Supergirl's Sacrifice, page 5
“Agent Smith?” Iris suppressed a chuckle.
“Yep.” Caitlin bobbed her head. “Cisco isn’t here to make a Matrix reference, so I’ll do it for him. Uh . . . Agent Smith is . . . He’s . . . Uh . . .” She blew out a defeated breath. “Sorry. I whiffed. I’ve got nothing. Cisco makes this look easy. Anyway, he’s really persistent and I know you have a lot on your plate, but he’s outside right now and . . .”
Grumbling, Iris swiped on her tablet to open a channel with the outside, not even bothering to look at the camera feed. All sorts of federal law enforcement personnel had come to Central City to help out with crowd control and speedster wrangling in the wake of Anti-Matter Man and the Crime Syndicate’s attack. A whole host of them had never been to Central City before and kept trying to pull rank in order to get a peek inside the world-famous S.T.A.R. Labs facility, home of Team Flash. Iris had better things to do than play docent to curious feds, and she told the man at the door precisely that in no uncertain terms.
“But . . .” he protested, and she cut off the communication feed.
“Well, that’s done,” Iris said, and checked off FED AT DOOR? from her list, then moved down one. “Next up: How’s Madame Xanadu . . . doing?”
“She’s Xanadu-ing OK,” Caitlin said, then winced at the pun. “Oh, I see what you were avoiding there. Anyway, I’ve been keeping her sedated and she seems like she’s finally given in to the meds. She actually slept about six hours last night. Real sleep.”
“And that’s good?”
Caitlin cracked a grin. “I’m a good doctor, but sleep is even better. I suspect the initial trauma and shock of losing the connection to her dead Earth 27 doppelgänger is beginning to wear off. With any luck, she’ll be up and about later today. Tomorrow at the latest.”
Iris nodded. “Then maybe she can conjure Cisco and Mr. Terrific out of the time stream and back here, where we need them.”
And maybe, she thought, she can also explain that weird vision I had of Barry.
“Iris?” Caitlin caught her by the elbow and stopped her. “You OK? You suddenly looked really, really . . . troubled.”
Iris blinked a few times and banished the thoughts of the odd dream she’d had. “I’m fine. Let’s go check in on Felicity.”
6
In the sky above Smallville, Kansas, the breach throbbed and pulsated like a suppurating wound, bleeding not fluids but rather noisome winds and spitting, crackling ribbons of radiation. From ten miles away, Supergirl felt its impact, a mélange of death and decay that befouled the air in every direction.
It’s like someone opened a portal into hell, she told J’Onn.
H’ronmeer’s realm, he agreed. I feel heat and cold at the same time. As though the souls of the dead have been yoked to the breath of demons and ride them into our world.
They paused in midair, hovering ten miles out from the epicenter. Kal had described the breach and its size, but it had grown since then. It was a hundred meters wide and almost as tall, a decaying and corrupt oval splitting open the sky. And within . . .
Do you see it? she asked.
Yes.
Within, a massive figure, larger than any creature she’d ever seen before. It was humanoid and bald, its skin a bluish hue, its face expressionless. Remorseless.
“It’s coming through.” She was so shocked that she forgot to use the telepathic link. “Alex,” she said into her communicator. “It’s coming through!”
She was greeted with only static.
We’re on our own, J’Onn told her. He turned to her as they floated there and extended a hand. I am honored to battle at your side. On all days. But on this one in particular. Today we fight not for justice or for peace but for life itself.
Let’s do it, she thought to him, and took his hand.
Together, they flew forward. The creature’s hands had come through the portal and now—somehow—gripped the edges. Within, she could perceive its head and its torso, filling the breach. There wasn’t quite enough room for it to come through entirely.
Until it began tearing the sky even more.
Her mind rebelled against what she was seeing. It . . . Somehow . . . It was grabbing the sky. It was ripping the world open. In thin air.
You do a flyby to distract it, she told J’Onn, and I’ll hit it with heat vision when it’s not looking.
Got it. J’Onn broke away from her and dived toward the breach—
—and a burst of static exploded in Supergirl’s ear.
