Come on, he thought. You beat Evil Star. You freed Aoran from his tyranny. If you could do that, you can do this.
“Let those who worship evil’s might . . . beware my power . . .”
Suddenly, it was as if a mighty dam had broken, unleashing a cascade of images. They flooded John’s mind so quickly he thought he would drown in them.
Images of people, of places. And they came with names that sounded strange to him. Superman. Batman. Wonder Woman. The Flash. Hawkgirl. J’onn J’onzz.
The Justice League. John’s teeth ground together as he remembered. He was part of the Justice League!
He remembered other people as well, their faces rushing up at him helter-skelter from the swirling depths of his memory. The woman at the fruit stand. The barber around the corner. His old basketball coach.
His friend Isaac. His uncle James.
His father.
His mother . . .
And the Guardians . . . the ones who had given him his ring. The ones who had assigned him a portion of the galaxy and given him the job of protecting it with his life.
They were the little blue men in his dream, weren’t they? Now John understood why they had seemed so important to him. When they gave him his ring, they changed his life.
The images assaulted him, bombarded him. Unable to sustain their weight, he stopped and cradled his head in his hands.
“Beware my power . . . ,” he said. Desperate now to dredge it up, he concentrated as hard as he had ever concentrated on anything in his life. “Beware my power . . .”
Finally, fighting John all the way, the last bit of it floated to the surface of his mind—and when it did, it gave meaning to all the rest. “Beware my power . . . Green Lantern’s light!”
No sooner had he said the words than a series of lights exploded in John’s brain. He felt himself reeling, his legs unable to bear his weight. The ground rushed up at him faster than he could stop it and smashed him in the side of his head.
But John didn’t feel it. In fact, he didn’t feel anything.
Even his ring seemed powerless to help him. What’s wrong? he asked himself, trying to push himself up. What’s happening to me?
He was still asking when he slid into that deep, dark well again and mercifully blacked out.
Maleen looked at John and wanted to cry.
Her people had found him in the street, moaning about things no Aoranite could have known about. And because of that, the Council had known that memories of his homeworld were coming back to him.
In the end, it didn’t matter that she had kept the truth from Agrayn and the others. They had discovered it anyway.
And now John was back in the seashell-shaped machine that had brought him to Aoran. But this time, he had been given a drug that kept him from moving or using his willpower to activate his ring.
The Council was going to send his essence back to Earth. And when it arrived there, he wouldn’t remember any part of his struggle against Evil Star.
True, the ancients’ machine had failed to erase John’s memories when he arrived on Aoran. But then, it was dealing with a lifetime’s worth of experiences. The Council was confident that it would be easier to strip away the few memories he had of their world.
Including his memories of Maleen.
Even in his drugged stupor, John sought her out from the depths of the machine. His expression was the same as when he had awoken from his nightmare.
He looked disturbed. Confused. He didn’t know where he was or what had been done to him, or even who had done it.
But John knew her, at least. Maleen was certain of it.
He turned to the others in the room—Agrayn and Jerred and Darmac. And he croaked out a word.
“Why?” he asked them.
None of the Council members answered him. They just frowned and looked away.
Maleen wished she could help him, but she couldn’t. His fate had already been decided. There was nothing she could do about it.
“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice thick with guilt and sadness. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s time,” said Agrayn, giving the technicians their cue.
As they went to work, the core of the machine began to glow again with a ruby light. John looked around, no doubt aware that something was happening to him against his will.
“Maleen?” he gasped.
Her vision blurred with tears. She tried to say goodbye, but the words caught in her throat.
“Maleen?” John said again.
“It’s for the best, John,” Jerred told him.
The red glow was getting stronger and more intense by the moment. Maleen wanted to remove John from the machine and throw her arms around him and never let him go.
But she didn’t. She held her ground.
When John arrived, the machine had assembled him a part at a time. But the reverse process was different. He didn’t disappear layer by layer. He simply began to fade from sight.
Maleen took a deep breath. She had to get the words out before it was too late. Finally, she did it.
“Goodbye,” she said, “John Stewart of Earth.”
He said her name again. But his voice sounded thin and weak, as if he were calling to her from a great distance.
John was vanishing slowly but surely. Another second and he would be gone altogether.
“I love you,” Maleen whispered.
Then the machine was empty. Aoran’s champion had departed the same way he had arrived—with not even the slightest idea of what was happening to him.
And Maleen felt as if a piece of her had gone with him.
