Future. Earth. Sicily. Kal-El.
Following the conversations among Captain Marvel, Green Lantern, Trinity and Superman, immediately before Darkseid's visage appeared in the skies, and just after Captain Marvel departed with Trinity, Kal leaped off the roof where he'd stood during the discussions. He soared southward into the dark and nearly starless night. The force of his leap shook the roof and reduced the cracked gargoyle to rubble.
"What were you worried about with your powers?" Green Lantern Kyle Rayner's voice buzzed in the Lantern Corps reserve charge over Kal's collarbone. The reserve charge glowed a dull green against the black of Superman's space travel uniform. "You look like you're flying just fine." GL's personal forcefield glowed a muted forest green as he flew along with the Kryptonian.
"Looks can be deceiving." Kal replied. He noticed the friction of the wind on his face. "This is long past the part where my gravity-defying power of flight would normally take over carry me away on the winds."
"So, why haven't you fallen into the sea yet?" Rayner flew just behind and to the left of Kal, in a position Air Force fighter pilots called the wingman position. GL's uniform currently resembled the pressure suit he'd worn for high altitude flights as an Air Force fighter pilot. Its color scheme was different though: black and green instead of olive drap and where his squadron patch would go, he displayed the green and white stylized lantern logo of the Green Lantern Corps.
"This is … merely a leap. I'll probably splash down in the harbor of Syracuse on Sicily, " Kal elaborated. "within sight of the Library, and just about the time Captain Marvel and Trinity arrive there. And then I'll swim to shore."
"What's the point of that?" GL queried.
"I'm gauging how much of my powers are left," The Son of Krypton explained, "and I want Captain Marvel to know as well. The last thing I want is to bring false hope to anyone in the Resistance, or anyone at all. That would play into the hand of the Conquerors. Dashed hopes naturally lead to hopelessness which in turn feeds the Lord of the Conquerors." Captain Marvel had reminded them not say Darkseid's name. Wizard Harry Dresden and Diana, Princess of the Amazons, had told them saying his name could summon his awareness or even allow him to physically transport into their presence. But that felt like half a lifetime ago.
"Yeah, I get what you're saying about hope," the fighter pilot replied. "When I did some work in an Army headquarters a while back, they had a saying, '...Hope is not a method.' But given what we're up against, inspiring hope in the people may actually be our most potent weapon."
The two heroes continued to climb into the night sky.
GL's Ring picked up the signal broadcasting from the only airport navigational beacon still connected to the Rome electric power grid. It told the pilot they were crossing into the flight levels for commercial traffic.
The higher they rose, the Kryptonian began to shiver slightly in the chill of the air. Not exactly a new feeling, but it had certainly been quite a while since he'd felt anything like this.
"So, I'm just spitballing here," Rayner spoke up "but Rome to Syracuse … that's a good 400 nautical miles, so you're leaping past low earth orbit? The amount of force required for that leap, exerted downward in a single instant, would most likely have crushed the building we were standing on top of while we talked with Captain Marvel."
"You...That's... Yeah, I can't argue with that physics..." Kal replied.
GL used Ring energy to form constructs of several analog flight instruments, like the ones from the old T38 jet trainers in which he'd learned to fly. He considered the horizon ball, airspeed indicator, and others. They all confirmed what his altimeter told him. "... And you aren't ascending any longer. You've passed the apex of your leap and you're descending now."
"How far are we going to make it?" the Man of Steel asked. Maybe now he was more like man of bronze, or brass...
Rayner hummed for a moment, employing a small part of the computational power of his Ring's AI to plot Kal's trajectory and overlay it upon a map. "You'll hit the water just off the beach."
"Really? So, I'm going to make it, then!" Maybe his powers weren't as far down as he'd worried.
"Were we just in low earth orbit there a moment ago?" GL queried with a wry tone.
"No. Not even close, we were passing through some high wispy clouds. Probably no more than 60 or 70 miles above sea level. So, I'm going to hit the ocean south of Rome."
"Yeah, we were actually more like about 35 miles high," Rayner did some quick estimates in his head and considered the map his Ring laid out in his visual field, "so you're going to hit the fishing waters off the cost of Anzio."
"Hey, Trinity...Did you hear that?" Kal asked.
"Yeah, your best leap from the building in Rome only gets you to the coast." The heroine's voice came thru the reserve charge, with a slight amount of static.
Kal considered, "It's way better than when I first started out as a teenager, but a far cry from flying between continents."
"Hey don't sell yourself short." Trinity sounded playful. "You could probably leap from Europe to Africa...across the Straits of Gibraltar!"
Rayner and Kal both chuckled. Rayner remarked, "That's only fourteen miles."
