The Power of Ten Book Four: Dynamo

It was only an hour later that I saw the spaceship coming down.

I calculated the speed and vector, and yeah, that was definitely a spaceship coming down in a flaming arc. I hadn’t seen any sign of anything yet, so I didn’t know what that portended.

My Mask lit up, funded by Wrath, magnifying forwards until I could make out the design of it.

Had similarities to stuff I remembered, but then, so much spaceflight stuff was similar that it didn’t mean anything. Nothing precise about it.

That said, it was going to come down only a couple miles away.

That was like seconds if I chose to speed up, so I did.

---

Strong hull, at least durasteel. It handled the incoming grind across the ground fairly well, but not the collision with a stony hillside. The hull was rent open by its own inertia, something failing inside, and it had come to a burning, steaming halt.

I felt the prickle of hard radiation over the thing. It wasn’t something I had to worry about, as I metabolized it instantly, but anything living there didn’t have long before I had to get to them.

The cockpit was cracked open, and I could see a green light within it. I raced on up, and paused for just a moment inside the opening.

Purple-skinned humanoid. Not a human. And sitting next to him...

“Greetings, female of Earth. I am Abin Sur...” he said, as I instantly spotted the Ring on his finger, which was preparing to leave his grasp.

I took a step, reached out with my Will, and stopped the Ring from leaving his finger.

“Be quiet. I am here to save you.” I closed my palm around his hand gently but firmly, keeping the Ring on his finger despite its preprogrammed course to seek a new wielder. “I am going to absorb the radiation inside you and start repairing the damage to your body.”

He had taken an unholy amount of direct radiation. I stared at the Green Lantern Power Battery there as I felt his Ring... and the yellow impurity inside it.

Something had trashed the radiation shields on his ship, and the sudden surge of yellow radiation had somehow caught him off-guard, nearly killing him before his Ring’s defenses could rise up and give him a broad-spectrum shield. The yellow light intensity had been too much... had he flown too close to the sun or something?

He was using the old Power Ring design that couldn’t stop yellow, meaning the bandwidth killing him was yellow and the Ring couldn’t expunge it.

But I had Alchemy, the Healing Ranks, the necessary Theurgy, and this was just Health damage.

From my grip on his hand, I began to suck out the radiation with Wrath, at the same time fixing the radiation damage to his hand, expanding rapidly down his arm as my other hand was on his chest, drawing the lethal rads out of his internal organs.

“Ahhh!” he cried out in surprise as the energies moved through him, and his Ring was frozen on his finger. Healing energy spread through his body and up to his head, and in pure relief, he fainted despite himself and the last dregs of his willpower.

“Green Lantern of Sector-2814 out of mortal danger. Preprogrammed search for successor terminated,” his Ring duly reported in semi-telepathy.

Vier sniffed at the other Ring, which lacked an item spirit and thus true sapience. I looked around at the ship, and Vier’s TK reached out, grabbed the Green Lantern, and I moved him and his Lantern out of the irradiated ship.

------

He came to a few hours later, after I let him sleep off the trauma. His bald purple head shook, and he thrashed a moment before opening his eyes and looking about in puzzlement.

There was a fire in front of him, and I was sitting on the other side of him. He felt the Ring on his finger, looked next to him, and his Lantern was sitting there.

I looked up at him and said in Tongues, not that his Ring couldn’t auto-translate for him, “Say your Oath, recharge your Ring, and then go over there and bury that ship of yours at least a kilometer underground, clean up the radiation damage to the environment, then come back here for a talk.” I held up a hand as he started to say something. “No talking. Just go do, and come back. Talk then.”

He slowly nodded as he looked down at his hands, and picked up his Lantern.

The words didn’t rhyme in his native tongue, but they did in English, amusingly enough.

“In Brightest Day, in Blackest Night,

No Evil shall escape my Sight.

Let those who worship Evil’s Might

Beware my Power, Green Lantern’s Light!”

Emerald light lit up the area as the link to his Lantern was renewed. The older Rings were designed differently than the newer ones I’d encountered, with a microportal to their Lanterns that stayed open for twenty-four hours before fading. Inside that time span, the amount of energy they could draw on was almost unlimited.

Newer Rings forwent the link to have a specific amount of energy they could tap, so the time the Ring held a charge was highly variable if they did or did not need to use energy.

The old Rings were also vulnerable to yellow, as was the energy of the Lanterns they took the power from.

He flew off, and I heard the groans of earth and stone moving; emerald light played across the ground, erasing the signs of his crash; and then he flew back to where I was waiting for him.

“You’re probably exceedingly hungry at this moment.” Create Food was a minor effect I could power up with Wrath, and I wafted over a bowl of strawberries for him. He took them and looked at them curiously, scanning them with his Ring to make sure they were palatable, and then silently began to eat.

