When a willing asset walked through your door carrying its own supplies, there was no point in being polite about it.
Thea went directly to the deepest layer of the main brain's psyche and left a brand. If it ever moved against her, it would die in ways that would be deeply unpleasant to experience.
It was a strange chain of events that had led here. She'd intended a simple transaction. Somehow, step by step, it had escalated until she was walking away with an entire insect civilization in tow.
She didn't hold the Rachi's reputation against them the way most cosmic powers did. Put the right tool to the right use. For dealing with Blackest Night, there was no better blunt instrument anywhere in the known universe. An army of soulless undead against a civilization with the highest breeding rate in the cosmos—that was her kind of equation.
For a subordinate who had just walked in with her entire species as a signing bonus, she wasn't about to be stingy.
Rachi biotech. Kryptonian genetic theory she'd stored away over the years. Rare materials fused with magical energy to form the body's foundation. Divine power to shape the final structure. And because this was her subordinate, a female form went without saying—Thea Queen had certain aesthetic standards. To make the new body look more human to people on Earth, Thea used a genuine thirty-year soul distillate. No synthetic substitutes.
"Transfer your psyche into the new body."
The main brain's neural structure parted along one of its folds, and a thread of pure, silver-white light leaped free from the interior—diving straight into the waiting body.
Outside the cave, the Rachi swarm went haywire. Their rudimentary thought processes had no framework for what was happening. Some turned on each other. Some stampeded toward the cave entrance in blind panic. The alien pilots who had been stunned inside their symbiont suits began to flicker back online, and several of them scrambled for the exits.
Thea let them run. One more or one fewer didn't matter. The Blue Beetle symbiont wasn't something that could be mass-produced anyway—the Rachi weren't an elite force, and she had no use for an elite doctrine. Volume was the entire point.
She sealed the cave mouth with a gesture. Eyes bright as a field of stars, she began channeling the soul into the new body.
Binding the main brain's ancient psyche to a fresh soul and an entirely foreign physical form was not a simple matching problem. Every variable fought every other variable, and she had recently given herself the title of Soul Sovereign—which meant she was the one responsible for solving it. It took a full day of sustained, concentrated work before the three elements settled into something stable.
The new body had been, by baseline standards, entirely ordinary-looking. Then the main brain's consciousness began to flow in, and the changes came.
The arms grew more slender. Bony chitinous spurs emerged from the elbow joints—the kind found on an insect's foreleg. What had been clothing reshaped itself into plating of dense, dark chitin. A pair of massive bone wings extended from the shoulders. The hair moved as though alive, each strand independent, in constant restless motion.
The vast psychokinetic field that had filled the cave collapsed inward, compressed tight. Dark green veining spread from the corners of the eyes. And then a pair of violet eyes opened slowly, with something ancient, deep, and faintly terrible looking out through them.
"Not bad," Thea said, surveying her work. "As an intelligent being, you need a name. The Rachi main brain is history. Kerrigan—that's what you'll be called."
She would swear on any oath that the resemblance was entirely natural, that it had nothing to do with her, and that borrowing the Queen of Blades' name from memory was a purely coincidental decision she just happened to find amusing.
Kerrigan rose. She moved her new limbs—slowly at first, then with growing confidence. The sensation of a body freely, voluntarily moving was something she hadn't experienced in longer than she could remember.
And her psychic power was under her command at last. Generations of main brains had accumulated it to a fearsome scale—and where before that same power had threatened to overflow at any moment, now it felt like a small insect she could flick aside with a thought. It was light, responsive, and wholly hers.
She could feel emotion. Not the dim, wordless drive of pure instinct, but something with texture and color. She almost couldn't hold it—an urge rising from somewhere deep in her chest to simply let it out in a long, raw cry.
"Hey." Thea's voice was cool and flat. "Bring your people back under control first. Without the swarm, you're worth nothing to me."
Kerrigan caught herself. She reached out across the Rachi's command frequency—one level at a time, cascading down the chain.
Sector lieutenants. Sub-commanders. Elite units. Main force. Infantry. Level by level, control spread back through the network. The swarm that had been in chaos for a full day was brought to heel. How many Rachi had died in the interim, Kerrigan didn't particularly care. Thea cared even less.
Without waiting for further instruction, Kerrigan began recalling the Rachi forces scattered across two sectors and over a hundred worlds, pulling them back toward the homeworld. The process cost her some psychic strength—rebuilding an authority structure from scratch was always expensive—but she managed it.
"Send your scouting swarms out," Thea told her. "I want continuous intelligence on the Green Lantern Corps—Oa specifically—and on the Star Sapphires at Zamaron. Leave nothing unmonitored. And start breeding. I want an army large enough to blot out a star field."
She had complete confidence in the Rachi's reconnaissance capabilities and their breeding rate.
Kerrigan, however, heard something slightly different. She wants to move on Oa and Zamaron. Her new master was a recently risen power with serious ambitions who hadn't revealed her hand yet. The breeding order was obviously a build-up for invasion. The new boss was serious.
Kerrigan stood a little straighter and began giving orders.
...
With the Rachi Swarm pulling back on all fronts, the Blue Lanterns' crisis dissolved on its own. From the outcome alone, Saint Walker's trademark optimism suddenly seemed justified—everything really had worked out.
Thea returned to the Blue Lanterns' home star. She said little to the serenely unbothered Saint Walker, only that her scouting confirmed the Rachi were in full retreat. Then she sent the Yellow Lanterns and Indigo Tribe back to their respective posts.
She didn't leave with them.
Instead, she flew alone in a different direction entirely, toward a far corner of the cosmos.
Sector 666—a sector that lived up to its number. She'd given John Stewart quite an earful about it during Justice League meetings—this was where the Manhunters, the Green Lantern Corps' robotic predecessors, had carried out their great purge. An entire sector's intelligent life had been reduced to five survivors. One of those five had gone on to found the Red Lantern Corps.
She wasn't here to pay her respects. People dead for thousands of years didn't earn much sentiment from her. She had a practical reason for the visit: she knew Blackest Night would originate from this sector. As for which specific planet, she still needed to search.
The Guardians had scrubbed all records of this region clean. No text, no archive. The entire sector had been dumped into the cosmic equivalent of a trash bin—discarded, unacknowledged, forgotten by everyone. What had happened here had degraded from history to myth to nothing at all. The wandering souls that remained had been left to dissipate: some were already extinguished, while others were still locked in the last instant before their deaths, their unresolved fury accelerating the growth of something the universe had not yet named.
She walked on the surface of one of these worlds. The nearest star was very far away. Sky and ground were both dark. The atmosphere crackled with faint crimson lightning rolling through the cloud banks overhead. Periodic gusts swept across the terrain, carrying with them a smell of iron and old blood that thousands of years had done nothing to diminish.
Bones everywhere she looked. The dense death-energy saturating this place had long since consumed flesh and tissue, but the skeletons of intelligent beings had endured, lying as they had fallen, arranged like a silent accusation directed at the sky.
Why us? Why did we deserve this?
The question had no answer. The injustice had no resolution. And both would keep feeding whatever was building here in the dark, for as long as anyone let them.