"Of course I could leap that." Superman continued. "You know what I meant...Metropolis to Tokyo is out and so is Anzio, Italy to San Salvador, El Salvador...or whereever Nightwing and his branch of the Resistance are."
The Amazon's voice took on a somewhat mournful quality, "Do you want me to break this news to Captain Marvel?"
"Yeah, and find out where Nightwing is, so I can ask the Lantern to fly me there."
Kal looked down and saw the water looming up at at him. He noticed that GL was slowing his own descent.
"Do you want me to slow you down or cushion your impact?" GL's voice came thru the reserve charge.
"No, I need to understand my current limits so I can figure out where my powers are likely to stabilize." He tried to stretch out and hit the ocean like a platform diver, but Kal's momentum was still pretty large in the direction of Sicily. With a thunderous splash, he hit the sea at about a 60 degree angle, instead of straight up-and-down. He hit the ocean a few hundred meters off the coast of Anzio and skipped across the ocean like a flat stone thrown by a child . This might leave a bruise or two.
Kyle followed Kal down and hovered over the water near where he came to rest.
As Kal swam in to shore, GL's ring alerted him to several man-sized objects rapidly approaching from the center of Anzio. Life signs indicated some form of mechanically and biologically augmented people. Apparently armed, they converged rapidly toward a spot on the shore near where Kal was about arrive. "Kal are you hearing the flying enhanced humans approaching our position?" They probably aren't going to offer us coffee and biscotti or a good deal on satellite television. Kyle went dark, turning the glow of his uniform, forcefield and ring down to almost zero.
The Kryptonian didn't respond. Perhaps he didn't hear them or Kyle. Trying to swim straight to shore on a moonless night probably consumed most of his concentration.
Green Lantern had several fairly easy ways of dealing the approaching troopers. His Ring could prevent them from detecting himself and Superman by muting their sound waves and bending their light rays away from the troopers. Or he could us it to jam their weapons or foul their jet packs. He could prevent their lungs from metabolising oxygen or disrupt the neurotransmitters in their brains that processed images and sounds or those that controlled their arms and legs—strike those last three. They were fine ideas, but the pilot wasn't sure he had the fine control over his Ring yet to keep from killing the approaching cyborgs whilst mucking about in their internal organs. Regardless, he felt fairly certain that Kal would want old fashioned fisticuffs, anyway. So he let them come.
As Kal waded out of the surf, about a dozen of the troopers hovered into his view. They carried rifles and wore green uniforms with yellow painted jet packs that had small yellow wings. Each trooper had some form of sensory augmentation in the eyes and ears, all similar, but none identical. The troopers called out in Italian in unison. It seemed more than a little eerie...
GL's Ring translated; but he didn't really need it to...As expected. He turned to Superman, "They want us to surrender."
"Predictable." Kal knelt on the beach and placed his hands behind his head. He heard the hum of GL's forcefield as he lowered himself to the beach and knelt as well.. The Son of Kryption spoke under his breath, "I can see their chests all rising and falling together; they're breathing in rhythm."
Green Lantern checked the troopers' life signs again and noted that not only did they speak in unison and breath in rhythm, but their heart beats were synchronized as well. Hmmm. "All of their hearts are beating in synch as well."
The troopers all touched down on the beach in a circle around the heroes, a perfect circle, evenly spaced. Two of them approached in lockstep, removing handcuffs from their belts in unison. The others trained their weapons: half on the Son of Krypton, the other half on the Green Lantern.
GL asked, "Do you think you're still bulletproof and laser-proof?"
Superman replied, "I suspect we'll find out in a moment."
As the first trooper reached for Kal's hands, the Man of Steel swirled around grabbing the thumb on the hand reaching toward him. He bent it backward until the trooper winced and yanked the hand back. Kal noticed the several of the others twitch the same hand. While his attacker was distracted, the Man of Tomorrow (would that be Man of Today, up here in the future?) swept its legs out from under it. As the attacker fell, it flailed its arms. Kal grabbed the arm closest to him, moved speedily up to the shoulder and grabbed its torso. He flung the trooper around in a semi-circle and tossed it up and away from the sea, ripping the rifle off it's back as he did. It sprawled through the air and landed a dozen yards outside the circle of attackers. Hmmm. I meant to toss it back over the dunes.
The first attacker knocked down two of its fellow troopers before either could react. Superman wondered how fast they would recover.
Meanwhile Rayner dispensed with his attacker in an even more old fashioned way: he threw sand in its eyes. The creature stumbled away distracted. The pilot reached out through his Ring forming a construct of a set of pincers that grabbed the attacker's rifle off of its back. Taking the barrel of the rifle in both hands and wielding it like club, he smacked the attacker's head in the temple with the flat of rifle's the butt-stock. The second attacker went down. Rayner hoped it was down for the count, but he couldn't concern himself with that right now.
