Chapter 14: The Bearers of Bad News

Snapper Carr was not usually the type to be lost for words, but right now that was certainly the case. One second he had been reporting on the Justice League's battle with the energy cloud in the skies over Metropolis. Then there had been that flash of light as the helicopter had been plummeting towards a fiery doom. And now he was here.

Wherever here was.

For a second he thought that maybe he was dead, that this was some form of afterlife. All that he could see around him was light. He was sat in a chair, but other than that he could see nothing but the shine. He felt almost as if he was in some kind of waiting room, and all manner of thoughts started crossing his mind. He thought that he was waiting to meet his maker, or perhaps that he was about to be judged to see if his life had been a good, worthy one. He began to think that maybe all of those religious tales he had cast off as a young man could prove to be true after all.

But then the chains had appeared. They had sprung from nowhere, wrapping themselves around his arms and legs, binding him down to that chair before he could even think of standing. They were tight too. No chance could he fight his way out of them once they had latched on, even if he had anywhere to escape to.

It was in the next second that he knew instantly this was no religious afterlife. Following the chains, a kind of dark portal had sprang up within the white. In no time at all a pair of figures he very definitely recognised stepped through it. The brightness of the place began to fade as they moved from the portal. By the time the two Imperium soldier's were stood right before him, it was as if the entire world had changed. Now Snapper could tell where he was. Whatever this place actually was, however these guys managed to change the environment around them, it was clear that he was their prisoner.

For a long time they didn't say a word, and Snapper was too scared to try to force them to. Snapper had paid plenty of attention the last time these alien creatures had attacked the world, had listened in to as much about them as the Justice League had made public. He knew that the ones from last time had had telepathic abilities. He was starting to think that these new ones would soon be in his head, scurrying around in then making no end of a mess of things. If they didn't just kill him outright, that was.

"Tell us what has happened."

Snapper was so startled as one of the Imperium suddenly spoke in a deep growl that if he hadn't been tied down he'd have leapt out of his skin. As it was, the voice had him so afraid that he couldn't speak until the alien forcefully repeated its words.

"Tell us what has happened to the Imperium! This was to be the next world claimed after Mars. Where are they? We must return to them!"

Now Snapper understood impeccably. These aliens were lost. Somehow, whatever had happened to them to cause all of this madness, they were just trying to find a way home, a way back to their people. They had expected to find the rest of their kind on Earth. They had expected to be lost no longer, but they had found only things that were alien to them. They hadn't found what they were looking for.

And Snapper knew why. It was because the Justice League had defeated the Imperium. Their leader was dead, as were many of its horde, lost to the burning light of the sun. Those that had survived had fled to who knows where, deep into the universe. They were long gone, and they weren't going to be coming back. These aliens were alone, and they would be staying that way.

But how could Snapper tell them that? How could he possibly tell the aliens who were attacking the Earth that what they wanted most they couldn't possibly have? Their aptitude for violence was well proven. If he told them that, then what was to stop them from simply killing him in outrage? What was to stop them from killing everyone?

"Tell us what happened!" the alien screamed again, its gelatinous head forming into a demonic snarl as it had roared out the words. And as if that wasn't enough, the silent one had reacted too this time. It's equivalent of a hand had surged forwards, latching onto Snapper by the throat. It was only holding back the squeeze enough to give Snapper the air to talk. The message was clear. If he didn't talk, then he was definitely dead.

It wouldn't matter to them, Snapper realised. He wasn't the only one that had been swept up by that light. The pilot and the cameraman had been for sure, and Lane probably had been too, as far as Snapper knew. Hell, the whole damn city of Metropolis could have been caught up in it. From what Snapper had seen, the Justice League's efforts against that energy cloud hadn't exactly been working. That made him sure of one thing. His best chance, his only chance was to talk. At least then there was a slight possibility he could survive this. If he didn't he was definitely dead.

"Th... They're not... here..." he stammered with every haggard breath he managed to draw through the grasp on his neck. And then he began to tell them everything.

And it was abundantly clear that the aliens did not like what they were hearing.

J'onn may have been unable to reach out to anyone in the outside world from within the cloud, but he could read Batman and Wonder Woman from their position. A lot was happening between those two right now, dealing with the effects the core of the cloud had had on their minds, and J'onn would not intrude on that while this moment of relative peace was afforded to them. He knew that what the core so nearly did to them would take a several long moments to recover from, and so he was not about to interrupt them. However, that didn't stop him from subtly searching for a status update.

And that was how he knew that the two heroes had succeeded. That was how he knew that Superman now understood there were people in here, living people. It was how J'onn knew that the cloud was leaving Metropolis.

