"He saved me, Kate. He pulled me out of self-pity and despair. I owe him my life." She gently pried Kate's fingers away from her arm. "If there's even a chance that getting Charlie back to Nanda Parbat will save him, then I'll do it... or die trying."
She gazed into Kate's moist brown eyes. This was farewell, maybe forever. She leaned forward and kissed the other woman passionately Defying the freezing temperature, they hungrily shared each other's warmth. A long moment passed before Renee reluctantly pulled away from her long-lostlove. She heard Kate choke back a sob.
"Good-bye," she said and headed for the plane.
WEEK 37
SOMEWHERE.
"Broken is time!"
Rip Hunter threw up his hands, in frustration. Glowing white crystals, embedded in the walls and ceiling, illuminated the futuristic laboratory. Bright red sunlight shone through an open window. A flying motorcycle zipped past the window, but Hunter paid it no heed. Instead he paced restlessly across the lab. His bloodshot eyes had a manic gleam. Stubble carpeted his haggard face. His disorderly blond hair looked like it hadn't been combed in weeks, relativisti-cally speaking. His attire reflected a mishmash of diverse eras, so that he wore a vintage World War I bomber jacket over a skintight twenty-third-century space suit. Army boots from Valley Forge stomped across the floor.
"Find can't the right power source for chronosphere the!" Years of time-travel had left him with a kind of temporal Tourette's syndrome. But though the words were scrambled, his impatient tone came through loud and clear. He swept a stack of notes and computer disks off the desk before him, scattering his work onto the floor.
"I've brought everything you asked for," Supernova insisted. He gestured at a nearby workstation, where the fruits of his prospecting were laid out atop a cluttered plasteel counter: Lex Luthor's kryptonite gauntlet, Starman's stellar energy rod, the Shadow Thief's dimensiometer, the radioactive cocoon from Doctor Sivana's abandoned laboratory, an Nth Metal harness, an uncharged power ring, and various other artifacts of Earth's super-heroic age. He placed an absorbacon headset, salvaged from a crashed Thanagarian warship, onto the counter beside the other relics. "Can't you make something out of them?"
Hunter snatched up the headset and angrily hurled it at the Flash's cosmic treadmill. The alien learning device ricocheted off the treadmill and clanged onto the floor. The treadmill toppled over onto its side. "S'gnhton working!" he shouted. "Nothing!"
"Rip, calm down!" Supernova pleaded, "It's tough enough understanding you when you're linear!"
The distraught scientist struggled to compose himself. "You're thgir." With effort, he spit out the syllables in something resembling chronological order. "I apol-lo-lo-gize. But we. Can't fight. Him yet. What if he sdnifs .. .finds ... us before we're rrrReady?"
"You're Rip Hunter," Supernova assured him. "You're the Time Master." To his relief, the other man no longer sounded like Zatanna on a bender. "I won't worry about deadlines if you can just stay focused."
He wandered over to the window and gazed out over the futuristic cityscape outside. Crystal spires climbed toward the heavens. Alien hieroglyphics adorned holographic signs and billboards. Antigravity cruisers soared beneath a crimson sky. Extraterrestrials of every shape, size, and species crowded the busy streets, which were patrolled by flying centurions. Maglev trains connected soaring temples, palaces, and skyscrapers.
"I realize Skeets has been searching for you," Supernova continued. "He knows you need access to this level of technology, but we're in the last place he'd think to look, if he even knows it exists."
High above them, a transparent dome arched over the gleaming metropolis. The dome looked huge from his perspective; it took effort to recall that the entire city was actually contained in a glass bottle no more than two feet tall. Welcome to Kandor, he thought. The Kryptonian city, which had been miniaturized by Brainiac generations ago, long before Krypton's destruction, now occupied a place of honor in Superman's Fortress of Solitude.
"For now, we're safe," Supernova insisted.
Belying his words, a sudden tremor shook the city. The collection of high-tech artifacts tumbled off the counter onto the floor. Deep cracks snaked across the vibrating walls. Shards of crystal sprayed like shrapnel. The world seemed to shudder beneath their feet, almost as though the last days of doomed Krypton had finally caught up with Kandor. Loud crashes and screams came from outside. Crowds of alien creatures panicked in the streets below.
"No, oh!" Hunter whispered backward.
