Two months of quiet, and the city smelled like salt and boredom.
Starfire sat beside him on the Tower roof, her legs dangling over the edge, bare feet swinging seventy stories above the bay. She was eating mustard straight from the bottle, which Hikaru had stopped questioning approximately six weeks ago. The afternoon sun turned the water into a flat sheet of gold, and the cargo ships below crawled through it like black beetles, slow and fat and predictable.
"Two hours," Starfire said. She took another squeeze of mustard and gestured at the harbor with the bottle. "You have been sitting here for two hours, and you have not said a single word. On Tamaran, that means either deep meditation or deep constipation. Which is it?"
Hikaru snorted. "Neither. I'm just watching the ships."
"You are watching the ships and worrying." She said it plainly, the way she said most things. Starfire did not do subtext. "I can tell because your jaw does the thing."
"What thing?"
She tapped her own jaw with one finger. "The tightening. You do it when something is bothering you and you have decided not to talk about it."
Two months since Slade. Two months since the team had fought anything more dangerous than a convenience store robbery and a confused metahuman who'd accidentally turned himself into a cactus. Terra trained with Donna now, running drills in the combat room every morning. Starfire had redecorated the common room twice, the second time because nobody had complimented the first. Cyborg upgraded the security grid, rebuilt the mainframe, and constructed an entire submarine in the launch bay below the Tower because he ran out of things to fix. Beast Boy adopted a stray cat and named it Detective Whiskers. Raven read the same book for the third time.
Everything was fine. Hikaru did not trust fine.
Starfire leaned her shoulder against his. Warm. She was always warm, her Tamaranean biology radiating heat like a furnace wrapped in orange skin and good intentions. "The peace makes you restless," she said. It was not a question.
"Danger is easy," Hikaru said. "Explosions, supervillains, whatever happens, happens. But routine?" He watched another cargo ship inch past the breakwater. "Routine is the enemy I didn't train for."
Starfire considered this. "On Tamaran, we have a word for the quiet between battles. It translates to 'the breathing.' It is not nothing. It is preparation." She looked at him. "You are breathing, Hikaru. That is all."
He looked at her. The sun caught the angles of her face, turned her hair into a curtain of fire. She smiled at him, and it was the kind of smile that made two months of boredom feel like a reasonable price for this exact moment.
"Yeah," he said. "Okay."
Three cargo ships sat in a loose formation below them, heavy in the water, riding low. Industrial haulers carrying hazardous materials, if the hull markings meant what he thought they meant. Toxic waste canisters bound for the disposal facility south of the city.
Then three of those ships stopped moving at once.
The first one listed hard to port, its bow dipping like a man falling forward. The second's stern rose out of the water, propeller spinning against open air. The third just sank, straight down, fast, as if the ocean had opened a mouth beneath it and swallowed.
Hikaru's communicator screamed before he could reach for it. Robin's voice, tight and controlled: "Multiple distress signals from Jump City harbor. Three cargo ships taking on water. Coast Guard is overwhelmed."
He was through the roof access door and down the stairs in four seconds. The operations room was already lit up when he arrived, the team assembling with the trained speed of people who'd been waiting for exactly this. Robin stood at the central console. Cyborg pulled up the harbor feeds on the main screen.
Three ships. All carrying hazardous cargo, specifically toxic waste canisters in reinforced containment drums. All sinking simultaneously. No storm. No collision. No visible attacker.
"Hull breaches on all three," Cyborg reported, his fingers moving across the display. "Punctured from below. Cargo holds compromised." He zoomed in on sonar data from the harbor buoys. "The toxic waste canisters are gone. Somebody tore through reinforced steel from underneath and took them."
"Aquatic metahuman," Robin said. "Strong enough to breach ship hulls. And they didn't just sink the ships. They took the cargo."
He barely recalled a similar occurrence in the show, but the details were hazy. He knew the name Trident and that he was related to Atlantis. Whatever version was operating in this timeline, he was bold enough to rob three ships in broad daylight.
"We need to go underwater," Robin said. He turned to Cyborg. "Tell me you finished that submarine."
Cyborg's grin was quite wide. "I've been waiting for someone to say that."
* * *
The T-Sub launched from the bay beneath Titans Tower like a missile fired sideways.
