(Required disclaimer: I don't own any of the characters in this chapter, they're the rightful property DC/Wildstorms, et al, No challenge to existing copyright is intented or inferred, etc, etc)
Prologue:
Swift was the first to go.
In retrospect, most of her companions would have agreed that it was the humiliating loss to Santini's new StormWatch team that had set the wheels in motion. She had been an officer of StormWatch back when it had stood for something, and to be laid low by people who defiled the name of that organization had hurt her particularly. She still recalled trying to put her hatred into words as the runt they'd called Cisco had released her restraints while hitting on her at the same time.
Despite Santini's ardent claims, the new StormWatch, composed of ex-Black Razors and special forces killers, carried the stink of the G7 economies. The same sort of people that had created the creature Seth to destroy the Authority for the crime of opposing their precious status quo.
Captured during the invasion of Reality Incorporated, she had only been able to put an end to the conflict with the help of Duvall, a man who had been sent to earth to cause destruction. But when the time came to detonate the explosives linked to his body, he had been unable to add to the destruction he had already experienced. In the short time she had known him, Swift came to regard him as one of the single most decent men she had ever met. He had been so determined to prevent what happened to his world from occurring again that he was willing to sacrifice himself to accomplish it.
In the end, surrounded by fire, smoke, and rampaging insectoid beasts, Swift had kissed him, and then broken his neck.
When they arrived back at the Carrier, she had cried for three hours solid. She was not just full of sorrow for the man she had been forced to sacrifice, but also with the realization of how badly it had affected her. For a few instants before her escape, it had almost seemed too heavy a burden to whisper "Door."
When the news reports had begun reaching the Carrier and the inevitable right-wing conspiracy-mad commentators had started their disparaging tirades, Angela Spica, the Engineer, had tried to reach out to her.
"You had to do it, Shen," she said, "He knew that. You saved the world. You both did."
"Keep telling me that, Angie," Swift had replied, "One day, I might even remember that I used to think it was worth saving."
A few days later, Swift realized that she just couldn't do it anymore. She was tired. Tired of fighting. Tired of killing. Tired of hurting. Tired of struggling, time after time, to defend a world that only seemed to despise her and her companions a little more each day.
They woke up one day to find her room abandoned. A few of her more personal objects were gone with her, but by and large, she had simply up and left. On her bed was a note that read: 'I've taken the last life trying to save a world that doesn't give a damn. I'm tired of fighting. I love you all'
Even more surprising than Shen's departure was the unspoken consensus that her wishes should be respected. Angie had seen the hurt in Shen's eyes, bloodshot from crying until she could cry no more.
Jack Hawksmoor had been angry at first, but then he remembered when he had first met Shen in StormWatch Black, when she had still tried to cling to her pacifist ways. He also recalled his own early days in StormWatch. He remembered the twisting nausea that had racked him when he had been forced to kill the insane, murderous love child of JFK and Marilyn. He remembered the sick, sorrowful feeling that had flooded through him when he had broken Rose Tattoo's neck to stop her bloody rampage. And then he remembered the Authority's inaugural battle in London against Kaizen Gamorra's clone army, where he had killed and killed and killed again without a thought. It was a sobering moment.
Apollo and the Midnighter had looked at each other uneasily. People could only take so much. That had always seemed like a given, but had never occurred to them that one day, they too would be burned out. They thought of their marriage, they thought of their adopted daughter, and for the first time in years, they truly thought about the concept of retirement.
They had tried to carry on without her, and actually did a decent job of it for a week. But when the Doctor returned from a lengthly sojourn in the Garden of Ancestral Memory to discover that one of his teammates had gone, he decided to disconnect from the teams radiotelepathy and take a vacation. What began as a vacation turned into a long vacation. A very long vacation. When Jack and Angela turned the TV on one night to see the Doctor at an Amsterdam hash bar, stoned out of his skull and oblivious to the paparazzi, they understood that he was not coming back.
With the Doctor gone, his druggie friends and associates stopped visiting. The parties grew less and less frequent, as if there were some intangible sense that the good times were finally at an end. At the same time, threats to the world that the Authority would have handled grew fewer and farther between. Santini's StormWatch team grew in size and funding. Flint, an officer from StormWatch's previous incarnation, joined Santini's command. She opened the door for many of the rogue super-powered beings roving the world to join a legitimate organization dedicated to the preservation of the peace. The Authority found itself with less and less to do, being only four people in the face of StormWatch's growing numbers.