"Damn it!" Supernova grabbed onto the window frame to keep from falling. "It's Skeets! It has to be!"
“YOU AND YOUR ERRAND BOY HAVE GOTTEN SLOPPY, RIP HUNTER!”
Impossibly loud, the robot's voice boomed from high above the trembling city. Staring upward, Supernova saw Skeets looming over the bottled city. The floating golden sphere was larger than Kandor itself.
“A TAOHYDN HERE, A DHRONAL FOOTPRINT THERE. YOU LEFT A
trail and i found ydui” Skeets bumped against the bottle, tilting it on its side. Supernova nearly tumbled out the window as the floor suddenly sloped beneath him. Tools, relics, and debris slid across the floor into the wall. Rip Hunter gasped out loud as gravity threw him against a counter. A hideous scraping sound reverberated up from Kandor's foundations. Skeets nudged the askew bottle toward the very edge of the pedestal, “surrender yourself IMMEDIATELY—OR IT’S KRYPTON ALL OVER AGAIN!”
Hunter shoved himself away from the counter and ran clumsily across the inclined floor. He yanked Supernova's cape from his shoulders. "Hey!" the startled hero protested.
"Prepared we're not a confrontation for!" Grimacing, he wrestled his time-warped syntax into submission. "Size up. And stall him!" He tore open the lining of Supernova's blue cloak and began to pull out heaping handfuls of electronic circuitry. Fiber-optic cables and minute ciystal transistors glinted in the faint light. "Leave costume the. So I can reassemble its stiucric... circuits ... into something with a little more oomphV
Sounds like a plan, Supernova thought. Not having any better ideas, he began to hastily peel off the costume even as Hunter continued to ransack the cape's lining for spare parts. The all-concealing disguise dropped onto the floor, leaving a dimly lit figure standing by the window. He rescued a pair of goggles from the floor and braced himself for the transition back to his usual dimensions. His fingers were poised above the size controls built into the palms of his gloves.
"Go!" Hunter urged him. "Og!"
The unmasked hero squeezed his fists. The controls clicked and luminous atomic orbitals suddenly swirled around his tensed body, which began to grow larger by the second. Harnessing the incalculable power of a miniature dwarf star fragment, the sophisticated technology, which he and Rip had "borrowed" from Ray Palmer, the brilliant physicist once known as the Atom, instantly increased the hero's height, mass, and density. He flung himself out the window, so as not to explode the lab from within, and zoomed upward toward the sealed neck of the bottle. The solid glass cap seemed to shrink before his eyes.
“fine,” Skeets taunted, “have it your way, hunter.”
Kandor teetered precariously beneath the hero. Bracing his hands against the bottom of the cap, he pushed it up, up, and away only heartbeats before growing too large for the bottle to contain him. He zoomed out into the glacial vastness of the Fortress of Solitude, while simultaneously regaining his normal size. Polished crystal pillars supported the ceiling of the arctic fortress. The pellucid monoliths angled upward to form what looked like a majestic temple made of solid ice. But the flying hero had little time to admire the Fortress's unearthly architecture as he arced around just in time to catch the bottled city before it plunged off its pedestal. Superman's famed S-shield was carved into the base of the crystal perch. ,
"Hunter's not your problem, pal," he warned Skeets. "I am."
The robot let out a startled burst of static.
“MICHAEL?”
Booster Gold touched down on the translucent floor of th
e Fortress. His familiar blue and gold uniform was conspicuously devoid of any corporate logos or trademarks. He carefully placed Kandor back onto its pedestal, while glaring fiercely at his former sidekick.
“dna scan: michael joN carter, i □□% matchSkeets was taken aback by Booster's apparent resurrection, “it—it is you. but how?”
"Tell him everything," Hunter's voice whispered in Booster's ear. He heard fabric tearing in the background of the transmission. Rip sounded like he was ripping the Supernova costume to shreds in his search for crucial components. "It'll buy me some time, and he'll know soon enough anyway."
Booster stepped between Skeets and the fragile bottle city. Just keep talking, he told himself. "I've known what's up with you for weeks now, Skeets. When I went into Rip's underground bunker, the clues were everywhere." Like a time machine, his memory carried him back to the chilling discovery he had made beneath the Arizona desert. "I almost asked you about it... but Rip showed up to stop me."
