Supergirl: The Last Daughter of Earth
Chapter 2
"What?" asked Alex incredulously, looking back and forth between her parents, searching for some sign that she'd heard them wrong. She couldn't believe what she was hearing. "You're sending me, alone, out into space, towards God know what or where? Do you know how crazy that sounds? Surely there's got to be some way to save at least a few more!"
"Alex, please, hear us out, okay?" Jeremiah held her shoulders gently in his hands as he came to stand in front of her, and next to Eliza. "This is it, this is the ship, the only ship. It has room for one person, and one person only. That person is going to be you. It has to be you." His voice was quiet, heavy with emotion as his eyes searched those of his daughter, hoping to see a spark of understanding, of acceptance of what was going to happen, what had to happen.
"But why, Dad? I don't want to be alone, flying through space, and then alone on some alien world light years from here. I don't want to be the only human being left in the universe," she said, her voice falling in volume. Her hands gripped the sleeve of her father's shirt, and her mother's forearm. "What makes you think I'll even be able to live there, assuming that I even make it there? What if I'm just going to be blasted out into space, only to die in some asteroid collision, or get run over by a stray comet or something?"
The two elder Danvers looked at each other a moment, silently agreeing with one another. This was a conversation they'd had between them many times before. This was simply the time the conversation they'd had had its true significance. Eliza brushed Alex's hair from her eyes and lifted her chin. "J'Onn's people had studied space in much greater detail for far longer than we have. He confirmed that there is indeed life on all those planets that we discovered. You won't be alone, sweetheart."
Jeremiah nodded, and drew Alex in for a firm one armed hug. "J'Onn says that the life forms on each of those planets are similar enough to humans that you should be able to survive, and eat the plants and such, with little trouble. Their planetary conditions and environments are a little different, and the atmospheres are not quite like ours, but very close. We wouldn't send you out just for you to die, Allie Bear. We're trying to give you a chance to live, to take part of us, of our culture and identity out into the universe, to pass these things along."
Alex's eyes grew wet when her dad used the nickname he'd called her since she was a baby. When she was little, all he had to do was call her Allie Bear, and suddenly, everything would be okay. Though she was plenty old enough to know better now, the nickname had the same sort of emotional reaction. After she left, she'd never hear it again, never hear her mother whispering that she loved her when Eliza thought she had slipped into deep sleep, or saying it during breakfast, on the way to school, when she gave her a ride to her best friend's house, or any other time. The "I love you's" from both her parents would probably be what hurt the worst, what the gaping hole left in her heart would probably be ripped open from. She'd never be able to tell them she loved them again, either. At least not where they'd hear her, and she'd know they heard her. They'd be gone, and she'd be…somewhere else.
Tears rolled down her cheeks as she looked up at her parents again, and clutched them both in a death grip hug, her fingers tangling deeply into their clothing. "It's not living without you, without everything that makes us who we are, that makes me who I am. I may not be here when Earth goes, but I'll be just as dead as you and everyone else is. I'll just be a shell. Don't you guys know that? Can't you see that?"
Her parents each kissed the top of her head, and Eliza once more brushed her hair out of her eyes, and lifted her chin. Her own blue eyes were wet, but she kept them from overflowing. She took a deep breath and caressed Alex's cheek once more. "Alexandra Danvers," she said, smiling both sadly and proudly. "You are so, so strong. You always have been, even when you didn't have to be. You're the best parts of your father and me. Everything that is good and fair and strong, and so much more, about humanity is standing right here in front of us."
Jeremiah patted Alex's shoulder, and nodded towards Eliza with a tilt of his head, but his eyes never strayed from his daughter's. "Your Mom is right, Alex. You're strong, strong in every way it matters. There's nothing that Alex Danvers can't do if she puts her mind and heart towards it. We've seen that every day of your life, Alex. You can do this. We'll live on in you, Allie Bear. We'll be alive as long as you remember us." He turned halfway, and continued with setting controls and double checking the ship, though he was paying complete attention to his family.
