Standing outside of Jason’s private quarters in the Council’s secret base, I can’t help but feel like a little kid preparing to knock on the door to his parents’ room. It’s an irrational feeling for a number of reasons, but I still can’t seem to shake it. Obviously, Jason isn’t inside, and it seems unlikely that he even spent an appreciable amount of time there before he disappeared. But opening this door feels like the final acknowledgement that I’m here to replace him, not just as Hawkshaw, but as a member of the world’s most exclusive, influential organization. I spent so much time trying to grapple with the immense influence that the Council has, that the fact I’m expected to be a part of it is only now hitting me. Anyone who puts on a mask is indicating their willingness to shoulder heavy burdens, but that’s not quite the same as someone handing you the nuclear football without any warning, and telling you that the closest thing you had to a real father figure wanted you to have it.

Quieting those thoughts, I pass my hand over the hidden scanner in the wall, which reads the chip in my wrist and allows me access. The fact that Machina could reprogram the door to recognize me, in addition to the room’s original occupant, suggests that none of the Council members’ private quarters are entirely private. That means I’m unlikely to find any especially compelling evidence in Jason’s room. If there was any to begin with, someone could easily have come in and removed it. But I’m not really expecting to find anything pertinent to the investigation in here. After all, I’ve already got a pretty good idea who the perpetrator was. No, the purpose of this search is twofold. The first is simply due diligence. The second is to keep up appearances. The recording on Jason’s hidden file gave me a general idea of who made him disappear and why, but until I know exactly who was and wasn’t involved, and know exactly what I want to do about it, I have to maintain the pretense that I’m still completely in the dark. Muddling around in Jason’s room, looking under his bed for clues, seems as good a way to do that as any- not to mention the fact that feigning ignorance will make the rest of the Council underestimate me. That’s the way I like it.

Judging by appearances, Jason made very little effort to modify the room’s original layout. All of the furniture is in black, to match the floor and walls. There’s a dresser, a neatly-made bed, and a desk with a computer. It brings to mind a bedroom mockup at a furniture store, or the sample dorm rooms they show people who are touring colleges. Sterile, clean, and clearly not lived-in. Before even entering, I cycle through a few different viewing modes in my helmet, to scan for any traps. Nothing shows up on thermals, EM, infrared, or any of the others, so I cross the threshold in a single step.

The room seems even smaller and more spartan than Jason’s usual tastes, and a part of me can’t help but wonder if he was assigned to this one out of spite, for the way he forced his way into the group. I certainly can’t imagine the ones who live here full-time accepting a glorified closet, not when they’re members of the most powerful organization on the planet. Then again, Jason could have just as easily requested a small room with minimal furnishings, knowing that he would almost never have cause to use it.

There’s nothing in the dresser but a few changes of clothes. Going through them emphasizes the feeling of being a child in their parent’s bedroom, though at the very least I don’t feel any sort of urge to put his clothes on. There are no hidden messages tucked away in the back of the drawers, so I close it up and move on. I don’t find anything under the mattress, or the bed itself, which seems like it hasn’t been slept in for a long time. That just leaves me with the computer. As expected, it’s almost completely empty. It clearly couldn’t match the processing power available with either the Council’s mission computer, or Jason’s own, so there was little reason to ever use it for anything serious, and he didn’t spend enough time here to use this thing to just browse the internet. I run a few cursory scans to make sure he didn’t leave any hidden files on it, but that was never very likely, considering it would probably have been the first place anyone checked when trying to find that sort of thing.

To satisfy the voice in my head that sounds suspiciously like Jason, and always demands thoroughness, I test the walls of the room to see if there are any hidden passages, and turn up nothing. I hesitate to call the entire process a waste of time, because verifying that there isn’t anything to find is almost as important as actually finding something, but searching this room was pretty much the sole reason for my visit to the Council’s headquarters, and having finished up in about twenty minutes leaves me at something of a loss for what to do next. This place isn’t exactly like the Front Line’s base, where I can relax with the other members of the team. The design is cold and sterile, while the layout is so labyrinthine that even using a 3D blueprint, navigation is a challenge. Some part of me is almost tempted to leave immediately, but that would be a wasted opportunity. This is the best chance I’ve had yet to explore this place on my own, rather than being led around by someone already familiar with it. Not to mention, the fact that the Council hasn’t contacted me in weeks makes me rather curious as to what they’ve been doing without me. Given how long they’ve been operating, it makes some sense that they don’t need to call meetings every day, since most of their day-to-day operations are already established. My curiosity is more directed toward the substance of those operations. The Maitreya incident was a good look at what kind of threat the Council exists to combat, but that clearly isn’t a constant occurrence. I want to know what an average day in this place is like.

Opportunity knocks not a moment after I open the door to leave Jason’s room. Samuel Blake is leaning against the opposite wall, wearing an evaluatory expression. Intuition tells me he hasn’t just been staring at the door, either. My suit’s sensory suite is powerful enough to see through walls when necessary, and the alien weapon he’s supposedly bonded with is doubtlessly a great deal more advanced. Luckily, I didn’t do anything in the course of my brief investigation that I would particularly care if he saw. Considering who this facility is operated by, it seemed safe to assume from the beginning that nothing I said or did would be fully private.

