Justice League Teamup

Once upon a time, Kara was invited somewhere she had only ever imagined.

The signal came at dusk — a frequency she did not recognize, encoded in a League cipher that Superman had taught her as a precaution three weeks earlier, which told her the message was genuine. The Watchtower was requesting her presence.

The Watchtower.

She said the name to herself quietly, then said it again, because it was the kind of name that needed a moment.

It was the Justice League's space station, a structure orbiting Earth at twenty-two thousand miles altitude — above the weather, above most satellites, far enough from the planet to see its entire curved face through the observation windows. Kara had heard it described. She had never been inside.

She flew up.

The thermosphere is where Earth's atmosphere begins to thin into almost-nothing, and Kara passed through it in minutes. The stars above were brighter and more numerous than she had ever seen them from the ground, and for a moment she hung very still in the dark between atmosphere and station, looking at them. She recognized Kryptonian constellations from her childhood. She found them here.

Then the docking bay lights came on, and the bay door opened, and she flew inside.

Batman was in the corridor. He always seemed to be in the corridor, regardless of what station you arrived at, as if he materialized there specifically to be observed watching.

Wonder Woman was more welcoming. She came forward and offered her hand, and her grip was firm and measured — Amazon strength, deliberately contained to a respectful level. Kara returned the handshake and kept her own grip equally careful, and something passed between them that was like recognition.

The Flash was vibrating slightly — the ambient energy of his speed bleeding through even at rest. He noticed Kara noticing and made an effort to stop.

The crisis briefing was delivered by Batman in under four minutes: a being called Maxima, from a distant world called Almerac, had created three simultaneous breach points in the dimensional fabric above three cities on different continents. Through each breach, automated battle drones were emerging into Earth's atmosphere. All three breaches needed to be closed within approximately forty minutes before the drones reached population centers in sufficient numbers.

Three teams. Three cities. The League split.

Superman would go to Metropolis. Wonder Woman would take Paris. Batman would stay aboard the Watchtower, running communications and coordination. That left a three-person team — Kara, The Flash, and Green Lantern John Stewart — for the breach above Tokyo, which the Watchtower's sensors had measured as the largest.

The team was in Tokyo in minutes.

The city below was in emergency protocol — streets clearing, warning signals running, emergency response positioning. Above the skyline, dozens of battle drones moved in complex formation, silver and angular, firing in bursts at anything that registered as a target.

The drones were not stupid. That was the first problem.

Green Lantern fired a construct — an enormous emerald net sweeping across the drone formation — and it worked exactly once. By the time he fired a second, the drones had already adjusted their formation and the construct passed through empty space.

"They learn," John said, floating beside Kara. "They read attack patterns and adapt."

Kara watched them for two seconds.

"Then we need to use two different patterns at the same time," she said. "I'll go straight at them. You won't. While they're adjusting to me, the Flash clears the power cells from behind."

The Flash gave her a thumbs up at approximately two hundred miles per hour, which meant she barely saw it.

They moved.

Kara took the front line directly, flying headlong into the drone coverage, drawing their fire onto herself — KRAANG, KRAANG, KRAANG — her Kryptonian cells absorbing the impacts while she moved in deliberately unpredictable patterns. The drones tracked her. Adjusted to her. Which meant they stopped adjusting to the blur moving behind them at speeds they could not even register.

Barry Allen, in the spaces between one microsecond and the next, disabled three hundred and sixty-one drone power cells in under fifteen minutes.

The sky above Tokyo began to clear.

But the breach itself remained: a tear in the dimensional fabric forty meters wide, anchored at its center by a floating crystalline device the size of a delivery truck, covered in geometric structures that pulsed with light on a frequency Kara recognized but couldn't immediately name.

Maxima had engineered it. The crystal was the anchor. Without it, the breach would collapse.

Green Lantern attempted to approach it twice and was driven back by the remaining drones, which had clustered around the device protectively. His constructs were effective at range but could not clear the thirty-foot zone around the anchor.

Kara looked at the coverage pattern. Looked at her own flight speed. Looked at the device.

"I can reach it," she said. "I know these structure types. My father studied Almerac technology."

John Stewart looked at her steadily. "The drone coverage in that thirty-foot zone is dense."

"I know."

She flew.

WHOOOOOOSH — straight and committed, into the densest part of the drone fire. KRAANG — KRAANG — KRAANG — she took everything the remaining drones could produce, driving through impact after impact, her cape shredding slightly at the edges, her suit dented. She did not slow down.

She reached the resonance device.

Her x-ray vision swept the structure in three seconds — the internal crystal lattice, the anchor couplings, the sequence points along the base. Her father had shown her Almerac resonance architecture in a lecture when she was eleven. She had not known why she was learning it then.

She knew now.

Heat vision. Four anchor points. Precise sequence — bottom left, bottom right, upper center, crown. ZZZT — ZZZT — ZZZT — ZZZT.

The crystal resonance device went dark. Then it folded. Then it was nothing.

The dimensional breach above Tokyo contracted to a pinpoint and disappeared.

Every remaining drone lost its command signal in the same instant. Three hundred and twelve pieces of battle technology dropped from the Tokyo sky, harmless and cold, into the waters of Tokyo Bay.

It was over.

The three of them floated above the city for a moment, breathing.

Below them, Tokyo's emergency lights began to go out one by one, replaced by ordinary light. Ordinary life resuming.

On the flight back to the Watchtower, John Stewart was quiet for a while. Then he said, "That read you did on the resonance device. That was the decision that won this."

Kara said her father had spent his career studying alien technology structures. She said she had thought those lessons were just science until they weren't just science anymore.

John nodded, in the way of someone who understood exactly what that meant.

Batman said nothing on the comms the entire flight back.

Three days later, Superman mentioned to Kara, in a deliberately casual tone, that Batman had filed a recommendation to the League that Supergirl be added to the provisional roster.

Kara stood very still for a moment.

Then she flew out over Midvale and made three loops of pure celebration.

Then — because three felt insufficient — she made a fourth.

She was Kara Zor-El from Argo City. She was Supergirl of Midvale. She was a provisional member of the Justice League.

And above her, twenty-two thousand miles up, the Watchtower turned slowly in the dark with all its lights on.

Waiting.