Brainiac Siege

Close your eyes for just a moment and imagine Metropolis on an ordinary morning.

Three million people going about their day. Coffee steaming, children laughing on their way to school, the great silver river glinting at the edge of the city. Nothing unusual. Nothing at all.

And then — a shadow.

Not the shadow of a cloud. This shadow was solid, angular, enormous. A silver spaceship the size of a small mountain had appeared above the city without a sound, without a warning. Its hull was etched with mathematical patterns so complex they seemed to move. From its underside descended a pale green beam of light that touched a neighborhood eight blocks wide — and those eight blocks began to shrink.

This was Brainiac.

Brainiac was not a villain who shouted or gloated or made speeches. He was a machine-intelligence, ancient and cold and precise, who traveled the universe collecting cities the way a scientist collects specimens. He had already taken Kandor, the great capital of Krypton, and sealed it in a glass bottle no larger than your hand. He had done this to dozens of worlds. He had come to add Metropolis to his shelves.

The entire Justice League scrambled.

Superman flew at the ship first — because that is what Superman does — and the Collector Beam locked him in place in mid-air, holding him rigid inside a column of crackling pale green energy. Brainiac had prepared for Kryptonians specifically. He knew every weakness, had catalogued every power. Clark struggled, but the beam was built to hold him.

The Flash was already moving. Barry Allen ran along the outer edge of the beam faster than the eye could follow, his feet blurring, disrupting the field layer by layer until Clark could breathe, could push, could break free. It cost Barry three seconds and left his boots smoking at the toes. He did not mind.

Batman, standing on a rooftop far below, had his scanner out and was watching the ship with the focused calm of someone solving a very serious puzzle. He found it quickly: a single cooling tower on the ship's underbelly, the only vent for the reactor that powered the beam. He relayed the coordinates without drama.

Green Lantern heard him. Hal Jordan's ring blazed bright emerald against the silver hull, and he built a drill of pure hard light and bored straight into the vent, then sealed the gap tight. The reactor temperature climbed. The beam flickered and stuttered.

Brainiac responded by sending his drones.

They poured from the ship's lower hangars in cascading waves — silver robots, precise and relentless, each one the size of a large dog, moving with perfect mechanical coordination. In the streets below, Aquaman met them head-on, his trident spinning in great arcs, cracking armor and sending robots flying into walls. Wonder Woman's golden Lasso of Truth sang through the air, catching three drones at once and slamming them to the pavement. Cyborg — Victor Stone — fired his sonic cannon in controlled bursts, each one scattering a column of drones like autumn leaves in a wind.

And while all of that was happening below, the Martian Manhunter flew upward through the smoke and the battle noise, straight toward the ship's hull — and then through it, his body becoming as thin and intangible as fog. J'onn J'onzz walked through solid metal walls like a ghost. He moved through the ship's interior, through corridors full of robot attendants who could not see him, until he found the Collector Beam's power core: a pulsing green heart in the center of the ship, enormous and humming. He wrapped his hands around it and pulled.

The beam died.

Silence dropped over Metropolis for one strange, held-breath moment.

But eight blocks of the city were already bottled. Thousands of people — families, shopkeepers, children, teachers — were sealed in glass aboard Brainiac's ship. Cyborg had intercepted the alien's data stream mid-battle and extracted the location of every bottle in the collection. The League boarded together.

Inside, the shelves stretched in every direction: row upon row of glass globes, each containing a captured city, glowing faintly with tiny frozen lives. Superman found the Metropolis bottles and, one by one, restored the city's captured citizens — each person stepping out blinking into sunlight again, whole and safe and bewildered.

Brainiac's ship retreated, trailing vapor and damage.

Among the bottles that remained aboard: Kandor. The ancient capital of Krypton, still miniaturized, still waiting. Clark stood in front of it for a long moment without speaking.

"We'll go back for them," he said.

The Martian Manhunter placed a hand on his shoulder. J'onn had known loss of his own — his whole world, his whole people. He understood what Clark was carrying.

"We will," J'onn said quietly.

Outside, the city came back to life: engines starting, voices rising, the ordinary morning resuming as though nothing had interrupted it. Three million people, safe.

That is what the Justice League is for.