"Calm down." Thea's voice hit her like ice water poured straight over her head. The rage that had been spiraling toward the breaking point snapped back under control in an instant.
Brainiac couldn't see Thea. He was baffled. What was wrong with this Kryptonian woman? How did she go from volcanic fury to dead calm in a heartbeat?
Then the Kryptonian woman's next words made him panic. "Thea, what do we do with this guy?"
At first he assumed she was using some kind of long-range communicator. But Brainiac ran three separate checks and tested scanning systems from thirty-nine advanced civilizations. Not a single frequency capable of supporting a basic transmission was present in this space.
There was someone else here? Not four intruders, but five?
Brainiac was rattled. He deployed even more detection methods—from this severed head, from every sensor across the entire ship, from probes buried deep in distant corners of the cosmos. The results were unanimous: there was no one. No "invisible person" of any kind.
Thea didn't bother with him. The Brainiac that had once loomed like a mountain was, by her current standards, nothing at all.
She gestured for Supergirl to hand the head to Batman.
Batman didn't disappoint. He uploaded several strings of code directly into Brainiac's data core.
"What is that stuff?" Supergirl squinted at the stream of data. Completely over her head.
"Fear described in digital format." Thea recognized it at a glance. Batman was a genuine genius. It was infinitely cruder, of course, but the underlying concept of his digitized fear already bore a faint resemblance to The Presence using equations to encode life and anti-life.
Brainiac crashed. Clearing the data anomaly would take considerable time. The group strolled freely into the collection chamber, where row upon row of glass enclosures held miniature cities, over a hundred in all. Each one frozen in place, preserved exactly as it had been the moment it was taken.
The three Kryptonians split up to search. Thea wandered through the displays at her leisure. Batman, true to form, was using some unidentifiable piece of cutting-edge tech to siphon Brainiac's databases.
"That thing survives as data. Don't bring him back to Earth."
"I know."
Their brief exchange was interrupted by Kara's shout. "I found it! Kandor!"
Thea and Batman hurried over. Looking down at miniature Kandor, everyone felt a quiet pang of emotion.
The ancient Kryptonian city had changed dramatically. Compared to the version they'd seen on their trip three hundred and fifty thousand years into the past to deal with Rao, it was a completely different landscape.
But the modern Kryptonians had preserved their heritage well. In the finer details you could still trace the outline of the city as it had been, though the wilderness had long since given way to technology. That primitive tribal settlement had become an elegant metropolis, alive with the brilliant glow of an advanced civilization.
Faora and Kara began scanning for familiar faces with their super vision. Superman stood nearby, simply gazing at the traces of his people's civilization, at his own kin.
Kara let out a shriek. "That's Thara! Thara Ak-Var! She was my best friend at school! Oh my god, she and her mother are both here!" Faora spotted plenty of acquaintances too—subordinates, colleagues, friends—but she stayed composed. Kara was the one shouting at every new discovery.
The other four listened to her periodic outbursts and understood. Kara needed an outlet.
"Oh my god! Rao protect us!" Kara's hands flew to her mouth. Tears spilled down her cheeks.
Thea caught Faora's eye with a questioning look. Who did she see?
Faora examined the figure, cross-referencing it against her memory. "Ah. He's from the House of El. Zor-El."
Then, quietly: "Kara's father."
Her voice was barely above a whisper, but everyone present heard it clearly. Superman hadn't expected to encounter a direct blood relative. This was his uncle.
Thea checked the time. They couldn't linger. "Let's go. We'll restore everyone together once we're back. You'll have all the time in the world to catch up."
Superman moved to lower the surrounding glass enclosures.
"What if some of those civilizations are hostile? Where do we put them? In the Solar System too?" Only Batman would play the villain here.
Thea couldn't be bothered to rescue outsiders. This trip was about honoring her promise to Faora. What did other alien species have to do with her? Save them and then what? An endless parade of headaches—feeding them, housing them, checking environmental compatibility, managing cultural clashes, technology gaps, climate adjustments. They were better off meditating in Brainiac's collection for eternity.
Out of sight, out of mind.
To preempt trouble, she'd quietly intervened while the others were fighting Brainiac. A handful of enclosures containing what appeared to be peaceful civilizations had been tucked away. What remained was a mix of dead cities and populations that looked downright vicious.
Superman was eventually persuaded, and the group departed with Kandor for the Solar System.
Batman had the Yellow Lantern Ring; the other three Kryptonians could all survive in open space. They wanted to watch Thea conjure an entire planet from nothing.
With the experience of one prior creation under her belt and overwhelming power to back it up, Thea surveyed Earth's orbital path. As agreed: the Sun as dividing line, two worlds on opposite sides. Thanks to the Sun's bulk, this new planet would be invisible to the naked eye.
As for those with instruments sophisticated enough to detect it, Superman could handle that. The Fortress of Solitude contained a piece of Jor-El's technology—some kind of electromagnetic interference device, from what Thea could tell. Installed somewhere on New Krypton, it would render all external probes useless. New Krypton would have a long, undisturbed window to rebuild.
Earth, fire, water, wind. The four elements converged, and a planet popped into existence with jarring abruptness.
Batman stared. This bore absolutely no resemblance to any planetary formation process he'd ever studied. What about accreting debris? What about gravitational coalescence?
"Don't sweat the details..." Thea wasn't about to explain the mechanics. Some things could only be felt, not taught. The short version: she could skip every stage of planetary birth and simply will a new celestial body into being.
And to ensure future Kryptonians wouldn't suffer from environmental incompatibility, she'd used the original Krypton template. Gravity, oxygen concentration, ecological balance—everything matched the old Krypton as closely as possible.
The group touched down on the surface. Supergirl was vibrating with impatience.
Thea held her back for the moment. A few precautions were still necessary. She blocked the star's light from reaching the surface, then set Kandor down at its original location and initiated reverse atomization.
A vast city erupted from the ground, fully sealed, its technology-laden architecture frozen in the state it had occupied decades ago. Bloodstains that had not yet dried still streaked the streets—the last stand of those warriors who'd fought Brainiac to the end. Civilians lay scattered in twos and threes, knocked unconscious by the overwhelming energy surge of the original capture.
They would never have imagined that a single moment of darkness would last thirty-eight years.
Supergirl rushed to the side of a middle-aged man. Her father. She wanted desperately to wake him, but feared triggering some unforeseen complication. All she could do was look to Thea, pleading.