High above the Earth hidden within the cloaked crystal citadel that was the Man of Tomorrow's orbiting Fortress the green form of the original Manhunter from Mars was a blur of activity. Solid walls were no barrier to the insubstantial at will changeling, and her work was completed speedily, only the scale of the Fortress ensured that it was also time consuming. For Jo the process of integrating the disparate technologies from Krypton, long lost Mars, and Earth was a fitting testament to the Justice Leagues nature. It was shortly after the work was completed that the first of the Manhunters invasion fleet dropped out Hyper Space. Patching herself in the neural network of the Crystal Station's Artificial Intelligent systems, Jo piggybacked her awareness on the hybrid matrix that linked Martian telepathy to Kryptonian sensors, and trans-dimensional broadcast technology, to the stone age silicon electronics of Earth. The earwigs, in ear communication devices, enabled her telepathic link, now unfettered by simple constraints of location and geography. Wherever any of League was, be they near of far, Jo could reach them with her mind. The Martian Manhunter found Diana in Themyscira, she heard her cry to Krypto, to find Kal, and she shuddered as Wonder Woman shared the truth she had learned through the golden lasso from Cronus. The ultimate aim of the old god's alliance with the machines. It was almost too horrible to conceive.

-8-

The Manhunter's Living Spaceship, cast a metropolis sized shadow across the plains of Kansas, bringing with it an unnatural night. It's opalescent shell was alive with flickering and pulsing flashes of colour. Twinkling lights that mimicked the starry night sky. Above and rising, the full height of the beast was lost in the clouds punctuated by rainbows of bioluminescent light arching through the turbulent wake above the great plains.

Superman was but a speck. Insignificant as flea against a whale, flying faster than a speeding bullet toward the iridescent carapace. Then like a needle drill the Man of Steel dove into the Leviathan with surgical precision. He bore through the living tissue of the space faring giant into the cavernous voids within.

The immensity of the beast tasked his super senses. Depth, height, breadth, the living ship was as vast as Metropolis and infinitely more complex. Yet the basic superstructure followed the pattern of the much smaller vessel he had encountered previously. The two related organisms shared a common ancestor, their biology followed a plan. The neural network was alive with electrical impulses, energies visible to the Man of Tomorrows highly evolved senses, and following the energy paths Superman's x-ray like vision identified the largest concentration of neuron like structures. The animals nerve centre, situated at the heart of the living vessel. Moments later he emerged in a central chamber, a void that was above this brain core. Behind him the broken shell of the interior void oozed, coagulating like a wound.

The belly of the beast was an auditorium of pearl like splendour. Shining shell walls towered and tapered curving upwards. Beyond the chamber narrowed towards the heart of the Leviathan Space craft, and it was here Superman snapped still, the sound of his arrival following after him, an auditory shadow.

As the crack echoed around the empty space, a familiar face greeted not the Man of Steel, but rather the Cowboy he had been. "Hello Clark."

Lana looked at him with the same passionate green eyes, twinkling emerald gems, a smattering of freckles and mane of fine auburn hair.

"I'm sorry."

"How?" Superman asked his voice quiet, his stance statue like. His superhuman synapses shocked, his mind dumbfounded. This didn't make any sense. His beloved wife was dead and buried.

"I'm sorry I left you." Lana said.

This had to be a cruel hoax, and yet he heard her heart beat, her blood pulse. Lana took breath, just like a living being.

"Does the evidence of your senses confound you Kryptonian?"

Superman for a moment had been Clark Kent, Farmer, but a grieving husband. This second voice concentrated Superman's mind once more. He turned all his amazing faculties to bare on the speaker.

"Doctor Whitney?" Superman observed.

"In the flesh." Replied the white haired man. Adding. "As it were."

Whitney's tanned face was lined with the years, but it was still the same face Clark remembered peering down at him, when he had been but a boy, feverish in his bed. Whitney had been Smallville's local Doctor for all of Clark Kent's life. Today Superman knew the problems he suffered then as a sickly child were because of the concentrations of Kryptonite around Smallville, the centre of Meteor Rock County. Worse a childhood fall had driven a glass like shard of substance K in his hand, and the sickly baby had grown into poorly child. The Kryptonite embedded in his palm, an ever present poison his body had learned to suffer with, contain and eventually ignore. At least until he was exposed to a much larger piece of meteor rock in Jerome's Bar Metropolis. This life changing event had caused a violent reaction leading to the shards expulsion. Free of the poison his growth into his full potential as a Kryptonian had begun that night. Now Clark as Superman could see more deeply, the Man of Tomorrow could peer layer by layer into the man before him.

"It would appear so." Superman agreed, only to say. "But appearances are only skin deep."

