"Officer two eight one four mission report, cycle thirty-three point seven, Oan universal time. I'm currently onboard the derelict science vessel 'Intrepid'... No signs of any internal damage." Hal reported to his personal log as he ran a finger across the dusty but undamaged interior plating of the ship. "According to the Intrepid's broadcasted distress beacon, her occupants came into contact with the biological entity known as Starro the Conqueror. I state for the record; seeing as I had the most experience against this suspect, I deemed it necessary to commandeer the situation pre-emptively before informing the Guardians. After this incident has been taken care of, I will surrender myself for disciplinary action."

It was difficult for the hot shot pilot, but he tried to dig out as many big, formal words as possible. Hopefully they'd like that.

Hal pushed to his feet and sighed. "No tentacle residue on the plating means that Starro is most likely in a fixed location. It can easily propel itself through the air naturally, but something of that size is bound to scrape by a corner or two in these tight spaces. Its most likely acting through the hosts of its parasitic offspring...which are concerningly elusive at the moment. Jordan out."

The human GL continued on his way to the observation deck after those few moments taken to update his log. Although he was technically AWOL on an unauthorized mission, Hal felt compelled to record what happened. Mainly to cover his own ass when the Guardians decide to punish him again.

Life signs are usually pretty easy to detect with a Green Lantern ring's onboard scanners, but these signatures were masked by some kind of distortion, necessitating an in-person inspection to be sure that they weren't just spatial anomalies. Hal's ring couldn't even pinpoint the cause of all the disturbance, but a part of him, the human paranoia that helped his species be wary of danger in case they were being stalked by a predator, kept telling him that this was all some elaborate trap.

As if beckoned by his second thoughts, just as he strolled into the centre of the observation deck, three armed soldiers leapt out of the shadows and trained their rifles on the GL. "Hold it!! Don't move!!" Yelled one of the soldiers.

Hal jolted slightly, but he was expecting more zombie-esque attackers...so he was pretty relieved to see the power armoured beings boxing him in. His sour disposition was instantly eroded, and Hal was once again standing tall as he raised his ring hand. "Stand down, fellas! Don't make me ask twice!" He barked.

The soldiers were bewildered by the sudden glow of Hal's ring.

"What is that thing?!"

"It's a weapon! Stay sharp!"

"Not the weapon, that...that thing! The alien!"

Hal cocked his head. "Don't be stupid! I don't have a starfish on my face, right?"

With that, the soldiers fell silent. "Sir?" One asked.

Seconds of tense silence passed as Hal stood at the ready.

"Hold your fire...!" The leader sighed reluctantly. Their voice was raspy and male; it reminded Hal of Clint Eastwood or something. After his order, the other soldiers slowly but surely lowered their arms.

"Smart man." Now that Hal was in contact with the soldiers, his ring picked up their identification credentials from their suits and displayed them as each soldier spoke.

The leader, identified as Exelton (a high military rank in these parts, maybe loosely equal to Captain in most Earth militaries) Onraiken, stepped up to Hal and pressed "Who in God's name are you supposed to be?"

"I'm the local Green Lantern."

No one moved.

"What the hell is a Green Lantern?" Said Pelartus (An initiate rank, similar to private) Ranten. Much like humans, there are many races out there that have no idea what a Green Lantern is until one lands on their doorstep. This is primarily due to the universe being so large, as well as the Corps' Intervention Protocol which prohibited interacting with species unaware of the existence of alien life. Hal himself was humanity's first link to the intergalactic community.

Hal planted his hands on his hips and quipped. "You're lookin' at one. The Green Lantern Corps is an intergalactic peacekeeping force. I detected your distress beacon. What the hell happened here?"

"Whatever the scientists had locked up in storage broke out. There's thousands of them. Every single person apart from us was...was latched onto. Turned into zombies..." Added Pelartus Nortos.

Hal latched onto this comment and responded "All of the things you've seen are just parasitic offspring. The real thing is...big."

