"They can read minds, but not control them—is that right?"
Tim Drake, the third Robin, cut straight to the critical question.
"Actually, I'm fairly sure the telepath was a genetic anomaly rather than a standard species ability," Thea said. "The other two women we captured showed no sign of it whatsoever."
"Speaking of which—we're about to board an alien vessel, so I pulled some of their language and loaded it into the system. If anyone wants to get a head start, go ahead." She interfaced her Lantern ring with the onboard computer and distributed the Demostar language files to the group.
The planning discussions never really stopped. Watching the back-and-forth, Thea gained a new appreciation for Tim Drake—he said very little, rarely inserted himself into the main conversation between her and Batman, but over the course of the discussion, he'd put forward more genuinely useful tactical suggestions than anyone else in the room.
The lunar surface. Batman navigated with easy familiarity—this was practically his backyard. The spacecraft was no match for Thea's unassisted flight speed; the crossing took forty minutes before they touched down at the target coordinates.
The Bat-family had portable oxygen units as standard kit. Everyone disembarked armed and breathing, moving carefully. The lunar gravity—roughly one-sixth of Earth's—played havoc with footing even with equipment assistance, and the team's usual ground-level confidence dialed back a notch while their alertness climbed to compensate.
Thea was the exception. She was still wearing her blazer. She walked the lunar surface with exactly the same easy stride as a city sidewalk.
She hadn't found anything on her earlier sweep of this zone, but Batman had flagged anomalies, so she ran the scan again—methodically, inch by inch.
"There!" Both she and Batman registered the discrepancy at almost the same moment. They brought the group northwest.
"There's a valley here." Thea frowned, scanning with her psychic senses a second and third time. "My readings show flat ground. But I can see a crater—minimum five hundred meters (~1,640 ft) long, three hundred meters (~985 ft) wide, and deep. What is that?"
They went prone at the rim and peered down. The pit was there. The ship was not.
The team spent several minutes with binoculars, scanning the interior. Nothing.
"If I'm reading this correctly," Tim said, pointing into the hollow, "their cloaking technology is well beyond what we estimated. But the enemy is down there. Assuming they're operating with a reduced crew, we split: one group draws their main force out, the second group goes in."
Goes in for what? That part was straightforward—thoroughly pleasant chaos involving hitting things. No one disputed it. The real debate was over the split itself, and underneath that, a deeper question: when this was over, who got the ship?
Handing it over to a government was out of the question—neither of them was that selfless. Batman was quietly imagining how a working alien spacecraft would look in the Batcave trophy room.
Thea didn't particularly want the ship, but she very much wanted that cloaking technology. She was standing right on top of it and still hadn't detected anything. That was extraordinary.
"They're dangerous and we don't know their strength. You draw them out—I go in." Thea opened the tactical bidding first. For balance, that gave her one side and the remaining nine of them the other.
"That's backwards," Batman said, tone perfectly even. "The interior defense will be tighter. I go in. You draw them out."
They went back and forth for another few minutes, each insisting the other take the safer assignment, each sounding extraordinarily noble about it.
"I notice," Batman said, pivoting with no apparent segue, "that Aldrich Pharmaceuticals was never found to have broken any law, yet the Committee had them classified as traitors and hit with a ten-year sentence. Wouldn't you say that's a little steep?"
"Is it? That was probably my staff acting independently. I'll look into it." Thea tilted her head. "Speaking of which—after that last major battle, one of my fallen Yellow Lanterns was missing a ring. Can't account for it anywhere. You wouldn't happen to know anything about that, would you?"
"Could have rolled away in all the chaos."
"Could it have."
"Ha."
Both of them laughed at exactly the same time.
The remaining eight stared. Something in the lunar atmosphere had clearly gotten to them. Either that, or there was some very efficient mutual blackmail happening.
"This operation falls under Management Committee jurisdiction. Thank the Bat-family for their material support."
"Incorrect—a threat of this magnitude to human civilization falls under Justice League authority."
"I think you're misreading that. The Female Justice League made initial contact with this situation—"
They went several more rounds before Thea checked her fate-threads and found no divergence. Whichever option she chose, it didn't matter.
"Fine," she said, ending it. "I'll draw them out. But be careful—you have no idea what their interior garrison looks like."
Batman nodded. "Understood. Take captives if you can."
Thea flashed to a distance, then came wandering back in a wide arc, affecting a casual, stumbling-upon-something air. At just the right moment, she "accidentally" kicked a football-sized rock toward the hollow.
HUM. An extremely low resonance. The stone's landing point rippled outward like water disturbed by a drop—and through those ripples, just barely visible, a surface of dull gray metal.
She acted confused. Curious. Like someone who'd just stumbled onto buried treasure. She threw two more rocks.
This time a much larger surface area revealed itself. Even the exposed section alone ran easily a hundred meters (~328 ft) long and fifty-odd meters (~165 ft) wide. The vessel was sleek, angular, all aggressive lines and cold gray metal—a thing built for violence.
A hatch opened in the ship's flank. More than a dozen semi-translucent blue aliens poured out.
They looked vaguely like what science fiction called "lizard people," though the resemblance was approximate. Their heads were inverted triangles; three tendrils hung from their chins. Their skin looked like it had been stretched over a clear keratin shell—musculature, vasculature, and bone were all dimly visible underneath.
Their vision had clearly degraded over time. They moved hunched, shambling, communicating through sonic pulses from their chin-tendrils.
The moment they spotted Thea, thick tails counterbalancing, they came at her on all fours.
Her job was twofold: draw out as many as possible, and give the Bat-family a clean look at enemy attack patterns. She kept her power dialed back and let them engage.
A few exchanges were all she needed. These things moved like identical copies—attack angles, lunge trajectories, almost perfectly uniform. Trained from the same template.
When a dozen-plus failed to put her down, they clearly panicked—silent, snarling, and within three minutes had pushed out another seven or eight reinforcements. Three of the newcomers were carrying energy rifles.
They were cautious with the weapons. At first Thea assumed they were trying to avoid hitting their own people. Then she realized the truth—their power cells were almost completely drained.