Beta-read by the incomparable arg914. Special thanks to technial advisor, The Five Foot Ninja.
Arsenal's gloved fingers gave the barest flick and a wall-length holographic replica of the Earth swelled out from the south wall of the Watchtower conference room.
"Hey, I think I know that place," The Flash said as Roy's hand moved again and the globe started to rotate.
"Might be harder to find your way around in the dark," Arsenal told him humorlessly. "We're getting reports of black-outs of varying intensity from all over the planet."
Martha uncrossed her legs and sat up in her chair. "There's an outage in Metropolis. Superman's on it."
"Yeah, that's one of the bigger ones," Roy said. He wiggled his fingers and a series of web-like markers sprouted from various locations on the globe. "Shanghai is completely in the dark – you can imagine what kind of hell that's causing – and there are a ton of smaller incidents, ranging from city blocks to – to, um…."
He cast a tense, sightless look at Midori, who sensed the attention, despite having spent the meeting staring miserably at a laptop near the far end of the table.
"My toaster worked, but my blender didn't," she mumbled. Martha and Quiver exchanged a glance. In the weeks since Midori had left him, she and Roy had barely been able to look at each other.
Gren leaned forward. "I'm thinking your blender issues are coming from somewhere else. Like a bad cord."
Midori looked up from her notes. "No, I measured the –"
"Let's bag the blender talk," Arsenal cut in brusquely. "I want teams out there helping with the major outages. Superman's got Metropolis under control, but Karachi's burning and Al-Qahirah is in chaos. Gren, Meera – head over to India and do what you can. Flash, Quiver – there's an emergency crew waiting for you in Egypt.
"Everyone rides with Gren," he added, nodding at the Green Lantern. "These disturbances are too random to risk using the Jav."
Arsenal turned to Batman, who was standing against the wall just behind Martha's chair. "You two head out for Shang–. What's the problem?" He asked Martha, who was squinting at the front of his crimson tunic.
"You've got dog hair all over you," she said. "What happened to the super-anti-shedding serum?"
"Shanghai," Roy said in a low, terse voice. Martha glanced back at Batman, touched her hip and was instantly swallowed up by her becaped blonde doppelganger. With a final expressionless look at Roy, Batman gave his shoulders a slight, upward thrust and the handhold Superwoman used to transport him snapped out from the back of his fighting suit. As they followed the others out to the hangar, they could hear Arsenal ordering Midori to do what she could to stabilize the planet's power grids and also to trace the source of the disruption.
"Which do you want me to do first?" she asked timidly.
Roy's answer was drowned in the hum of the unsealing airlock, but the irritation in his voice was palpable.
"Oh, God," Wally moaned, looking back toward the conference room with a pained look as the team was enveloped in a sphere of emerald light.
"Business," Batman said firmly.
"Tell that to the big red hairball," Gren muttered. He lifted his comrades through the airlock and pushed on toward Earth.
Nearly every superhero team on the planet worked to restore power and order to the cities plagued by the mysterious outages. Within days, stability had been re-established in those places where the word could have previously applied and the problem itself seemed to disappear. Midori, having devoted several sleepless days to restoring the power grids of the affected cities, had not been able to trace the source of the disruptions; Arsenal responded to her apologetic confession of failure with indifferent silence.
Three weeks before she had noticed her inexplicably unresponsive blender, Midori had moved back to Hudson, the quaint Catskill Mountain town where she'd lived before moving in with Roy. She was unable to return to her old apartment, which had been rented out, but the landlord also managed a handful of newly acquired town homes. Midori leased the largest one – the advance on the anti-shedding solution she'd developed more than covered the rent – and sluggishly began rebuilding her home laboratory. In an effort to avoid traumatizing him, she had left RJ temporarily behind. By the time the lights went out in Metropolis, she had thoroughly researched trends in joint interstate pet custody and had worked out a schedule that Roy listlessly accepted without examining.
"Did he want this dog?" Lian asked Wally over the phone as she looked around her father's unkempt living room. RJ had deposited several large nests worth of fur throughout the hardwood floors and furniture and in what appeared to be distress over the disappearance of his green bipedal mother, he had gnawed off the leg from one of Roy's couches. Roy had either not noticed this or simply lacked the energy to fix the sofa. It was most likely the latter; he had spent most of his free time collapsed on it and could not have missed the pronounced list as he settled miserably onto its hair-coated cushions.