“You were quicker in there than I expected,” the extraplanar explorer remarks. Blake- or ‘Astro,’ according to his locker in the Council’s ready room -doesn’t look his age. Though I suppose he isn’t actually as old as he should be, despite having been born in the nineteen-forties. Thanks to relativity, he’s only middle-aged, and fairly well-preserved. Sandy hair, a clean-shaven face, and the same bomber jacket he’s been wearing every time I’ve encountered him. It’s possible that’s the form his symbiote-weapon takes outside of combat, but so far I’ve failed to detect anything unusual about the garment, other than the fact that it was manufactured before I was born. Probably just one of the few relics of his childhood era that isn’t currently moldering in a museum.

“Not much to see,” I answer, appreciating the fact that he didn’t bother pretending to have just been passing by. “Doesn’t seem like he spent much time here outside of meetings.”

“No he did not,” Blake confirms. “Between you and his team, it never seemed like there was much time in his schedule to spend with us.”

My detective skills aren’t necessary to know why that was. He blackmailed his way into this group- something like that tends to set the tone for a relationship, no matter how long you spend working together afterwards.

“You two didn’t interact much, then?”

If Blake is going to be fairly obvious about the fact that he was watching me work, I see no reason to be circumspect about my objectives in this conversation. I’m treating every member of the Council as a potential suspect, and he’s one of the ones I know very little about. That means I can’t just chat idly with him. I need information. Especially if Jason’s theory is right, and every member of the Council was responsible for the end of the world in one of Gilgamesh’s alternate timelines.

“No. I was always curious about the man, to be honest. He seemed to be of a different mold than the other masked heroes of this era.”

It doesn’t shock me that Blake talks about the modern day as if it’s a foreign country. Even since his return to Earth, he’s been at a remove, interacting mainly with the Council from what I can tell. He translocated out of the last meeting, suggesting that he doesn’t live here full-time, but I doubt he’s fully assimilated either. Maybe they set him up in a small town that wouldn’t give him too great a culture shock. But before I can ask him about any of that, the interstellar pioneer continues speaking.

“I’m rather curious about you, to be frank. Specifically, your motivation for taking up Hunt’s mantle. I’m familiar with his... origins, of course. But yours are more of an enigma.”

Something about Blake’s blunt request suggests to me that he’s not fishing for something he can use against me. The man is genuinely curious, as I would expect of someone who left his home planet alone to explore the wider universe. I can’t afford to be that open about my own inquiries. Letting a suspect know why I’m asking a specific question means they might figure out the right lie to tell to throw me off their scent. The expressionless mask I wear helps with that, of course.

“Tell you what- I’ll give you my life story if you give me yours.”

Blake raises an eyebrow. I don’t blame him for being surprised, considering Jason would never have made an offer that open. But I’m not Jason, and I don’t have the luxury of slowly gathering information on all my suspects without letting them know what I’m after. If they took him down, it was because he’d gotten in the way of something, and I can’t afford to find out what it is after the fact. Not to mention I’ve always been better at making friends than he was. A personal virtue by some accounts, but also a weapon I’m more than willing to wield when necessary.

“Works for me. But if we’re going to do storytime, there are better places for it than in the middle of a hallway.”

I’m half expecting Blake to suggest we leave the facility for a more ordinary environment, but instead he starts down the hall, glancing back only once to make sure I’m following. The man maintains a brisk pace, always a step ahead of me, so there isn’t much room for chatter while we’re walking. Unless his alien friend is projecting a map on the inside of his eyelids, he seems to be capable of navigating the facility by memory, as it’s not long before we arrive at his chosen destination. Another door slides silently open, and he stands aside to let me enter first. My paranoia twinges, and I half expect to detect a land mine in the entranceway, but there are no traps, and common sense suggests that he’s just adhering to some anachronistic rules of conduct I never had beaten into me at a Sunday school.

The room is a lounge of sorts, with a few couches, a bar with no tender, and an artificial fireplace. Sterile in many ways, but not entirely unappealing, at least for the sort of person who appreciates the Council’s black stone aesthetic to begin with. Fortunately for me, I don’t hate it, though it was always more Jason’s kind of thing than mine. Blake heads around to the other side of the bar, and immediately begins fixing himself a drink. I’m not quite familiar enough to know what kind of cocktail it is for certain, but a vague memory tells me that it’s probably a Manhattan. If Blake were anyone else, I would internally deride him for trying too hard, but the man isn’t adhering to the stereotype because he fancies himself a modern Sinatra. He’s just legitimately nostalgic for the era he left behind. Or its trappings, at least, even if he disliked it enough at the time to leave the planet entirely.

“Get you anything?”

“Just water. I don’t drink on the job.”

Not strictly true, but I don’t want to embarrass myself by asking for some cocktail I don’t actually know the contents of- or embarrass him by naming a cocktail he’s never heard of. Blake chuckles somewhat drily.

“On the job, eh? Well, you’ll need to at least take that helmet off to drink your water.”