Eight of the remaining attackers raised their rifles in unison and took aim: four at Kal, four at Rayner. Rayner formed corks from Ring energy and shoved them down the barrels of the rifles aimed at him and then turned the energy construct from cork into iron. He wondered if the weapons would crack or explode the way they did in movies. The attackers pulled their triggers and nothing happened. Rayner decided the rifles needed cracked barrels as well; he willed more energy into the iron plugs and made the energy into solid iron as well. Then he willed the plugs to expand. Presently four satisfying cracks split the air. These rifles would still make good clubs. He wondered if they attackers would think to use them that way.
The other four attackers each fired a three rounds at Kal. With his eyes, he focused enough heat on three rounds to melt them into slag. He couldn't burn them into vapors fast enough. He sped up his movements and dodged the next six bullets, moving in and out and around their flight paths, as though performing really fast tai-chi. For the last ones he dropped to the surface of the sandy beach, allowing the bullets to simply fly over him. Then he rolled along the beach like a log and hit the attacker's legs hard enough to break some and pull hips out of joint in the others. It wasn't his usual method of pulling punches, but it worked. The first three troopers Kal had knocked down, recovered their feet. He heard Kyle's attackers choking and gagging and saw them pass out, collapsing on the beach.
Kal dashed up the beach to where the three attackers had pulled themselves up to one knee and were getting back into fighting stances. What was it the Smallville High boxing coach had said? 'Keep your guard up. Jab and circle left!' Kal figured this would be useful about now. Or not. The first of the attackers advanced with a roundhouse kick toward Kal's head. He grabbed the foot with both hands as it approached his head. He moved up the leg and grabbed the thigh. He spun the attacker over and dropped him on his back.
The sound of jet packs came from above and several more of the Troopers swarmed into the fight. Again arranging themselves in a circle around Kal and the Lantern, they moved in unison, closing the circle. Kal looked over his shoulder, "Back to back! Let's fight off as many of these guys as we can."
Kal back-peddled to the center of the circle and Kyle joined him in a single bound. GL floated in like an astronaut on the moon. "Did you ever learn boxing, Kal?"
"It's a long story, but yes."
"I took a semester of it at the Academy. It was a phys-ed requirement."
"So, jab and spin left, then. It isn't like we can exactly circle left here."
Rayner tossed the two rifles he'd planned to use as clubs outside the circle. He was pretty sure everything these attackers saw, heard and did was being transmitted somewhere. They appeared to be controlled against their will or over their skill set. Some of them may have been actively resisting, while others just lacked fighting skill. As an artist he noted that the Troopers' movements lacked all poetry and humanity. In the midst of a fight, a boxer or a kung-fu fighter moves with a certain grace and poetry of motion. These Troopers had none of that. The net result was that the Troopers moved like zombies. The Troopers hulked in and began throwing awkward punches.
Rayner wondered if they could be rescued, their humanity restored. He decided the best way to save them would be return to his own time and gather a greater force to counter the conquerors in the space battle at the Jump Gate, prevent this future from ever happening...
GL and Superman both kept their guards up; Kal blocked the first punch on his forearm, while Rayner turned into his Trooper and took the punch on his shoulder, applying a bit of Ring energy to disperse its force across his body. The heroes jabbed and spun left almost in unison, nearly tripping on eachothers' feet in the process. Maybe the whole back to back thing wasn't such a good idea until they had more practice. On the other hand, this was likely as not to be their practice.
The each landed a few jabs and some body blows on their attackers, but having numbers to their advantage, the attackers could rest between blows. Rayner and Kal, naturally could not. They accelerated the punches and began to mix in more powerful kicks. As one attacker might fall, another rose back up to take its place.
"This is going nowhere." Rayner declared. He interlocked his right arm through the Kryptonian's left. "Close your eyes on the count of three," he whispered and counted quickly. On three he made a blinding flash of light in the eyes of all the Troopers. For a moment they staggered and while the attackers were off-balance, GL raised himself and Superman eight meters into the air. And then they sped off due west. As they passed over the horizon from the point of view the Troopers, the pilot slowly bent their flight path around in a wide arc to the north.
"GL, where are you taking us?"
"We're going to St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican."
"It's the middle of the night, we aren't going to get an audience with the Holy Father now."
Rayner chuckled. "If he's even alive. I expect he'd be one of the first the Conquerors killed or sent to the salt mines. I just think we should go light a couple of candles. Do the same kind of thing we did at the Western Wall in Jerusalem when we were there a few weeks ago." Besides, Rayner thought to himself, I also need a few minutes to look at the art and reflect on the greatness of humanity reaching toward the Divine
Earth. Sicily. Chloe.