Wally was through Roy's front door before Lian had set down her cell phone.
"Where is he?" he asked. There was enough fur scattered around the room to put together a new dog, but neither RJ nor Roy were evident.
Lian led Wally down the hallway to her father's bedroom. She stopped at the doorframe and gestured helplessly into the room.
Roy lay on the top of his unmade bed, staring vacantly at the ceiling. Sprawled lengthwise across his body was RJ, muzzle tucked dolefully beneath Roy's unshaven chin. Even from the door, Wally could see the thick layer of long golden hair covering his buddy's olive-colored sweatshirt and black jeans.
RJ released a plaintive sigh and Roy stroked him absently. Alarmed by this display of inter-species despair, Wally took Lian by the arm and pulled her back into the hallway.
"What happened to the shedding cure?" he asked.
"It's not on the market yet," Lian said. "And he won't ask her for it."
Wally groaned softly, then asked, "Can you dog-sit for a while? I've got to get him out of here."
Roy listlessly allowed himself to be directed into the shower and some slightly less hairy clothes, but dinner in Central City, where Linda had agreed to cook one of his favorite meals, had almost no impact on his despondent mood. He barely responded to a few casual questions as he picked at his chicken piccata. After a while, the Wests stopped trying to draw him into the conversation.
A few hours later, Linda pulled her husband into the kitchen.
"Is he going to sit in our living room with his face in his hands all night?" she asked.
"He's really down," Wally said. "I hate to leave him alone."
"Sure, he's down," Linda said. "He just held open the door and let the love of his life walk away. He's not afraid of interstellar monsters or murderous super-powered androids, but making a commitment –"
"He's had two horrible marriages," Wally reminded her. "Commitment hasn't been his best friend."
Linda's eyes softened. "Should I get the guest room ready?"
Wally pressed a grateful kiss against his wife's cheek and returned to the living room. He sank into the couch next to Roy, who looked up and said forlornly, "I try to stay objective when I talk to her, but everything I say comes out so mean."
There was no point in disagreeing with this. "You don't want to drive Midori away from the League," Wally said. "It's going to get easier. Give it some time."
"She doesn't have time," Roy said morosely and Wally realized that their conversation had just veered unexpectedly onto another path. "She has to meet someone and fall in love with him and have his baby. Before her 'window of reproductive viability' closes."
"She so didn't say that to you," Wally said.
"Oh, yes she did," Roy said. A moment later, he added, "She didn't mean anything by it. That's just Midori."
"Pretty brutal, though," Wally said. "She hasn't – gotten started on that little project, has she?"
Roy stood up. "Could you please take me home?" he asked tiredly. "RJ's probably wondering where I am."
The manor was always quiet, but rarely so silent. Bruce stood by the bottom of the stairs, listening for creak or a whisper that might telegraph the location of his butler and possibly Martha, who should have gotten off work an hour earlier. She had largely assumed Alfred's role of waking Bruce for dinner, in what was an appreciably more pleasant experience for him than the elderly butler's practice of placing a cup of coffee on the nightstand and abruptly switching on the lights.
Ear cocked, Bruce walked slowly toward the kitchen. He stopped at the door, determined that despite the stillness, there were two people positioned in the vicinity of the kitchen table, and pushed open the door.
Martha sat at the table, apprehensively scrutinizing an unopened business-sized envelope. Across from her sat Alfred, the thick lenses of his glasses magnifying the concern in his pale blue eyes.
"What's going on?" Bruce asked, when neither of them reacted to his presence in the doorway. Martha looked up at him.
"A letter from Gotham U," she said.
Bruce dropped into the seat next to hers. "Open it."
"It's a rejection," Martha said, staring at the envelope.
"You don't know that," Bruce said. He wondered how long they'd been sitting there. "It could be a request for an interview."
"They would have called me for an interview," Martha said numbly.
"They may want more information," Bruce said. "Or maybe they're just acknowledging your application." Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Alfred give a subtle shake of his head. Apparently, he had already suggested these possibilities.
"I received an acknowledgment months ago," she told him. "And if they'd wanted more information, there'd be a return envelope inside this one. There isn't."