Giving Blake an equally dry laugh in return, I do just that, removing the helmet and placing it on the bar, before taking a seat. My coat goes on the one directly to my left. Sitting down wearing only my armor might look a little odd, but leaving the trenchcoat on wouldn’t be much better. Pretty much no part of my costumed ensemble was designed for casual wear. Occasionally, I envy people whose powers mean they don’t need to wear a hundred pounds of armor into combat. Spandex tends not to leave much to the imagination, but it’s probably a lot more comfortable in contexts like this.

When Blake’s done mixing his own drink, he places a glass of water on the bar, and circles back around to my side. Thankfully, the seats are spaced out, so we aren’t uncomfortably close while we talk.

“Not much to do around here, is there?”

It’s still a little surprising how much easier it is to socialize with the mask off. Without it, I don’t have to worry about people seeing Jason when they look at me. Even so, I haven't forgotten what I’m after. The more banal parts of the conversation are a part of that objective, as they help me establish a rapport with Blake.

“Not at all. It was something of a challenge convincing Robards to have this bar installed at all. Of course, he doesn’t spend nearly as much time here as I do, so it’s easy to understand why he wouldn’t see the need.”

Blake’s way of speaking is odd. He’s clearly picked up some modern vernacular, but there are aspects of his speech that are stilted compared to mine. On the other hand, if this were the fifties, the way he talks would be seen as strange and informal. A microcosm of the man as a whole, caught between the two eras, unable or unwilling to fully commit to either.

“He doesn’t strike me as the drinking type, either.”

Not many of the other Council members seem likely to drink much, at least not outside of a social context. Robards in particular is far too serious, and I have a hard time picturing Zero drinking anything other than energy boosters, to keep her going during a marathon coding session. Geas has champagne during events he hosts at the Royals’ castle headquarters, I’m sure, but never enough to risk him slipping up and exposing any of his carefully maintained facades.

“Not at all. But don’t try to deflect, Graves. We made a deal.”

I don’t sense any annoyance in Blake’s tone. He doesn’t think I’m actually trying to deflect, just doing his best to get the conversation back on track.

“Right. What is it you want to know? And keep in mind there are things I can’t tell you about.”

It’s hard to think of much that Blake and the rest of the Council couldn’t plausibly know about already, besides Jason’s secret dossier on methods of dealing with each of them. Then again, the appearance of having secrets can sometimes do almost as much good as actually having them.

“Oh, I’m not interested in the details. I’ve worked most of those out myself. I want to know... why. Why is it that you do what you do.”

That does elucidate some things. Blake understands the logistics of our operation, or at least thinks he does. But the analytical engineer’s mind inside of him can’t calculate why I would devote my life to Jason’s mission the way I have. The rest of the Council has more obvious motivations- protecting the world at large, and improving life for as many people as they can. Standard liberal humanism. My job involves a lot more violence. Less high-minded pontificating, more cutting apart dead bodies in search of evidence. I could give him the standard speech about justice, and the need for an investigator who’ll solve the cases that the ordinary authorities won’t, but that isn’t going to be anything new for him. He wants my own personal motivations.

I nod, and take a second to get my thoughts in order. This isn’t something I’m uncomfortable discussing, exactly. But I’m not exactly used to talking about it, either. Not with relative strangers. But it only seems fair to give Blake some insight into me, when I’m looking for insight into him.

“I grew up in Pax. Parents were junkies, though thankfully that only started after I was born. My mother was prescribed painkillers for some chronic pain, and ended up getting hooked on them. Can’t really blame her, or my father for following suit. They both worked multiple jobs, around the clock, and still never had enough to hire a babysitter. Or they didn’t want to spend the money when it could have gone towards the next hit. Either way, I practically raised myself. If my ability hadn’t manifested earlier than most, I would probably have turned out just as bad as them.”

Blake holds up a finger to interject, though he’s mid-sip. Placing the glass down swiftly, he swallows and opens his mouth to speak.

“Enhanced information absorption and retention, right?”

“Yeah. I learn faster. And the public schools in Pax are incredibly under-funded, so I was essentially self-taught as well as self-raised. By the time I was ten or so, my parents had both graduated from painkillers to the harder stuff. It was more difficult to know what an appropriate dosage was with a drug they were less familiar with, so my father ended up in the hospital for an overdose. They saved him, but without insurance, the medical bills meant he was pretty much better off dead. The prospect of permanent debt didn’t exactly motivate them to clean up their acts- they started using even harder. Eventually, someone turned them on to a new high- Meta. You familiar?”

If the blase way I’m describing my family’s sordid past bothers Blake, he doesn’t show it- just shakes his head.

“Everyone I knew back then called it ‘cape crack.’ Gives you powers, briefly. On paper, it’s got no narcotic properties, but being able to fly is more addictive than heroin. Or so they said. Meta gave my parents something more to live for than the next hit. With powers, they could make some quick cash, and pay off their debts. That was what they told themselves, and me. In reality, most of what they made knocking over convenience stores went towards the next dose of Meta. And they managed to kill a few people in the process too.”