"We'll always be with you, sweetie. Always. We love you, and that'll never change, and never stop, no matter what happens, no matter where you are," said Eliza, giving Alex a soft smile. "We're so very proud of you, we always have been, and we both know we always will be."
She reached up and took the chain she wore as a necklace from her neck, and fastened it around her daughter's neck. The weight of the pendant it held pulled it into a V on her chest, and the light of the lab caught in the facets of the blue stone held in the silver ring on the clasp that held it to the chain. It was something she never took off, it was always present around Eliza's neck, as long as Alex could remember. In every memory of her mother to that point, that necklace had always been around her neck. Now, it was around hers, and she'd never felt anything so heavy in her life, even though she knew it wasn't really very heavy at all, but it was weighed down with the mass of the emotions rolling through her at that moment. Her arms wrapped tightly around her mother, and she hugged her like she was drowning, which at that moment, Alex felt like she was.
Jeremiah finished double checking the instruments in the cockpit and he came over to Eliza and Alex with a light smile. Outside, the sky was growing dark rapidly, and the air felt charged with electricity, a subtle reminder of the unusual changing conditions of the world growing more and more frequent. Jeremiah ignored it for the moment, and met his daughter's eyes once more.
"Your Mom gave me this the day she found out she was pregnant," he said, slipping off the silver bracelet he always wore. It was a solid band, thin, and was very smooth. It had no adornment, other than on the inside was an inscription that said, Our child is our love overflowing. "I've never taken this off since the day we found out we were going to have you. It was a way I could always keep you close to me, even when I was at work, or you were away, or whatever. There's never been a time that I've looked at this, and not saw you in my mind's eye, Alex."
Alex slowly wrapped her fingers around the metal band and took it from her father. She knew that he felt he was never good at saying how he felt, not even to her or her mother, but he didn't need to be. Alex and Eliza both knew how he felt about them, and how deep those feelings went. She slid it onto her wrist, and made sure it was closed enough that it wouldn't slip off, then she grabbed and hugged her father as strongly as she had her mother.
The lab lurched hard, as if it was a boat slammed by an angry whale, and everything rattled and bounced. Equipment fell to the floor and crashed, some objects were actually thrown across the room, and there was a loud sound, a rumbling like thunder, only it came from under their feet. The floor literally shifted at a fairly steep angle, and the concrete broke apart into three separate chunks. Lightning flashed across the sky, and thunder rumbled, joining in the chorus of the earth's death song beneath them. A loud cracking noise sliced through the air outside, and dust filled the view outside the window as violent winds blew harshly past the building.
"Alex, you have to get in, now, and get going. We've already waited too long as it is!" exclaimed Eliza, and she began quickly herding her daughter towards the ship, and the cockpit. She and her husband were rapidly getting her settled, and showing her where all the controls were. Desperation was heavy on their faces, and they were both talking so fast, she just barely managed to catch what they were saying as they explained the controls to her.
Jeremiah fired up the engines for her, and their distinct roar and whine was audible even over the chaos around them. "We don't even have hours. We have minutes. Remember, Allie Bear, we're always with you, and always will be. I love you, sweetheart," he said, kissing her cheek and giving her hand a squeeze as he stepped down from the ship's side, and was promptly tossed to the floor when the ground shook and shifted again. "Don't worry about us, Alex. Take off!"
The world shook again, the shockwaves stronger this time. Eliza clung to the side of the ship long enough to initialize the cockpit sealing routine, then fell backwards, and caught herself on an overturned table before she completely hit the floor. "I love you, baby girl! Be safe, and learn how to be happy again, for us!"
The ship was on auto launch, Alex knew, as it lifted and began moving as her mother finished her loudly spoken words. A thick, sharp spike of rock thrust itself up through the floor of the lab, stabbing up from some unknown depth within the ground as her ship cleared the launch hatch on top of the lab. She turned to look back as the ship lifted through the hatch, in time to see her parents embrace each other tightly, lying prone on the floor during its aggressive upheaval.
