He smiled crookedly at her. "What, you would have saved twice as many planets by now?"
Mulder, Stonetree, Buffy, and Jonathan Kent were on the road from Smallville to Metropolis, driving the monstrous Cadillac that had apparently once belonged to a vampire cop. All Dawn's scientific apparatus (and quite a bit of LexCorp's, too) was on the same road, going the other way. Lex thought her experiments were intriguing and important, and they were stashing the gear in his castle in Smallville, to theoretically keep it clear of the big alien battle coming up.
Chloe's preliminary report on Fox Mulder indicated, basically, that he was thrown out of the FBI for running a Wall of Weird, and now she wanted desperately to meet him in person. Stonetree's reputation, on the other hand, was spotlessly normal and respectable for a retired Canadian policeman. Clark had seemed much reassured (and considerably calmer, after thwarting a bank robbery, a car-jacking, and two liquor-store heists) to hear that.
Dawn had been on the computer with Willow for almost an hour, getting the specifics of the binding spell. She sent Clark to England to borrow Giles's magic gourd, while she worked out all the modifications she was going to have to implement. Sineya, the First Slayer, had been cranky enough the first time Buffy's gang had used her spell. She'd probably be even more reluctant to let a boy from a different planet be the focus. Dawn realized she was counting pretty heavily on "Gotta Save the World" as the Slayer Prime Directive, but she figured gambles like that were what world-saveage was all about.
She was sitting on the front porch of the Applied Physics building and finishing up her cards when a big car drove up.
"Over here!" she called, waving.
Buffy hopped out of the back door and came over. "How come vampires always have the coolest cars?" she wondered.
Lex came up the steps from the lab in time to hear her remark. "Hey!" he objected. Then he saw the Cadillac. He blinked at it for a couple of seconds, then shook himself a tiny bit. "American made," he sneered, but Dawn could tell it took an effort.
Buffy smiled at him and took his hand. "Snob," she said fondly. "So. What's the sitch?"
"The airline tickets are all arranged. Your reinforcements should be here within twenty-four hours, on LuthorCorp's dime."
"Not LexCorp's?" Jonathan Kent asked, in a disapproving tone, as he came up to the Applied Physics porch.
Lex smirked and looked cool. "It's Dad's world, too."
Unexpected gruff laughter came from the big man, must be Stonetree, who'd worked his way free of the driver's seat of the Caddy. "Always thinking. I like that in a man." He narrowed his eyes and peered intently at Lex for a long time. Dawn noticed Lex swallow nervously.
"Hey, Chief!" called a tired-looking middle-aged man from the car. "Help me get this stuff up there, huh?"
"Don't call me Chief," Stonetree grumbled, turning back to the car.
"You brought stuff from Smallville?" Dawn asked, folding her papers and homemade magic cards into her binder and following Buffy down to the parking spot.
"Oh, yeah. Clark's mom made us a ton of food!" Buffy confirmed happily. "Which is good, 'cause we'll be kinda feeding an army here in a day or so."
"I have a plan!" Dawn told her sister proudly. She'd never really been in on the make-up-a-plan stage of saving the world before.
"Let's hear it," Buffy said, handing her boxes of food.
"Well, okay, yes, a lot of it is your plan, with the summoning up the army and Angel Investigations and the part where Superman takes out as many as he can before they get a chance to land. But! I have a way to make the space part have a much higher probability of success! Remember that power-sharing spell you and the guys did to take out Adam?"
Buffy froze for just a second, then went on with what she was doing. Stonetree and Mulder had taken some boxes into the building. Lex must be showing them where the fridge was. "I remember," Buffy said quietly.
Dawn's exuberance was a little squelched, but this was a good plan! So she continued, "I got all the details on it from Willow, and Cl -- Superman's over in England borrowing Giles's gourd now. I've figured out a way to modify it so that he's the Hand." Buffy's dubious look forced Dawn to add a reluctant, "I think."
"What's the First Slayer going to say about that?"
"Well, I was hoping she'd let it slide, for the sake of saving the world. You'd be in the spell, too -- it's not like it would be completely non-Slayer-related."
Buffy was silent, so Dawn felt compelled to go on. "Come on, Buffy! You know that the only way that we'll avoid a total bloodbath for the People of Earth is if Superman gets rid of all those ships before they even land. And you've met him! He's not going to be able to just kill them all and let God sort it out, attack from surprise, take 'em out blinking! Maybe you could do it; Faith sure could; I know Giles would say --"
"He can't, and it's good," Buffy interrupted quietly. "You have no idea what a threat he'd be if he weren't such a nice guy."
