Buffy skirted the whole ship without sensing any other demons besides the ones the soldier-boys had already done in. She didn't find any other doors, either. By the time she got back to the main airlock, the four Initiative-types had become eight, and one of them was Riley, so she showed herself.
"How's it look?" she asked casually.
Three of the guards, all wearing the LuthorCorp logo, jumped and swung their guns up at her. They looked kind of perturbed. Apparently, this had been a weird and trying night, compared to a standard shift at LuthorCorp.
Riley stood them down with a gesture. "Pretty good," he said. "We've swept it twice, and these are all we found. Sam at the Inner Perimeter reports five more aliens killed, with only light casualties to her team. Lt. Sawyer at the Outer Perimeter says they didn't see any ET's, and most of the T-men came around once the spaceship landed. Sure would be nice to know how many aliens there were to start with, though, especially since that FBI man of yours said they'd infiltrated and lived disguised as humans before. Oh, and City Hall's on fire. If we could give the all-clear, we could get the Fire Department in here to contain it."
Buffy thought back. "I think one shipful was about forty or forty-five, but you're right. It would be good to be know exactly. This looks like a job for a standard locating spell!" She got out her cell phone and called the contact number for their spell-casters in England. "Hi! This is Buffy Summers. Could I please speak to Willow Rosenberg?"
"One moment, please." Why did people with an English accent always sound so smart?
Willow's familiar well-loved querulous tone came over the line. "Buffy! Is everybody all right?"
"Hey, Will! Yeah, we seem to be. Just mopping up now. By the way, great job with that anti-poisonous-alien-demon-clone-blood spell! It just kind of itched when you got it on you, instead of, you know, burning holes in you and killing you dead. We all really appreciate it." The soldier-boys listening all kind of smiled and nodded. "We were wondering if you guys could cast a standard locating spell on, say, the state of Kansas, to find any aliens we still haven't killed yet."
"Oh, yeah, absolutely. We have one almost ready here. You wanna hold on?"
"Sure, I can hold." Buffy put her hand over the mouthpiece. "They're doing the spell now," she told Riley. He nodded, already on the walkie again to someone else. It sounded like they were compiling kill stats.
Another call came in on her cell. She gambled on Willow's spell taking about as long as they always did and switched over. "Hello?"
"Buffy?"
"Lex! Are you guys okay?"
"I'm out in front of City Hall, with Joe Stonetree. He has a person here who needs an ambulance. Did you know the Civic Center is on fire?"
"Yeah, Riley told me. We're just trying now to see if we got all the aliens, so we can let the Fire Department and paramedics in. Oh! Or I think Mrs. Sam Finn, apparently in charge at the Inner Perimeter, whatever that is, used to be a doctor or a nurse or something. Peace Corps. You guys could go find her. What about Dawn?"
"We'll take him there then. Thanks. Dawn's fine. I left her in good hands, and besides, the weapons are all still glowing green -- that's her doing."
"Good. I had actually guessed the sword-glowiness must be Dawnie, but it's good to hear from somebody who actually knows."
"Oh, and Buffy. I'm... I'm sorry, but Fox Mulder's dead."
"That's too bad. He seemed like a nice guy. Sorta crazy, but that's what happens. We owe him the world, this time." He was a nice guy, and he had saved the world. If he got a tombstone, maybe they'd put that on it.
"Yeah." Lex sighed. "Well. I'll see you later. Be careful."
"You too." She disconnected from Lex's call, and in a couple of minutes Willow returned.
"We came up with three aliens still alive in Kansas. Two are less than a mile from you, and the other one is about a hundred and sixty miles southwest from there. I can give you the exact coordinates. Ready?"
"Um, maybe I better hand this over to Riley and let you tell 'em to him. Numbers, you know?" Willow's amused snort of exasperation was full of high school memories, and it made Buffy smile. "The hundred and something mile away one is probably Superman. He got a little beat up taking out the first four ships, and he might have crashed or something. Can you do a locator on Superman, and see if it's the same thing?"
"Sure, of course. Want me to give Ri the other info first?"
"Yeah, I guess so. Here." She handed over the phone to Riley. Smallville was about a hundred and sixty miles away from Metropolis, wasn't it? Three hours' drive, anyway. It was a little odd that Superman hadn't been in on this bounce, all over his city.