That had been the point where I lost most of my sympathy for them. Fucking up their own lives, and even mine, was one thing. But cutting another life short, just because they were desperate for another rush, I couldn’t forgive. That didn’t mean I hated them, or even wanted them to suffer. But I’d never had much interest in seeing their faces ever again.

“That was where Hawkshaw came in.”

It didn’t feel right to use his name in this context. Not before I’d known it. He wasn’t a person to me at the time. Just an idea.

“He put them away pretty easily. A dose of Meta doesn’t really last long enough for you to learn any sort of control over the powers it gives you. And they were still shooting up the regular way too, which didn’t help.”

Blake had been nodding since I mentioned Jason’s name. He was treating my story like it was a puzzle to solve, and it seemed he’d put some pieces together.

“So you went out looking for him? Decided you wanted to help?”

“No. I hated him at first. Thought he was just as bad as the people who’d saved their lives just to give them a bill they could never have afforded to pay. So I went looking for my parents’ dealer. I’d never told them I had powers, of course. But I’d been studying more than just my textbooks, and I knew how to fight better than most of the guys I went up against. When I found the guy who’d been supplying them, I made him tell me who his supplier was, then I shot him full of his own product and left him for the cops.”

Not every drug dealer deserved quite such brutal treatment. It was, and is, a disgusting practice, but one that plenty of people in Pax and cities like it find themselves forced into by context and circumstance. My parents’ dealer was not one such person. I shadowed him for days before deciding what to do with him, and everything I saw during that time justified what I did next. He would find vulnerable people, convince them his drugs were what they needed to ease the pain, and then jack up the price once they were hooked. And when he was done, he’d laugh about it. After I was finished, he didn’t laugh about anything at all.

“His supplier was the real deal. No powers himself, but he had cape muscle. Lieutenant of a powerful Pax gang at the time. I took it seriously, trained up as much as I could, but I was in over my head. Tried to take some of his people down, ended up getting ambushed. Hawkshaw saved my life. Then I told him to go fuck himself.”

Blake cracks a smile, clearly a little surprised by the sudden humor in my otherwise grim tale. It’s not a happy story by any means, but I never believed in wallowing in trauma as much as Jason did, and dumping a bunch of depressing backstory on Blake without any laughs to lighten the mood would make establishing a real rapport difficult.

“It took a while, but he got me to listen. Explained that he was going after the people who were putting Meta- and the other shit -on the streets. He wasn’t just interested in punishing people like my parents, but he wanted to be sure his case against the suppliers was airtight, so they wouldn’t have a chance of exploiting any loopholes in the legal system. I asked why he didn’t just put bullets in them, if he knew they were guilty. The criminal justice system was not something I had much faith in, at the time.”

I still don’t, obviously. But Blake still has some mid-century sensibilities, and extrajudicial revenge killings aren’t likely to endear him to me, even if the entire enterprise he’s currently tied up in is completely unaccountable to any law.

“Jason told me that if the system failed to do what was necessary, he’d let me pull the trigger myself. But he felt it was better to give the law a chance. Even if these particular people were never going to be rehabilitated, we couldn’t go around executing anyone who we felt deserved it. If that had been his policy, my parents would have been on slabs in the morgue, rather than cells in the county jail.”

It had been a rather compelling argument, even for all my adolescent rage. Thanks to my enhanced information processing capacity, I can’t help but recognize sound arguments and logic faster than most other people. It’s frustrating, when my impulse is to cling to my original stance out of stubbornness, but I’ve come to see it as more of an asset than a flaw as I’ve matured.

“We took down the dealer and his people, and Jason asked me to work with him full-time. I’d pretty much burned every other bridge in my life during my little crusade, so I said yes. After that, the rest is history.”

“Did you end up killing the dealer?”

At this point, I don’t even think Blake is trying to judge my moral character- he just wants a resolution to the story. On one hand, maybe his fifties ethics say that revenge is bad, but on the other, it’s entirely possible he was raised on cowboy movies, and thinks hot lead is the best way to deal with someone who’s wronged you.

“No. But if he ever sees the outside of a cell again, I will.”

That seems to satisfy the engineer well enough. He nods, leans back, and takes another drink. My mouth is rather dry from having spoken without much interruption for so long, so I gulp down half my glass of water in one go.

“Well? Understand me a little better?”

“I rather think I do,” Blake answers, seeming thoughtful. Then his eyes brighten, and he smiles. “Now, I’m a man of my word. Ask, and ye shall receive answers.”

The offer gives me pause, for a moment. I hadn’t exactly forgotten the terms of our arrangement, but in telling my own story, I’d spared no thought to what exactly I would ask him about. Jason would have scolded me for that- being able to hold two things in your mind at once is important in any profession, but particularly for a detective. He wouldn’t have been too harsh, though, knowing that it was my own past that had distracted me.

“Sure. I want the whole story, but first, I’m curious. Where is it you go, when you aren’t here?”

