Thea kept them occupied for another two minutes. When no more aliens emerged, she turned and ran, pulling the entire pack behind her.
The lizard-like aliens weren't about to let their target walk away with what she knew. And she hadn't exactly demonstrated herself to be a serious threat—as far as they were concerned, they had a runner, not a warrior. The pack fell into formation behind her with the focused purpose of a hunt.
While they were moving, Thea opened a mental channel to Batman.
"No telepathy or mind control in this group—they compensate with combat precision that reads like machine calculation, but that's all. Their power weapons are nearly depleted. One more thing: when the hatch opened earlier, I managed a quick psychic scan of the interior. I counted three or four more hostiles inside. Stay sharp."
With Thea and her trail of pursuers growing smaller in the distance, Batman signaled the advance.
Damian had already made himself a ghost—the moment the hatch opened, he'd slipped through like a shadow. On his father's signal, he worked the interior lock, and the two groups—inside and out—coordinated in seconds to open the ramp.
"Assume they know we're here. Batgirl, Batwoman, Cassandra—sweep the east corridor, collect any weapons you find. Catwoman, Batwing, Huntress—north passage. Tim and I take the center. Damian holds this exit. Nothing gets through our back door. Move."
Damian's mouth tightened at being left out of the action, but he held position. Batman had seen the aliens fight; three-person cells were more than adequate.
There was no Gotham rooftop choreography here. Moving carefully through a spacecraft humming with technology that should not have existed, the Bat-family felt something they rarely experienced—genuine disorientation. The corridors were tight, the air was wrong, and the geometry of the ship followed logic their instincts hadn't been trained for.
Batman's division had been deliberately considered: Barbara carried the Demostar language files on her personal computer. Batwing's powered armor had its own translation suite. Neither team would hit a language wall. As for Batman himself—he'd been cramming vocabulary on the flight over, manual study at spacecraft speeds.
None of them were naive enough to assume an alien vessel would be booby-trapped everywhere, but all three groups moved as if it might be. The text was sparse and mostly functional—signage and labeling they could parse with the translation key.
The Demostar social structure was becoming clear as they progressed: a hive. Room after room of soldier quarters, each completely stripped of personal effects. No decoration, no individual items—every occupant a replaceable unit performing an assigned function, day after day, world without end.
The sci-fi aesthetic of the ship—auto-sealing bulkhead doors, instrument arrays with no recognizable purpose, the cold efficiency of the corridors—all of it carried a strange charge for the team that usually called Gotham's crumbling gargoyles home. It was novel in a way that sharpened rather than dulled their senses.
When it came to searching, Catwoman had always been in a class of her own. Preternaturally sharp eyes, a nose that caught things others missed, and what could only be called a gift for being in the right place. She was the first to hit something significant.
"Gentlemen—and lady—I've found a large-scale artificial incubation chamber." A pause. "They appear to be cloning humans. All the subjects in the pods look the same."
Barbara's discovery came second. "Dozens of animal remains. Fragmented—some appear to be grafted with human cellular material. Hybrid mutations."
Whatever experimentation this species was running on human genetics, the broad outline required no advanced degree to interpret.
"I've got three tangos here. Possible command-grade. Wait—we've been made." The earpiece crackled with interference. Then silence.
Batman had seen it coming. He waved Tim back to cover and stepped out alone.
One of the aliens stood there—chin adorned with five tendrils instead of three, clearly something above the standard soldiers. It regarded him with an air of connoisseurship.
"I recognize you." The alien's tone was almost indulgent. "What a gift."
Batman's jaw tightened. Everything he'd built up here over the years—every experiment, every test, every late-night breakthrough—all of it watched. Catalogued. And he'd never detected a single sign of it.
"What do you want?" he asked flatly. "How long have you been here?"
"We were here long before humans ever set foot on this moon." The alien studied him the way a collector examines a find. "You are an extraordinarily intelligent specimen. Your brain has considerable preservation value."
Two more aliens emerged from behind—four tendrils each.
"Take him. I want his mind and his knowledge in service of the Demostar."
The three closed in a triangle formation.
Batman had faced worse odds in worse conditions. A single batarang staggered the lead alien; a spinning heel kick took the second one across the face; when the third lunged to tackle him, he fired his grapple line and swung horizontally out of the triangle, clear of all three.
With all three aliens turned toward Batman and their backs exposed, Tim Drake dropped from his hiding spot and brought his staff down hard on one skull. The pair found their rhythm instantly—the three "command units" fought with precise technique but applied it like a textbook, mechanical and slow to adapt. They were administrators, not warriors. Their opponents were two of the finest martial artists alive.
Batman and Tim exploited every inch of their flexibility advantage, weaving through the gap-and-counter rhythm the aliens struggled to adjust to. Batman's arm blade caught an alien's clawed swipe; Batman grabbed the wrist, torqued the shoulder, and Tim's staff caught the exposed back of the skull. The alien swayed for four or five seconds and folded.
One down. The other two followed in short order. The five-tentacled leader was the real problem—it took Batman three clean punches to finally put it out.
The two of them located the bridge. Between Batman and Tim—both exceptional systems specialists—plus the Demostar language files, they worked the alien interface through a combination of analysis and educated guesswork, eventually disabling the jamming array and bringing their comms back online.
"Status reports."
"Clear here." Damian, crisp and immediate. In the field, the kid was everything he was supposed to be.
"We've got a big one on our hands. Bat-Girl is with us. Manageable, but active." Catwoman's voice—clearly mid-fight.
Batman pulled up the ship's internal surveillance and found their location.
The six of them were circling a massive creature. Anyone who'd been present for the earlier capture would have recognized the profile—similar in shape to the heavyset man who'd detonated, but significantly larger, more brutal, and sporting a pair of vestigial wings on its back. The wings were deformed, and the creature's own weight made them functionally useless—decorative at best.
Despite its ferocity, the creature was losing. Cassandra activated her Word Spirit ability and drove both blades into its eyes. Catwoman and Barbara lashed its arms with their whips simultaneously. Batwing, in full powered armor, delivered the finishing blow.
The creature dropped.
Moments later, Thea came drifting back in from the distance, a string of alien prisoners trailing behind her with the resigned air of people being escorted somewhere they didn't want to go.
All ten converged on the bridge.
Batman, Tim, and Barbara—the three computer specialists—were already working the alien systems at full capacity. Thea settled in beside them and began reading the alien leader's memories.
Both streams of intelligence pointed in the same direction.
Neither was good news.