It hit J’Onn, too, from what she could tell. He wobbled in the air, adjusted his flight path . . .
“Supergirl! J’Onn! Abort your attack run! Return to DEO!”
“Alex?” Kara hesitated, slowing her flight. After a split-second delay, J’Onn had recovered and now bore toward the breach in a straight line.
Nothing. No further communication.
J’Onn, did you hear that?
Just some static. I’m moving—
It was Alex, telling us to retreat. She wouldn’t tell us to fall back unless she meant it.
I’m so close, Kara . . . It was telepathic communication—Supergirl experienced the full weight of J’Onn’s elation, his fear, his dedication to seeing the task through. I’m almost there. I can smell . . . scorched clouds. Oh, gods of Mars! What is this abomination?
Break off, J’Onn! She focused all her emotions and all her mental energies into the telepathic burst.
I have to stop it! He wasn’t even really talking to her anymore. He pushed forward, his thoughts washing back through the telepathic connection. It reeks of evil and hate! I must destroy it!
Kara pursed her lips in worry, her brow furrowed. J’Onn was older than her. So much more experienced. He had spent literally hundreds of years as the Martian Manhunter, stalking criminal prey on Mars, then fighting the good fight as Hank Henshaw on Earth. With her biological father, Zor-El, dead saving Argo City after Krypton’s explosion and her adoptive father, Jeremiah Danvers, missing ever since he’d chosen to betray Lillian Luthor, J’Onn had become her de facto father. Never mind the dramatic differences in age, race, culture, species . . . J’Onn J’Onzz was as dear to her as either of the men who’d helped raise her. She couldn’t doubt him, not with the stakes so high.
Or could she?
Must she?
In the end, she had to trust her gut. Her gut and her sister.
Then, without another thought, she pushed her superspeed to its utmost, launching herself forward in the sky, fists outstretched.
Ahead, the breach ground open, pulled apart like hardening taffy in the creature’s massive hands. J’Onn was a green speck in the foreground. Rolling waves of hot air disgorged from the breach, buffeting him, rippling his cape. He hesitated a moment, no doubt gathering his courage, plotting the best way to strike the human-like shape within.
That pause was all Kara needed. She pushed her speed even further, zooming closer to J’Onn. Just as his fists clenched and his shoulders bunched in preparation for his attack run, she grappled with him from behind and dragged him a thousand feet straight down in less than an instant.
“Kara!” Kara! He was so stunned that he spoke and telepathed to her in the same moment, causing an eerie, warbling stereo effect that scraped her brain like nails on a chalkboard. He struggled against her, his incredible strength threatening to burst her arms open. Kal had once called J’Onn “the most powerful being on the planet.” They’d never tested that.
She didn’t want to test it now.
Tightening her grip, she suddenly found herself holding nothing at all. J’Onn had phased right through her arms, spinning around, his face contorted into bemused rage.
“Alex said to abort the mission!” she told him. “Stand down!” For good measure, she thought it as hard as she could, too.
“Alex?” J’Onn said. His expression slackened into something more peaceful. “But I was just about to . . .”
“I know.” She drifted over to him and looked up. The hole in the sky was growing. Enormous fingertips, down to the first joint, clutched the sides, straining, pulling. “I know, but we have to trust Alex.”
“Back to the DEO, then,” J’Onn said, and they flew off together.
“Did it work?” Oliver asked, shading his eyes with one hand and looking up in the sky to the east.
“Yes,” said Superman. He was on the rooftop along with the Flash, Green Arrow, and Alex. Like them, he was looking up and to the east. Unlike them, he didn’t need to shade his eyes. “I see them about four hundred miles out, heading here. They should be here . . .”
He drifted off for a couple of seconds, and then two dots appeared above the horizon, closing in.
“That’s fast,” Oliver murmured.
“Not so fast,” Barry said with only a tiny bit of asperity.
Oliver chuckled under his breath. For the first time, he got it: Earth 38 made Barry Allen feel the way non-metas felt around Barry Allen.
• • •
“How did you get in touch with us through all that static interference?” Kara asked.
