Part 3 — Escape
Prologue
---
Space had no speed limit, and the ship was using that fact aggressively.
It tore through the dark at the kind of velocity that made the stars ahead stretch slightly at the edges, the thrusters running hot, the hull vibrating with a frequency that was below sound and above comfort. Inside, the cabin was lit in the cold functional way of military vessels — enough light to work by, no more. Ten plumbers occupied the space, two of them at the control seats running navigation and monitoring the instruments, the rest distributed through the cabin in the particular stillness of people trained to stay ready without burning energy doing it. Their suits were the standard grey and black, identical except for the two who wore the red orbital insignia at the belt and carried the additional hardware of Magister rank.
Tal J'mezz sat with his hands resting on his knees, his posture the kind that came from decades of having nowhere to be in a hurry. His skin was the deep green of his species, his eyes red, his face carrying the settled quality of someone who had processed most of what the galaxy could offer and arrived at a state of general equanimity about it. His suit was darker than the others, the grey pushed almost entirely toward black, the helmet retracted to let his face breathe. The material was fire-resistant throughout — a necessary modification, given that fire was the one thing a Martian could not reason his way past. If the situation demanded it, the armor could seal completely. For now, it didn't.
Beside him, in the adjacent seat, Lyn-Dar was not still.
She wasn't moving exactly, but the stillness wasn't there either. Her red hair was pulled back from her face, her green eyes tracking nothing in particular, her jaw set in a way that communicated something she was trying not to communicate. For someone whose physical capabilities placed her near the top of any room she entered, she looked profoundly uncomfortable.
Her suit was unlike any other on the ship. The Plumbers' standard materials included trace lead compounds in several of the alloy layers — harmless to most species, catastrophic to a Daxamite. Hers had been rebuilt from the composition up, the standard alloys replaced entirely with a dense polymer composite that provided equivalent protection against ballistic and energy-based threats without a single atom of lead anywhere in its construction. The result looked slightly different in texture from the others, the surface finish marginally smoother, and it had been engineered to the same protective standard as a full Magister suit despite her having held that rank for only four years.
She had earned it the hard way, which was the only way available to her.
Tal looked at her.
He didn't reach into her mind. He didn't need to. Her expression was doing the work without any assistance.
"Calm yourself," he said, with the unhurried delivery of someone who has said sensible things to anxious people for a very long time.
Lyn turned her head sharply. "Did you read my mind? Tal, I told you not to do that."
"I read your face," he said. "Your mind is your own."
She looked away, exhaled, and made a visible effort to settle. "You're right," she said, after a moment. "Yeah. You're right." A pause. "How are you so calm?"
"Practice."
"I heard from the older Magisters that they're terrible to deal with." She said it with the directness of someone who hadn't yet fully learned the difference between thinking something and saying it. "That they look down on everyone. How do you sit there knowing we're about to walk into that?"
Tal considered a response, and before he could deliver it, one of the pilots said, "Approaching destination."
He and Lyn rose together.
Through the forward viewport, OA filled the view.
It was massive in the way that very few things were massive, a planet that glowed with its own generated light rather than reflected starlight, the green luminescence visible from a considerable distance as a faint corona. The structures on its surface were enormous and deliberately so, built to communicate scale rather than simply achieve it, towers and platforms and transit lines arranged across the surface like a civilization that had decided long ago that grandeur was a form of governance. Lanterns moved through the space around it in ones and twos, the green of their rings small against the planet's glow, going about their routes with the ease of people who had been doing this so long the scale no longer registered.
A few of them glanced up at the incoming ship. Most didn't.
"Take us down," Tal said.
The ship entered the atmosphere, and two Lanterns broke from their patrol lines to flank them, moving into position on either side and signaling them forward. The ship followed their lead through the descent, leveling out over one of the main platform structures and setting down with a low hydraulic thud.
Tal and Lyn were the only ones who disembarked.
The two Lanterns waiting on the platform brought their fists to their chests in the compact greeting of their corps. "Magisters."
Tal gave a small, measured nod.
"Right this way," one of them said. "They're expecting you."
---
The chamber was built for authority.
The platforms were elevated at the center, arranged in a graduated arc designed so that whatever stood below them was always looking up. The lighting came from somewhere indirect, cool and blue-white, and the acoustics were such that even quiet voices carried. Tal had been in rooms like this before — rooms engineered to remind visitors of their position before a single word was spoken. He had learned to walk into them anyway.
On the raised platforms, the Guardians of the Universe stood in their red and white robes, the green lantern crest at each chest, their blue skin and white hair giving them the particular ageless quality of beings that had stopped counting years long ago. Ganthet stood among them, and it was he who spoke first.
"Friends," he said, with the warmth that distinguished him from most of his colleagues. "I trust your journey was uneventful."
"As safe as can be expected, Guardian," Tal said.
Another Guardian stepped forward slightly. "To what do we owe the visit?"
Lyn drew breath. Tal's voice reached her before she could speak, not aloud but directly, settling into the channel she'd begrudgingly grown accustomed to over four years.
Let me handle this.