For the others, it’s a question I can answer pretty easily, even if I don’t know the exact truth yet. Geas and Machina have lives outside of the Council. Pallas has her own country. Zero’s probably got some apartment with more server stacks than windows. But Blake is a mystery, and the more I think about my small-town theory, the less it holds up. Those places might seem familiar enough to him on the surface, but the values of the fifties haven't survived at all. A town like that in the American midwest would be full of people who march into Starbucks with an assault rifle every Sunday and demand the barista write Jesus Christ on their coffee cup. Astro would have found himself in a more alien culture than any he might have encountered off-world, in a place like that.

“Oh, I still live on my ship. We parked it on the dark side of the moon after I came back. Not actually on the moon, obviously- it’s not like there’s any wind up there to blow away the evidence that would leave behind. Just using it as cover, really, so nobody down here spots us.”

While that does answer my question rather neatly, what really draws my interest is Blake’s use of plurals. He’s probably not referring to the other Council members, which means he’s talking about himself and his weapon-partner. That implies some level of agency ascribed to the thing, though I haven't even seen it yet. Still, it could be communicating with him telepathically at any moment- maybe even feeding him information. Or using his body as a puppet, with his mind having been erased a long time ago. But if that were the case, I have a hard time believing the Council wouldn’t have noticed.

“The same ship you left Earth in?”

Blake makes an amused sound.

“Well, that’s the paradox, isn’t it? When you’ve retrofitted the original design with alien parts enough times, when does it stop being the same ship? If you showed the current model to me when I was designing it originally, I might not be able to recognize it. But yes, for some value of the term, it’s the same ship.”

I’m a little surprised, both at such a philosophical answer from a more practically-minded man, and that he’s still flying around in a vessel built in the nineteen-fifties. But if it was spaceworthy then, I suppose there’s no real reason it shouldn’t be now. Particularly not if it’s been upgraded with advanced off-world tech since then.

“Does that mean you ran into other alien species out there, then? Besides the Andromedans?”

“Well, if we’re going to get into that, I may as well tell you the whole story. Are you ready? Need a bathroom break first?”

Rolling my eyes, I gesture for him to go on.

“Okay, great. I’m going to skip over a lot of my childhood- it wasn’t particularly interesting, compared to yours. Suffice to say, my gift developed around when I hit puberty. I’d always been of above-average intellect, but something was obviously different when I started building miniature engines out of household appliances. Mental powers like mine- and yours, I suppose -weren’t as commonly recognized back then, so nobody suspected I was anything other than an ordinary prodigy. I was accepted into MIT at sixteen, and graduated two years later. This was during the war, so the government had their eyes out for anyone who might be able to bring them the next big breakthrough in weapons tech. Even being a genius, I wasn’t exactly immune to wartime propaganda. I wanted to do my bit for the good old US of A, so I ended up accepting a contract, and eventually found myself working on the Manhattan Project.”

Interesting as that is, it does raise one question- why the bombs weren’t more advanced. Blake built an actual spacecraft capable of near-lightspeed travel a decade before we managed to get a man on the moon, yet the nuclear bomb still had to be dropped out of a plane like a particularly deadly rock. Rather than interrupt, I let him continue, assuming he’ll get to that sooner or later.

“I was always more interested in the engineering than the nuclear stuff, but that didn’t mean I was useless. In fact, a few of the ideas I had in the early days probably saved months of work. Who knows how much longer the war would have gone on if they hadn’t had the bomb ready to drop on Berlin? Of course, I didn’t find out about that until after I got back. After a while I started to get cold feet. Building weapons of mass destruction wasn’t what I’d wanted to do with my life. By the time testing started in Los Alamos, I’d decided I wanted out. But if I’d tried to just leave, the suits would have figured I was trying to defect to the Germans or the Russians. And frankly, I wasn’t sure I wanted to be around when either of them got their hands on the bomb too. So I started working on a little escape plan.”

Not an unreasonable assumption. If the American government had snatched up at least one meta-genius to help develop the nuclear bomb, it wasn’t absurd to suggest that the Nazis and the Soviets had done the same. And with all three in tension, a nuclear resolution to the war might have felt inevitable, even if it meant the end of all life on Earth. Abandoning the planet entirely would have been a sane move, if a somewhat callous one. As far as I knew, Blake hadn’t brought anyone with him when he left.

“The design was the easy part. Finding a source of funding was harder. Then I realized the answer was staring me in the face. Millions of dollars were being poured into the development of the atomic bomb, because the people in charge thought we’d need it to win the war. I could bring them designs for what would look like an advanced fighter jet, and they’d give me as much money as I’d need. Even truckloads of plutonium to power it, if I asked. They only authorized a single prototype, but I never intended to build them- or anybody- a whole fleet. And to make sure they didn’t steal it away from me, I programmed the thing so that only I could fly it. Once it was finished, I snuck in and stole it. My guess is that some embarrassed suit decided to cover the whole thing up, because he didn’t want it getting out that they’d flushed tens of millions of dollars down the toilet just to help me leave the planet.”

Blake grins mischievously, and I can’t help but like him.

“Grabbed this jacket on my way out, too.”

The grin fades swiftly, though, and it’s replaced with a more somber expression.

“I suppose now you’ll be wanting to hear about the Andromedans.”

Alien invasions aren’t the sort of thing that happen every day. We’ve only had the one so far, in fact. As you might expect, it was a pretty big deal.

