~Chapter Seven~

Bruce was reading the specs of the shipment of micro-particle accelerators that G'lorth had made off with, and she did not like what she was finding. Green Lantern had been understating the danger. Each accelerator was the size of a man's forearm, and was essentially a rail gun on crack. A marble-sized piece of stone (or concrete or glass or an enemy soldier's body) was loaded into the gun and accelerated to half the speed of light. The energy stored in the bullet could boil a lake or crumble a fortress. If you put one on a ship and took it a far enough distance from the target, it could potentially knock a small moon out of orbit, or cause a tectonic plate shift.

Used by a smart enough person, it would be a planet-killer. An atomic bomb for war on an intergalactic scale.

"You shouldn't ruminate at a party." Clark leaned over to whisper at her. "Especially when you've got a line of admirers as long as the Watchtower is tall."

Bruce glanced backward at the clump of men and several women all huddled around in an attempt to get a dance, and promptly went back to the touchpad she was reading off of. "Is winning a stupid fake battle thing really that appealing? It may just be me, but I've never found a sweaty, dirty, bleeding woman to be at her most attractive."

"You're just on a roll, aren't you?" Diana asked, and downed what must have been her third or fourth goblet of mead. "Half the time you see me I'm sweaty, dirty, and bloody. That's our job."

"And I thought I had a thankless relationship." Shayera's interjection earned her a glare from both of them.

"Word is that G'lorth's demonstration of the weapon is supposed to happen any time now." Wally popped into the seat on the other side of Clark, with what appeared to be half of a steak shoved in his mouth. "Hopefully he's not planning to blow up, like, a person."

"Yes, Wally, avoiding murder would be preferable," Bruce said, but Wally was too engrossed in the alien buffet to care much about the razor-sharp edge to her voice. So Bruce just sighed and went back to avoiding her suitors, or she was about to when the entire Talanian complex shook like a level-5 earthquake and she was thrown out of her chair on to the floor.

Aliens, both humanoid and non, ran screaming to the edges of the room as hardwood tables came crashing to the floor and glasses shattered against the walls. The flagstones buckled and snapped.

Then, just as suddenly, it stopped.

"Don't tell me we've got another problem on our hands," GL said, standing up to wipe spilt wine off his shirt. "What was that?"

One of the Talanians, a teenage girl, pointed up to the grand skylight above the hall. Her eyes were wide enough to be more white than color. "The moon!"

"That," Bruce said grimly, "was G'lorth's demonstration."

The moon of Talan lay shattered, the rough sphere broken into a crescent and an asteroid, split down the side like a broken heart. It had spun around the planet for millennia, and would have for many more, if not for one egomaniac pirate and his apocalypse machines.

"Damn," Wally said, rubbing his hair. "Those sure are some guns, huh?"

"Hence us trying to stop him." Bruce resisted the urge to clock the kid. "Anyone see him around? Or another guest who looks particularly interested yet unsurprised by what just happened?"

"Over there." Diana pointed at a gaggle of blue-skinned aliens—the Zorkians, oh how Bruce would love to get even with their horny little race—and another group of small, brown people who looked rather like the Hobbits out of a Tolkien novel. Both were sipping bubbly wine and staring at the moon like it was an amusing fireworks show rather than a celestial body cracked in half. "And look, in the sky. Isn't that one of the Zorkian ships, pretending to be dead in space? That's probably where G'lorth and one of his accelerators are. He wouldn't let a customer try it on their own; he'd want to be up there too."

Clark nodded. "Much too valuable to risk a buyer making off with one."

"All right, we know who the buyers are. Now sit back down so they don't think we suspect them." Diana took her seat at the table again, just as the Talanian ambassadors did. The play going on at the front of the hall had continued throughout the commotion, the actors so well-trained that the had hit the climax of their plot in the middle of the devastation. Now the curtains fell, to scattered applause.

Bruce was still frozen on her feet, staring off into space.

"Hey." Clark poked her gently. "You awake? Bruce?"