For now, the people were safe. For now. But J'onn knew that there was no time for Flash and himself to celebrate that, to rest on their laurels. He knew that the Imperium would attack again soon. He had had enough experiences of the pure evil of these parasitic invaders. They would attack again, and the Justice League would need to be ready when that time came. They would need to come up with a new plan.

And as far as J'onn could tell, particularly with what he had just picked up from the minds of Batman and Wonder Woman, that would almost certainly involve having to convince the Martians to help them.

Easier said than done.

"Your friends, they have escaped the blend. They have achieved what you desired," M'vall spoke up again. Her and the other Martian's were all still there, still gathered around with J'onn and Flash as all who could had stopped to listen in on what was happening to see if the day could yet be saved. However, J'onn definitely did not fail to notice the tone M'vall had used when she broke the tense silence that had befallen them. It very much implied a sense of 'you don't need us after all', a sense that she would be determinedly refusing to budge on her stance of non-action.

"Would somebody care to tell me what the heck is going on?" Flash virtually pleaded. He sounded a blend of worried, anxious and confused. Of course he would be feeling those emotions. Unlike the rest of them, he would have no idea about what had happened across the cloud. Worse, he had insinuated before the silence that something terrible had befallen two of his closest friends and allies. Of course Wally would be desperate to know their fate, just as much as he needed to know what was going on with the bigger picture. J'onn knew full well that Wally West never forgot about his friends, no matter what else was happening.

"To cut a long story short, Batman and Wonder Woman managed to successfully access the cloud's control core and drive the cloud away from Metropolis," J'onn quickly stepped in to ease Flash's worries. He could immediately tell that Flash had more questions, that he wanted more details, but there just wasn't time for that. He stressed the next words to make sure Flash understood. He very much intended for M'vall to pick up on those words too. "It was a close call, but they both made it out safely. However, it was only a temporary measure. The Earth is not safe yet. The Imperium are going to strike again. Our aim has notyetbeen achieved."

"So... What now? What do we do now?" was the question the Flash settled on asking, clearing biting others away. M'vall was noticeably quiet once J'onn had finished talking. Perhaps it was time for a new tack.

"Now we need to learn what exactly we're up against," J'onn told Flash. "Among all the other things we have to fight to stop this cloud is the unknown. We don't know enough about the Transcendence to be able to definitively say how to stop its creation."

"Right," Flash was quickly nodding, obviously having caught on to where J'onn was going with that. "If only we knew a bunch of guys who'd been living here for a while who could give us the full guided tour..."

"It was around a hundred years into the war, a hundred years or so after the Imperium had first invaded Mars," M'vall immediately leapt into things. She had got the point very quickly, and she sounded like she wanted to get it out of the way, like she had been expecting this. J'onn was not about to interrupt any time soon, though. He wanted to hear this. "Us, all of us, we were in a top secret underground bunker, a place where we were trying to find a way to fight back. We were scientists, not soldiers. But then the Imperium found us, and they attacked us. We had to stop them. We knew that there was no way out for us, so we decided to take them all with us. We set the facility to self destruct and kill all of us within it, but to get the timing right and ensure no Imperium had a chance to escape the multiple bomb setters had to be in telepathic contact. When the bombs blew... Well I guess, as the old rumours said, we all stayed in contact. As soon as some of the linked died, the cloud instantly formed. One second I felt the fires hit me, I felt the warmth of my death, the blistering of my body at its final end. The next I was here, in this place, feeling as healthy as could be. Except for the fact that my body was gone. Within seconds I saw the others in here with me, and we knew that the rumours were true. How it happened exactly is a mystery we have not tried to solve. There has never been time to. Only seconds after we had come to terms with what had happened, we had realised that we Martians were not alone in the cloud. It had managed to form so quickly that it had swallowed up the Imperium soldier's minds before their bodies were destroyed too.

"From that very first moment we hid. There were no doubts, no stragglers who disagreed with that course of action. Then this realm we are in was just emptiness, endless darkness with us in the middle. The Imperium saw us and began to attack, but luckily we had one advantage they did not. We knew the rumours of Transcendence. We knew the stories of what could be done if such an event actually happened. We knew that there was a possibility that in such a realm we could use our minds to shroud ourselves where the Imperium could not track us. And so we hid. And we have remained hidden ever since. Hundreds of years have passed, and the Imperium never found us.

