Wayne of Gotham Read Online Free

current version was, as always, an improvement over the last. Gotham was largely an island severed from the continent by the Gotham River. That meant there were only a handful of bridges connecting the boroughs of the city proper to the outside world, many of them a commuter’s nightmare during drive time.
    Bruce flashed a rueful smile. The image of a Batmobile—black fins, menacing angles, and screaming engine—crawling along across the Trigate Bridge while stuck in traffic was laughable.
    Justice must be swift … and sure … and final.
    So this particular incarnation of the Batmobile was a modification he knew as TS8c. It had started from a military scout vehicle frame. He had married it to a modified aircraft power plant and a custom-engineered combined gearbox and differential. It normally ran on RP-1 kerosene rocket fuel—relatively common and easy to obtain. Keeping the sound dampened from the screaming, high-torque engine had been a major problem that was solved, in part, with a secondary electric drive system when distances away from the power conduits were short and stealth was required. There were also four sets of modified RCS rocket motors mounted on gimbals—each shrouded by the vehicle’s shell and drawing on the same RP-1 rocket fuel used for the drive engine—that could give him some control over the vehicle’s attitude should it become airborne. There were also four downsized PAM-D solid-rocket boosters fixed to the back of the frame in a cluster. He could use those one at a time in case he needed a significant push. The deployable weapons hard-points were specifically designed to allow for different load-outs depending on what Batman considered to be required for the mission at the time. The cockpit had its own layer of passive armor, while the shell of the car used an active armor similar to his own Batsuit—not only protecting the control, weapons, drive, and sensor systems, as well as the Caped Crusader himself, but also allowing the exterior shape of the vehicle to shift. It could find its own aerodynamically optimized shape at high speeds or could modify its look at lower speeds simply to confuse his prey in the middle of pursuit. There were no windows in the vehicle at all, and no lights—the driver depended entirely on an array of cameras, radar, and sonar sensors to give him a picture of his surroundings. However, as the exterior surface could become alternately polished or dull from one plane to the next, it could impersonate the look of smoked glass found in more common vehicles—temporarily blending in with traffic when necessary.
    It did nominally look like a “mobile,” Bruce admitted but, that, too, was something of an illusion, because the wheels on the vehicle were not solely designed to operate on streets. Bridges were choke points too easily cut off by civilian traffic or the misguided vigilance of the Gotham City Police Department. So for the last year, Gotham Power and Light had been upgrading—thanks to the influence of a number of Wayne Industries subcontractors—power, water, and sewer systems throughout the Gotham network. The real purpose had been to install rapid access points at key locations throughout the city where the TS8c could turn a corner and vanish from the street, the suspension shifting the wheel positions as the vehicle plunged down abandoned subway tunnels, utilities-access conduits, or even main subway lines, if traffic permitted. His favorite system involved a pair of rail clamps that could extend upward out of the front and rear of the vehicle and attach themselves around the specially designed power conduits that ran the length of each of the Gotham bridges. The variable suspension could then rise upward against the bottom of the bridge structure as though it were an upside-down road, allowing him to cross the river beneath the bridges unimpeded, while above him the snarled traffic contended with