Bruce's eyes moved across the thin envelope. He repeated, "Open it."
Martha wet her lips and slid an index finger along the upper corner of the envelope, ripping a jagged line across the top. She fumbled the folded letter from its paper confines, fixed her eyes on the type beneath the letterhead for a few tense seconds, then closed them.
"I would have been their first choice," she said. "But they're closing the department."
Bruce covered her free hand with his and took the letter from her.
"Why?" Alfred asked, his voice filled with disappointment.
"Reallocating their funds," Martha told him hollowly, as Bruce read a slightly elaborated version of this explanation. "No profit in my kind of research."
Except for the potentially massive benefit of reducing the crime rate, which cost American society alone billions each year, Bruce thought, as he folded the letter and placed it onto the table. He studied Martha's downcast expression, tightened his hand around hers and gave Alfred a meaningful glance. The old man pushed back his chair and shambled out of the kitchen.
"You would have been their first choice," Bruce said. "That's something."
Martha nodded bleakly. Bruce could tell that she was struggling not to cry.
"Listen to me," he said. "And when you do, remember that part – that you would have had that job if it still existed."
She nodded at the tabletop, her eyes shimmering. Bruce leaned forward and said, "Even if you'd gotten the job, it would be a long time before you'd have had the chance to do what you wanted to do. You'd have to spend years carrying out other people's research and publishing papers until you built up the academic chops to start conducting your own studies."
Hoarsely, Martha said, "But that's –" Bruce held up a hand before she could finish.
"I know how it's done. But what if you had a chance to bypass all that, to get right to the heart of your research now and to do it here in Gotham?"
She understood exactly where he was going and started to shake her head.
"Hear me out," Bruce said. "This is not about Bruce Wayne setting up some lightweight operation to entertain his girlfriend. I'm talking about an accredited research facility affiliated with the university that just said they would hire you if they could."
Still shaking her head, Martha said, "Bruce…"
"Is what you want to do less important than your ego?" Bruce asked quietly, remembering Jim Gordon's comment about Martha not wanting to feel like a kept woman.
She sat back in her chair. "This isn't about my ego," she said. "It's about us."
He waited.
"This has got to be an equal relationship," Martha said finally. "You buy me a career – a multi-million dollar research foundation – that tips things way out of balance."
"It brings things back into balance," Bruce corrected her. "After you decided to give up everything you've spent your life working for, if necessary, to stay with me in Gotham City."
She looked a little surprised, as though she had never regarded this as a sacrifice. Fueled by her momentary lack of resistance, Bruce added, "Gotham University would co-sponsor the institute through a private grant –"
"From you," Martha said.
"From the Wayne Foundation," Bruce said. "Which sponsors ventures like this every day. The board of directors would have to approve it," he added. "But a thoroughly written proposal should convince them."
"Is this proposal already written?" Martha asked warily.
Bruce shook his head. "That's your job."
It was the right thing to say; he could see it in the relief that washed across her face. He was not just handing this to her. She would have to earn the job – at least somewhat. Bruce wanted to tell Martha that she'd earned it already, through her countless years of devotion to what they both knew would remain a thankless and grossly undervalued undertaking.
"You'd kind of be my boss," Martha said pensively.
Bruce shook his head. "Not at all. In fact, maybe just the opposite." At her questioning look, he said, "I might – at some point in the future – be interested in a job."
As Martha's eyes grew, Bruce added, "The one I have now – I wasn't planning on dying doing it."
He had worked this out years ago; he would someday have to retire. Going out in a blaze of glory was a conceit he could not afford: Nobody could be allowed to claim with any credibility that he had killed Batman. The ensuing battle for control of Gotham could wipe out the lifetime he had devoted to its protection. He would not do that to his city or himself. When Batman could not physically keep up with the demands of the suit, he would hang it up. This would not be for a good, long time, he said emphatically, as he explained this to Martha.
If she agreed to build the institute with him, Bruce continued, he might have the chance to keep up the fight – in a somewhat less hazardous manner.
"I don't know," Martha whispered. "All the paper cuts in this business… tragic."
"Then you'll think about it?" Bruce asked. Martha nodded, a bit too quickly. He said sharply, "Not because you want to give my 'waning years' meaning. Because it would be the right thing for you."