Starro's parasitic spores attached themselves onto a subject's face, so it was easy to see if someone was a host or not. Hal wanted to be sure and check these guys, but it didn't seem to be a good idea. He had to expect that Starro was anticipating that move and has parasites in wait if these guys are in fact clean. The second Hal manufactured an atmosphere for them and they pulled their helmets off, they'd be infected. Although it was relatively easy to remove a spore from a human host, Hal had no idea how the physiologies of these lifeforms would react to Starro's parasites. It could do nothing, or it could kill them. That wasn't a chance he was willing to take.

The only approach he could use was to play with his cards close to his chest. One of these three could belong to Starro, or it could be all of them. He had to try to find signs of the infection...

Vell's voice suddenly broke the silence. "I've got survivors. They say they're the only ones left."

Hal closed his eyes, sighed in exasperation and muted his voice so that the soldiers couldn't hear him. He then turned away from them to hide the fact that he was speaking to someone else. "Hm. Funny. I got a bunch of mercenaries here saying the exact same thing." He groaned.

"W-What?" Vell's voice cracked.

"Not as simple as I would've liked either..."

"What do we do?"

"I don't know. We need to find out which of these guys is compromised. It could be one from my group, one from yours, a few from each of ours or hell it could be all of them."

Vell asked, sounding a little bit concerned "What do you mean you don't know?"

"Hey, if you got any ideas then please, be my guest."

The channel was filled with Vell's frustrated growling. "It planned for this to happen, right? Starro wants to outsmart us."

"It sure did. And quite frankly...I'm stumped." Hal admitted. "He's probably watching us with a bag of popcorn in his lap right now."

Vell ignored the comment about whatever popcorn was and continued "Their suits are blocking scans."

"The only thing I can see for us to do at the moment is act like we're here alone, and try to get close to them. All the while, we need to keep our eyes peeled for suspicious behaviour."

"No...that'll take too long...!"

"Again...got anything else?"

"No." She answered instantly.

"At times like this I really regret keeping this stupid ring." Hal joked. "Keep me posted."

Jordan unmuted his comms channel and turned over to the three mercenaries. "Before I can extract you guys, we need to contain Starro." He said, looking for any signs of strange behaviour as he mentioned his hostile intent towards the creature.

Ranten shrugged. "We don't even know what it looks like. All we've seen is its little...face-hugging things."

Hal answered "Starro feeds off of radiation. When he attacked my planet, he was after our energy. We should check out the ship's fusion reactor."

Nortos scoffed in amusement. "Are you crazy? The reactor's on deck twenty two; the zombies are all over that place."

"That's the point, chuckles. It wants to keep us away." Hal quipped. He looked towards Onraiken once again. "Now unless you and your men aren't up to it, I'm going to check it out."

Onraiken's body language became a lot more stiff in reaction to Hal's bluff. The Green Lantern made for the door behind him, only for Onraiken to call after him. "Wait."

The armoured soldier stepped forward and powered up his plasma rifle. "Can you save them? The possessed?"

"Maybe. I've noticed that the ship's atmosphere is out... The hosts don't need to be alive for Starro to take them." With Hal's sombre reply, the soldiers began to seem tense. "They could be dead already...but if they're not, I'll need to contact a medical scientist to determine if removing the parasite would affect your race in a way it wouldn't affect mine. Then disconnecting it is straight forward."

The visor on Onraiken's helmet was a straight horizontal line, glowing blue from the interior. He stared motionlessly at Hal, whose ring hand was ready to shoot up into action at the first sign of trouble. However, the alien mercenary sighed and told him "I'm coming with you. I didn't initiate that lockdown for no reason...this thing has to be stopped. What about you two?"

The two other soldiers glanced at each other. Ranten nodded hesitantly "Y-Yes sir."

Nortos was much more reluctant to go than his squad mate. "We're going to die if we go there."

"I'm not commanding you to come with us. You can either hide here like a boy, or follow us like a soldier." Onraiken snapped.

Hal's eyes were keenly monitoring the situation. There were too many possibilities. Perhaps Onraiken was infected and is attempting to cover it up by agreeing with Hal, maybe even plotting to terminate him before they reached Starro. Or Nortos' harsh opposition could be Starro attempting to mislead Hal by making him doubt himself. And finally, the unassuming Ranten might be Starro disguising itself in plain sight by being low-profile, not calling any attention to its host; what Hal called the 'Clark Kent strategy'. Hal was just wondering how Vell was doing at this point.