"And what do you see my dear boy, what does it tell you?" Whitney asked with all the charm of a lifetime of carefully practised bed side manner.

"You are a simulacrum of a human being, albeit a very accomplished copy. Good enough to fool anything but the most invasive microscopic examination. But Doctor Whitney you are not human."

"Neither are you darling." Lana said.

Clark felt his heart skip, he could not ignore her. Lana's voice, the scent of her was all the stronger because of what he had grown to be. Superman moved back sailing through the open void of the living space craft. He could not allow himself to be trapped by this transparent attempt to influence him. His thoughts were plain. Lana died, he had buried her. His brow knitted tight and angry. His eyes flashed red. Both Lana and Doctor Whitney were in his line of sight. Superman knew he must compare them, he must establish who or what Lana truly was.

As he listened he heard a third sound, not so much a voice, nor words, but a primal noise, animal, instinctive but intelligent, it was a warning that was getting closer.

Superman hovered in the vast chambers void. "I maybe super, but I am still a man – human, even if I am not a native to earth for humanity is bigger than a single race of people."

"Cut me and don't I bleed?" Lana asked her green eyes sparkled with anger. "Didn't I bleed out on the floor of our barn darling?" She tossed her red hair back as she tilted her head, her finger pressed to her rosy cheek. She invited him to look into the socket of the eye which had been ruined by the cow's horn. It was as if she had read his mind, or at least guessed at his intentions.

Something was very wrong.

Superman examined this Lana Kent, as only a Superman could. His vision peering as an X-ray microscope, seeing the markers of repaired damage. Lana's on the face of it perfect green eye actually told a story of a fatal blow, he looked deeper still at the grey matter within her skull – just as he had assessed the Doctor moments before.

"Tell me Clark, am I real, is this me?" Lana asked. Her voice wavered, implying doubt and fear.

"Lana your body is teeming with nanites." Superman answered.

"Tiny machines?" Lana asked. "I know, or at least that's how Doctor Whitney explained what he did to me, how he brought me back." She explained. Less angry, her eyes were pleading.

"Resurrection?" Superman said his face stern, his voice deliberate.

"Consider this a gift from the Manhunters, a gesture of good faith." Whitney replied holding out his open hand. "The beginning of a mutually beneficial relationship."

"How long have you known?" Superman asked the machine camouflaged so completely as a man. "How long have you been watching me?"

Smallville's Physician for nearly thirty years shrugged off the demeanour of the small town Doctor's gentle self effacing ways, years seem to fall away from him as he stood tall resolute, like a young man wearing an older man's skin.

"From the very beginning."

"Garbage." Superman growled.

The machine man sneered. "Initially there was suspicion. Short lived. A child found abandoned close to the crash site demanded attention. It was an easy thing to replicate and replace the Whitneys.

"The Kents being good people of course made sure you were checked over at Smallville Medical. As a Manhunter I tested you for an alien heritage, and it was clear that you weren't born on Earth."

"Why not take me then – or later, why wait at all – why leave me with my parents?"

"Wait?" Whitney laughed. "You make it sound like twenty five years is a long time, how so very human of you, how short their lives are." Chuckling he shook his head. Then Doctor Whitney became stern again. "We were interested in your capacity to process solar radiation, and given that exposure to Kryptonite at the crash site depreciated your base metabolism to something close to Earth norms, it wasn't clear you possessed this ability.

"We speculated that your biological parents had meddled with your genetic make-up, that perhaps they intended you to be human-normal on earth, after all as a race your people chose the uniquely hostile world of Krypton so that they might live as normal humans, rather than supermen.

"It was decided I would observe your development to ascertain if we had been cheated of an opportunity to harness this stellar Kryptonian ability."

The Man of Steel pointed an accusatory finger. "No doubt you thought you could snatch me at any time."

"Of course." Doctor Whitney laughed. "But you never developed beyond human-normal. Intervention was deemed unnecessary – secondary plans were enacted."

"In other words you weren't able to uncover the secret of the Kryptonian solar metabolism from me, you turned to retrieving any Kryptonian technology you could." Superman concluded, saying. "And that's what this was all about. A blue print for a replacement power battery."

"Such power is our right." The faux Doctor exclaimed. He paused, then with contrasting emotionless delivery, said. "The Kryptonian basal adult state is engineered to withstand extreme gravity and pressure, also radiation and other environmental toxins – while remarkable for a biological organism, it is comparable to the standard Manhunter Android specifications. However Kryptonian Science evolved the capacity to leverage Solar Radiation to manipulate mass."

Whitney added in his colloquial Kansas tone. "So oh-boy, I was surprised when suddenly you were flying." Then without emotion the human simulacrum asked. "How is it you have only just emerged as a true Super-Man?"

