Yue

 22nd January

03:28 GMT

I slow as Bleez follows me towards the airlock. "How.. serious were you about needing my protection?"

"Kinda serious? Like, Andar seems like the sort of guy who'd make someone disappear? But I don't think he cares enough about me to put any real effort into it, so once I'm out of the way I'm probably fine."

"Um. Okay, but why are you following me?"

"'Out of the way', like, 'not on a ship full of people who report directly to him'."

Ah. And the large zeta tube on Earth is down for testing, so I can't just ship her back… "I could just take you hom-."

"Oh no."

"I can't honestly believe that your mother is more fearsome than cultists, mutants, mutant cultists and manifested demons."

"There isn't gunna be anything like that down there. C'mon, even if there are ruins, they'd have to be idiots to perch there."

I actually start laughing.

"What?"

"Bleez, I know a man who invented a gun which reduces anything it shoots to zero degrees Kelvin, and who uses it to rob museums. When it comes to supervillainy, there is literally no level of stupid that would surprise me. I'm fully expecting us to walk in on the whole cult mid-ritual."

"They'd have to be kind of dumb-. Oh."

"Yeah."

I extend my environmental shield to cover her as we step into the airlock and I trigger it to cycle. This class of warship generally leaves its fighters out in the vacuum, Thanagar having found that while it makes sense to have permeable force fields on larger ships it just isn't efficient on smaller ones and that constant atmosphere-vacuum transitions are actually worse for maintenance than either fixing them outside or dumping them off on a tender. As such, there isn't a nice easy hangar to stroll out of, so we have to wait-.

Lights flash and a warning alarm sound, and then the exterior door opens and I fly us out.

"Three, two-."

"Hey can we… Actually fly-fly down?"

"Thanagarians might be able to fly in space, but you can't fly very fast. And I don't want to wait a couple of hours."

"Can't you just make us go faster? Pleeeeease?"

Ring, how far have they gotten? Oh, not very. Though there are geophysics scans on file for this part of the planet, they were looking for places that would be worth mining. Dense rock with no trace of Nth metal ore didn't warrant closer investigation, but thanagarians do know how to mine and they've got an industrial matter flayer down there silently boring a tunnel down towards where the temple should be.

"Al.. right." Bleez smiles-. "How well can you mimic normal humanoid body language?"

"Ah, pretty well?" She shrugs, and she makes the gesture more naturally than even Ms Thal does. "I had a diplomacy tutor from when I was five years old, and I've wanted to perform outside the Empire for, like, ages. No good swinging my wings around if no one knows what it means, right?"

She giggles as I give her a slightly closer look. Oh, trying to manipulate me without me noticing and embarrassed that I spotted it. Fine, it's pretty harmless, and if Onimar Synn or Thasaro turn up in person I can be down there in a second.

"Alright, fine."

I bend space a little, increasing our downward speed relative to the rest of the universe. The skin around her eyes pulls tight in a more thanagarian expression of pleasure, flying free and focusing on what's in front of her. She angles her wings, and the feedback from my ring suggests that she's using her own Nth metal space-warping abilities extremely well. Deciding to humour her a little further, I generate construct wings and adopt a similar posture as the continent spreads out before us.

She glances at my wings for a moment, then returns her gaze to the landscape ahead.

"Do they bother you?"

"Makes me wonder why you're surprised that I can do alien body language."

"Working as a Lantern brings me into contact with a great many alien species. Plus, I have my ring's database to draw upon." Closer now, I can start to see the shape of the terrain surrounding the buried temple with my eyes. "What do you actually make of this?"

"Huh?"

"The Seven Devils being historical fact, what looks suspiciously like a government conspiracy… I mean, pop singers on Earth generally don't get involved in this sort of thing."

"Y'know… Fighting's… Pretty much part of being thanagarian? Not just Thanagar's.. military government thing, but… We've never exactly been shy about violence. So if some thanagarians practise some weird religion and turn each other into monsters they're just another fight."

"And the mutants?"

"My Mother's generation lived through the Equality Plague and Hyathis's algae cure. Another way of messing with someone's body is just… Yeah, they're creepy, but that's more the face-wearing thing? They're not really out there."

As we fall through the atmosphere the thanagarians below us begin moving the boring equipment away from their entry point.

"The carrier's commander didn't seem quite so phlegmatic about it."

"That's 'cause he's from Thanagar. They get, like, taught from birth to hate the 'enemies of our glorious empire'. I'm a bit more realistic about stuff."

"And the colonies aren't? I'm surprised the Empire's government missed that trick."

"Education gets controlled by individual worlds. There are schools like that, but-."

A huge clawed arm shoots up out of the bore hole, grabs one of the soldiers mustering there and jerks back inside.

Right, we're inside the atmosphere. I stop bending space.

"Sorry, we'll have to continue this conversation later. Head away from the dig site."

I warp down, appearing in front of the bore hole as the thanagarian sergeant shouts his soldiers into some sort of order. Ring scans of the hole show me.. nothing useful. I fly down immediately, filaments extending ahead of me as I go. Assuming that the owner of the arm was humanoid, they would be… Approximately twenty metres tall. The claw put me in mind of the Man-Hawks' talons, but the structure they were attached to was clearly an arm. Large room up ahead and while there's some noise I'm not hearing any screaming.

And I'm out, rock wall behind and to the left of me while Nth metal columns support an Nth metal ceiling. The temple's portico, presumably.

"Ugh."

The thanagarian who was snatched a moment ago stabs at the claw enveloping her with her short sword, but the giant Vultureman lookalike holding her appears unaffected, not even bothering to look down at her.

Soon see about that.

Destruction pulse.