"I am thinking about me," Martha assured him. "And you, too. We'll need someone to sweep the lab floors. I'm not gonna do it."
Bruce pulled Martha onto his lap. "I'll sweep the floors with you."
"I need to ask you something though," Martha said seriously.
"Go ahead."
She hesitated. "Did you talk to Adrienne about letting me move Harvey to a better cell?"
It was a question she might have asked weeks ago, but the answer had just become more important.
"No," he said. "I haven't exchanged a word with him since the day we moved you back into your office."
He had, however, put in a call to a friend of his on Arkham's board of governors who agreed with Bruce that moving Harvey to a less restricted cell could highlight the rare success story among the asylum's hugely recidivist population. Bruce was sure his friend had wasted no time in passing on this opinion to Adrienne.
He had done this as much for Harvey as he had Martha, but considering how things had turned out, Bruce realized, it had been a mistake. As Martha apologized for having asked and started to kiss him, he promised himself he would never again run behind-the-scenes interference on her professional life. To do so was to compromise the reputation she was had worked so many years to build.
"We might do this?" he asked between kisses.
"We might," Martha said. "Let me think about it. I love you," she added.
Alfred poked his head through the kitchen door.
"Excuse me," he said. "But as it appears everyone's spirits have been lifted, I should like to get a start on dinner."
On Colu, living space was largely restricted to modest utilitarian cubicles meant for the individual or rare couple to nourish themselves and sleep. These ascetic dwellings were not the function of an overcrowded society – reproduction was, in fact, diligently controlled – but rather from an ingrained cultural belief that basic bodily requirements did not merit the resources of, say, a state-of-the-art laboratory.
The first time Roy took Midori to Wayne Manor, she asked Bruce how many families lived there. She could not fathom his need to reside in a place with fifteen bedrooms when the mansion had only two occupants. As Roy repeatedly dragged a finger across his throat – a gesture he would explain to her later that evening – Midori informed Bruce in the most helpful of tones that she had observed people living in a cardboard refrigerator box under the highway near Gotham International. She thought they might be willing to help him populate his enormous house.
When the implications of this gaffe had been made clear to her – again, later that night – a mortified Midori toiled for days on a palm-sized, laser-guided grappling gun, which she presented to Bruce as an apology gift. Her remorse went a long way toward explaining why, in the years that followed, she continued to be welcome at Wayne Manor. But she had never ventured there alone until a month after her break-up with Roy.
The dinner invitation had been Martha's idea. In Wally, Dick Grayson and his other lifelong friends, Roy had access to an abundance of emotional support in the aftermath of the split. Midori's social resources were more limited. Gren, who lived a few towns away, had attempted to console her by taking her out for a drink. The effects of this innocent outing quickly became legend throughout the Catskill Mountains as Gren learned the hard way that Coluan physiology and less than a single bottle of beer made for a calamitous combination. A substantial amount of Midori's advance from the pet grooming company went toward paying the damages.
"I want to make sure she's doing OK," Martha had explained. "We said we wouldn't take sides, but Roy's been here."
Bruce had a lower comfort level with Midori than he did Roy. He agreed to the evening with the provision that the visit not interfere with their nightly patrol. This turned out not to be a problem; Midori had monitor duty that night; Martha could drop her off at headquarters after dessert.
"Thank you so much for inviting me," Midori said as Bruce handed her a glass of strawberry soda and seated himself on the couch next to Martha. "RJ is with – I don't have RJ this week," she finished lamely.
"Have you reconnected with your old Hudson crew?" Martha asked. "Ryan and LaTisha –"
"LaTonya," Midori corrected. "A little. But it's hard to spend much time with them because of all of the men."
"The men?" asked Martha, whose deceptively light hand on Bruce's leg was suddenly the only thing keeping him from bolting from the room.
"I was going to research the most efficient way of meeting a man who wants to fall in love and get married and have babies," Midori explained, oblivious to the twitch working at Martha's cheeks. "But apparently, there's a newspaper that tells people when members of the Justice League have left their boyfriends. And then men ask them out. It's called The Weekly Worldwide Truth and –"
"Don't let my mother hear you calling that rag a newspaper," Martha cautioned. "So you're dating? Uh – a lot of guys?" Bruce's trapped thigh tensed under her palm.