The elusive Time Master had stepped out of a shimmering temporal rift while Booster had still been reading that damning graffiti on the wall. It was he who had pointed out that the phrase "It's all his fault" referred to Skeets, not Booster. A chronal force field had enveloped both men, shielding them from surveillance.
"I told y9u Rip wasn't in the lab ... the first of many, many lies I'd learn to spin. He revealed to me the truth about you ... and we formed a plan."
Angry at being deceived, Skeets fired a laser blast at Booster, who took evasive action, flying deeper into the silent Fortress. That's it, he thought. Lure him away from Kandor and all those innocent people. The laser fire chipped away at the sanctuary's towering crystal pillars. Loose flakes sprayed outward from the once-smooth walls. Booster mentally apologized to Superman for staging a firefight in his home. I'll have to help him patch the place up—if I come out of this alive! .
. "First off, I had to play dumb," he explained, shouting back over his shoulder. "And if you were really yourself, Skeets, you'd be having a field day with that straight line."
His apparently random flight led him right to the Fortress's armory, where Superman had collected weapons from all over the galaxy Booster plucked a Rannian energy-rifle from its niche on the wall and fired back at Skeets, who zipped out of the way of an azure bolt, so that the blast shattered a crystalline control console instead.
Damn, Booster thought. I missed.
"Rip knew that he was destined to face off against you, so he needed the right weapons, but he had to stay hidden until he was prepared to fight. It was my job to gather the necessary materials, and there was no way to do that under your 24/7 observation." He vividly recalled Skeets tagging along with him everywhere he went. "I had to get totally off your radar somehow."
Dodging Skeets' energy bolts, he drop-kicked the levitating robot into a nearby pillar, then ducked behind an alien tank left over from Mongul's attempted invasion of Earth a few years back. The bright red bursts ricocheted off the tank's armor plating. A deflected blast burned a hole straight through a preserved suit of Tamaranean battle armor. Booster shouted over the sizzle of melting metal.
"So we pulled a fast one. Rip explained how I could be in two places at once with the help of time-travel. Then he faked my death, yanking me out of the timestream at the last minute and substituting my own future corpse." Booster remembered feeling the heat of the nuclear explosion/ a split second before he slipped sideways through time. Thankfully, he had only caught a glimpse of the charred skeleton Rip had replaced him with. "That's something I'd rather not dwell on, by the way"
He emptied the rifle's cartridge at Skeets, but his blasts bounced harmlessly off the robot's unmarked casing. Out of ammo, he tossed the weapon aside and took refuge behind the turret of the massive tank.
"Suddenly I was twelve weeks back in time, co-existing as both Booster Gold and under a new, humbler, more virtuous identity that would, frankly, be the last place anybody would ever look for me." He winced slightly at the assumptions underlying the disguise. The truth hurts, he thought, but what can you do? "The Booster/Supernova rivalry was designed to throw off any lingering suspicions, and it worked."
He couldn't help wondering what was keeping Rip? He imagined Hunter frantically cobbling a weapon together from the Kryptonian circuitry installed in the Supernova suit. How long is that going to take?
"Meanwhile, Rip had me lift the Atom's size-changing belt and gloves from JLA storage, so he could take advantage of the super-science in the bottle city of Kandor. As Supernova, I brought him every super-weapon I could find, from Luthor's kryptonite gauntlet to Hawkgirl's Nth Metal, in hopes of building something that could beat you."
The furious energy bolts stopped whizzing over his head. He guessed that Skeets was holding his fire to hear the rest of Booster's narrative. Curiosity seemed to have momentarily won out over the robot's homicidal agenda. Booster suddenly felt like some sort of sci-fi Scheherazade.
"That's right, buddy," Booster taunted him. "We operated out of this Fortress ... and don't think we didn't plunder it." He gave the knife another twist. "Where do you think we found the parts and powers for my suit?"
Rip's voice emerged from Booster's earpiece. "Distracted keep him, Booster! I'm my way on!"
About time, Booster thought. I'm running out of exposition.
Abandoning his position behind the tank, he took off through the Fortress once more. Over the last few weeks he had taken the time to memorize the sanctuary's layout, thank goodness, so he had no trouble circling back toward the trophy room containing the bottle city. The vengeful robot followed in hot pursuit. .