As the ship cleared the hatch, the roof of the building began crumbling down, blocking her view of her parents. She saw her house, or rather what was left of it. Only a single corner was standing, the rest of it was tumbling down the street, or wrapped around several large spears of rocks that rent it asunder. Under the heavily clouded black and red sky, she saw the world doing exactly as her parents predicted, literally tearing itself apart. Pockets of methane, natural gas, and other flammable gasses exploded as rifts tore open in the ground, sending plumes of flame blasting upwards, followed rapidly by molten lava.
The town of Midvale literally ripped into three separate pieces, the explosions and gushers of lava gleefully pouring from beneath the gutted town. She barely cleared the high school gym, which was a full fifty feet higher than it should be, riding the crest of a stone wave that blasted from the torn earth. Alex tried to look back at her home, but all view of it was obscured by the flaming gas, lava, and the funnels of three immense tornadoes that were ripping through what used to be Midvale. The winds ripped and clawed at the ship as it broke through the cloud cover.
The ship pulled clear of the atmosphere and suddenly, all was quiet. The hum of the engines and her rapid breathing were the only sounds audible. The buffeting winds and lightning were gone, and it was a vista of stars, the sun, and distant planets as she soared towards the moon as it wobbled in its orbit, chunks of it already torn from the surface of the pitted sphere. The ship was moving around the rapidly deteriorating moon and heading for the drive jump coordinates.
With tears running down her cheeks, Alex turned to look back at Earth, but instead of the familiar and beautiful blue marbled globe streaked with whites, greens and browns, it was a vision of Hell. The planet had cracked into several pieces, and the core was belching its lava and heat upwards towards what used to be the surface. Bright flares flashed high and wide, and were just as suddenly snuffed out as the atmosphere was rapidly vanishing. With a final few explosions of gasses, the chunks of the planet spread apart, allowing her a glimpse of the bright, burning core suddenly going dark. Pieces of the planet collided with the moon, cracking it apart as well, and just like that, her world was reduced to so much cosmic gravel. Earth was only a memory.
It took the ship about an hour to reach its jump coordinates to launch it into its full acceleration, which carried it past Saturn and several of its moons, then diverted out of the solar system at an angle, heading for a close grouping of stars. The young girl couldn't believe what she'd seen, not even now. She kept thinking…hoping…praying that it was a horrible nightmare, and she'd wake up screaming, and her parents would hold her and assure her that it was just a dream and not real. Unfortunately, she knew she was very definitely awake, and that it might be a nightmare, but it was a nightmare of reality. Her home, everything and everyone she knew, it was all gone, nothing more than rocks and debris. It was very real.
The demise of Earth and its moon disturbed the gravimetric forces of the entire solar system, and Alex was doing what no other human had ever done. She was watching this phenomenon actually occur in real time. She could only see the sun, and the planets that were large enough and close enough to be visible and identifiable, but the effects were very evident even on that small sampling of victims of the effect. She could feel the gravitational forces altering as the ship rocked and shuddered as it flew on its path past the sun as Saturn reached its closest solar approach during its orbit.
A sound like millions of rocks being thrown at the ship at once, like solid rain, grew quickly, but there was no visible debris striking the ship that she could see through the cockpit window. A bright, pulsating flare erupted past the window. It apparently originated from passing back closer to the sun than the path had taken her a bit ago, as the navigational computer adjusted its preprogrammed course. The light pulsed in different wavelengths of colors, and she felt odd. She knew that flashing lights could trigger nausea and other effects in people, depending on the frequency, and their susceptibility to certain conditions, but this felt odd, really odd.
She was warm, warmer than she felt she should be, given the environmental controls carefully controlling the temperature, air pressure, oxygen and nitrogen ratio, and other factors precisely. Finally, the pulsing light flashes were gone, and the ship was fully free of the solar system, and lights changed on the console before her. The hum was changing pitch, and growing a little louder, and then suddenly there was a whoosh and the stars flew past as little more than streaks.