Unlike what you might expect, it didn’t happen without warning. The official story was, Marcus Robards had detected alien spacecraft approaching from around Jupiter, and shared that information with the government, who had in turn authorized him to share it with the rest of the world. In reality, Robards and the rest of the council were informed by Astro here that they were coming, though exactly how he knew, I still haven't found out.

Their ships move fast, but not so fast that we didn’t have time to prepare. Robards immediately put an entire armada of next-generation vacuum-ready fighter craft into production, with American government bankrolling the whole project. I’m sure one of the people who remembered Blake’s fake prototype had argued against it, but in the face of impending extraterrestrial annihilation, no budgetary concerns could have ever won out. Thanks to the bottomless well of money he had access to, and a highly efficient production line, he managed to have a few hundred ready by the time the actual invasion came. Everyone knew it wouldn’t be enough- which is why they called on us.

In this case, I’m using the broader ‘us,’ meaning the entire superhuman community. Obviously, the Peacekeepers were already onboard, being Robards’ team, and having strong ties to the government already. But this wasn’t the sort of thing that they could handle alone, even if they had Air Force pilots in Anvil-made planes alongside them. An invitation was extended to everyone who fell even vaguely under the umbrella of ‘hero,’ including the Front Line. Plenty of people weren’t happy to see them, but Adamant and Vindicator in particular represented enough firepower that they bit their tongues. Jason brought me along too, despite not being an official member of the team at the time. Partly because it was a real ‘all hands on deck’ situation, but also, knowing what I know now, probably to prepare me for dealing with global crises when I eventually replaced him on the Council.

Some of the Council was in attendance as well- the members who people know exist and are alive. Robards and Geas, along with their respective teams, as well as Pallas, though she demanded some serious concessions before agreeing to help. Representatives from every other major hero group in the Western hemisphere came too. Even some villains, which is typical for events of that nature. Not the petty thieves or the pure psychopaths, but the ones who are powerful enough to matter, and smart enough to know that the world ending means bad news for them too. There were also a few military officials, at least one of whom I’m sure was Network wearing a war criminal’s skin. Notably absent, however, were any representatives from non-NATO members or affiliates. Even in the face of an alien invasion, international cooperation was too much to ask.

With everyone assembled, Robards and the generals gave everyone a briefing. The sources of their information were classified, which I assume means it all came from Astro, but they couldn’t very well tell us that. The invaders were from the Andromeda galaxy, our ‘neighbor’ by several million light years, hence the name. Attempts to communicate had failed, and they appeared to be armed for war. We had no idea what they looked like, how powerful they were, or really anything about their capabilities. Just that they were probably coming to kill us, and that we’d probably have to kill them first.

To make a long story short, that was exactly what we did. I spent the time before the invasion learning how to fly one of Robards’ spacecraft, since my usual arsenal of weapons were unlikely to even scratch the enemy ships. Mine was a more advanced version than the one that the Air Force boys got, because Robards knew I’d be able to learn how to fly it faster than they ever could. He didn’t let me keep it afterwards, though. Jason flew along with me, as my dedicated gunner, a skill he’d picked up instantaneously. Everyone else trained for zero-gravity combat, which was different even for those of us who could already fly. Without a ‘down’ to center them, many found it difficult to focus, but some took to it naturally, and with a higher degree of maneuverability, ended up flying circles around the enemy.

The actual attack came a few days before it was projected to, but we were ready. Obviously, we didn’t wait until they were at our doorstep to strike, and neither did they. The Andromedans arrived in two gigantic capital ships, but each of them deployed a small fleet of fighter craft once they were about halfway between Mars and Earth. One of them was targeting the Western hemisphere. The other went East.

On both sides, things went very similarly. Probably because Network was coordinating things at the highest level from within every nation involved. On the ‘home front,’ the Air Force and a large contingent of capes held off the Andromedan assault, matching their superior numbers with our greater strength. Their tech was impressive, but some of the metahumans we fielded were basically cheating. The other half of our forces were assaulting the capital ship. Paradoxically, most of the fliers were helping out at home, while those who couldn’t were selected for the away team. They stormed the capital ship and took it down from the inside, while our most powerful were tearing chunks out of the exterior. Vindicator threw a number of asteroids at it, while Pallas put the full breadth of her powers on display in a way she’s never done since.

Things played out a little differently on the other side of the world. The Chinese military doesn’t conscript all metahumans by default, but it does demand one year of mandatory service and training from them, after which they’re placed into a special reserve group. Plenty of them decide to join the military full-time, both because it’s heavily incentivized, and because there isn’t a whole lot of crime to fight over there, but others pursue fame and wealth with their powers. When shit gets serious, like it did with the Andromedan invasion, the government has the power to activate every single member of those reserves, and call them into service. It wasn’t just them, of course- the Russians and Indians fielded their own superpowered soldiers too. But China was targeted for its massive population density, and they have a commensurate number of metahumans. Enough, in fact, that they didn’t really need to develop conventional military countermeasures for the Andromedans. The PLA played their part, but mostly evacuating targeted areas and occasionally shooting down enemy craft that got too close to the surface. The exact details aren’t completely clear, but they managed to deal with their capital ship too.