She hoped Clark was okay. Dawn would be upset if he was hurt.
All the mopping up was finished before sunrise. Good thing, too. Some of the most important people to the end-of-the-battle squaring away were sort of flammable in sunlight.
Dawn had been so relieved when the fight was over, and a delegation from the Earth-Metropolis-defense forces came to let her know about it, that she'd almost cried. She might have, too, except that she'd taken a semi-serious disliking to the two Amazons in polyester that Lex had sent up to guard her, and she wouldn't give them the satisfaction.
The post-battle letdown was made all the more potentially tear-jerking because the group that came to fetch her was almost all old Sunnydale friends or acquaintances, and (although she usually managed not to think of it at all) Dawn hadn't been home all year. Homesickness was a bitca.
The whole time she'd been casting the focused dissolution spell, Dawn had kept her eyes on the stars. Their power, as they moved through their set paces and paths, reinforced her own, and it helped a lot to concentrate on them. She was only starting to get tired when she heard Riley Finn's voice saying, "Stand down, please, miss. The fighting's over."
She dropped her gaze from the heavens to the door, and it was him! Of all Buffy's ill-fated boyfriends, he was probably the one she missed the most. (It would have been Spike if only he hadn't... never mind.) She let the spell fall and ran to him.
"Riley!" she cried, dodging LuthorCorp security goons, who still had their dang guns out even though he'd been super-polite asking them to put them away. She gave him a hug. "Is everybody okay? Are the aliens all dead? Where's Buffy?"
He hugged her back, and then she noticed Cordelia and Angel and Spike were there just behind him. She frowned at them. Spike slunk further back into the doorway, looking ashamed, but Angel and Cordy, of course, totally ignored her angry look. Dawn wished she could forgive Spike for what he'd done to Buffy, especially considering all the tears she'd shed for him when they'd all thought he died in that last big battle at the Hellmouth, when they'd wedged the First Evil into the Master's old trap. She wished she could ask him, or Angel, or even Cordelia, to explain how exactly he'd gotten out of that one, and why he hadn't called or anything to let them know he was okay, but they were all (dearly though she missed them and remembered them) people she was mad at, for various reasons, and not speaking to. So she confined herself to talking with Riley.
"Buffy's fine. The only alien left in the state of Kansas is Superman. We lost five men killed, including Mr. Mulder, and twelve wounded, and preliminary reports say about forty civilian deaths, including the President. Not bad, considering what it could have been," Riley told her, hugging her back.
"Not bad," Dawn echoed weakly. Why did it always feel so much like losing, when they won but so many of their own died? How did people like Riley and Buffy manage to keep on planning and fighting like they did, knowing that their own forces would die even if they won? There probably was no good answer to that.
"Without that spell of yours it would have been a lot worse, so buck up." Riley always treated her like a kid sister. Dawn really didn't mind it from him.
"Yeah. What happens now?"
Angel spoke up. "Buffy sent us to bring you to the ship. She says you and she and Lex Luthor are the ones who'll be able to tell if there are any more of those aliens hidden inside. There's no guarantee that Willow's spells would be reliable through the hull of a spacecraft. There needs to be a physical search." Angel sounded dogged, like maybe he'd been in an argument about this earlier.
Dawn still addressed herself to Riley. "You're kind of a large group to send, just to fetch me, aren't you? And what happened to Superman? He was the one who was actually really inside those other ships."
Angel didn't even have the decency to look annoyed by her snub. "The streets are still full of frightened people. Conditions are ripe for a riot to break out. I don't know about Superman. I didn't see him during the fighting."
"Buffy said that he might have crashed or something. Willow's locator spell showed him alive and still in Kansas, just a couple hundred miles away," Riley reassured her.
"I think he just didn't want to fight in this city," Cordelia sniped. "Can we go?"
"She's not leaving here without us. Not until Mr. L -- Lex says she does," declared one of the security guards.
Cordy looked mad. Angel looked impatient. Strangely, so did Riley Finn. Lips tight over some sort of complaint, he got a phone out of his cargo vest and handed it to the guard. "Call him," he said shortly.
One quick conversation later, Dawn was free of the Smirking Security Sisterhood, and on her way to the wreckage of Metropolis City Government.