As he and the troopers made their way through the empty ship, Hal made sure to keep an eye on each of them at all times. There was no telling when one of them would lash out if this was all just a charade.

"How are we gonna stop this thing?" Onraiken asked Hal as they trod down the corridor.

Hal needed to play this carefully. From experience, he knew that Starro was slightly vulnerable to calcium oxide. He made sure to remember the chemical makeup for this substance in case he ever crossed paths with Starro ever again. He obviously had to make sure he didn't mention this little scheme, lest Starro was listening. "I was going to blast the living crap out of him."

"Really? You don't have anything else?"

The human Lantern narrowed his eyes. "No." He figured the less prepared he appeared to be, the better. "I only beat him last time because I had a team with me."

Onraiken fell silent after this, seemingly discouraged by Hal's lack of confidence.

Suddenly, there was a distant clattering from a nearby room. The soldiers were all as sharp as knives and reacted to the sound by bringing their weapons about and rushing to cover. Hal raised his ring towards the dark doorway...and was met with nothing.

"G-Godammit." Ranten muttered to himself.

"Stay frosty, I'll check it out." Hal declared.

He cautiously approached as a riot shield manifested on his right arm. Raising the shield, Hal stepped into the dark room. This storage compartment was meticulously kept, even for science vessel standards. On the ground was a metal rod, still rolling from when something had undoubtedly knocked it over.

In the corner of his eye, Hal saw a silhouette. It was mangled, hunched over and broken beyond all recognition. After enhancing the image, Jordan noted that it was the distorted, sheet-white corpse of a humanoid life form, with a purple throbbing organism attached to its face. The Starro parasite was starfish-shaped, a vibrant purple in colour and possessed a singular, devilish yellow eye. The eye rolled and widened as it fell onto Hal.

Hal grimaced, noting that the host had no life sign. The zombie lunged at Hal, who lashed out with his shield, sending the creature rolling over backwards. He then willed an ion hand to zoom over and tear the parasite from the dead husk.

"Contact!" Hal shouted.

It seemed redundant, because his encounter with the host alerted Starro, who then attacked the mercenaries with his other slaves as indicated by the sound of gunfire. Screaming answered, and Nortos' fierce shouting followed. "Ranten!! No!!"

Hal bolted back out to the main corridor, a chain gun floating next to him. The end of the hallway was a mess of dozens of possessed, who tumbled over each other trying to reach the fighting soldiers. Heads exploded from energy weapons fire, and Hal joined the flurry of force by sweeping his minigun across the crowd.

Glowing emerald rounds pierced the bodies of the face-hugging spores, splattering their insides all over the hallway. Hal created another minigun which positioned itself on the other side of his body and unleashed another rapid-fire stream of rounds at the incoming horde. He gritted his teeth as he thought about how all of these people died...and how he wasn't there to stop it. And now, he was tearing their corpses apart, because a monster like Starro was using them like puppets.

He stifled these grievances and continued to pulverise the incoming hostiles. Minutes passed and the four men stood before a muddle of blood, guts and garbled parasite carcasses.

Onraiken growled under his breath, turning away from the aftermath of the encounter. "We never managed to hold them off before...but they took Ranten. Carried him off like a bunch of savage jaitoks."

Hal knelt before one of the bodies, frowning. "I couldn't save them...or him."

"We don't have time to think about that right now." Onraiken added.

"...Our main concern is stopping this 'Starro' guy, right?" Nortos said quietly, clearly affected by the disappearance of his comrade.

Green Lantern stood with a deep inhale, and silently continued down the hall.

The path towards the reactor was eerily empty after the dozens upon dozens of possessed that the crew had to tear through. They came upon a sealed security hatch, which Hal insisted on taking care of with his enhanced strength. Without much effort, he wrenched the massive door apart with a screech.