His eyes popped after biting into the first QL30 one and the flavor exploded in his mouth, and he hurriedly gobbled through the entire batch.

He sat the bowl of hardened sand aside with a sigh as he settled back. “I see that I was not having a fever dream, after all. You... are the Healer who saved me?” he asked graciously.

“I am. You can call me Dyna. I wasn’t expecting to see a Green Lantern here. What brings you to Earth?”

He seemed a bit startled. “My apologies. I was not aware that Earth had developed sufficiently to be aware of the Green Lantern Corps. I am Abin Sur, the Green Lantern for this space sector, Dyna.”

“Well met,” I said briefly. “There are exceptions to every rule, Abin Sur. You are sitting in the middle of one now.” I eyed him seriously. “I have just broken your Doom. Are you aware of what that means?”

He blinked in surprise. “No, I am...” he trailed out, staring, and thinking. “The prophecy...” he realized hoarsely.

“Yes. It was a weaponized way to kill you, and it worked. You are supposed to be dead right now. Only the fact that I came in from outside Fate saved you.”

He was thoughtful for a moment, doubtless thinking of the other Prophecies he’d heard from Quill of the traitorous Five Inversions. “I see. And what does that mean?”

“That the prophecy was true, and you were supposed to hand your Ring off to your successor, who will become the greatest of the Green Lanterns.”

He tensed up despite himself. “Have... I stopped this from happening?” he asked hesitantly.

“Not if you recruit him and lead him to Oa to take a Ring, volunteering to take over Sector 2815 in the interim. There he will have a mentor, if needed, who can keep him on track when otherwise he might fall. Also, you need to be there for Sinestro.”

“My brother-in-law?” Abin Sur exclaimed, rising to his feet. “What of him?”

“He is going to be stripped of his Ring shortly,” I told him gravely. “You have warned him of this, in how he runs his sector, and specifically his homeworld. He is going to fall, and fall hard, when that happens. You can change his fate, as yours was changed for you, if you can but lead him towards the Blue, where he can prove he is right, without falling for the trap that is the Yellow.”

He stared at me and my silver eyes. “I owe you my life and more, so I will trust in your words on this. You speak of the War of Many Colors...”

“It is a real thing, the Guardians are fully aware of it, but are repressing knowledge of it so that word of the Colors does not spread and induce chaos. It is already too late, of course. Only the Blue and the Yellow do not have active Wielders at this time. The former is because none have discovered its source, and the latter is because the impurity in the Lantern Rings binds the Yellow for now.”

His eyes widened in shock. “The, the yellow impurity?” he asked softly. “It... does not have to be there?”

“It binds the Yellow Source from manifesting. Were it to be removed, the Yellow light of Fear would again be freed upon the universe. That will happen, and it cannot be stopped once the other Colors are made manifest, but the Corps has contained it for a very long time.”

He sighed, and slowly seated himself, thinking on that. “You would have me recruit this man to the Corps, see that he is trained, and succeeds me as a Green Lantern of this sector?”

I nodded slowly. “Yes. He has a great career ahead of him, and you... you have a future which is now completely uncharted.” I smiled slightly. “Congratulations. Decks with wild cards are always the most fun.”

He smiled despite himself, then stiffened for a moment. “I... may have led a great foe of the Corps to this world. I will have to distract him away...”

I waved him off. “I can probably handle him. Who is it?”

“Legion, the hive-mind of Tchk-Tchk, was the one who attacked me and damaged my ship prior to me coming here. He is no doubt pursuing me, sensing for the energy of my Ring.” A hologram of an insectile humanoid with a bright yellow carapace rose before me.

“Easily dealt with. Simply create a node of the Lantern power that will bring him here, and I will handle him.” I waved my hands in dismissal. “My strength is not vulnerable to the Yellow at all. He will be handled easily.” Him and his yellow carapace didn’t mean anything to me.

“Ah.” He was trying to scan me surreptitiously, and failed. “Very well, I shall trust in your words. Do you... know the name of this successor?” he asked me warily.

“It is the one your Ring chooses. I need say nothing.”

He nodded slowly. “Ring, initiate a search for a suitable candidate for my replacement in the Green Lantern Corps!”

“Initiating search. Potential successor...” I noticed it was looking at me, and I directed it to the next target, “...located! Retrieving candidate!” An emerald beam of light arced off into the distance.

“Why don’t you set up a faked crashed ship to really drive the point home of how crazy this is, and the opportunity of a lifetime. Also, ‘Legion’ coming is a good reason to get you off the planet quickly,” I said, rising to my feet. “I’ll show myself out of sight. A pleasure to meet you, Master Lantern.”

“And you, Lady Dyna. You have my eternal thanks for your aid,” Abin Sur said sincerely.