"I'm scheduling them," Midori said, looking bemused. "But they never seem to show up for the first date."
Martha frowned. "That's weird."
"It is," Midori agreed. "Especially after I've screened them so carefully."
"Screened them?" Martha repeated. The twitch returned to her cheeks.
Midori nodded. "I only agree to dates with men who want to get married and have babies."
Bruce rapped Martha's hand, which was now digging into the flesh above his knee.
"Sorry," Martha said, releasing him. She turned back to Midori, "So you – meet someone in the supermarket or somewhere and he asks if you want to get some coffee and you ask him if he wants to have some babies?"
Midori seemed pleased that Martha had caught on to her system so quickly. "Exactly. I can't waste time dating men who don't want to have babies. This process eliminates –"
She stopped, taken aback, as Martha whirled facefirst into Bruce's chest.
Midori noted her friend's quaking shoulders with distress. "Is she sad?" she asked. "Because my babies won't be Roy's?"
Bruce looked down at Martha, whose tears of silent laughter were rolling down his sweater. "Very," he said gravely. Martha's shoulders shook harder.
"I'm sad, too," Midori said and her yellow eyes began to glisten. "But LaTonya says when I find the father of my children, I'll feel much better."
By the time she had finished this sentence, Midori and Bruce were alone on the couch. Martha had vanished so quickly that Bruce's arms were still encircling the space where she had been sitting.
Bruce got to his feet. "She's overcome," he told Midori, who seemed touched by the depth of Martha's compassion. "I'd better go check on her."
He found Martha flopped on his bed, laughing uncontrollably. "You're a terrible friend," he said mildly.
"Her babies won't be Roy's," Martha gasped. "Her babies won't be anyone's." She sat up, still laughing, and wiped her eyes. "I'd better straighten her out."
"We agreed not to take sides," Bruce reminded her.
Soberly, Martha said, "Not telling her is taking sides."
But her tutelage on the finer points of dating would be forcibly delayed. As soon as she and Bruce rejoined Midori downstairs, the living room went dark.
They didn't make it out onto the streets of Gotham before the first rock shattered a storefront window, but the shock of being plunged into darkness did have some delay on the city's usual complement of looters, gangs and simple vandals.
Midori had brought neither rocket boots nor weapons to dinner. Considering the worldwide scope of the previous outages, it was agreed she should be returned to headquarters. Superwoman ferried her there quickly, then rejoined Batman in the heart of the mayhem, which was, predictably, centered in the Narrows.
A telepathic call from Meera reached Batman less than an hour later.
We need you at headquarters right away, she told him.
Batman withdrew his fist from a gang-banger's mouth. "I'm busy."
Roy says to let the police handle Gotham, Meera replied. We just found out what's causing these outages and we need you. Superwoman, too. We're launching the Javelin the moment you get here.
Stopping the disruption at its source might see the lights back on in Gotham sooner. Batman scattered a quartet of hoodlums with a broom-sweep/twist kick combination and popped the fighting suit's built-in handgrip seconds before Superwoman seized it.
Midori and Quiver were doing a pre-flight count by the time Superwoman and Batman boarded the shuttle; the others – except for Gren – were already buckled in.
"You consider this a safe move?" Batman asked Arsenal. "We lose power in mid-flight and we're dead."
Superwoman put in, "I could fly outside the shuttle and make sure –"
"No you can't," Arsenal said. "We're going into space."
He ordered them to strap in, promising to brief everyone as soon as the shuttle cleared the atmosphere. The Javelin-13, like its short-lived successor, was engineered to withstand limited forays into deep space. Its boundaries had not been tested – this being done in increments by Midori, Gren and Quiver – but the team had embarked on several successful trial runs just beyond the outer reaches of Mars.
"Gren's following us in case we run into any problems," Roy said. "Midori's pinpointed the signal behind the blackouts and she thinks it may be a poorly administered distress call."
"From where?" asked Batman, as the shuttle started to lift off.
"The asteroid belt," Roy replied.
"Someone's calling us from an asteroid?" Superwoman asked skeptically.
"That's where the signal's coming from," Midori replied from her pilot's chair. "We don't know what's sending it."
"Could be a ship," Quiver mused as the shuttle pushed through the ionosphere. The sky pouring in from the shuttle's portholes shifted from powder blue to near-black. She glanced over at Midori. "Arm the weapons."