She closed her mouth.
Tal addressed the chamber. "In the last four years, Vilgax's forces have spread through explored and frontier space alike. Plumber units and Lantern units have repeatedly entered sectors that the other has already secured, duplicating effort across territory we've both already covered. The result is that while we're collectively revisiting secured ground, Vilgax moves freely through the gaps between us. His forces hit a location, complete their search, and leave before either organization can redirect assets from wherever they've just been sent."
He let that sit for a moment before continuing.
"The plumbers and the Lanterns are both large organizations. Neither is large enough. Vilgax's forces are effectively unlimited, his Knights alone capable of destroying a planet, and every unit we send somewhere unnecessary is a unit not covering somewhere critical." He paused, and made a decision. "I came here to request cooperation. A coordinated operational division — plumber units taking sectors where rapid response and ground-level intelligence are the priority, Lantern units covering deep space patrol and large-scale threat containment. No duplication. No gaps." He held the silence for a moment more. "I'm asking. But I want to be direct about how seriously I'm asking."
One of the Guardians tilted his head, the gesture carrying the specific quality of condescension that comes from beings who have decided they are patient with lesser creatures.
"What makes you believe," he said, "that you can demand anything of the Guardians of the Universe?"
Another continued without pause. "The operational decisions made were made to safeguard those sectors. You would have us leave the matters of the universe to organizations of inferior capability?"
Appa Ali Apsa spoke with the measured certainty of someone reciting a position held for millennia. "Mortals are governed by emotion. We Guardians are free from that limitation. Emotion produces error. In matters of universal scale, error is unacceptable."
A fourth Guardian turned slightly, as if the conversation had already concluded. "If that is all, we have more pressing matters requiring our attention."
They began to leave the chamber, the movement unhurried and absolute.
"While you stand here debating who is superior enough to protect the universe," Lyn's voice cut across the chamber, sharp and unfiltered, "Vilgax could be winning."
The Guardians did not stop.
One by one they filed out, until the chamber was empty and the two Magisters stood alone under the blue-white light.
Tal exhaled through his nose. He had known this was the likely outcome. He had come anyway, because there was a small but nonzero chance that reason would be sufficient, and he had learned long ago not to skip steps simply because they were unlikely to work. Now the step had been taken and the result confirmed, and it was time to move.
He looked at Lyn. "It's time to go."
---
The ship was back in the dark before she finished.
Lyn sat with her arms folded and her jaw tight, working through something she hadn't finished working through. "Who do they think they are," she said, to nobody in particular and to Tal specifically. "Calling us inferior. The Plumbers have held sectors together that the Lanterns couldn't reach. We've done that without power rings, without a planet-sized base of operations, without — "
"Lyn-Dar." Tal's voice was quiet and even.
She stopped.
"The Guardians have refused to acknowledge the Plumbers since before you were born," he said. "We knew this was unlikely to produce results. It was still worth attempting." He settled back in his seat. "Rage won't change what they are."
She unfolded her arms slowly, and after a moment, the tension in her shoulders gave slightly.
She was eighteen years old. Tal was occasionally reminded of this at moments like the present one — not because she seemed young in most respects, because she didn't, because four years of operational combat had settled into her in ways that showed, but because the anger was still fresh. She hadn't yet learned to be unsurprised by the things that deserved to be surprising. He wasn't sure she should.
The ship ran on in silence.
The Plumbers had not always operated at the scale they did now. The organization had begun with humans — a small, idealistic peacekeeping body with modest reach and no standing in the wider galaxy. Other species had discovered it over time, some of them choosing to contribute technology and personnel, and for a period it had grown quietly and effectively, filling gaps in galactic peacekeeping that the Lanterns either couldn't reach or didn't prioritize.
Then the Guardians had found out.
The response had been immediate and categorical — the Plumbers were to be dissolved. The Guardians had no interest in an independent peacekeeping organization operating without their oversight, staffed by what they considered imperfect beings making imperfect decisions. The species that had built the organization together refused to comply. The situation moved toward open conflict with a speed that alarmed everyone involved, including those driving it.
What stopped it was Azmuth.
The Galvan scientist had no particular investment in either organization, but he had a considerable investment in not watching a war break out over a jurisdictional dispute, and he had made his position clear in terms that the Guardians understood. A conflict that included Azmuth, the creator of the Ascalon and the world purger and a catalog of other things that polite company didn't discuss, would not be a conflict with a clean outcome for either side. The Guardians were old enough to know when a calculation had changed.
A truce was reached. The Plumbers and the Lanterns would co-exist, operating in parallel without formal acknowledgment of each other's standing.
Co-existence was not recognition. The Guardians had never offered recognition, and Tal had never expected them to.
He looked out at the stars and let the silence run.
Daxamites Backstory.
In this universe, like canon, daxamites are a species that doesn't socialize with other race, but that change when darkseid attack earth, and their council realized that if it could happen to earth, it can happen to them, they realize that they might need aliens in their Conner should that day every come, so they sent a young daxamite, Lyn-Dar to the plumbers, hoping it would secure their planet safety.