Before dawn the next morning, Chloe awoke with a start. Opening her eyes, she saw one of the tiny carols in the ancient Library of Sicily, a room where monks and scribes had slept, a thousand years before, in Medieval times. The walls and the ceiling looked very similar to the room she went to sleep in the night before, but the the cot felt sturdier. And … why didn't she smell any scent of smoke from the fire she'd started the night before? She'd forgotten to open the flue in the tiny fireplace before she started the kindling. Fortunately, she'd gotten it open before the logs had caught and she hadn't had to test either the Lantern Corps reserve charge or the Amazon resistance to injury. She knew the reserve charge worked. She felt that hollow sensation in her gut again, the one that came back along with the memories of her fight with the Bizarro on a Kansas State Highway in the outskirts of Smallville. Every time she'd needed her Amazon powers they'd been there for her, but she didn't like to put them to the test except in the line of duty, or super-duty. For that matter, where was the draftiness that had led her to light the fire in the first place?
Chloe stood and looked around...sturdy stone walls, a stiff cot, and large high windows on the north and south sides that provided plenty of light for study without all the heat in the summer. All of this she remembered clearly from last night and more distantly from years before during her graduate studies as an Amazon. But she smelled no scent of smoke, and the fireplace held neither ashes nor embers of the fire she'd made a few hours before to keep her warm.
And yet it wasn't cold. Instead, she felt the warmth of a radiant electric heater. Hearing the sound of footsteps that echoed out in the narrow hallway that ran between the rows of tiny carols, Chloe took up an Amazon martial arts stance. With her eyes fixed on the opening to her space, she reached for her sword in the place where she'd left it at the foot of her cot. Then... she noticed her armor and weapons were missing. A candlestick could be an improvised weapon, she scooped it up and changed her stance for more aggressive combat. At the sound of running water in the shower from father down the hall toward where the footsteps had padded, Chloe relaxed.
What the heck was going on here -electricity working? Armor gone? At length, she looked up to the tiny window and where she'd expected to see the constellation Hercules or Libra in the summer sky, instead she saw Pisces indicating fall. She knew she'd seen summer constellations from the skies over Rome after sunset... Had she been mistaken? Some of the stars had been missing from the constellations and now that she thought about it...where had the Milky Way been in Rome? The clouds had cleared off as she approached Sicily and with as few electric lights as were working around southeastern Italy, the Milky Way should have shown clearly.
Thinking for a few moments, Chloe determined that she hadn't been mistaken: armor, smoke, ashes,constellations. Her memory wasn't at fault. She must have time jumped again, like when she went from the middle of nowhere 12,000 lightyears off in space in this future, back to the Darkseid battle at Alpha Centauri and then back to the President trying to give them the Orion Capsule or something... How convenient that she'd turned up in the Library of Sicily and not in her old house in Smallville during junior high...She hoped she'd still be here when the day started and the Mother Superior of the nearby Monastery or the Curator of the Library would come in and put the graduate students onto their work!
The sound of shower water still drifted down the hall. So, Chloe took a moment and jogged quickly and quietly up the hall the other way to where the footsteps had come. She glanced in the doorless rooms on the way. She recognized Phillipa's and Nike's carols on the Amazon side, along with Tomas's and Friedrich's on the other side. All sleeping. And at the end of the hallway, in the last carol, she saw her own armor arranged at the foot of the cot. A quick glance showed none of the battle scars from the engagements with Darkseid. She also recognized the few personal items she saw on the desk and atop the clothing chest. Shortly, the owner of that armor and those nicknacks would be coming back down the hallway and she needed to leave her some instructions.
The Past. Earth. Sicily. Cassiopeia.
At dawn the next morning, Cassiopeia awoke with a start. Opening her eyes, she saw her tiny carol in the ancient Library of Sicily, a room where monks and scribes had slept, a thousand years before, in Medieval times. The walls and the ceiling looked right, the the cot felt right, but something was off. Why did she smell the scent of wood smoke in her carol when the electric radiant heater was working just fine and no one had built a fire last night, least of all her? She looked at the wall next her pillow and saw a note there in her own handwriting.
Dearest Cassiopeia
I remember you so clearly. You have amazing potential and the world is wide open before you. Your Amazon sisters love you. Your strength and skill and knowledge are growing, but you still have no memories of what came before the night you washed up on the shores of Themyscaria. Don't worry. It will all come back to you, in due time, and then you will remember me. In the mean time, I need you to do some research into lost, ancient supernatural weapons reputed to have the ability to wound deities and angels.
Thanks, you're the best.
Chloe
Cassiopeia hoped her fellow graduate students, the Curator and the Mother Superior wouldn't mind her diverting from her studies of Amazon and Mediterranean antiquities, for a few hours to research ancient supernatural weapons. Lost ancient supernatural weapons... why had the writer of the note asked for this?