"And the translator," Meera added. She spoke English and French. As an empath, Meera could read intent universally, but her telepathy was limited to the languages she understood.
A craft built with cutting edge Earth-based technology would have taken months to reach Mars, but Midori had crafted the Jav's hyper-fast solar-powered propulsion system from an amalgam of alien technologies. They were rounding the red planet within an hour. Not long ago, this demonstration of scientific prowess would have given rise to profuse boasting from Roy that his girlfriend was a genius. During this trip, he merely dispensed quiet instructions to individual members of the crew and stayed away from the cockpit unless it was necessary to get an updated estimate on their arrival time.
"We're approaching the area where the signal came from," Midori said as the shuttle skimmed the shifting border of the asteroid belt.
Quiver leaned forward. "I don't see anything but rocks."
"Big rocks," the Flash said. "How 'bout we not get too close?"
Midori repositioned the Jav to ensure maximum safety and activated a series of sensory probes. She worked in a largely silent shuttle, zeroing in on the coordinates where she had most recently picked up the signals that had sent a dozen Earth cities into darkness.
It was a painstaking process: radiation and the constant movement of tumbling asteroids made for constant interference. When the breakthrough was finally achieved, it came from the team's least mechanical resource.
"Yes!" said Meera, her voice rich with the triumph of discovery. She turned to Arsenal and added more soberly, "People. They're terrified… suffering."
"Where?" he asked.
Meera shook her head and gestured broadly through the cockpit windshield, where dozens of enormous asteroids loomed.
"Can you be a little more specific?" Arsenal asked sarcastically. He cast an impatient glance at Midori, who was pouring frantically over her readouts.
Meera shook her head. "Sorry." She concentrated for a moment and added, "There's maybe twenty-five of them. Not from Earth. I hope the translator works."
"I've got them," Midori said. She punched a few numbers into her console. What appeared to be an ordinary asteroid popped onto the shuttle's monitor.
"They're inside it," she said. "It's some kind of ship."
"Try to contact them," Arsenal said. "Meera, tell Gren to stand by."
A few minutes later, an excruciatingly loud synthetic voice boomed through the shuttle. "SOMEONE IS THERE?"
"Turn down the volume," Roy told Midori. He rubbed an ear. "And ask why they've been disrupting our planet's power network."
Midori complied. "He says they're on a peaceful scientific mission."
"He's lying," Meera said instantly. "That's not why they're here."
"Tell him he's lying," Arsenal instructed Midori darkly.
Blushing olive, she repeated this message. A few minutes later, she said, "It's a harvesting station. There's a precious metal in some of the asteroids their people use to power their technology."
"And they didn't feel like asking us for it," Roy said. According to interstellar law, the resources within the confines of a solar system belonged jointly to its sentient occupants. With Martian society extinct, Earth had long been the sole beneficiary of a mineral wealth it was nowhere near capable of utilizing.
"Can we rescue them first?" Superwoman asked. "And scold them later?"
"Ask them why they felt they had to plunge half our cities into chaos in order to get our attention," Arsenal directed.
Midori restored the volume. A halting mechanical voice replied, "Regret crude call distress. Device communication broken. Ship breaking. Controls temperature breaking. Dying us."
As Meera predicted, there were about two dozen scientists and miners on the station, which was concentrated within a wedge-shaped segment of the large asteroid. They had been harvesting minerals without incident for almost a year, relatively safe in the stable orbit they'd assumed, when a meteor rammed the outpost, irreparably damaging its temperature controls. Engineers had been struggling futilely for weeks to restore the system. They were steadily losing control over an artificial climate that careened erratically from frigid to broiling. Heatstroke had killed five members of the crew. Within hours, the station's leader continued, they would all be dead.
"Not within hours," Midori said. She looked at Arsenal. "They've got a massive bank of generators they use for mineral processing. They're superheating. They've got less than forty minutes."
"Send Gren in there now," Arsenal told Meera. "Have him evacuate everybody. Tell the outpost commander to get his people ready to move," he added to Midori. "And get coordinates so that we can land and help out."
She nodded, but did not turn back to her console. "It gets worse."
"How?" Frustration was creeping back into Roy's voice.