Dawn figured the cooperation between the LuthorCorp Security teams and the Special Monster Forces and Angel Investigations had not been completely perfect in every respect. Her suspicion was confirmed when their little party made it out to Union Park. Firefighters were getting the Civic Center conflagration under control. Metropolis Paramedics were tending to the wounded LuthorCorp personnel, but Medics in fatigues were dealing with the injured among Riley's soldiers. The uninjured were even more separate, facing each other angrily across the airlock, with Buffy looking stony between the two armed camps. Buffy greeted Dawn with an enormous bone-crushing hug.
"Dawnie!" Another hug. Dawn hugged back as hard as she could. "That glowy-green-weapons thing you did was awesome! Good job!"
"Thanks. Is --?"
Buffy didn't let her finish, which was probably good, because Dawn realized a second too late that she was so totally about to blow Superman's secret identity. "I called Clark's mom, and he's okay. Getting over that stomach bug just fine. She said all he needs is sleep, so don't worry about your boyfriend. We have a little something right here to worry about, actually."
"What? But Riley said the aliens were all taken care of. Angel said that Willow might be wrong about there being some left inside the ship, but Willow isn't usually... okay, there was that one time, and then that other time, but..."
Buffy cut her off again, which was again, fine. Dawn had no idea where that sentence was going.
"There's a little conflict between the Initiative-type boys and the LuthorCorp minions, and sort of the LexCorp guys."
Lex, looking sort of sooty and red around the edges, looked up at his name. Sam, Riley's wife, was bandaging up his arm. "Leave me out of it, please."
"It doesn't seem fair if everybody else gets to play pinata with the smushed ship and you don't, Lex. You're in. No arguing," Buffy told him.
Lex smiled, surprisingly sweetly. "I've got the one thing I needed to come safe out of that ship," he told Buffy.
Buffy beamed at him. "You're still going in and looking around. It's only fair."
"I still don't get it. What's going on?" Dawn asked.
"People want to loot the spaceship," Angel told her disgustedly.
Dawn just blinked, too surprised to ignore him. "Isn't that dangerously insane?"
"That's what I said!" Cordelia shot back. "Not to mention a huge waste of time!"
"It's important that the people who set this up aren't the people who profit from it. If we leave this wreckage here tonight, you know that those members of the U.S. government who betrayed the people of Earth to our enemies will be the ones who get this technology for their own purposes," Riley said patiently, as if he'd already said this about a million times. "We have only a limited amount of time to make sure that doesn't happen, and we don't have the explosives to blow it up right now. I don't even think we could if we had them, in the middle of the city like this. If we have you guys to show us around in there, it'll be safe enough. And this subject has been talked to death."
"It really has," Buffy agreed. "Okay, looting teams it is. Dawn, Lex and I will be the trusty native guides; Angel, Spike and Cordelia will be the disinterested safety observers. Lex, I assume you'll want to go with your own LexCorp guys. Who do you want for your observer?"
Cordy suddenly looked alert and interested. "Lex Luthor? Twenty-five years old, President and CEO of LexCorp, which has been on the Fortune 400 list each of the last two years? Net worth 1.4 billion dollars? Currently single? That Lex Luthor?"
Buffy rolled her eyes.
Cordelia, despite the fact that she'd been right in amongst the blood and char and death all night, just like the rest of them, managed to look stylish and beautiful as she gracefully stood, approached Lex a little more closely than was polite in Kansas, and breathed, "I'd be glad to accompany Mr. Luthor's team."
"Lex," Lex corrected her absently. He looked meaningfully at Buffy, and Dawn was extremely pleased to see that he was amused by Cordelia rather than entranced or anything. She was even more pleased to see that Buffy saw it, too, and that she was able to smile at the whole situation. Buffy deserved a guy who thought she was hotter than Cordy. She always had.
"Right," Buffy said, smiling as she talked. "Dawnie, would you like to go with Riley's guys? And you can have Spike, too." Okay, that was sort of malicious on Buffy's part, and Dawn applauded the move whole-heartedly. She'd show that bleached bum -- make her cry over his mysteriously non-existent death, would he? With Riley and the boys there to do the direct talking for her, she bet she'd get the whole secret story out of him, too. "Angel and I will go with the LuthorCorp team," Buffy concluded.That was smart, too. LuthorCorp was definitely the group that needed the most strenuous watching. "Let's go, everybody! We need to have this hulk stripped of everything freaky and be out of here before sunup!"
The salvage teams got moving.