"It wasn't as simple as that sounds however. Over time the Imperium began to realise that they too could control the cloud. In fact, with their numbers, they truly took control. We could not fight them. We could not resist. We could only use our telepathy to keep ourselves shrouded. For the first years the Imperium continued to try to track us, but thankfully we were always able to keep them at bay. Eventually they grew tired of the hunt. Eventually they began to miss their glorious lord and master. They began to miss their conquest. Simply living on in the cloud was no life for them. They couldn't accept that as we could. They soon began to feel that they now had the ultimate weapon at their fingertips, that they now had the means to truly defeat all Martian resistance to their invasion. But thankfully we had one thing to stop them from utilising the cloud against Mars. It was buried, buried deep. The underground bunker that it had been forged in was many miles underground, beneath tonne after tonne of rock. Even an energy cloud can't just fly through that, as the Imperium found to their detriment. The cloud's energy could have probably passed through with ease if that was all it was, but we surmise that the core must have some form of physical element to it, despite what it all seems, some trace of all of us who died to form it. It was that trace that held the cloud back and prevented the Imperium from escaping the deep tomb near instantly. They tried, though. And eventually they succeeded. It took a lot of effort, all of their concentration, but eventually the Imperium were able to use the energy of the cloud to steadily create fissures through the rock, to tear cracks in it all, to create a path to the surface and to freedom. But, even without us doing anything to stop them, it took them centuries. Many of them. It was only months ago that they managed to get the cloud to the surface of Mars again. Only to find that their people were gone. And so was ours.

"And then we all, the Imperium and we Martians both, detected you. You, J'onn J'onzz. We may have been far away, but we heard you, communicating telepathically across lightyears of space. You have to understand, the Imperium were lost when they found that their kind was gone, no longer on Mars. They need their leader, they need to be with others of their kind. Alone they're lost, without purpose. That scares them, and in turn that makes them even more dangerous. They need to find the others like them, to reunite with the other Imperium. They didn't know where to start to do that until they detected you. You J'onn J'onzz, the last living Martian, the last link between them and their kind. And you lived on the world they knew would have been their next target once Mars had truly fallen to them. They had to find you J'onn. They intended to take you, to torture you, to do whatever they had to do to get you to take them to the Imperium. Without even trying we overheard their plan to harm you. We didn't dare do anything to stop them, but we couldn't let the last Martian we knew to exist fall to them. That was why we tried to warn you.

"But it clearly turned out to be a fruitless attempt. You are here, and so are so many of the people of your new home, fallen to the Imperium's cloud. You're entire world shall not be far behind it. There will be no stopping them. The Imperium will not halt. They can't be reasoned with, they can't be–"

"Yeah, yeah, we've met them before," Flash was quick to interrupt M'vall's long running monologue as soon as she began to go off track, to fall back into the whims of her fears. J'onn was about to butt in himself, but he never should have expected to do so quicker than the world's fastest man. "Big scary bad guys, we know. Go on with the story. I want to hear the rest of it before you rant about how we're all doomed. I always get bored by that part."

"There isn't much more to tell," M'vall responded, giving Flash a dirty look but talking more regardless. "At least not a lot that we know of. All there is left to talk of is the fate that awaits the people of this world. Those that the cloud has already claimed will be in the Imperium's power now. There is no hope for them. They are lost. The Imperium will keep their consciousnesses at bay and use the raw power of their minds to make their control of the cloud even stronger. But before that, they will talk to them. They will find out everything their new prisoners know in an effort to track down the other Imperium, and then they will tear this world apart until either they have found their people, or there is nothing left. Your world's only hope is that the Imperium find what they are looking for before the Earth falls, as Mars did."

J'onn wasn't really surprised about a single word that he had just heard, but that didn't mean that he wasn't shocked to hear them spoken aloud. They weren't ones he wanted to hear. At all. They continued to describe the Martians' collective hopelessness about their fate. They continued to make it clear that the Martians wouldn't be about to help any time soon. And J'onn knew that the Justice League and the people of Earth would be needing that help, even if the cloud had backed away for now.

For there was one thing that M'vall had said that had truly resonated with him, one thing that he knew was absolutely true. The Imperium would be interrogating those that they had captured from the city down below, and J'onn knew from touching the minds of Batman and Wonder Woman that the Imperium had captured plenty of them. When the aliens would inevitably learn about what had transpired, about their leader's demise and their people's defeat, things were not likely to end well.

"It doesn't have to be like that," he implored, not wanting to think about that any more than he would have to. Once again, he spoke directly to M'vall. He had to convince her, to convince them all. "You could help us. There's still time. You could help us stop all of this. Please..."

M'vall sighed, a sigh of almost exhaustion. "We have been through all of this already, J'onn J'onnz. We cannot interfere. We cannot."

"Then it is you who doom this world, not the Imperium," J'onn was quick to counter. He was having a fairly hard time keeping all of his emotions in check. For so long he had dreamt of meeting another Martian again in whatever form they may have taken, but this...

