The Legends of Forever

by Barry Lyga

  Owlman’s upper lip curled in disgust and he opened his mouth to speak . . .

  . . . just as a sudden wind erupted in the center of the room, bringing with it a lurid red light that hovered and throbbed in midair before coalescing into a familiar form.

  Barry.

  He stood there for a single second, not moving as his body vibrated into view. His costume, ragged and torn, revealed bruises and patches of blood. He stood between Iris and Owlman, but even with him turned three-quarters away from her, Iris knew her husband—his stance, his poise. It was him.

  “Owlman?” Barry said, his voice tremulous and thready. “But that must mean . . .”

  And then, as they all watched, he vanished just as quickly as he’d appeared.

  Before anyone could react, a bolt of silver spun across the room, slamming into Owlman’s jaw at top speed. The villain spasmed, dropping his knife as he collapsed to the floor, unconscious. A shiny ball of metal hovered in the air near Madame Xanadu’s shoulder.

  From his chair at a workstation, Mr. Terrific grinned. “Not exactly what I created the T-spheres for,” he admitted, “but it got the job done, right?”

  Iris tried to collect her thoughts even as Caitlin dashed to Madame Xanadu’s side to support her. Felicity kicked Owlman’s knife out of range.

  “What do we do with this guy?” she asked, gesturing to him.

  “Pipeline,” Iris said. “Like I—”

  She cut herself off as the room lit up again, this time with a familiar blue light. In an instant, there were Barry and Oliver, along with a man she’d never seen before, but who wore the very familiar and very welcome emblem of the Kryptonian house of El. She was used to seeing it on Supergirl, not whoever this guy was. But that was the least of her concerns right now.

  “Is it really you?” Iris rushed to Barry’s side and clutched him before he could vanish again.

  “It’s me,” he told her. “I told you I’d come back. I think we were supposed to get here tomorrow, but from the look of things, I guess it’s better that we got here when we did.”

  “Oh, I love it when you talk time travel shenanigans,” Iris deadpanned.

  They kissed.

  “You gonna give me some of that action, Green Arrow?” Felicity asked.

  Much to everyone’s surprise—possibly even Oliver’s—he swept her into his arms and planted a serious, deep kiss on her.

  “You should travel the Multiverse more often,” Felicity said when she could catch her breath.

  Barry made introductions after whisking Owlman down to the Pipeline, where he joined the rest of the Crime Syndicate in a cell. Back in the Cortex, there was a confused babble of overlapping voices and stories for a moment before Superman stepped into the center of the room and, without speaking, commanded everyone’s attention. Then, very calmly, he pointed to each person in turn and requested an update. Soon, everyone knew the status of each crisis.

  They were all grim.

  “And what’s the deal with these visions of Barry everyone keeps seeing?” Felicity asked. When the collected heroes all groaned, she threw her hands up in the air. “What? Yeah, I know it’s not the end of the universe, but it’s weird and it has me freaked out, OK?”

  Mr. Terrific stroked his chin, deep in thought. “It could be some kind of interuniversal quantum residue from Anti-Matter Man’s incursion into a plus-matter universe.”

  “I know that was English,” said Green Arrow, “but could you try it in English for fourth graders?”

  “He’s saying that Anti-Matter Man’s transit from universe to universe was so violent that images from other universes might be bleeding through into ours,” Barry said. He checked with Curtis, who nodded his assent.

  “Yeah,” said Mr. Terrific. “With something that big and that violent ripping open the universe, there’s a good chance we’d see all kinds of temporal refractions and rebounds for a while.”

  “Then it wasn’t really you?” Iris asked. “It was a Barry Allen from another Earth?”

  “Or a possible future,” Mr. Terrific added. “Or the past.”

  “Maybe even the TV world,” Barry speculated, shrugging.

  “TV world?” Superman asked.

  Barry quickly recapped for the Man of Steel the story of the other version of the Multiverse, the one in which Barry Allen had decided to change history. Now there were two entire realities, one in which Barry had changed history—the transuniversal version, or TV—and one in which he hadn’t . . . their own.

  “Only Cisco can communicate with the TV world, thanks to his Vibe powers,” Barry finished. “Without him, there’s no way to be sure if this other Flash that people are seeing is from our Multiverse or somehow crossing over from the other one.”

  “In any event,” said Iris, clutching Barry’s hand tightly, “it’s surely the least important of our problems right now.”

  Barry nodded. “From what you said, it sounds like Cisco was kidnapped by our foe at the End of Time.” He suddenly cracked a grin. “Good thing we’re headed there anyway.”

  “Oh?” Iris asked archly. “Are you planning to run there? Last time you got lucky and the Tornado Twins let you use the Cosmic Treadmill. What’s your plan this time?”

  “The Time Bureau,” Barry announced, then, for Superman’s benefit, explained: “That’s a government agency here on Earth 1 that helps police the time stream. They have Time Couriers, which can transport you anywhere in space or time. They were no help in rescuing Cisco or Curtis because we didn’t know where and when to look. But now we have a destination.”

  “The end of everything,” Superman said solemnly.

  The room went silent. For a moment, there’d been an incipient sense of something like relief, something akin to optimism. The Flash was back, and he’d brought an ally with the powers of a god! Everything would be OK!

