"Bring them all in! Two pounds of Veritaserum each—find out who they were handing the data to and who their contact is!"
The agents were obedient enough, but their efficiency left something to be desired. Thea waited all day, and it wasn't until that evening that the exhausted team dragged out a preliminary interrogation report.
The agent delivering it wore thick glasses and was visibly terrified standing before Thea. It took him a full three minutes of stammering to get the words out.
"What? You're saying they have a ship on the far side of the moon?"
Thea shot to her feet. Her ice-cold glare sent the agent into another round of nervous nodding—he didn't have enough energy left for actual words.
This was bad. Very bad. An alien vessel, this close to Earth—parked practically in their backyard—and nobody had noticed?
That was almost impossible to believe. Thea and Diana flew into space all the time. Hal Jordan made regular patrols out past the atmosphere. And then there were Batman and Lex Luthor, two walking anomalies who could detect almost anything. Between all of them, how had something this big slipped through? Especially when Batman maintained a sprawling research base on the far side of the moon.
Thea took the report and cross-referenced the coordinates. She had to admit—that particular patch of lunar surface had never been on her radar.
"Seal all files and classify them top secret. Keep the woman—the one named Priscilla, alias Voodoo—in custody. I'll check the site myself."
She left the agent staring after her in open admiration as she shot straight up through the sky.
The flight took her only a few minutes. The far side of the moon greeted her as it always had—a pockmarked wasteland of craters, utterly silent, utterly dead, without so much as a trace of microbial life. No matter how carefully she scanned, nothing looked out of place.
Are the agents feeding me bad intel? The thought was dismissed almost immediately. They wouldn't dare.
Did the woman just make it up on the spot? Thea felt the faintest tremor in the threads of fate overhead. No—something was here.
She ran a full sweep with her psychic senses, then again with telescopic vision. Nothing.
Whatever was out there, it was hidden by technology that outstripped anything she'd encountered before. She turned around and went to find Batman. When it came to things like this, the old bat was well ahead of her.
"You're saying there's an alien ship hiding on the far side of the moon? And they've been watching Earth this entire time?"
Even Batman's composure cracked slightly at that.
Thea nodded. "If I had to guess, your every move has been under their surveillance for years."
Batman acknowledged the gravity of the situation. His old lunar base had been relocated, but the monitoring equipment was still in place. He mobilized everything, analyzing the data point by point.
"That chubby guy from the party caused all of this?"
Barbara and Catwoman had caught wind of the news and come running. The women talked over each other in excited bursts until someone filled them in on the origin of the whole affair—and it turned out to have something to do with them.
Thea explained, half-laughing, half-exasperated: the heavyset man had not been a staged entertainment act. He'd stumbled into the situation entirely on his own. As for everything spiraling out this far—she could only chalk it up to the Female Justice League's uncanny good fortune.
Barbara, Catwoman, Batwoman, Huntress, and the statuesque young Cassandra all exchanged glances. What they'd assumed was a casual girls' night out had somehow unearthed a threat of this magnitude. Unspoken agreement passed between them—they were absolutely attending the next one.
The noise from six women in full debate was enough to test even Thea's patience. She glanced over at Batman, who sat perfectly still, expression unmoved.
Then she noticed the small switch on his cowl—the built-in noise-canceling feature, already toggled on.
So that's why you wear the mask in your own home. She was fairly certain she'd cracked one of Gotham's greatest mysteries.
Half an hour later, Batman pointed at the screen.
"Your instinct was right. These three points here, here, and here don't match the expected readings. The metallic density at these locations runs thirty-one times above the lunar surface average—but the scans detect nothing at all."
Standard superhero logic applied here: locate the enemy, neutralize the enemy. The plan was never really in question.
Thea had intended to scout ahead on her own, but Batman shut that down immediately. He intended to look the surveillance team in the eye himself. The Bat-family women were equally enthusiastic—as Barbara put it, this mission was already on their list, and they planned to see it through.
In the end, the third Robin, Tim Drake, and Damian also joined the expedition. With them came a young man Thea hadn't seen before.
"This is Luke Fox," Batman said by way of introduction. "Lucius Fox's son. Goes by Batwing." Lucas wore a gleaming silver-white high-tech suit of armor—the only member of the Bat-family to use powered armor.
Thea's eyes flicked over it. You added a new face because there were too many women, didn't you. She also noted the suit bore a distinct resemblance to an upgraded version of her own Management Committee armor.
"Lucius Fox's son." She kept her tone warm. "You look just like your father. He's a remarkable man—one of the best mentors I've ever encountered." Privately: You really do both have the same look...
Lucas stood awkwardly, unsure whether to treat her as a peer or an elder—she'd opened with something that could go either way.
Damian saved him from the dilemma by barreling straight into Thea's side. "Sis! Any leads on my flying magical beast? You said you'd—"
Thea was already running on a packed schedule. Where on earth was she going to find an animal that could go toe-to-toe with a young Kryptonian? She kept the kid occupied with vague reassurances.
Meanwhile, Batman directed the rest of the group like a mob boss quarterbacking a heist—equipment was moving constantly: batarangs, explosives, welding torches, cables, electronics, precision instruments. Getting out of Gotham for an actual field mission was apparently a rare treat, because even Cassandra, who usually wore a permanent blank expression, was enthusiastically hauling gear.
Thea had planned to fly herself, but one look at the Bat-family's fully equipped spacecraft and she stepped aboard without complaint.
Nine members of the Bat-family, plus her—an even ten.
Alfred had packed food for the journey. Thea accepted her share—it felt like a school trip. She watched Batman retract the roof and, under cover of darkness, launch them straight through the atmosphere.
The expedition was underway.
For everyone in the Bat-family except Batman himself, this was uncharted territory. A commercial flight was one thing—punching through Earth's atmosphere was another experience entirely. The moment they cleared the clouds, a chorus of hushed reactions swept through the cabin as the full sweep of the cosmos filled the viewports.
Thea bit into a piece of fried chicken. Alfred's hands weren't what they used to be, but the old man still had it. She helped herself to one piece only—there were nine other people who needed to eat.
"What else do you know about these Demostars?" Batman asked.
Thea wiped her hands on the edge of Damian's cape. The boy shot her a death glare. She pretended not to notice.
"Not much. Their species has been extinct for nearly a century. They were built around collective intelligence—every individual, upon death, contributed their brain tissue to a central archive. Accumulated knowledge, experience, and memory merged together to form the Overmind that governed the entire race. In life, each member had a precise function, like a component in a machine—day after day, the same role, the same task. I suppose that's why the humans who named the organization they built called it the Hive."