Alex pointed to Oliver. “It was Green Arrow’s idea. He said we needed an arrow. He was right.”
They had convened in the DEO command center, where drone and satellite sensors fed a constant stream of telemetry to the surrounding monitors. Superman, Supergirl, the Flash, Green Arrow, Brainiac 5, J’Onn, and Lena stood arrayed around the central monitoring pedestal, but all eyes were on Alex Danvers as she explained.
“We needed a way to boost our signal so that we could get through the static. We built a signal repeater into a javelin and then Superman threw it halfway across the country so that it could ricochet our signal to your comms.”
Supergirl raised an eyebrow as she glanced at her cousin. “Only halfway across the country?”
The Man of Steel smiled back at her. “Don’t worry—I’m improving every second. I’ll be up to full strength in no time.”
“Let’s catch everyone up,” Alex said, adopting her no-nonsense director of the DEO tone. “Time’s a-wasting, and every second we delay is another second that thing has, to come through the hole in the sky.”
The Earth 38 folks quickly filled Barry and Oliver in on what had happened here: the opening of the breach, the attack on Superman (who looked none the worse for wear, Barry noted), the realization that this was bigger than they could handle alone, even with two Kryptonians and a Martian on hand.
“You said you’ve encountered this thing, too?” Kara asked.
“That thing has a name,” Barry told them. “According to . . . Well, according to someone we know, it’s called Anti-Matter Man.”
No one reacted . . . except for Brainiac 5, who made a slight choking sound and then waved off any possible concern with a curt two-finger slicing gesture.
“Anti-Matter Man, then,” said Alex. “What can you tell us about it?”
Barry nodded. Between him and Oliver, they explained what had happened on Earth 1. How the Crime Syndicate had ripped open a breach from Earth 27, a breach that had spilled out thousands of superspeedsters. A breach that had given them a window into the blasted, denuded landscape that was now Earth 27.
“That place is entirely uninhabitable now,” said Green Arrow. “And unless we can close this breach, he’ll do the same to Earth 38.”
Amid a general murmur of discontent and worry, Supergirl spoke up. “How did you close the breach on your end?”
Barry sighed a long and suffering sigh. “We beat him before by using a gadget Cisco and Mr. Terrific built into Oliver’s arrow.”
“Then let’s do it again,” Superman said.
“Cisco and Mr. Terrific are . . . unavailable,” Oliver told him.
“We should be able to replicate anything your team put together,” Lena said. She looked over at Brainy, who seemed distracted, staring off into the middle distance. “Brainy? Do you agree?”
“Of course.” He didn’t so much as snap out of it as he blinked exactly once and was immediately refocused. “We’ll need to capture quantum data from the breach site, as well as . . .”
“Here.” Barry handed over the thumb drive. “This is all the data we collected from the Earth 1 breach site. Should be enough to get you going.”
Brainy accepted the drive and held it in his cupped hands for a moment. When no one said anything, Oliver said, “Aren’t you going to do something with it?”
“I am copying the data for internal collation and analysis,” Brainy said.
Barry and Oliver shared a gape-mouthed moment. “For real?” Barry asked.
“Brainy’s sense of humor doesn’t extend to computer jokes,” Kara assured him.
“Untrue.” Brainy sounded deeply, fundamentally offended by the very notion that there was something he did not excel at. “I will offer a computer joke now: Have you heard of that new band, 1023 Megabytes? They’re good, but they—”
“Later,” Alex snapped. “We have work to do.”
“Hurry,” said Superman. He was staring at the ceiling, profound concern twisting his mien.
Kara focused her X-ray vision and telescopic vision along the same path as her cousin. “Oh no,” she whispered.
The breach had widened considerably. Anti-Matter Man’s head and one arm had already come through, birthing him into a world that could not afford his presence.
“Work fast,” she told Brainy and Lena. “Faster than you’ve ever worked before.”
7
Work fast, Supergirl had said. So of course Barry had to lend a hand.
