Supergirl and all related characters and indicia are owned by DC Comics/Warner Bros. This work of fan fiction is written for pleasure, not profit.
Deadeyeus2: Thanks, I'm glad you're enjoying it.
Triaxx2: What can I say:)
It should be noted that much of the material in this, and the preceding chapter, is adapted from or inspired by the story 'Last Daughter of Argo', written by Evan Dorkin and Sarah Dyer, and published in issue 21 of Superman Adventures.
It was decidedly odd, Susan thought, to be in the Fortress of Solitude, and be sitting in a room filled with mundane appliances. Her eyes scanned the chamber. Stove, sink, microwave, refrigerator. It could have been anyone's kitchen. 'Maybe it's just that its Superman's kitchen,' she mused, taking a sip from her glass of orange juice. Kara had said she needed time to compose herself after watching, again, the destruction of her homeworld, and Susan couldn't blame her.
"I always thought Superman had a perfect life," Susan said slowly. "Having all those powers, being famous. I never really thought about the 'Last Son of Krypton' thing, and what it meant."
Kara looked up and smiled sadly. "Don't feel bad. Clark hasn't thought about it much either." Susan gave Kara a perplexed look, and Kara shrugged. "He was, for all practical purposes, born here. He doesn't remember Krypton, so to him, the whole thing is just an abstract historical event. He didn't experience it, so in a sense it isn't real to him."
Susan shuddered. Kara had sketched in the aftermath of the explosion of Krypton and its effect on Argo. Four years, she had spent, huddled in the basement of her parents' house, clinging to life. She had told of scavenging supplies, of fighting off would be looters who were just as desperate as they were or bartering with them if they were willing to trade, all the while a winter that would never end descended on her ruined planet.
"Trade? Trade what?" Susan had been surprised enough at that to interrupt.
"Food, equipment, medical supplies or care. My mom was a doctor, remember."
Susan had forgotten that. Part of Kara Kent's 'cover story' was that her late mother had run a small free clinic in Boston.
"And other stuff," Kara concluded, a bit uncomfortably.
Susan started to ask what the 'other stuff' was, but the look on Kara's face stopped her. In a flash of insight she realized that Kara would have had one commodity to offer in trade just by virtue of being female, if Kryptonian men were anything like human men. Susan gulped. 'In a situation like that, I guess you do what you have to,' she allowed, and decided not to press he issue.
She told of the other groups of survivors, scattered across Argo and in outposts elsewhere in the system, which her mother had found and contacted. Of their efforts to devise a way out of their plight, and the utter despair that came with the realization that there wasn't a way out. Of listening, helpless, while other groups ran out of food and perished, either deliberately, or by resorting to cannibalism.
"Or worse," Kara had added darkly.
"What could be worse than cannibalism?" Susan had wondered in a sick voice.
"What do you think could be worse than eating someone else?" Kara had responded.
Susan was perfectly willing to admit that she wasn't the most imaginative person to ever come down the pike. On her own she probably wouldn't have thought about what might be worse, but Kara's words were enough to goad her mind into conjuring up an image. She'd thought she'd felt nauseated before, but it was nothing compared to the feeling that sight induced.
Susan shuddered again. 'I wish I hadn't thought of it again, let alone the first time.' She looked at her glass of juice. Her appetite, even her thirst, was gone. She set the glass down and pushed it away.
Most heart wrenching of all was the tale Kara told of the day when her mother announced that their own end was at hand.
"With no resources to build a ship, and no answer to our distress signal, all we've done is survive day-to-day. Now even that is at an end. Our power reserves are almost gone, and Argo's atmosphere is beginning to freeze, leaving us only one option for survival," Kara related her mother as saying, then telling her reaction to that 'one option'.
"I've converted these medical chambers for cold sleep. The lab's reserve power will be channeled into them, and the distress beacon. Hopefully someone, someday, will hear it, and help will arrive."
Kara had cringed at the words 'cold sleep'. She had learned to hate the relentless, inescapable cold. Even the lab was cold, barely above freezing. Only one room, the sleeping chamber, was heated anymore.