That shut Dawn up for a moment. "Okay, yeah. I know. This spell, the binding -- I thought Lex for the Mind, you for the Heart; I'm Spirit, of course, since I'm casting, and Superman's the Hand. That way Lex could talk to the alien fleet, see if they're really invading, which we all know they are but he's not convinced, and you're an expert on destroying things that are bigger and stronger than you, which is experience Superman kind of totally lacks, and I'm, you know, casting. What do you think?"
"When Willow did it, she had to be right in the next room practically, as close as she could," Buffy objected. "You're not thinking of all of us in space, are you?"
"I think I've got the range to do it from here."
Buffy looked disapproving and disbelieving. "Willow Rosenberg is the strongest witch I ever heard of. She's a strong witch, compared to the strongest Giles ever heard of. What makes you think --"
Dawn didn't let her finish. "I'm not a witch."
They'd been there long enough, just standing by the car talking, that some of the men had returned to see if there was anything else they could carry down to the lab. Mulder and Stonetree seemed to be close enough that they might be able to hear the conversation at any moment, and Buffy looked ready to let the matter drop. Dawn wasn't quite, though. In the sudden awkward silence that had fallen between her sister and her, she muttered. "Witches are human."
Buffy looked at the strangers, as close as the steps of the building, glared at Dawn, and pursed her lips meaningfully.
Dawn flipped her shiny brown hair, picked up a box and turned to go.
Joe had managed to get a pretty good idea of the cast of characters during the long drive up into the city. It looked like Miss Summers and her sister were having some sort of a fight. He smiled, remembering his daughters' college years.
The smile faltered. Segeeth hadn't been what he'd hoped for. A legendary hero shouldn't be so petulant, so tentative, so broken. Joe took in about a bushel of hot, humid, city air and let it out again in a mighty sigh. He had friends, though, that was something to add in his favor.
Joe had sensed the power in Buffy Summers. She had an air of long, hard-won experience about her that was similar to that he associated with Nick Knight. Vampire Slayer, huh.
Her sister, Dawn, struck Joe as more powerful yet, although she seemed awfully raw -- young and somehow also old, like fresh-turned earth. Funny family. Probably a good thing they were here.
Naman lightly touched down to the pavement. He was carrying a large gourd, written over in mystic sigils. It absolutely breathed power, and age. Joe smiled at the young god. "Naman. What do you bring?"
Superman looked at the mystic object in his hand. "I'm not sure. Something that should help. Let's get these things inside, Mr. Stonetree." The superhero swallowed nervously as he and Joe lugged all the remaining supplies into the lab building, which would be serving as 'Save-the-World Headquarters' (Buffy's phrase) until the evening of July third, when all the elaborate plans the young people had prepared based on Fox's information would come into play.
Stonetree suddenly felt that, anciently prophesied god or not, this kid needed a little encouragement. "It'll be okay," he rumbled, clapping him on the shoulder with a force that used to stagger Don Schanke, and that Nick (on those rare occasions that the old cop felt the need to comfort the vampire) used to barely notice. Superman didn't react physically at all. "You've got a good team here, and it'll be okay."
Mulder shouldered past them, carrying a box of supplies. "If you're super-strong, shouldn't you be carrying this stuff?" he grumbled.
They grabbed the rest of the boxes from the car and followed him in.
Superman launched himself into space from the top of the LuthorCorp Tower, carrying an industrial-sized refrigerator (shelves removed) containing a compressed air cylinder, a battery-powered shop-light, and a state-of-the-art frequency-scanning telecommunications console that he didn't know how to use.
It was like something out of a bad joke.
He found it hard to believe that same building had been full of vampires just a week ago.
It was even harder to believe that Dawn was gearing up to cast an extremely scary mind-blending spell on him, just four hours from now. He had four hours to get to the invasion fleet, and to maneuver (undetected) into some sort of a 'behind them' position -- Clark was never totally sure he understood Buffy when she gave him fighting advice. Supposedly, the spell was going to fix that right up.
This was such a bad idea -- even Clark recognized that. Going it alone was probably even a worse idea, though, and that scared the heck out of him.
On one side, you had technologically advanced aliens with multiple actual working spaceships, probably big political allies and maybe a long-range plan for the conquest of Earth that had been in the works since his dad was a child. On the other side there was one alien, from a dead race, with a non-working tiny ship just big enough to hold a baby.
Maybe these guys weren't even bad guys after all; there was no real way to tell. Okay, yes, he had two separate sources, kind of, which is good enough to write a newspaper story, but it wasn't good enough to destroy spacecraft and kill people! Of course, if they were right then that was pretty near the only chance that the people of Earth had, and a slim one at that...
Clark took a deep breath and tried to calm down, one last time before taking a deep breath became impossible. He wasn't even totally sure he could destroy a space ship. He hoped it wouldn't turn out that he had to.
Maybe this was all a big misunderstanding. Yeah, right.
Superman quit breathing, quit thinking, and just flew.