He joined Brainy and Lena in one of the DEO’s labs and did his best to help out. Barry was smart, but Brainiac 5 seemed a thousand years ahead of him, and Lena Luthor wasn’t a whit duller than Brainy. Barry allowed himself to help out on the edges, running computer simulations and fetching whatever the others needed in order to do their jobs.
Oliver ambled into the room at one point. “I’m feeling a little useless here,” he confided to Barry. “Maybe I shouldn’t have come.”
“This is going to be all hands on deck time again,” Barry told him. “I’m glad you’re here. Really.”
“Am I going to have to fire another perfect shot?” Oliver asked with only a trace of sarcasm.
“I hope not.” He indicated Brainy and Lena with a tilt of his head. “These two geniuses seem to be hitting their stride. I think there’s a good chance they’ll come up with a better delivery method than the one Cisco and Curtis threw together at the last minute.”
“Are you saying their geeks are better than our geeks?”
Barry couldn’t tell if Oliver was joking or serious. Then again, he usually couldn’t tell if Oliver was joking or serious, so he just always assumed serious.
“I think they have a whole different setup here, and they have the advantage of knowing more than we did.”
As in most rooms in the DEO, this one had a monitor mounted in a corner up near the ceiling, and it was showing a live television feed of a news channel. Someone announced something. Barry would have ignored it, but at the same time, he heard a small gasp from Lena.
She had glanced up at the screen, and she did a double take. “Is something wrong?” Barry asked her.
“No, it’s just that . . . my friend Kara is supposed to be reporting on what happened at Governor’s Park. They just showed a snippet of the press conference, and I didn’t see her there. I hope nothing has happened to her and that she’s all right.”
Halfway to saying, “But Kara is in the other room right now!” Barry managed to yank his mouth shut. Lena didn’t know that Supergirl and Kara Danvers were the same person. He could scarcely believe it. Lena was a Cisco-class genius, if not smarter. How could she miss something so blatantly obvious?
Oliver tugged Barry’s elbow, drawing him into the hallway. “You don’t see it, do you?”
“See what?”
Oliver’s eyes narrowed and he lowered his voice even more, almost below a whisper. “That Lena woman. You can’t believe she doesn’t see through Supergirl’s disguise.”
Barry checked over his shoulder that Lena hadn’t come out into the corridor. “How could she not?”
With a shake of his head, Oliver clapped a hand on Barry’s shoulder. “You’ve never understood this, Barry: Consider that she doesn’t want to know.”
“Why not?” That made absolutely no sense.
Oliver offered a lopsided, self-deprecating grin. “I know a disaffected rich kid when I see one, Barry. Lena’s got money, resources, and demons. Her friendship with Kara Danvers is probably the most normal, grounding thing in her entire life. On some level, she knows she can’t afford to lose that. A powerful brain like hers can uncover the truth, sure . . .”
“But it can also cover the truth when necessary,” Barry whispered. “I get it. Thanks, Oliver.”
Back in the lab, Brainiac 5 and Lena Luthor raced against the clock. They had the Earth 1 data about the breach, as well as hastily assembled schematics from Cisco and Mr. Terrific for the gadget they’d built into one of Green Arrow’s arrows. The problem on Earth 1 was the same as the problem here on Earth 38: The breach could only be closed from the other side. Given the toxic nature of Earth 27, the Earth 1 team had needed a special delivery system to get the gadget into place. Lacking anything truly special, Lena noted, they’d opted for the literally medieval solution of a bow and arrow.
“This isn’t a problem for us,” Lena commented as she used a nano torch to solder some circuitry. “We should be able just to have Supergirl fly our version of the breach-closer over to the Earth 27 side and use it from there. Her invulnerability should protect her from the effects of that environment, and her superspeed will enable her to get back through the breach before it closes.” Lena tapped one immaculately manicured finger against her chin, thinking. “We’ll need to take the time-contraction effect into account, though. Green Arrow ended up propelled through time due to his proximity to the explosion. So Supergirl will need to—”
“Not Supergirl.”
Lena broke off. She’d been rambling for quite a while. So long that she’d almost forgotten that Brainiac 5 was in the lab with her, working diligently on the other side of the lab bench.