After a few weeks, Apollo and the Midnighter broke the news that they planned to move out of the Carrier. They would stay in contact, but with little Jenny to take care of, the time had come to settle down. A steady stream of postcards and letters came from their new home in California, but their absence was an almost tangible thing aboard the Carrier.
The refugees were gone. After the disastrous incident with the monstrosity called Seth, they had realized that the Carrier was too easy a target and that too many innocents were in jeopardy while they were aboard. There were visitors, of course, but they grew more and more infrequent.
One night, Jack startled Angela out of a slumber borne of a contented afterglow with convulsions and strangled breath. It had taken her intelligent nanobots only seconds to diagnose his physical condition and her intuition only a few instants longer to deduce the problem. The people were going. The Carrier didn't feel like a city any longer.
Jack visited as often as he could, but as it had been in the old days aboard Skywatch, he could only stay for short periods of time. Gradually, he fell out of touch.
Finally, Angela was alone onboard the Carrier. Unwilling to abandon her post and leave the world with only the likes of Santini to guard it, and unable to truly relate to any of the normal people that may have desired to find her, she closed off the Junction room from anyone outside of the radiotelepathic link. Shen could not have gotten in, and she felt bad about that, fearing that now a reunion would never come to pass. The Doctor was also barred, but frankly, she could have cared less about him. She knew Jack's circumstances, and grudgingly forgave him that. She had always known that she was only a mistress. He had gone back to his first love: the cities. Apollo and the Midnighter occasionally called through radiotelepathy, but they had come to love their simple, domestic life together. They only visited once after she closed off the Junction room, and that absence hurt Angela more than she could say.
Beginning a long, lonely vigil patrolling the Bleed and the higher dimensions, she started talking to the only partner she could find: the Carrier itself. Talking required merging herself into its core. Her sessions with the Carrier became longer and more frequent, until at last she merged and did not step out.
The Carrier cruised the higher dimensions. For almost twenty years it was silent. Ghostly vestiges of mirth and happiness could be felt in its empty halls, as if the ship itself was reminiscing. Images and whispers of camaraderie and a closeness that could only be described as family flitted intermittently through the dark halls and corridors of the massive ship.
Time marched on. There were new advances, new wars, new celebrities, new scandals, new machines, and new people. The world soon forgot its one-time protectors. The exploits of the Authority were considered to be at an end, nothing more than a chapter in a historical documentary.
But if there is one constant of the universe, it is change.
Prologue:
Swift was the first to go.
In retrospect, most of her companions would have agreed that it was the humiliating loss to Santini's new StormWatch team that had set the wheels in motion. She had been an officer of StormWatch back when it had stood for something, and to be laid low by people who defiled the name of that organization had hurt her particularly. She still recalled trying to put her hatred into words as the runt they'd called Cisco had released her restraints while hitting on her at the same time.
Despite Santini's ardent claims, the new StormWatch, composed of ex-Black Razors and special forces killers, carried the stink of the G7 economies. The same sort of people that had created the creature Seth to destroy the Authority for the crime of opposing their precious status quo.
Captured during the invasion of Reality Incorporated, she had only been able to put an end to the conflict with the help of Duvall, a man who had been sent to earth to cause destruction. But when the time came to detonate the explosives linked to his body, he had been unable to add to the destruction he had already experienced. In the short time she had known him, Swift came to regard him as one of the single most decent men she had ever met. He had been so determined to prevent what happened to his world from occurring again that he was willing to sacrifice himself to accomplish it.
In the end, surrounded by fire, smoke, and rampaging insectoid beasts, Swift had kissed him, and then broken his neck.
When they arrived back at the Carrier, she had cried for three hours solid. She was not just full of sorrow for the man she had been forced to sacrifice, but also with the realization of how badly it had affected her. For a few instants before her escape, it had almost seemed too heavy a burden to whisper "Door."
When the news reports had begun reaching the Carrier and the inevitable right-wing conspiracy-mad commentators had started their disparaging tirades, Angela Spica, the Engineer, had tried to reach out to her.
"You had to do it, Shen," she said, "He knew that. You saved the world. You both did."
"Keep telling me that, Angie," Swift had replied, "One day, I might even remember that I used to think it was worth saving."
A few days later, Swift realized that she just couldn't do it anymore. She was tired. Tired of fighting. Tired of killing. Tired of hurting. Tired of struggling, time after time, to defend a world that only seemed to despise her and her companions a little more each day.