"Bruce?" she asked, eyes wide and about as intelligent as Bambi's idiot brother. "I'm not Bruce. I'm Brenda. Like Brenda Starr."

"Does this mean I get to knock him out?" Shayera asked, reaching for her mace, at the same time as Wally said, "Bats has a girl name now?"

Shayera reached for her weapon, but Bruce's face went blank suddenly and she shook her head like she was trying to get something loose. "Don't hit me. I snapped out of it."

"Damn," Shayera said sadly, as she had not yet had the opportunity to punch anyone on this expedition, and got up to find something semi-edible on the refreshments table.

"You read Brenda Starr?" Clark asked, after she'd gone. Bruce shrugged over a plateful of tiny chocolate things.

"I read the paper at breakfast. Including the comics."

Clark considered this. "That's abnormally normal for your. What a weird image."

"I just can't win with you people." Bruce poured herself another glass of wine—a very, very tall glass. "Half the time you're telling me how odd I act, but when I actually do humanlike things you say it's bizarre."

"Did you just call yourself humanlike?" Clark asked.

Bruce threw her hands up in frustration. "I read the sports section too, and I don't give a damn about sports. But if I didn't read all of the paper it wouldn't last the whole way through breakfast."

"How come I'm the alien and I care more about football than you do?"

"Because you're a Kansas hick and your entire culture is made up of football and county fairs." Bruce stretched in her chair, watching the others around the room. "When are G'lorth and his Talanian stooge going to show their faces? I'm glad to have something other than tentacles or oatmeal to eat, but I don't want to have to dance again."

Clark pointed at a floating blob of blue energy, which was waving its flanges suggestively at Bruce. "That Yxkylian girl sure seems to like you. The blue Yxkylians are the girls, right? The green ones are guys?"

"Yes." Bruce gave him a long, long look over her plateful of chocolate (which was all she had eaten since breakfast. Clark suspected she was taking the chance to enjoy junk food now that her body was going to be magically reverted to prime condition). "Although both those terms are relative."

Clark watched her push her food around glumly for a few more minutes before trying the tack that Bruce usually responded worst to: sentimentality. "You know we're going to fix this. And heck—all you have to do is walk through a portal. We've been to literal Hell before, and fought a full-scale planetary invasion off twice. This is nothing."

Bruce let out a stream of air through her nose. "And what if it isn't? What happens if I'm stuck as a—a mindless bimbo, as Diana put it, for the rest of my life? Everything I am—my whole life—just wiped clear away."

"That's not going to happen. Just like you're not going to go dance with that blue gas sack over there."

Bruce laid down her napkin next to her plate, like she'd entirely lost her appetite. Come to think of it, Clark hadn't actually seen her eat more than a few bites off the various plates of food she'd had. "I can feel the real me slipping away. This is dying."

"I recall that you once told me that this life wasn't for those who feared dying," Clark said. "Once of the first few times we met, in fact. In quite a self-important and holier-than-thou fashion to boot."

"I lied." Bruce smiled, ghostly. "The possibility of being replaced by the Fembot wouldn't be so bad if her name wasn't Brenda. I mean, Brenda? It sounds like I should be a fifties housewife with a bad puffy hairdo."

"I'm sure Alfred would love to finally have some help with cooking," Clark said. "Maybe Brenda will be the first of the Waynes to figure out how to boil pasta without help from a Pennyworth."

"My mother could cook."

"Didn't your mother marry into the family?"

"Oh, shut up." Bruce kicked him under the table, probably hard enough to bruise if Clark hadn't been invulnerable. "Seriously though, if something goes wrong—and let's face it, for us it always does—promise you'll fucking lobotomize me. Just so I don't have to be that insipid little estrogen-bag."

"Only if you promise me that you won't do something stupid like go after G'lorth during the window where the portal's open, or jump in front of a ray gun instead of going through or something." Clark cut off her response. "No, for real. I know you. Don't worry about space pirates or particle accelerators, and just go through the threshold, okay? We can handle G'lorth."

"All right," Bruce agreed, reluctantly. "But you may have just jinxed it."