Enter the Batman

Chapter One – Newfoundland, 33.1

Chloe Sullivan sat in front of the main monitor in her little techno-wonderland, somewhere in downtown Metropolis. She had a cup of coffee from MetroBeans sitting on a separate table, near her right elbow, close enough for her to reach it easily, yet far enough away that she had no need to worry about spilling it on her expensive equipment. Oliver had just arranged a serious upgrade for her, importing a new processor he'd purchased from WayneTech, which she'd wasted no time installing. It would boost her computing power by nearly half. No easy feat considering how good the equipment already was.

Her role as Watchtower for the Justice League was always important, but the current operation was one of the biggest, and most important, that they'd run in quite some time. Victor had picked up a few whispers in Los Angeles about a secret Luthorcorp facility somewhere in Eastern Canada. It had taken the better part of a week, but Chloe had managed to track a supply chain of integral products, which led them to an isolated facility in northern Newfoundland. Green Arrow and the entire team, minus Boy Scout, were going in to take a look around, and to shut it down, if necessary.

She glanced at the screen. They were just a few minutes from initial contact. She double-checked that both of the Queen Industries satellites she'd tasked to watch over the installation were set and ready. She'd already made close-up photographic and infared sweeps of the place for the last two days. Current count was the same as those first two, fourteen people on-site, six of them grouped closely, but not together, in what appeared to be a bank of cells. That left eight Lexcorp staff, assuming that those first six heat signatures were indeed metahumans being held and "studied".

Suddenly, her earpiece crackled once, and then Green Arrow's voice, changed from Oliver's by the voice masker, sounded. "Green Arrow to Watchtower. We'll be on-site in two minutes. Is everything still looking good Watchtower?"

"That's affirmative," she answered. "Fourteen heat signatures, six in the northeast corner, four outside in a standard patrol pattern. The other four are spread throughout the facility."

"Looks like nothing has changed." That was Victor's voice.

"They haven't seen us coming," A.C. put in.

"And they won't see me at all," from Bart.

"Just stick to the plan," Green Arrow said. "Three teams. Impulse takes out the guards outside. Canary and I will take out the scientists and any guards inside. A.C. and Cyborg will make their way to the holding cells. Use caution when you try to free the prisoners. Lexcorp will have plenty of security in place."

Chloe spoke up again. "And once you've taken care of the scientists, you'll hook up that little uplink device I gave you, and I'll download the entire database of the facility to my backup machine here at Watchtower."

"Copy that," Green Arrow said. "Let's move out."

Chloe watched via satellite feed as her team moved into the facility. All four of the external guards stopped moving at very nearly the same second. They never stood a chance against someone with Bart's abilities. The others all began moving into the facility.

"It's hot as hell in here," A.C. said a moment later.

"Keep your eye on the ball, man," Cyborg said as the two of them peeled off from Canary and Green Arrow, moving northeast.

"Something is wrong here," Green Arrow said.

"Let's just get the job done and get out, quickly," Canary replied.

Something tickled at the back of Chloe's mind, but she couldn't quite piece it together. She furrowed her brow, working hard, using all her intellect to find the elusive clue. She watched as the three teams moved, Bart circling outside the facility, maintaining a perimeter.

"It's like a damned hothouse," A.C. said again, his voice much lower this time.

Suddenly, the realization hit her. "Cyborg," she said, "just how hot is it in there?"

"Is that the most important question right now?" Victor asked.

"Yes," Chloe said. "How hot?"

There was a brief pause before Victor said, "Ninety-nine degrees."

"Oh, crap," she said. "G.A…."

"Yeah," Ollie said. "I understand. It's a damned trap. There's a hell of a lot more of them here than we thought. Pull back, now."

Chloe could only listen as all hell erupted. What sounded like plenty of gunfire, and other weapons, probably energy weapons judging by the sound, her team yelling, fighting, trying to get back to one another.

"Damn it," Victor called out, "A.C. is down."

"Canary too," Oliver said. "One of their teams has her, I'm circling back now. I'll get her free."

Unable to reach Bart, who was unusually still , and surrounded by a good dozen heat signatures, Chloe made a decision. "G.A., I'm sending you Boy Scout."

"Good call," Oliver responded. "Tell him to haul ass!"

She tapped a key and called Clark's cell. He picked up on the second ring.

"I'm kind of busy right now, Chloe."

"Boy Scout," she said, using his code name to tell him, without a long explanation, that the call was mission related. "The team is trapped in the 33.1 facility in Newfoundland. Canary, A.C. and Impulse are down. They need you there now."