They woke up one day to find her room abandoned. A few of her more personal objects were gone with her, but by and large, she had simply up and left. On her bed was a note that read: 'I've taken the last life trying to save a world that doesn't give a damn. I'm tired of fighting. I love you all'
Even more surprising than Shen's departure was the unspoken consensus that her wishes should be respected. Angie had seen the hurt in Shen's eyes, bloodshot from crying until she could cry no more.
Jack Hawksmoor had been angry at first, but then he remembered when he had first met Shen in StormWatch Black, when she had still tried to cling to her pacifist ways. He also recalled his own early days in StormWatch. He remembered the twisting nausea that had racked him when he had been forced to kill the insane, murderous love child of JFK and Marilyn. He remembered the sick, sorrowful feeling that had flooded through him when he had broken Rose Tattoo's neck to stop her bloody rampage. And then he remembered the Authority's inaugural battle in London against Kaizen Gamorra's clone army, where he had killed and killed and killed again without a thought. It was a sobering moment.
Apollo and the Midnighter had looked at each other uneasily. People could only take so much. That had always seemed like a given, but had never occurred to them that one day, they too would be burned out. They thought of their marriage, they thought of their adopted daughter, and for the first time in years, they truly thought about the concept of retirement.
They had tried to carry on without her, and actually did a decent job of it for a week. But when the Doctor returned from a lengthly sojourn in the Garden of Ancestral Memory to discover that one of his teammates had gone, he decided to disconnect from the teams radiotelepathy and take a vacation. What began as a vacation turned into a long vacation. A very long vacation. When Jack and Angela turned the TV on one night to see the Doctor at an Amsterdam hash bar, stoned out of his skull and oblivious to the paparazzi, they understood that he was not coming back.
With the Doctor gone, his druggie friends and associates stopped visiting. The parties grew less and less frequent, as if there were some intangible sense that the good times were finally at an end. At the same time, threats to the world that the Authority would have handled grew fewer and farther between. Santini's StormWatch team grew in size and funding. Flint, an officer from StormWatch's previous incarnation, joined Santini's command. She opened the door for many of the rogue super-powered beings roving the world to join a legitimate organization dedicated to the preservation of the peace. The Authority found itself with less and less to do, being only four people in the face of StormWatch's growing numbers.
After a few weeks, Apollo and the Midnighter broke the news that they planned to move out of the Carrier. They would stay in contact, but with little Jenny to take care of, the time had come to settle down. A steady stream of postcards and letters came from their new home in California, but their absence was an almost tangible thing aboard the Carrier.
The refugees were gone. After the disastrous incident with the monstrosity called Seth, they had realized that the Carrier was too easy a target and that too many innocents were in jeopardy while they were aboard. There were visitors, of course, but they grew more and more infrequent.
One night, Jack startled Angela out of a slumber borne of a contented afterglow with convulsions and strangled breath. It had taken her intelligent nanobots only seconds to diagnose his physical condition and her intuition only a few instants longer to deduce the problem. The people were going. The Carrier didn't feel like a city any longer.
Jack visited as often as he could, but as it had been in the old days aboard Skywatch, he could only stay for short periods of time. Gradually, he fell out of touch.
Finally, Angela was alone onboard the Carrier. Unwilling to abandon her post and leave the world with only the likes of Santini to guard it, and unable to truly relate to any of the normal people that may have desired to find her, she closed off the Junction room from anyone outside of the radiotelepathic link. Shen could not have gotten in, and she felt bad about that, fearing that now a reunion would never come to pass. The Doctor was also barred, but frankly, she could have cared less about him. She knew Jack's circumstances, and grudgingly forgave him that. She had always known that she was only a mistress. He had gone back to his first love: the cities. Apollo and the Midnighter occasionally called through radiotelepathy, but they had come to love their simple, domestic life together. They only visited once after she closed off the Junction room, and that absence hurt Angela more than she could say.
Beginning a long, lonely vigil patrolling the Bleed and the higher dimensions, she started talking to the only partner she could find: the Carrier itself. Talking required merging herself into its core. Her sessions with the Carrier became longer and more frequent, until at last she merged and did not step out.
The Carrier cruised the higher dimensions. For almost twenty years it was silent. Ghostly vestiges of mirth and happiness could be felt in its empty halls, as if the ship itself was reminiscing. Images and whispers of camaraderie and a closeness that could only be described as family flitted intermittently through the dark halls and corridors of the massive ship.
Time marched on. There were new advances, new wars, new celebrities, new scandals, new machines, and new people. The world soon forgot its one-time protectors. The exploits of the Authority were considered to be at an end, nothing more than a chapter in a historical documentary.
But if there is one constant of the universe, it is change.