"You mean you don't know?" Superman replied with a wry smile. "All those years watching me – and you don't know?"

"Data indicated that Kryptonian's capacity for solar energy conversion and storage developed progressively through early childhood becoming exponential during adolescence."

"How disappointed you must have been when I appeared to be a damp squib. Human-normal."

"Superman was an unforeseen development." Whitney admitted. "Blood tests indicated high residual levels of Kryptonite, it was determined your exposure as an infant had permanently disabled your highly evolved physiology."

"How wrong you were." Superman replied, adding a loud whistle while shaking his head. "You should have looked more closely."

"Who are you to mock us." Whitney roared. The ship around him burst alight, like fireworks.

"Clark." Lana gasped shielding her eyes from the bright kaleidoscope.

"Speck. Insignificance. We are millions. Millions of years old - each of us. Together we are the Manhunters. No man escapes us."

"Very big and very old." Superman agreed. "But the small details of short lives are not insignificant."

"Biology be damned. Flesh is disorder. Flesh is death. True life is mechanical, true life is eternal."

Krypto burst through the giant vessels carapace, a white hot hurtling mass of teeth and claws, a missile, guided by a super-whistle.

His teeth locked around the throat of the faux Doctor driving him back into the shimmering pearl coloured wall.

Removing the earwig from his ear, the Man of Tomorrow's eyes flashed red as cut a hole in the floor of the chamber. Into the superstructure of the animal. Directly below was the nerve centre of the living spacecraft.

"Okay Jo." Superman said into the upturned microphone. "Krypto's running interference. Here she goes," he said dropping the device, "the key is in the hole."

Superman watched as the earwig fell into the mass of interconnecting nerve-like conduits.

A flash of white and red indicated the Whitney Simulacrum had freed itself of the dog. Krypto was already recovering for a second bite, twisting in the void of the empty chamber. The Manhunter shed his disguise, the country doctor was replaced by dark red man-machine, it however still laughed like Whitney. "This craft is but one beast of many. If you were playing for time Superman, you wasted your effort. Destroy this vessel and a thousand stand ready to take its place. Whatever you've secreted in that simple communications device can do nothing to hurt to us."

"I wouldn't be so sure." Superman replied as the Androids hand reformed into the barrel of a weapon.

"No matter." The Manhunter released a burst of green tinged plasma. Superman dived out of it's path, only to feel the unique fire's peculiar heat as it roared past him. Bring with it the pain of Kryptonite.

"You are not the only one to make use of that time. You see we are not the slow lumbering collective you imagined us to be, we are able to act quickly where necessary. In this case the collection, and weaponisation of Kryptonite from the soil of your homeland.

"Of course the plan has been in existence for only a short time – your full life span. I say full span, for your life ends now."

"You talk too much." Superman growled unleashing a flash of heat vision that melted the Androids arm. The Manhunter shrugged off the melted limb, it fell glowing red on black broken to the floor. It shrugged the shoulder above the self inflicted amputation, and a new limb began to assemble itself from the stump. "Here Superman I have access to energy from this ship, and material stored in her belly." The Man hunter leapt upwards saying. "It seems I'll have to make this up front and personal."

From his hands formed the protuberance of blade, a great sword forged in that moment, luminescent the blade shone bright green.

"Krypto stay clear." Superman waved the Hound of Kryptonopolis away from the flashing blade.

Laughing the Manhunter moved at lightning speed forcing the Man of Steel to dance away all the faster.

"The longer you wait the weaker you will become." The Android taunted. "This chamber is being flooded with Kryptonite Radiation as I speak. All I need from you is your cooperation."

"Never." Superman replied.

"Willingly or not you will surrender." The Android struck once again, his mechanical arms a blur of movement bringing the simple weapon, an edged blade together with advanced technology. Superman leapt back, his face damp with perspiration as the background radiation began to take its toll. The blade bit deep, cutting across his chest, opening up the Kryptonian suit, and letting his blood run red across the S shield and vivid blue of his costume.

Superman staggered. Krypto growled at his side, the incredible animal also felt the pain caused by the contaminated atmosphere. Superman dropped to his knees.

"Soon both of you will fall into unconsciousness."

His arm wrapped across his gaping wound the Man of Tomorrow, looked across to the woman who had meant so much in so many of his yesterdays. Lana Kent looked on impassive.

Superman couldn't know what this meant, he couldn't be certain she was even his Lana, and even if she were, he was certain her mind and will could not be her own. Either way it was the cruellest cut of all.

Superman looked up defiant, even as he bled onto the shimmering shell of the living spacecraft.

"Poor living things." The Manhunter said. "The thing about life is that there has to be death." He leant in closer, but not until we have dissected from your living flesh the secret of solar energy leverage."