It wasn’t a cakewalk, by any means. A lot of heroes died, and a few cities got hit pretty badly by the Andromedan bombardment. But ultimately, the enemy was repelled, and things mostly went back to normal. From what I’ve been able to gather, the Council took full advantage of the situation afterwards, to encourage every major world power that it was more important to prepare for a second attack than to arm up against one another. The climate of perpetual fear about another attack isn’t exactly fun, but it’s better than constant scaremongering about the need for a ‘confrontation’ with China or Russia. It’s not exactly the unified world that an optimist might have predicted would result from an alien invasion, but it’s better than what we had before.

All of that is still only half the story. With any luck, I’m about to get the rest.

“My main concern after I left Earth was survival, plain and simple. We knew even back then that the conditions necessary to sustain human life weren’t particularly common. Luckily, I had a subspace drive, and a pretty impressive sensor suite, so I set out looking for somewhere I could fill up on oxygen and nutrients once the supply I’d brought with me began to run low.”

Blake’s skipped over most of the tedious logistics in his story so far, which tells me that this isn’t a pointless digression. It’s got some relevance to his overall point.

“As it turns out, that’s exactly what the Andromedans were looking for, too. See, they didn’t target us at random. Far from it. They may not bear much of a resemblance to us physically, but there’s a pretty significant biological similarity. Not in the way we’re similar to monkeys, but in the way we’re similar to... I don’t know, reptiles. They require a very similar set of conditions in order to survive as we do. So they’d set their ships to seek out the same kind of planet that I was looking for. Only, I was just looking for a place to refuel, whereas they wanted a lot more.”

That explains a great deal. No official photos have ever been released of any Andromedan bodies that might have been acquired during the battle, which has resulted in about as many conspiracy theories as you might expect, but I’ve heard descriptions from Adamant, who was on the capital ship herself, and her photorealistic drawings made clear that they were organic, not mechanical or crystalline or gaseous, or any of the other bizarre forms of life that may or may not exist beyond what we can see. The Fermi Paradox asks why we haven't been visited by more alien species, considering the odds of their existence, but if most of them couldn’t survive in our atmosphere, it makes sense they wouldn’t bother with us. Whereas the Andromedans can, but they weren’t just interested in making contact- they were looking for conquest.

“I visited a few uninhabited worlds first. Unintelligent fauna, exotic flora, all the pictures I took are in the database if you’re interested. Fairly boring, though, because it all thrived under conditions just like ours, so the potential for variance was fairly low. But after a few years, I stumbled across a world that had been home to intelligent life. Past tense. That was where I met Selene.”

Blake turns his chair and stands up, stepping away from the bar. Seemingly without any action on his part, his weapon activates. At first it’s like a black liquid, originating from what looks like the base of his skull, and swiftly swallowing his entire body. But no sooner than it’s done that does it harden, forming an almost chitinous shell. This would be his living alien weapon, then. Named Selene.

“Of course, she wasn’t called that originally, but her language doesn’t really translate all that well.”

Despite there being no obvious opening for his mouth, or even his eyes, Blake’s voice comes through perfectly clear. When he laughs, the surface of the armor ripples, like it’s laughing right along with him. The design is, in a word, alien, which makes the fact that it’s fitted to a human body all the stranger. I imagine this is what a wild dog would feel when looking at a domesticated one wearing clothes a human had made for it.

“She says hi.”

After a split second’s deliberation, I extend a hand to shake. To my surprise, a tendril emerges from Blake’s forearm, and reaches out to wrap around my hand gently, before shaking it up and down.

“Nice to meet you,” I offer, a little unsure of exactly how best to interact with this thing. Best to err on the side of politeness.

Selene seems satisfied with the greeting, and her tendril retreats, followed shortly by the rest of her, leaving Blake back to normal. Precisely where that black substance lives when it’s not protecting him, I can’t tell, though I’m sure there’s a long-winded explanation waiting for me if I ask.

“Her species inhabited a planet with an atmosphere almost identical to ours. Their biotechnology was highly advanced, which culminated in the creation of symbiotic life-forms like Selene. They’re potent weapons, which allowed her species to put up a fight against the Andromedans. When they realized that they weren’t going to be able to take over the planet and enslave the population, which is their usual M.O., they decided to raze it instead. That was a few hundred years before I arrived.”

I don’t bother asking why the Andromedans are bent on conquest. It would be about as pointless as asking after Genghis Khan’s motivations. They have the power, so why not? And if they can’t have what they want, nobody else can.

“Most of Selene’s kind bonds with a host at birth, which makes their connection pretty much unbreakable. That also means that when the host dies, the resulting psychic trauma usually kills their partner. Selene was... a special case, which is why she survived after the Andromedans killed the planet. Before I showed up, she was wearing local wildlife, and since a lot of her processing power is derived from the host’s brain, she wasn’t entirely there. So when I came around, she latched onto me pretty quick, and got most of her brains back. Wasn’t a one-way trade, either. She still retained the memories and knowledge of her previous hosts, which meant I got access to an entire culture’s worth of information about the rest of the galaxy. And, you know, the Andromedans.”