"We have no other choice," her uncle Del had assured his son when Dar had voiced the same reservations Kara was feeling. "At least it's a chance..."
Susan blinked. Her eyes stung as she remembered the final conversation Kara had had with her mother.
"Oh, mother! I'm so afraid!"
"Shhh. There's nothing to be frightened of Kara. Just close your eyes, and the next thing you know, we'll all be together again, safe, happy, and warm," her mother had crooned softly as she put her daughter into one of the chambers.
"But what if we never wake up?" Kara had asked, her voice shaking with terror. "What if we sleep forever? Forever and ever, in the cold?"
Her mother had answered with what Kara knew even then was a lie, but she'd clung to it with the same desperation as a shipwreck survivor who couldn't swim would cling to a tiny piece of debris in the middle of a trackless ocean.
"As my heart beats, I promise you, my most beloved - you will awaken, and you will once again see the sun shining high above you in the heavens. I promise. Now sleep, my baby. Sleep in peace, knowing that you are loved."
Susan swallowed. She took a deep breath and exhaled forcefully. Thank God for Clark Kent, who'd told his side of the story of Kara's rescue before she and Susan left for the Fortress. He had borrowed a starship from somebody, just who Susan couldn't guess, and gone to the Rao system. It hadn't been a rescue mission. He was just going for the sake of seeing it with his own eyes, to make a connection with it. Bare chance, and an inexplicable impulse, had led him to scan for signals thirty odd years after the fact. The odds of anyone having survived that long had been infinitesimal. But he'd run the scan anyway, and found a signal. The beacon had led him to the frozen wasteland Argo had become, down to the In-ze home and into the lab beneath it. There he had found a recording Kara's mother had made.
He hadn't understood it at first. Thanks to the foresight of his father, Clark had had the means to learn his birth world's language. He spoke and read Kryptonian fluently. But Kara's mother had spoken the Argoan dialect of Kryptonian, which was sufficiently different that Clark had to replay the message five times before he was sure he understood it perfectly. To say that he was thrilled at the prospect of survivors would have been putting it mildly. He'd raced to the room that held the cold sleep chambers, only to have his high spirits crushed. Three of the chambers were so obviously damaged, by ice that had fallen from the ceiling, that he wasn't surprised to find the occupant was a freeze dried corpse. A man, a boy, and a woman.
He almost hadn't bothered to look at the fourth chamber, in fact had started to turn away, when, out of the corner of his eye, he'd noticed a dim refection in an ice covered wall. A single, tiny light. The only light, it turned out, that showed the fourth machine was still working.
"I don't put much stock in miracles, but I like to think that last bit was His doing" Kara had said as she pulled out the pendant she wore around her neck. Susan had seen the seven pointed star before, and always assumed it was just a bauble. Instead, it was the symbol of Rao, and Kara had led Susan, who had believed Kara was an atheist or something, since she showed no more than a polite interest in Christianity, to the shrine she had built in the attic of the Kent house. It wasn't very big, just a small cabinet with some candles and an incense burner, but Susan had found it both deeply moving and strangely comforting. Susan was a Baptist. She wasn't as demonstrative as some, but she took her faith seriously, and the discovery that that was something that she and Kara had in common...reassured her, somehow.
Susan looked across the table. Kara was gazing off into nothingness. 'Probably putting her thoughts in order for the next session with Brainiac,' she mused. 'Hopefully that one won't be so rough for her.' She wondered if Brainiac could explain Raoism for her while they were here. Then she shook her head. 'No, I want to hear that from Kara,' she decided. It would be interesting to compare Raoism with Christianity. Whatever the differences might be, Susan was sure the two religions would have far more in common than she expected.
Susan cleared her throat. Kara blinked and looked up. "Ready for another go?" Susan asked, gesturing in what she hoped was the general direction of the library. Kara grinned.
"Sure. It may be a little dry, though," she cautioned. "I mean, I know history isn't your favorite subject, and Brainiac isn't exactly a riveting speaker."
"I noticed that," Susan replied dryly. "I'm sure the material will more than make up for a lousy lecturer."
