Banning nuclear weapons—no one in the room was going to argue against that. This wasn't fireworks. Even the Pentagon's cleaning staff would have raised both hands in agreement, having worked too hard for their jobs to be comfortable with the alternative. Implementing a comprehensive national sweep for other hazards was a different conversation entirely, and everyone from the Secretary down to the custodians understood how much trouble that could cause.
How far would the audit go? Would it be used as cover to surface all kinds of other problems? The assembled officers had their own entanglements and lost interest in debating the point.
But the President had put the question on the table, and they had to respond. They couldn't very well say go ahead and blow things up, we're not afraid of dying.
In the end, General Lane called it: a full national investigation.
Moira was not going to let the opportunity pass. The military was the highest-risk category—the most weapons, the most dangerous ones—but corruption, dereliction, espionage, and deliberate underreporting were equally prevalent problems. Previous presidents had acted as rubber stamps for the Pentagon: the military nominated someone, the president submitted the name, Congress confirmed it, and that was the extent of executive influence on what actually happened inside. Real internal decisions were untouched.
This was an opening. Moira formally assigned five of her own senior staff to join the investigation team, and submitted to Congress several amendments that appeared narrow in scope but were anything but—they gave government personnel formal, precedent-establishing access to the Pentagon's leadership structure for the first time, justified under national security.
Congress gave its full support. Simple calculation: presidents had term limits. When the current crop of legislators eventually ran for the White House themselves, those authorities would be theirs to inherit. There was no rational basis for refusing.
Proposal, review, approval—green lights all the way. Faced with simultaneous pressure from the White House and Congress, the military had no room to push back. They stood aside.
The foot in the door was just the beginning. Moira followed it with a series of moves that didn't let up.
That unnamed country was routinely criticized for political structures dense with appointed officials. The other side of the ocean, it turned out, was no different. A coalition of legislators had assembled a body called the "Superman Threat and Democratic Development Committee" for the explicit purpose of countering metahuman power. Outdone by events, Moira simply built something better—an Oversight and Review Committee with a stated mandate of auditing hazards and enforcing strict security classifications.
Every material capable of producing high-lethality weapons was catalogued. Nationwide tracking: does the material still exist, and if so, where? If it was still on site, a physical inspection was conducted. If it had left custody, a full chain of disposition was required—buyer, date, circumstances.
Thea also directed the global black market networks under her influence to cooperate with the operation.
What the audit turned up was alarming even to the people who had come in looking for something specific. Even the senior military brass were terrified by what they found—more than one of them thought privately that surviving this long had required divine protection.
Fifteen nuclear warheads were missing. Their entries existed only on paper—no physical location, no chain of custody, no trace. Thea's resources hadn't been able to find them either.
The tally of other high-yield munitions was worse. The quantity of precursor materials capable of producing mass-casualty weapons had gone missing at a rate that defied credulity.
Within days, the climate had shifted to something approaching controlled panic. Even Batman was stretched thin managing the fallout.
Wayne Enterprises bore the brunt of it. Old Lucius spent an entire day dealing with one inquiry after another before announcing he simply couldn't cope. Their internal records were not exactly clean—there were accounts that didn't add up and items that were better not examined—and they had no interest in anyone examining them.
Bruce Wayne had no choice but to swap the cape for a suit and tie, put on his public face, and deal personally with the national audit apparatus.
While doing that, he quietly dispatched Barbara and Nightwing to falsify records while dangerous equipment was piled into storage rooms; once the inspectors left, they hauled it away.
Thea was also a major shareholder of Wayne Enterprises—effectively both player and referee—and today she was leading the inspection team.
"Mr. Wayne," she said, keeping her voice neutral, "there are some irregularities here. The technical specifications on this aircraft don't match the registered documentation."
She was looking at the Batplane—stripped of its insignia, repainted stem to stern in a thorough and entirely unconvincing makeover. She nearly laughed.
"The equipment hasn't been used in some time. Probably degraded," Batman said, with a straight face. He had taken the thing out over Gotham the night before.
Thea helped cover for him with equal solemnity. Wayne Enterprises cleared its inspection without incident.
Scenes like this were playing out across the country. Most participants had expected the usual theater—loud overture, quiet follow-through. But then someone leaked the information that a nuclear detonation had come within one second of actually occurring, and the atmosphere curdled instantly into something real.
Waller and Trevor—genuinely patriotic, whatever their other qualities—had absorbed an entire day of senior-level dressing-downs and were still participating in the operation with composure.
Aided by intelligence assets, a team of scientists, and the Justice League acting as enforcement muscle, the national sweep moved quickly.
Individuals, private labs, and independent research groups were found to be sitting on stockpiles of materials suitable for assembling high-lethality weapons.
Predictably, some of those affected organized to resist. "Individual rights are inviolable," they declared, loudly and in chorus.
Thea didn't coddle that particular instinct. She mobilized the public against them, seeding the neighborhoods around the flagged labs with targeted information: radiation concerns, carcinogen exposure risks, the statistical likelihood of being vaporized in one's sleep.
Once the surrounding residents heard how dangerous their neighbors had been making their lives, the citizens went wild. The individual-rights advocates were quickly shouted down by ordinary people who vastly outnumbered them. As for calling the police—the officers on duty were not going to arrest a thousand aggrieved constituents to protect one research team.
After a week of this, Thea finally had time to turn her attention to the Antimatter Universe haul. She brought the metals she'd selected to Diana.
Metals that had survived the cosmic explosions of the Antimatter Universe's own creation and come out the other side intact. Their toughness was easy to imagine.
Diana had been worried about her shattered shield; this was exactly the right moment for an upgrade.
The new shield was named Courage. It was pale green throughout, carrying an almost indefinable quality of weight—a solidity that seemed to come from somewhere beyond the material.
Diana described what she had seen while forging it: a warrior from the Antimatter Universe who had resisted the Anti-Monitor to the very end. The fighter's refusal to yield had passed into the metal itself, and the shield that emerged was stronger for it.
Thea made no comment on this. Privately she suspected that the "warrior" and the "defiance unto the last" were a vision Diana had produced for herself at the peak of their recent sparring sessions—but she was not going to say that out loud. If Diana said it was true, then it was true.
The battle on Earth-3 had restored something in Diana's confidence. With the Antimatter Universe's rare materials worked into entirely new gear, her equipment had been rebuilt from the ground up. It wasn't yet in the same category as the Holy Sword—nothing mundanely forged could match a weapon of pure legend—but within the physical world, it had reached the ceiling.
Both goddesses had been practicing together constantly of late, and Thea had at last internalized both Courage and Love as emotional forces.
The Ring of Volthoom was fully purified. They had both tried it on. The results were not entirely surprising.
Diana's range of positive emotions was extraordinary—she was almost the physical embodiment of every virtue. But emotions ran in both directions. Rage, greed, fear—and beyond those, envy and hatred—were all poorly suited to her. Diana lacked the breadth to channel the darker registers.
Which meant Thea kept the ring for herself.
The emotional forces were still housed inside, but the impurities were gone. The ring could be worn now. It sat on Thea's right hand, casting its radiance across the room—brilliant, eye-catching, too vivid to look away from.