The Legends of Forever by Barry Lyga (free children's ebooks online .TXT) 📗

powering a run to the future through an impenetrable Iron Curtain of Time? Especially without alerting the enemy?

He scratched the back of his head as he stared down at the control pad they’d wired up to the treadmill. Something seemed off. He caught the attention of Bruce Wayne’s evil doppelgänger from Earth 27, who crouched nearby, wrenching a couple of bolts tighter. “Owlman? Why is there this accelerator circuit patched into the frequency modulator?”

Owlman answered without missing a beat: “Redundancy. Clearly, on this Earth, you expect everything to work perfectly the first time. In my experience, that’s rarely the case.”

Curtis blinked a few times. It didn’t make much sense, but he was both too tired and too eager to stop to question it. “Atomic batteries to power; turbines to speed,” he said. “Let’s fire this sucker up.”

Standing in a corner of the Safe Lab with Sara Lance, Mick held the ring with his thumb and forefinger. It ached and pulsed like a rotten tooth, shooting arcs of pain up his fingers and down along his arm. This was not, he knew, going to feel good.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Sara asked. “I can feel that thing’s evil from where I’m standing, and I’m not even touching it.”

Mick had never been one for planning things out or thinking things through. He was more your basic charge ahead and see what happens sort of crook. The ring looked too big for his ring finger, so he slid it onto the middle finger of his right hand, where it caught for a moment on his knuckle, then kept going. Almost as though it wanted to be there.

Pain.

Pain raced up his arm.

Slender, brachiated green tendrils crawled from the ring, puncturing his flesh, then emerging, only to re-puncture it again as they slithered up his arm, like a series of threads being sewn into his skin. He gritted his teeth and groaned into the agony, fighting it.

“Mick?” Sara said. “Mick, take it off. It’s OK; take it off!”

Shaking his head, sweat streaming down his face, he leaned into the anguish, accepting it. It was like holding his hand over a flame, something he’d done innumerable times since childhood, when he’d first discovered his love of fire. The flame could roast his flesh, but he never moved his hand. It was a point of pride. It was a measure of strength.

If flames couldn’t cow him, some junky piece of jewelry from another Earth wouldn’t knock him to his knees, either. He permitted himself a grudging, groaning wordless cry of distress, then clenched his fist.

There was a voice in his head. VOLTHOOM! it said. Demanding his subservience. Offering him everything he’d ever wanted. VOLTHOOM! A world consumed by fire. Endless heaps of treasure—gemstones sparkling like waves in sunshine, cold gold coins feigning fire, stacks and stacks of cash . . . VOLTHOOM!

mick I am yours you are mine we are together let me in let me in let me in and the world is yours I promise you don’t fight me don’t resist me I am everything I can give you everything mick mick it’s within your grasp just let me in let me in let me in

“There’s only one of us in charge here,” Mick grunted, wiping sweat from out of his eyes with his free hand. “And it’s me!”

With a final cry, he raised his right hand above his head. The ring glowed. The tendrils dissipated and a sheath of verdant light enveloped him. The voice in his head quieted to a whisper, like a ringing in his ears—ever present, but possible to ignore.

“Are you all right?” Sara asked. He could tell she wanted to touch him, to put a calming hand on his shoulder, but the green energy coruscating around him warned her off.

“Never been better,” he snarled. He lowered his clenched fist to eye level, glaring at the ring perched there. “Lemme tell you something, Captain: I don’t know what this thing is or where it comes from, but no matter how bright it gets or how dark it gets, nothing bad is getting past me as long as I’m wearing it.”

Sara nodded. “Good enough for me. Let’s go.”

The Earth 27 speedsters lined up single file outside Central City, ten thousand strong, ready to take their places on the treadmill.

Felicity had taken a break from her duties helping Joe West’s team in Star City, long enough to work up an algorithm that determined the optimal placement for speedsters on the acre-sized treadmill belt Curtis had cobbled together with the guy who looked creepily like Bruce Wayne. And a creepy Bruce Wayne, to boot. The real Bruce Wayne was handsome and sort of playfully useless in that way some rich men projected. This guy was good-looking, too . . . but his pulchritude only barely concealed a seething, squirming rage and a brute confidence that gave her the heebie-jeebies. The faster she could see the back of him, the better.

The treadmill was practically the size of a football field, with a series of internal railings so that the speedsters could stand in rows, one behind the other. The faster speedsters would be at the front, accelerating, with the slower ones toward the back, using their speed to keep up and generate the necessary vibrational energies.

She and Curtis guided the speedsters into position with the help of James Jesse, who knew or was known to many of them. Some of them, she knew, could only reach subsonic speeds. Others could hit Mach 2 or 3. It wasn’t, though, so much about the speed as about the unique vibrations speedsters produced when they ran. Those vibrations would need to be channeled through the special shock absorbers Curtis had constructed under the treadmill belt. They would be converted into a frequency waveform and funneled into a heavy-duty cable that Superman had buried between the treadmill and S.T.A.R. Labs.

It shouldn’t work at all, she knew. It was the very maddest sort of the mad science, the kind of thing