"Once the generators reach a certain temperature, they're going to explode," she said. "The chain reaction is going to blow apart the asteroid."
"That's fine," he replied. "We'll be out of here by then."
Midori shook her head. "The force of the explosion will send the fragments out of orbit. The placement of the generators and the projected velocity –"
"Get to the point," Batman interrupted.
"There's a more than fifty percent chance of a significant fragment bypassing Mars and slamming into the Earth."
"And we do like the dinosaurs," Roy said. He shook his head in disbelief. "C'mon, land this thing and let's get these people out of here. And figure out how we can prevent that explosion," he added.
With a look that expressed a complete absence of self-confidence in her ability to carry out his latter instruction, Midori relayed Arsenal's message to the outpost's leader and initiated the docking process. By the time the Jav was swallowed up by the rock-shielded doors of the mining station's hanger, Gren had already started the evacuation.
He had conjured a mammoth green solid-light school bus and had boarded nearly everyone who could walk. The outpost's occupants were largely human in appearance, though with a distinctly alien hue and hair texture and a slightly odd kink to their ears. Most of them appeared on the verge of collapsing, no surprise in the hothouse the outpost had become. Temperatures, Midori reported, were nearing 130 degrees Fahrenheit.
"Is this it?" Roy asked a solid-looking man who greeted them with gratitude radiating from his sweaty mauve face.
"Is eight more," the man said, speaking into the translator Roy held out to him. "But trapped." He gestured toward the west side of the station. "The cave-in traps five engineers." Then he pointed in the opposite direction. "The other cave-in traps three in dormitories."
Roy used a word the translator was programmed to ignore. "You go with your people," he said, jerking his head toward the emerald school bus. Apparently the tradition of going down with one's ship was not a part this particular culture. The outpost's commander bounded up the transport's oversized steps.
"You go with them," Roy told the Flash. "One ER probably won't be able to treat all these people. You may need to carry them somewhere fast – they look half-dead. And hysterical. You go, too," he added to Meera. "Keep them from freaking out while they're sailing through space in a school bus."
The Flash started to object to his assignment, but Arsenal had already turned away from him. He ordered Batman and Superwoman to find the engineers; he and Quiver would go after the people trapped in their living quarters.
"Roy," the Flash said tentatively. "I think I should –"
"Yo, West!" Gren shouted. He gestured impatiently for Wally to get on board. The Flash took a last reluctant look at the backs of his scattering teammates, then shot between the bus's folding green doors.
Arsenal, Quiver and Batman were wearing light suits designed to offer some protection from extreme temperatures, but the rapidly rising heat could be felt even through this gear. The overloading generators were already causing existing faults within the asteroid to destabilize; small rocks showered down on Quiver and Arsenal as they dashed toward the station's dormitories.
"There," shouted Quiver, pointing to a passageway. But moments before she and Arsenal reached it, a massive tremor shook the station and rocks came crashing around them.
"Shit," she said, as they shook pebbles from their hair and shoulders and looked in frustration at the entryway, which was now sealed off by a mountain of fallen rock.
Midori must have registered the quake; she was on the radio to Arsenal immediately, seeking to confirm his and Lian's safety. She had figured out a way to minimize the chances of an asteroid impacting the Earth.
"We can detonate the generators with our laser-cannon," she said. "But we need to achieve a precision hit before they explode on their own. If we direct the blast, we can minimize the size and trajectory of the asteroid fragments."
Arsenal threw up a hand to shield himself from a curtain of falling rock. "Good. How much time do we have?"
"I wish you'd come back now," she said, adding hesitantly, "No more than ten minutes."
"We'll be back by then," Roy said. "But just in case…. There's no scenario where you don't blow this asteroid before it poses a risk to Earth."
She agreed, her voice quavering. Roy turned back to his daughter, who was attempting to move enough boulders aside to get through the door to the living quarters. It was a losing battle.
"We're going back," Arsenal told her. "There's no way –"
The rest of his words were lost in an avalanche of rock. So were he and Quiver.