"On my way," Clark said. The blip from the transponder in his, now active, communicator vanished from Metropolis, only to reappear some 1,600 miles away in Newfoundland eleven seconds later. It never ceased to amaze her that when they chose to, Clark and Bart could both run so fast that they could literally run across water.

"External security team disabled," Clark said into his communicator. "Impulse down but stable. Moving inside."

Chloe realized that she was biting her fingernails. There were more sounds of combat, and suddenly, nothing. The blips from all six of the team's communicators suddenly went off the grid. "Guys, sit-rep." She waited a moment. "G.A.? Cyborg? Boy Scout? …..Come on, somebody talk to me."

What had gone wrong? She started to type furiously, sending orders to the satellites, attempting to re-route them, get a different angle, maybe punch through whatever interference was now blocking their signals.

BOOOOOM! The reinforced door to Watchtower exploded inward. A team of armed men, all dressed in tac suits came charging through the door. The first lifted a pistol of some sort and fired at her as she threw herself out of her chair and to the floor. A damned trap was right. It was a trap for all of them. As she rolled away, she heard a "tink" sound and saw the tiny dart that had just missed her roll away from her chair. She scampered around the back of her machine, trying to push it over, block them and hopefully damage the system enough that they wouldn't be able to get anything from it.

Before she could manage it, two men swarmed around, grabbing her from either side and pulling her up and away from the machine. Another was now sitting in her chair attempting to get through the firewall. She'd managed to log herself out with a quick keystroke, meaning they would have to crack the system to get anything. It would be tough, but doable.

The men sat her roughly in another desk chair. A pair of plastic zip-ties secured her wrists to it. Another man stuck his head out into the hall and said, "We're clear. We've secured her."

A familiar face, beneath a mass of red hair, came toward her through the throng.

"Chloe, you'll save yourself a lot of pain if you give me the passwords to access your system."

"Go to hell, Tess," Chloe said.

"We'll get in eventually anyway," Tess reasoned with her. "Why suffer all that pain, and humiliation to protect what will eventually be laid bare regardless?"

Chloe bit back the acid response that wanted to leap from her lips. She simply looked away. They might torture her, or even kill her, but she would heal, sooner or later. What she wouldn't do was make it easier for Tess to get all of her files.

"Do it," Tess said.

A man stepped forward, tapping a large syringe filled with some sort of amber colored fluid.
Another man grabbed her arm, pushing back the sleeve of her sweater. She would have kicked him, but they'd secured her ankles to the chair with zip-ties as well. The man jabbed the syringe into her arm and depressed the plunger, emptying whatever that fluid had been into her vein.

It took only a few seconds for her head to start going fuzzy. She blinked twice to clear her vision.

"It acts fast, doesn't it?" Tess smiled. "It's an experimental drug developed by the C.I.A." Her voice seemed strange to Chloe's ears, the pitch going up and down, the words elongating. "In a few more seconds, you're going to answer any question I ask."

Chloe shook her head, trying to clear the gathering cobwebs from her mind. "No," she said, but even she didn't believe she could resist.

"There is some bad news, I'm afraid," Tess said. "In roughly seventy percent of the cases where this drug is used, the subject dies within a few hours."

There was another great crash, from somewhere behind her, but Chloe couldn't turn to see what it was. Suddenly, there was a great din, the men all firing, Tess shouting orders. Had one of the team come to save her? That didn't seem likely, but she had trouble understanding why. There was another loud boom, though not as loud as the first one, and then Tess was in front of her, a gun in her hand. She looked scared, Chloe thought, but of what? The gun in her hand went off and Chloe felt a white-hot searing pain in her chest. Tess fell in front of her.

She was struggling to breathe. A face swam into her rapidly dimming view. The drugs must really be doing a number on her. Her last thought as she sank into unconsciousness was that the man who'd come to her rescue was actually a giant bat.

In Newfoundland, the battle was drawing to a close. Boy Scout lay upon the ground, huddling in on himself, his body wracked with pain. Several tiny green darts stuck out of his skin. Dinah lay unconscious a few feet away, one of the men standing over her, a rifle pointed at her head. Another man stood just a few feet away, a small lead box in his hand, the top open, a small chunk of glowing green kryptonite sapping all of his strength.

In the distance, he could hear footsteps growing closer, a purposeful stride. A pair of shiny black boots stopped just in front of him. He looked up, just as the man wearing those boots knelt down. He was shocked at the familiar face, and the bald head. "Hello Clark," Lex said with a sinister smile, "welcome to Newfoundland."

All right so with Jethro25's permission I am redoing this fic, the first three chapters will be the same, but then I'm taking over hope you like!