Cyborg's submarine was a thing of aggressive beauty: sleek titanium hull, reinforced viewport, modular stations for each Titan arranged in a semicircle around the central command console. It seated nine, which was exactly how many of them there were, and it moved through the water with the kind of speed that made Hikaru suspect Cyborg had "borrowed" propulsion designs from sources he'd rather not name.
Beast Boy was immediately insufferable. "Dude. The ocean. MY element." He spread his arms wide, as if presenting the viewport and all the dark water beyond it as a personal gift. "You're all guests in my house now."
Cyborg tapped his console without looking up. "You turned into a fish one time."
"An EXCELLENT fish," Beast Boy said. "A barracuda, for the record. Fastest predator in the—"
Cyborg tapped another key. Beast Boy's mic went dead. His mouth kept moving. His hands kept gesturing. No sound came out. Wally laughed so hard he choked on the protein bar he'd smuggled aboard.
Starfire pressed her face against the viewport as they descended, her green eyes reflecting the deepening blue. "The ocean is quite wondrous! The pressure is most invigorating!" Raven, seated beside her with her hood up and her expression flat: "It's dark and wet." Starfire beamed. "Yes! Wonderfully so!"
Robin cut in from the command chair. "Focus, people. We're looking for the wreck of the Meridian, the largest of the three ships. Cyborg, sonar sweep."
Hikaru sat in the co-pilot seat and watched the ocean close in around them. Nine people in a metal tube at the bottom of the sea. He'd catalogued every aquatic threat in this universe, and most of them were worse than anything on land. Whatever was down here had been smart enough to steal toxic waste without being seen, strong enough to breach reinforced hulls, and fast enough to hit three ships simultaneously.
'This isn't boredom anymore,' he thought. 'This is Tuesday.'
The sonar pinged. Cyborg's display painted the ocean floor in green wireframe, and there it was: the Meridian's wreck, broken across a reef, its hull torn open from below. Massive puncture wounds in the steel, metal bent inward like something had punched through from underneath.
"Cargo hold is empty," Cyborg reported. "The toxic waste canisters were stripped clean. Whoever did this wasn't on a rampage. They were shopping."
Terra leaned forward in her seat, frowning. "What does someone do with stolen toxic waste?" Robin: "Nothing good." Donna, arms crossed: "That's quite an understatement."
Then Cyborg's sonar pulsed. Three new contacts. Fast. Closing from three directions.
"Movement," Cyborg said, and his voice lost every trace of humor. "Three signatures. Converging on our position."
* * *
The first blast hit before Cyborg could identify the source.
The T-Sub lurched sideways, throwing everyone against their restraints. Alarms shrieked across every console. "Energy weapon discharge," Cyborg called out, hands flying. "That wasn't a torpedo. That was a directed energy beam."
A second blast rocked the hull. The entire sub groaned, a deep metallic protest that Hikaru felt in his teeth. Water sprayed from a hairline crack in the forward viewport, thin as a needle, cold as death. "Hull integrity at seventy-two percent," Cyborg reported. "We are NOT built for sustained fire."
Beast Boy's mic was back on, and he was no longer joking. "Can I go outside and fight it?" Robin: "You'd get hit by the same blasts. Stay in the sub."
Hikaru pressed his face to the viewport, trying to get a visual. Through the murk he caught a shape. Fast, armored, humanoid but wrong. Too angular. Too symmetrical. A weapon in its hands, trident-shaped, trailing energy. It moved like the water was part of its body.
A third blast hit broadside. The lights flickered. Systems cascaded warnings across Cyborg's display. "Hull integrity fifty-eight percent. One more hit to the port side and we breach."
Starfire's hands lit green. She wanted to fight. Raven's eyes darkened beneath her hood. Donna gripped the armrest of her seat hard enough to dent the metal. Wally vibrated in place, energy with nowhere to go. Terra's fists were clenched, and she looked sick. Earth was a long way up.
"Cyborg, evasive maneuvers," Robin said. "Get us out of the open water. Find a cave, a trench, anything with cover."
A fourth blast hit. The T-Sub shuddered from bow to stern. The lights died. Emergency red flooded the cabin, painting everyone in blood-colored shadow. Through the cracked viewport, the attacker banked for another pass. Fast. Armored. Trailing energy like a comet.
"Well," Hikaru said. "That's not good."
***
A/N: Back for Volume 2 updates may be a bit slow as go back an edit my old Volume 2 chapters.