nuclear holocaust had consumed Earth and when the Dominator installations received the news that they would receive no reinforcements, they realised that they had fallen into a trap of their own making. As radioactivity began to seep into their usurped bunkers, the Dominators turned on each other, until only the former Magda Richards was left. She turned her eyes to the Moon and cursed it.
On the moon, the Survival League met, with memorials to Batman, Zatanna, Batgirl, Robin, Black Canary, Green Arrow and Aquaman now before them. Starfire had managed to get Nightwing to the Hawkship, which dropped them to the Sanctuary that now covered most of the former Mare Imbrium. However, despite Zatanna's foresight and diligence, there was only limited food left, and while an atmosphere could be created from carbanaceous chondrite asteroids, that provided an insurmountable obstacle. Paradise Island and the Fortress of Solitude were safe, encased in protective inertron bubbles that shielded their inhabitants from radiation as they rose from the irradiated, dying, desolate planet below. And so, the Survival League mourned. In the microverse, the Atom had survived, but there was nothing for him to return to. Nightwing clung to Starfire as they traversed the graves of Batman, Batgirl and Robin. Barry and Iris Allen, Hal Jordan and Carol Ferris laid flowers in memory of their fallen cities and comrades in arms. Atlantis was nothing more than debris, the result of blind, capricious and malignant fate and a stray US nuclear missile which had fallen well short of its Eastern European target, but which had obliterated neutral Tritonis and Posiedonis instead. Lois and Clark rocked backward and forward as she comforted him, sick at heart at the deaths of Jimmy Olsen, Lucy Lane and Perry White, and Batman. Not as connected to her civilian life as Linda Danvers, Supergirl conferenced with the Kryptonian minds in Kandor about ways to circumvent what might become the delayed immolation of the entire human race.
Superman and Supergirl wanted to construct a starship to transport the survivors to the nearest habitable but uninhabited planetary system, the seven worlds that orbited Tau Ceti ten light years away. Its second, third and fourth planets, Hesperus, Phosphorus and Amphiluche, were all habitable prospects and any one might have done. However, it turned out to be advanced Amazon interdimensional science and technology that found possible salvation for Earth 986's survivors first- as it detected two other Earths in deadly peril, and one that could provide the resources and living space that they now so desperately needed. And in return for their rescue, Earth 948's Per Degaton proposed a faustian solution to the grateful members of the Survival League of America...
THE END
TO BE CONTINUED