All was darkness, complete and unbroken.
After a while, a tiny point of light became visible. For a while, it remained that way, small but unyielding, a single glimmer of hope in a sea of despair.
Then it grew bigger. And bigger still. And eventually, it drove away the darkness, revealing a city of high, metal-and-glass towers that rose around him like the points of a shining crown.
Where was he? Even more important . . . who was he? Then it all came flooding back to him.
I’m John Stewart, he thought. I’m a Green Lantern. And I’m here in Coast City to stop the high-tech monster that’s sucking up all the power before someone gets hurt.
Last he remembered he had been hovering high in the air. Now he was lying in the street, propped up on one elbow. But nothing was broken. As always, the Guardians’ ring had done its best to protect its wearer from injury.
Abruptly, his teammates gathered around him.
“Are you all right?” Wonder Woman asked.
John nodded. “Fine.”
“You took quite a fall,” said J’onn.
“For a second there—” said Flash.
“I told you, I’m fine,” John insisted.
“Hey,” said Flash, holding up his hands in mock defensiveness, “who am I to argue?”
A strange feeling came over John just then—a feeling that he had forgotten something. Something important.
But whatever it was, it couldn’t have been as important as his duty as a Green Lantern. And right now, his duty called for him to go after the energy-absorbing monstrosity that had laid him out—preferably before it stripped the city of its last bit of power.
“Where’s that heap of nuts and bolts?” John asked.
Hawkgirl jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “It went that way. Ready to take another shot at it?”
John glanced at her. “I was born ready.”
Then, his ring blazing with emerald energy, he took to the sky.
But before the Green Lantern had gotten very far, he knew that something was wrong. Looking at his ring, he could see that its glow was getting erratic—a clear sign that it was running low on energy.
How could that be? He had just recharged it a few minutes earlier while he recited his oath. It should have had enough energy to last him for hours even at its highest level of intensity.
One thing was clear—
he wasn’t going to do anyone any good by rushing into battle with a useless power ring. Clenching his jaw in frustration, he glided to the ground on the last of his energy reserves.
A moment later, he saw a red and gold blur. Suddenly the Flash was standing in front of him.
“What’s up?” asked the Scarlet Speedster.
John shook his head. “I don’t know. My ring’s out of power all of a sudden.”
Usually, the Flash would have answered him with a wisecrack. But not this time. Even he seemed to realize the seriousness of the situation.
“You’d better go after the others,” the Green Lantern told him. “Try to knock out that thing without me.”
“I guess so,” said Flash. “Wish us luck.” And he turned to go.
But before he could actually speed off, John changed his mind. “Wait!” he shouted at his teammate.
Freezing before he could take his first step, the Flash looked back over his shoulder at him. “You’re going to have to make up your mind, y’know. All this starting and stopping is murder on my boots.”
John barely heard him. His mind was running a million miles a minute, even faster than the Flash could sprint.
“I think I’ve got a way to beat this thing,” he said. And he told his teammate what it was, putting the details together as he spoke.
Where had he gotten such an idea? He didn’t know. He couldn’t remember ever attempting it. And yet, it felt so familiar . . . as if he had just pulled it off the day before.
“I guess it’s worth a try,” said Flash. Then he sped off in a blur of red and yellow to do his part.
In the meantime, John contacted the rest of the team through the tiny communications links they all wore in their ears. Then he told them his idea. J’onn, Wonder Woman, and Hawkgirl had the same reaction as the Flash—they were willing to try anything at this point.
As the Green Lantern watched from a distance, frustrated at his inability to lend a hand, the Justice League went into action without him. But in a sense, he was with them after all, because it was his plan they were putting into effect.
Flash was grabbing all the metal debris he could carry and piling it in the middle of the street. Moving so quickly he could barely be seen, he had already put together quite a pile.
Wonder Woman’s job was to pound the accumulation with trip-hammer force into a rough but unbroken sheet. Because there was so much metal there, it took a while—even for someone as strong as the Amazon.
The Martian Manhunter and Hawkgirl continued to harass Solarac, distracting the monster and keeping it from digging into any more energy sources. They did a good job of it, too. But John knew they couldn’t keep it up forever.
And if his plan worked, they wouldn’t have to.
Pounding a last pile of debris into shape, Wonder Woman called out to her teammates that she was finished. It was then that Hawkgirl, J’onn, and the Flash came back to join her.