This was so infuriating. His people had never been warriors, but they had never been cowards either. They had fought when their world was so threatened, right to the bitter end. For M'vall and the others to refuse to share that spirit was an insult to their memory. Worse, it could very easily lead to the deaths of billions of other innocents. The billions who made up J'onn's adopted home. The billions, of which one individual was his wife.

"I know that you've all been through a lot, that you're all afraid, but we need your assistance to know how to put a stop to this," J'onn went on in his imploring tone. "We need your experience of the cloud, your knowledge of its inner workings, your knowledge of how these Imperium think, how they operate. We need you to help us to find a way to put an end to this madness. Against the vastness of the Imperium army, we'll need your numbers, your strength. Without you there is little hope. Myself and the residents of this world will fight on no matter what it costs us, but you and I both know that there is a very real chance that that will not be enough. Please. Live up to the good name of our people. Please don't turn your backs on who we were, who we are as a race. Please help us to save lives, to save peace. Please. Otherwise you are no better than they are. You'll be killing us all just as much as any Imperium."

The instant J'onn had said those last two sentences, M'vall's face immediately fell, then became pure thunder, literally altering shape as if to display it all the more. Rage had clearly overcome her. Her next words made that even clearer as she stormed closer to him, finger jabbing out at his chest.

"We are nothing like them!" she howled at him, baring fangs she had just forged. "Don't you ever compare us to those monsters! Ever! You've had plenty of time to forget about the horrors they caused. You've had a chance to forge a new life. Don't forget we've seen your thoughts. We know that you might have lost one, but you've had the chance to forge a new family. You haven't had to spend half a millennium fearing for your life, for what they might do to you next! We have. So don't you dare compare us to them! Don't you dare!"

J'onn knew that it was a risk responding to that as he did, but it was a risk that he just had to take. "I dare. Because I must. You must help us. You must prove that you remained Martian beyond the Transen–"

"This talk is over!" the words exploded out of M'vall. "This is over! Do what you will, J'onn J'onzz. Leave us out of it. We will have nothing to do with you or your fight! We won't! Do not come after us. Do not involve us in your hell. Leave us out of it!"

J'onn opened his mouth, ready to argue. Beside him, he could tell that Flash was doing the same. Neither, though, had the chance to get the words out. In less time than a blink of an eye, M'vall suddenly became a mere wisp of fog before J'onn's eyes, and then even that was gone. Typically following her lead, the other Martians were soon gone too.

They had failed again. J'onn had failed to get through to his own people, and now the Earth could well fall because of it.

"Err... Are we boned now big guy?" Flash muttered at the situation. Up until then, J'onn had been left motionless, shocked to stillness. Thankfully Flash was able to snap him out of it.

"We cannot stop fighting, my friend," J'onn answered, forcing all negative feelings that were swimming in him away. He couldn't listen to them. He couldn't give up like the others Martians had. He couldn't give up. "In fact, we will need to act fast."

"The bad guys are pissed at us, huh?" Flash commented in return.

J'onn immediately nodded. What Flash had said was an understatement. In fact, it was a massive understatement. With the Martians gone, J'onn dared to reach out to the Imperium, to feel what they were up to. It only took him seconds to confirm everything. The Imperium knew it all. They had learned it from Snapper Carr, and now they were really, really angry.

"So? What do we do?"

"Right now, there is only one thing we can do," J'onn replied to Flash's question. He knew this was true. He knew they had to do it, even if it would be interrupting a much needed moment between two very important people. He knew that not only did they need to regroup, they would need those two to help them make a plan to save everyone. "We need to get to the cloud's core. Without the aid of my peo... With those Martians aid, we're going to need Batman and Wonder Woman more than ever. This is going to get pretty rough. This time, the Imperium will only want to deal in death. The people below thought the last attack was bad. The one coming will make it pale in comparison."

The negativity had tried to creep up on J'onn again as he had spoke, especially at the mention of M'vall and the rest. He managed to fight it off again, but he knew that it would just keep coming back. Thankfully, Flash was never one to give up. He always found a way to stay positive. He might not have had a wise crack at the ready this time, but what he did say was every bit as important.

"In that case, next stop Bats and Wondy central. I'll get us there in no time, just show me the way. And J'onn, once we're done, it'll be the nasty aliens who won't know what's hit 'em."

A/N:

There's the next bit for you folks. Enjoy it since I going to get quite distracted over the next few weeks. Small matter of the World Cup, which cannot ever be missed! Hence progress will be slow while its on. However, if you all hit me up with a plethora of reviews, I'll have to reward you by working extra to get the next chapter out earlier. It'll have to be a fair few mind, since I do rather like getting them. I look forward to hearing from you all!

In the meantime, kindly offer England plenty of support, no matter where you're from (yes, even if your from Scotland). We're going to need it.