Beyond was the form of a familiar species, wrestling with a parasitic spore as a crowd of zombies stood unmoving in the background. The orange-skinned man was dressed in small amounts of dull lavender, with blazing red hair.

Nortos gasped. "What...who is that?"

"Not a member of the crew. I know all of their faces." Onraiken replied.

"It's a Tamaranean... Get behind me." Hal warned as he took several steps forward.

"No way. This is our fight too." Said Onraiken.

The Tamaranean's struggling eventually faded, and he slowly turned to face the interlopers. Hal cocked his head. "If I duke it out with this guy, you two might get killed if you're anywhere near us. Just take care of the spores."

Hal went roaring forward, fist raised like an emerald missile. In response, the Tamaranean man swept a hand at the GL, which sent a starbolt hurtling his way like a bolt of lightning. The bolt, moving much faster than perceivable by the human eye, impacted against Hal's energy shield. His shield's integrity dropped to 77 percent from that single blow, causing Hal to curse under his breath.

A railgun put itself together around Hal's front facing arm as it came closer and closer to the Tamaranean's face. At the last possible second, the rail roared forward with an explosive payload. Hal's innards rumbled as a blinding explosion consumed the corridor, sending him and the Tamaranean male soaring away from each other.

As Hal skidded across the flooring, he noticed that Onraiken and Nortos had engaged the rushing body of Starro zombies. "What are you doing?! Get outta here!" Hal commanded.

"We're not leaving until this thing is dead!" Nortos snarled. "Now quit complaining and kick his ass."

Jordan gritted his teeth and flung himself back into the fight just as the Tamaranean did the same. The pair locked hands, wrestling with such incredible force that either one would've ripped a human being in two. If that single starbolt reduced his shields that much, Hal knew he couldn't keep this up for very long. Hal suddenly realised that this Tamaranean could still be alive. Their species could survive in space with ease. He had to free this man before they ended up tearing the whole vessel into shrapnel.

Hands restricted by the alien's grip, Hal stared unblinkingly into the parasite's single eye and envisioned a vice securing itself onto the thing and prying it off. With a brief struggle, the parasite's tendrils that slunk into every open orifice on the man's face snapped off and squirted blood all over him.

The parasite dropped to the ground along with the freed Tamaranean. Hal moved his attention to Onraiken and Nortos...who were nowhere to be seen. All Hal saw was a pile of possessed. "No!" He cried. Hal fired a spread of pure ion energy which hurled the mindless drones into the previous passage like ragdolls. Underneath this stack of bodies was Onraiken, shaken but alive. Nortos was absent.

The mercenary captain glanced around frantically. "N-No...he's gone...! Nortos..." He muttered to himself.

Hal fought back the urge to punch a hole in the hull out of frustration.

"L-Lantern...I owe you my life!" A new voice said. Jordan glanced over his shoulder and saw the Tamaranean man, already recovered and ready to go. "My name is Ryand'r, prince of Tamaran."

"Prince of Tamaran...wait...are you...related to Koriand'r?"

"Yes of course, she's my older sister! You must be Harold Jordan of Earth. I've heard many things about you."

"She never mentioned having a brother... What are you doing all the way out here? Tamaran's in a whole different sector."

"I was nearby on a mission of peace for Tamaran, and I intercepted the distress signal. Next thing I knew, that thing was wrapping itself around my face."

Hal thinned his lips. "I need you to bring soldiers to secure this station. The security crews are out of their depth."

"Don't you need my help against Starro?"

"I can handle it, don't worry. Anyway, you owe me."

Ryand'r, clearly not exactly thrilled about the situation but compliant regardless, said "If you insist, Harold Jordan. I am in your debt." The Tamaranean made haste for an exit, leaving Hal and Onraiken in peace.

Finally, with Ryand'r out of the way and the zombies taken care of, Hal approached Onraiken. He felt responsible for this. It was clear that his team was clean...and now, they were all dead. Because he brought them with him. "This is my fault. I...I shouldn't have let you come with me."

"We were paid to do a job, Lantern. It was our duty to come with you." Onraiken steeled himself and pushed upwards. "I'm not giving up now."