Together, they lifted the enormous piece of metal the Amazon had created, J’onn and Hawkgirl taking the top two corners and Flash and Wonder Woman the bottom two. Then they went after Solarac with it.
The monster didn’t have a clue as to what the Justice League was up to. It lumbered along as it had before, focused only on finding more energy sources to feed its immense hunger. By the time it realized there was something blocking the sunlight, it was all but too late.
Whirling, Solarac flung its arm at the huge sheet of metal that J’onn and Hawkgirl were holding between them. But its aim was spoiled by Wonder Woman, who had snared the thing’s leg with her lasso and was pulling it off balance as hard as she could.
When the high-tech marauder swiped at Wonder Woman instead, J’onn and Hawkgirl lowered the sheet of metal over its head. Then they crunched it together at the spot where its head met its shoulders to keep it from falling off.
Apparently realizing how it had been fooled, Solarac reached for the metal sheet to tear it off. But before it could do that, the Martian Manhunter rocketed into its midsection. A moment later, Hawkgirl delivered a mighty blow to its leg with her mace—now an ordinary weapon since its owner had deactivated its energy feature. But in Hawkgirl’s hands, it still packed quite a wallop.
The monster didn’t know who to try to swat first. And before it could figure it out, the Flash ran up and down its body, ripping out wires wherever he could find them.
The Green Lantern didn’t think Flash’s work would have any real effect on Solarac. After all, the thing was growing new wires almost as quickly as the old ones were torn.
But, like his teammates, the Scarlet Speedster was keeping Solarac busy, forcing it to use the energy it had accumulated. And little by little, the mountain of research components began to slow down, striking with less and less force each time.
Finally, staggered by one last blow from Hawkgirl’s mace, the colossus crumpled in a heap of metal and plastic in the middle of the embattled street. The ground trembled under the booming impact. Then all was still.
John’s idea had worked, even if his ring hadn’t. He could take some pride in that.
Flash was the first one at his side. “Nice going,” he told the Green Lantern. “That little brainstorm of yours did the trick.”
A moment later, J’onn, Hawkgirl, and Wonder Woman descended beside him.
“How’s your ring?” the Amazon asked.
John frowned at it. “I don’t know. It’s never lost power this way before.”
“Hey,” said the Flash, “maybe it was Solarac.”
They all looked at him.
“You know,” he said, “the way it sucked up power from everywhere? Maybe it sucked up the ring’s power too.”
Hawkgirl smiled. “Actually, that makes sense.”
“It does?” asked Flash, looking surprised. Then he caught himself and said, “I mean, of course it does.”
It did make sense, John thought. His ring was probably just another power source as far as Solarac was concerned.
But for some reason, he had a feeling there was more to it.
Maleen watched the image of John Stewart in the core of the seashell-shaped machine.
He was standing alongside a fallen mechanical thing. And he wasn’t alone.
There were other heroes on John’s homeworld, apparently. One had wings, another blinding speed, and a third had a golden lasso in her hand. Still another had green skin.
As far as Maleen could tell, none of them wielded a ring like John’s. But by working together, they had emerged victorious over the mechanical monster.
The Green Lantern himself hadn’t lent a hand in his comrades’ victory. It seemed his ring had no power left. Maleen wasn’t surprised, considering how much energy John had expended on Aoran.
“Maleen?” someone said.
It was Jerred. He left his fellow Council members and joined her in front of the machine.
“We need to leave him now,” he said.
She nodded. “I just wanted to make sure he was safe.”
Jerred smiled. “You know,” he told her, “John was a good man. I’ll miss him too.”
“No doubt you will,” Maleen said. She turned back to the machine and the image of John Stewart in its core. “But not the way I will.”
MICHAEL JAN FRIEDMAN is the author of more than fifty books of fantasy and science fiction, eight of which have appeared on the New York Times bestseller list. For years he has been a mainstay of the Star Trek book publishing program, contributing critically acclaimed novels that have been widely translated around the world. He also wrote the novelization of the 1997 film Batman & Robin (Warner Books) and a series of original novels based on Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (HarperCollins, 1996). In 1995, Friedman co-wrote the Star Trek: Voyager television episode “Resistance,” which series star Kate Mulgrew cited as her favorite. He has also written more than 160 comic books for DC Comics and Marvel Comics. Friedman lives on Long Island, New York, with his wife and two sons.
Michael Jan Friedman, Justice League_In Blackest Night
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