"Think back, Skeets. Everything Supernova did—everything—was based on applied teleportation. Every bit of circuitry in that costume was cribbed from..."
He flew back into the trophy chamber. Just as he'd hoped, a full-sized Rip Hunter stood in front of Kandor and its pedestal. A metallic red cube, about the size of a thick paperback book, rested in the Time Master's grip. A concave metal dish was mounted to the front of the authentic Kryptonian relic, which Hunter held before him like an old-fashioned box camera. Booster wondered if Skeets recognized the device.
"Superman's Phantom Zone Projector!"
Rip clicked a switch and a beam of black light targeted Skeets. The beam produced a photo-negative effect that reversed the colors of the robot's casing and optical sensors. It also halted his advance, freezing him in place.
"NOOOOO!" Skeets cried out in alarm. Or was it Skeets? The angry outburst lacked Skeets' visual robotic timbre, causing Booster to eye the immobilized mechanism suspiciously. Was there somebody else inside that golden sphere?
The question was possibly academic as Skeets began to fade from view. The hovering orb started to flatten out into merely two dimensions. Solid metal became immaterial, so that you could see through Skeets as though the robot was a ghost... or a phantom.
It's working-, Booster thought triumphantly. Back on Krypton, Superman's forebears had banished their worst criminals to the Phantom Zone, a parallel dimension inhabited only by bodiless wraiths. With any luck, Skeets would join Krypton's Most Wanted in endless purgatory, where he would no longer be able to do any more damage to the timestream.
"That's it!" Booster encouraged Rip. "Crank it up!"
The veteran chrononaut rolled his eyes. "It's a guitar amp not, Booster." The rush of battle seemed to have stabilized his syntax somewhat. "A prison portal it's a ... and Skeets is holding on for life dear!"
For a moment or two, Booster thought victory was theirs. But then Skeets began to resolidify. The flattened disk inflated back into a sphere. The photonegative effect flickered alarmingly. The robot almost seemed to be drinking in the beam from the Projector.
No, Booster thought, horrified. That's not possible. Is it?
Flunter poured on the power, pushing the Projector to its limits—and beyond. The device began to shake itself apart, so that Hun ter had trouble holding onto it. Smoke seeped from the junctures of th
e metal cube; Booster smelt the circuitry burning. The black-light beam wavered erratically as Skeets absorbed its power like a black hole.
But more than just raw energy was being consumed. Booster's jaw dropped as he glimpsed a stream of humanoid figures flowing into Skeets. Warped and elongated by a seemingly irresistible pull, the agonized specters wailed silently as, one by one, the condemned denizens of the Phantom Zone exchanged one prison for another. Booster shuddered at the sight. "Rip, what the hell is he doing ... ?"
"Aaagh!" Hunter yelped as sparks erupted from the Projector, shocking him. He yanked his hands away from the smoking cube, which crashed down onto the floor. It sparked for a few more seconds before shorting out completely. Skeets sucked in the last of the beam before the ebon light flickered out for good. Booster stared mutely at the unstoppable robot, transfixed by the terrifying sight before him:
A trio of Zoners—Kryptonian criminals, presumably—peered out from behind the translucent screen over Skeets' sensor array. Booster made out the contorted features of a pale-faced man with a neatly trimmed mustache and beard. Crowding behind him, their faces equally anguished, were a slinky-looking woman with short black hair and a hulking lummox who reminded Booster of every surly bouncer who had ever kicked him out of a bar. All three prisoners wore matching gray uniforms emblazoned with obscure Kryptonian symbols. Their fists pounded impotently against the inside of the screen, before being drawn deeper into Skeets' voracious core. Booster wondered briefly what the nameless trio had done to be banished to the Phantom Zone in the first place.
Not that it really mattered now.
"Oh my God," Booster whispered. "He's eaten the Phantom Zone."
"I'll go you worse one," Rip said. "A meal not it's for him. Just it's an appetizer!" Producing a handheld console from the pocket of his bomber jacket, he stabbed at the keypad with his fingers. "But a retreat us it bought! You are ready?"
. Booster stared at the menacing robot. There was nothing cute or funny about Skeets now. Darksome energy crackled around the robot, whose very presence seemed to distort the fabric of the space-time continuum, causing reality itself to warp and bend all around him. Booster still didn't know what malevolent force had possessed Skeets, but he knew serious trouble when he saw it.