Villain Brainiac

Once upon a time, the sky above Midvale went quiet in the wrong way.

Not the peaceful quiet of a clear night, when the stars look close enough to touch. A different kind of quiet — the kind that makes birds stop singing and dogs press close to their owners' legs. The kind that means something very big is coming.

Kara felt it before she saw it.

She was sitting on the roof of the school building that evening, watching the sun go down over the rooftops, when a cold signal reached her ears on a frequency she had not heard since Krypton. A mathematical pulse. Precise and regular as a clock. And pointed directly at Earth.

She looked up.

Far above, moving slowly through Earth's outer atmosphere, was a ship the size of a small island. It was dark green and shaped, impossibly, like a skull, and the lights behind its eye-sockets pulsed with cold blue light. Kara had only seen pictures of this ship before, in her father's books. But she knew it. Everyone from Krypton knew it.

Brainiac.

She whispered the name to herself, and it tasted like something cold.

Brainiac was not an ordinary villain. He did not rage or shout. He did not make grand speeches. He was a being of pure machine intelligence, older than most civilizations, and he had spent centuries doing the same terrible thing: flying to a world, identifying its most interesting city, shrinking that entire city down to the size of a snow globe, sealing it in a glass bottle, and flying away with it forever.

He had done this to Kandor, the greatest city on Krypton. He had come in the night, shrunk it down, taken it — and no one had ever gotten it back.

Now, Brainiac's scanners had found Midvale. And he had decided it would look very nice in his collection.

Kara flew up to meet him.

WHOOOOSH — she hit the hull of the skull-ship with both fists, and the whole craft rang like a bell struck by a giant. Brainiac deployed his defenses immediately: hundreds of skull-drones, small robots shaped like metal skulls with energy cannons on their shoulders, filling the air around the ship in a buzzing swarm.

The fight that followed lasted a very long time.

Kara flew through the swarm at full speed, her heat vision flashing in long golden arcs, her cape snapping behind her. ZZZT. ZZZT. KRAANG. She was fast — faster than the drones could track — and she drove them back cluster by cluster, smashing through them like a comet through a cloud.

Far below, the people of Midvale had come out of their houses to look up. They could see a small bright figure moving through the darkness above them, surrounded by flashes and sparks, and even though they were a little frightened, they were also filled with something that felt very much like hope.

But Brainiac had prepared for a Kryptonian.

He fired a containment beam. Inside the beam was something Kara had only ever heard described in whispers: synthesized kryptonite radiation — a green light tuned precisely to hurt someone from her world.

The moment the beam touched her, every bit of her strength disappeared.

It was like someone turned off a switch inside her chest. The heat vision winked out. Her muscles went soft. She dropped through the air, dropping and dropping, and below her she could see the edges of Midvale beginning to fold inward as the shrink beam started its work.

She closed her eyes for just a moment.

She thought of Kandor. She thought of all those people, frozen inside a glass bottle, sealed away forever, shrunk to a size so small they could never climb out. She thought of her father's face when he described what had been done to Krypton's greatest city.

Not Midvale, she said to herself. Not today. Not ever.

She turned away from the beam — angling just sideways of it, one inch, then two, gathering what little strength remained — and she flew. Not up toward the drones. Up toward the ship's emitter array, the long mechanical arm extending from the skull-ship's jaw where the shrink beam originated.

With the last of her strength, she reached inside the array's control couplings, found the polarity circuits her father had once described in a lecture about Brainiac's technology, and reversed them.

The emitter folded back on itself. The kryptonite radiation vented harmlessly into open space. The shrink beam, redirected, collapsed.

Midvale snapped back to full size with a sound that rolled across the countryside like a thunderclap.

Brainiac's ship went quiet. Inside, his vast machine mind was calculating something: the probability of success against a Kryptonian who had not only survived his kryptonite weapon, but understood his own machinery well enough to dismantle it from the outside, in the middle of a battle, while falling.

The probability was not good.

The skull-ship turned slowly in the night sky, and then, without another signal, without another drone, it drifted back toward the darkness between the planets and disappeared.

Kara hovered above Midvale, breathing hard. Her hands were shaking — just a little. The kryptonite radiation had faded with the beam, and her strength was slowly returning, seeping back in with the warm light of Earth's yellow moon.

Below her, every window in Midvale was lit. She could hear people talking on their porches, pointing up at the sky where the skull-ship had been.

She took a deep, slow breath.

Midvale was whole. Every building. Every street. Every person who lived there.

She thought of her mother's voice, and for a moment she could almost hear it again.

Be brave. Be kind. Be who you are.

She was all three tonight.

She turned and flew home, trailing the warm glow of the yellow moon behind her.