One of the five trapped engineers was dead by the time Superwoman and Batman broke through the landslide of rock, another was unconscious. Superwoman slung him over her shoulder, wrapped an arm around the waist of a second weakened survivor and flew them both back to the Jav. The doctor in Martha was already cataloging the sequence of treatments they'd need as she flew back to help Batman recover the remaining engineers, neither of whom could walk unassisted. By the time Batman made it back to the shuttle dragging a half-conscious, grossly overweight man, six minutes had passed since Midori's warning to Roy that only ten remained.
Midori turned to him fearfully.
"I can't reach Roy," she said. "Or Lian."
He nodded. "I'll find them," and disappeared back into the station.
As he raced down the corridor where he'd last seen his teammates, Batman spotted a pair of legs sticking out from a pile of rubble and felt his stomach heave. It was Roy. Refusing to let himself think about what he might find under the heavy stack of stone, Batman flung the rocks away with a wild urgency. Less than a minute later, he was ripping away the protective helmet of Arsenal's suit and pressing bare fingers against the spot in Roy's throat where Batman prayed a pulse would still beat.
The suit had been breached – Roy's body temperature was rising with the heat – but the throb of life that pulsed up from his sweaty flesh was strong and stable. Batman lugged him back to the shuttle, wondering if Superwoman had managed to find Quiver. Lian had last been with Arsenal. If she had been caught under that rockslide, he doubted even Martha would be able to get to her in the precious time they had left.
"Roy!" Midori screamed as Batman deposited him on the floor of the shuttle. She looked desperately as though she wanted to throw herself at him, but she did not step away from the controls.
"He's OK," Batman said. He looked around the shuttle. Superwoman had retrieved the last engineer – there were four of them huddled in the back of the Javelin – but she wasn't in the shuttle.
"She went to look for you and the others," Midori said. And in a voice that begged for forgiveness, she added, "We have to leave. Now."
Batman stared at her. "We can't –"
"We have one minute," Midori told him. "Before it's too late to change the direction of the explosion. If an asteroid hits the Earth, even a small one….
Aching, she repeated, "We have to go."
Batman gave her an incredulous look and lunged at the shuttle door. He nearly collided with Superwoman as she ducked back through the hatch. The heat had somehow affected her hologram projector so that in a weird strobing effect, irregular glimpses of a disheveled Martha Kent were visible.
Indescribable relief flooded him at the sight of Martha, but Batman hadn't forgotten Lian.
"Tell Gardner and West to get back here now," he shouted to Midori over the roar of the shuttle's engines. The Green Lantern might still be able to reach Quiver, he thought. He hoped it would be a rescue and not a recovery.
Martha looked around the cabin, blinking. "Where's Quiver?"
"Strap in," Midori called. Tears poured down her face as her hands played over a succession of switches and the Javelin began to shudder. Martha shot a horrified look from Midori to Batman, whose face betrayed a rare hopelessness.
"Time's up," he told her. "Get these people strapped in."
Martha's eyes widened as she glanced out the shuttle door, then looked back, aghast, at Batman.
"I can't leave Lian," she said frantically. Midori flipped a switch and the hatch started to slowly shut.
And then before he could tell her that they had no choice, that the survival of the Earth depended on them leaving immediately, and that between the cave-in and the heat, Lian was probably already dead, Martha gave him a look that might have said, "I'm sorry," or possibly even, "I love you" and she stepped back through the closing shuttle door.
Batman threw himself at the hatch, but the lock had already sealed. The Javelin started to lift up through the deserted hangar.
"Turn around," he roared at Midori. Tears whipped across her face as she shook her head. She slapped a red switch on her primary console, remotely activated the hangar doors and pointed the shuttle into space.
Batman dove for the ship's controls. He slammed into an invisible wall; Midori had thrown a force field up around the cockpit.
"They're two people," she said piteously as he smashed a fist against the transparent barricade. "Millions, maybe billions could die …."
A numbness colder than space coursed through Batman's desperate heart. As he let his forehead fall against the invisible barrier, he saw flashes of Martha disappearing in a rolling explosion of green smoke… of making love to her for the first time… of holding her in his arms by a tropical waterfall as they watched an old year turn new.
"No," he whispered. "Please, Midori."
But as the endless stream of tears cascaded town her salt-tracked cheeks, Batman's sobbing teammate aimed the Javelin toward a predetermined point just outside the asteroid belt where she would swing the shuttle around and blow the outpost – and her most cherished friends – into dust.
Next Chapter: Lost in Space