She was moving faster than any human being had ever gone before. She was approaching light speed, she estimated. It would only make sense if her parents said it'd take about ten years to get to where she was going. By her calculations, the ship would eventually even out at what would most likely be two, maybe three, times the speed of light. The stars her parents spoke of were approximately thirty to forty light years from Earth, and if it only took ten years, the math insisted that she would be moving faster than light. If it weren't for the circumstances, and the memories of the horrors she'd just witnessed, she'd have been ecstatic.
Alex tapped a few keys on the console. According to the computer, she was due to go into suspended animation in about an hour. She would have that long to observe things no human had ever seen. Then she'd take the longest nap of her life, and when she woke up, she'd be near her new solar system. The computer had the name of the world she was heading towards, and it was noted that the name was an approximation of what its natives called it. She figured that once she landed, and they figured out how to communicate, she'd eventually learn their language, and how to correctly say the name of her new world.
Numbly, she read the information the computer had been given concerning this place. Its sun was a yellow G6 star, a little bigger than Sol, and its output was a little brighter than the sun she was used to, but perfectly livable. The world was roughly the same size as Earth, only a few miles difference in circumference, and the air content was slightly different in ratios. The planet sounded beautiful, and she'd probably have appreciated it more if she hadn't just watched her world collapse on itself. The water to land ratio was a little different. There was approximately two percent more water than what Earth had.
With a soft sigh, she turned the computer readout off. That was all the astronomy she could handle at the moment. She had the rest of her life to learn more about what was going to be her new home, so she felt she could forgive herself if she wasn't all that excited about it at the moment. Her world had died less than eight hours ago, and that loss, and the loss of everyone and everything she knew, was a little too fresh to start viewing what was happening to her as some grand adventure.
She held her mother's necklace in her hand, the feel of it something familiar, and welcome. She knew it was just her mind trying to cope with the loss, but she felt like she could feel, literally feel, her mother with her, just because she was holding the pendant on the necklace. Alex glanced at her wrist, at her dad's bracelet, and she felt the same about him. She knew they weren't really there, that it was just the feeling of familiarity, especially when contrasted against her grief, but it still gave her an odd sense of comfort.
A shrill, rapid noise suddenly started repeating, and the ship felt like it was being physically dragged from its path as it sped through space. Panic was starting to peek out in Alex's mind and she was fighting hard to push it back and away. The lights and sounds were obviously an alarm, and the computer showed a definite deviation from its predefined course. The radiation levels had increased during the pulsing lights before she left the solar system, but it was well within safe limits. She knew that outside Earth's atmosphere, you'd encounter different types of radiation, and that sort of thing. Astronauts had talked about it, as well as scientists, for decades.
Alex tried to correct the course, but to no avail. The ship slowed, the engine's emergency systems disengaging the translight drive to prevent burnout, or worse, which dropped the ship back into normal space time. When the stars once more became points of light, rather than streaks, she saw it. A strange, circular ring of swirling gas and light was drawing the ship, and her, towards it at a very rapid pace. The ring actually looked like it was spinning, and the corona of the thing was massive enough it looked like a space born Ferris Wheel.
There was visible light inside it, making it look oddly like a porthole on a boat, or a tunnel or something, but there was something off about it as well. It couldn't be a black hole, she thought, not unless scientists were drastically wrong about what one would look like up close. She felt the strong pull, of course, but she didn't feel crushing gravity, or anything that would suggest the presence of an event horizon, at least not like the event horizon of a black hole.
Just from the structure of it, she briefly thought for a moment that it looked like a digital rendering of what an Einstein-Rosen Bridge would look like, but they were just theoretical, weren't they? She couldn't remember if anyone had actually discovered one or not. Whatever it was, it was taking her off course. As if enough bad shit hasn't happened today, she thought sourly. God, they say You have no sense of humor. They're wrong. You do have one. It just sucks ass big time is all!
The words had barely passed through her mind when the ship suddenly jolted hard, setting off another alarm, and the ring grew closer at an exponential rate. Whatever it was, she was about to get up very close and very personal with it, of that there was no doubt. "Oh, fucking hell," she muttered under her breath.