That explains how he knows what her original name was, though there’s a difference between having an alien language downloaded into your brain and being able to speak it fluently- particularly if you lack the biological components necessary to even vocalize it. Maybe the species that created Selene’s kind didn’t even vocalize at all- they could have communicated with pheromone trails or colors or used some other senses I have no conception of whatsoever.

“Selene hadn’t exactly heard much about them since they left, so I didn’t really think of them as an active threat. What she did know was the location of a place called Terminal. Rough translation, obviously. It’s a trading hub, the biggest in our arm of the galaxy. Used to be totally barren, but a huge conglomerate purchased it and had the entire planet converted into a massive city. Fascinating place, though having a translator attached to your spine really helps navigation. I stayed there for a few months, but those stories are gonna have to wait for another time. The important part is, I eventually ran into some people from a planet that the Andromedans had subjugated a long time ago. Even conquerors need to trade, though they prefer to do it through intermediaries. They mentioned hearing some chatter about a new world the fleet was targeting, and Selene mentioned that the description sounded pretty close to Earth. Obviously, they go after a lot of planets that have similar conditions to ours, so I was skeptical, but I asked after the coordinates, and they told me exactly where the fleet was headed. Here.”

Their willingness to share the Andromedans’ plans isn’t exactly surprising. A slave species probably doesn’t harbor much love for its masters, even if it’s unwilling to defy them except in small ways. Plus, they’d probably figured that we stood no chance even if we were forewarned, so the potential cost of telling Blake was low.

“I headed back immediately, though I was half expecting to find an irradiated wasteland. Instead, the Council contacted me before I even entered the atmosphere. They explained that they were in charge, and I told them that they needed to start preparing for an alien invasion.”

“You weren’t surprised that the world had been taken over by a secret cabal while you were gone?”

Blake chuckles.

“Trust me, the world was run by a secret cabal long before anyone here got involved. I was just glad the new management seemed halfway competent. Before I arrived, I figured I’d have a hard time convincing anyone that I was for real, and that was if they didn’t try to just stick me in some research facility immediately. Then, even if I managed to convey the gravity of the situation, I was pretty sure we’d still lose. Even if they’d been able to replicate my designs, it would take months of training before anyone was ready for zero-g combat, and the Andromedans had five battleships full of veteran pilots. Of course, I hadn’t accounted for how many more metahumans--”

“Hold on. Five?”

Looking slightly startled by having been interrupted mid-sentence, Blake raises an eyebrow, confused at my confusion. Then he figures it out.

“Right, I forgot. Hunt kept you in the dark. Originally, the Andromedans sent five of their capital ships, which is standard for taking a smaller world like Earth. They travel using subspace engines, which allow ships to travel long distances in relatively short periods of time, using some complicated technology that isn’t entirely relevant to the story. Most space-faring civilizations develop it eventually, like I did, though the rest of the species hasn’t caught up quite yet. When Robards was going over my ship’s schematics, he noticed a vulnerability in the navigation system that would allow us to alter the destination of a jump to ‘undefined,’ which would trap them in subspace indefinitely. Initially, we were going to do it to all of them, and end the war without a single shot fired. But O’Connor pointed out that a... manageable invasion might actually be to our benefit. An outside-context problem to shake up the status quo, and allow them to reshape things to their liking. So we ended up trapping three of their battleships, and dealing with the other two the regular way.”

The matter-of-fact way he says it is almost stunning. Most people would at least have enough shame to seem somewhat regretful, even if they remained convinced of the necessity of such a choice. But Blake just lays it out like he's explaining some uninteresting bit of historical minutiae. And according to my timeline, this all happened after Jason joined the Council, meaning he was in the room when that decision was made. I can't help but wonder- did he argue against it? Were they able to convince him that it was a necessary sacrifice? It's entirely possible that more lives have been saved as a result than were lost during the invasion, but the calculus still doesn't sit right with me.

“And those ships are stuck there permanently? No chance of them getting out?”

Blake grimaces.

“Well, that’s what we thought. But one of them just got out.”

“What?”

“Yeah. Showed up on scans out past Neptune. Robards is gonna call a meeting tomorrow to discuss our options.”

The casual way he mentions it is enough to give me whiplash. Some part of me still thinks it’s just a part of his story, but he’s talking about something that’s happening right now. There was a sense of ambient horror in the weeks preceding the first invasion. Our understanding of the universe had been turned on its head. We weren’t alone, and the only other species we knew about was coming to kill us. Beating them certainly helped alleviate that feeling, but it had still taken a while to fade. Already, I can feel it beginning to set back in.

“See, the first invasion, that’s the sort of thing that we let the general public see. A manageable threat, big enough to scare them, but not anything the people in capes can’t handle. Behind the scenes, we deal with the real world-enders, and we do it in a way that lets the rest of the world sleep easy. You got a taste of it on your mission with Lai, but that was the kind of problem a cluster bomb or two would have solved, if you two hadn’t. This is the real deal.”

Astro flashes the kind of grin that only someone who’s flown off alone into the vast unknown of space can make.

“Are you ready?”