  But the End of Time . . . as Superman said, it was the end of everything. Who knew what dangers and evils lurked there? And any foe who could turn the Reverse-Flash into a living weapon was a true menace to be reckoned with.

  “Iris, Curtis,” Barry said soberly, “I want you two to coordinate with Brainiac 5 and J’Onn J’Onzz on Earth 38. Do whatever you can to start closing these breaches and tracking down the people who’ve fallen through them.”

  “What about me?” Felicity asked. “I’m more than just arm candy for the Emerald Archer, you know.”

  “You start working remotely with the crew back in Star City,” Oliver suggested. “Give them some tech support in their hunt for Ambush Bug.”

  “All due respect, Oliver,” Mr. Terrific interrupted, “but I’m a hometown boy and even I’m wondering if Star City is really a priority. We’re talking about the sanctity and survival of the entire Multiverse here. One city’s safety just doesn’t seem to measure up.”

  Before Oliver could respond, Superman spoke: “Green Arrow is right,” he said, his voice soft yet steady. “We don’t just fight the biggest battles or the strongest foes. There’s a wise saying: ‘Whoever saves one life has saved the world.’ I truly believe that. We can’t turn our back on pain, suffering, or people in distress just because there might be something worse around the corner. Even if there is something worse around the corner.”

  Mr. Terrific nodded slowly, but still seemed unconvinced. “We just seem to be stretching ourselves pretty thin.”

  “Then we stretch as far and as thin as we need to,” Superman said.

  In the S.T.A.R. Labs medical bay, Caitlin Snow helped Madame Xanadu back into her bed. “I’m so sorry you had to go through that,” she apologized. “We don’t usually let super villains kidnap people who are recuperating. Or, you know, not even recuperating. We just generally try to avoid letting super villains kidnap people as a matter of policy.”

  “He did not kidnap me,” Madame Xanadu said, settling onto the bed. “I went with him voluntarily.”

  Caitlin blinked rapidly, positive she’d misheard. “I’m sorry . . . What did you j
ust say?”

  Madame Xanadu gestured with both hands, her fingers inscribing complicated kaleidoscopic patterns of woven light in the air. Caitlin stared into the shifting, shimmering brightness, her eyes wide and unmoving, her jaw slack.

  “It is time, Caitlin Snow,” said Madame Xanadu. “And time is a trap.”

  3

  “Is Central City sending help?” Dinah Drake asked. The situation in Star City had quickly degenerated from lunacy to outright panic. Ambush Bug was no longer just a demented pest—he was now an absolute threat.

  Joe grimaced. He understood perfectly well why Team Flash couldn’t afford to send someone to Star City to help out. The threats to the universe and the Multiverse of course superseded Ambush Bug’s smaller-scale threat. But he still chafed at the wholly rational, utterly horrific calculus that meant the lives of those in Star City could, would, and had to be sacrificed in the name of the greater good. He wouldn’t surrender. He wouldn’t give up. Not for any reason.

  If the universe died, then and only then would the people of Star City die. That was Joe’s promise to himself.

  “We’re on our own,” he said, sucking in his breath. “Felicity’s gonna do what she can from Central City, but other than that . . .”

  Wild Dog, Diggle, and Dinah took it about as well as he’d anticipated. Dinah rolled her eyes and huffed out a breath, crossing her arms over her chest defensively. Dig shook his head and stared at the floor.

  And Rene snorted in disgust and threw his Wild Dog mask against a table. “Are you kiddin’ me, hoss? We got a psychopath ready to sting the whole city to death, and your posse can’t spare five minutes to help out?”

  Joe pondered how, exactly, to explain it to them. The breaches. The foe at the End of Time. The Reverse-Flash. It was all so enormous that it almost defied comprehension. The threat to Star City was so much easier to juggle.

  “We can handle this,” Joe promised with a confidence he did not feel. He used the big monitor to call up Bert Larvan, the Bug-Eyed Bandit’s brother. He’d been helping Joe and the others anticipate Ambush Bug’s moves and was working on a way to track the Bug using his intimate knowledge of his sister’s tech.

  “Do you have good news for me, Bert?” Joe asked when Larvan’s face filled the screen.

  “I’ve made some progress,” Larvan said. He looked tired, his eyes bloodshot and sunken into purplish folds of skin. “We know he’s using the bees as his teleport targets. I think I might be able to identify the bees as he uses them.”

  “What good’s that?” Wild Dog scoffed.

  Joe shushed him. “That means if he teleports away, we’ll know where, right?”

  Larvan cast a baleful eye through the camera, no doubt hoping his angry gaze would fall on Wild Dog. Rene, for his part, loitered against one of the Bunker’s workstations, cleaning dirt from under his fingernails with a ridiculously large, sharp knife, not paying any attention at all to Larvan’s glare.

  “Yes, Detective West. That is precisely what it means. This Overwatch person you have me working with seems to think he can repurpose a weather satellite to locate the bees along Ambush Bug’s path.”

  Joe permitted himself a small smile at Larvan’s assumption that Overwatch was a man. Sometimes people’s prejudices made keeping a secret identity easier. “Great. That will at least give us something. In the meantime, Bert, how many bees did he get? Can we calculate how long it’ll take for them to swarm over the city?”

  Larvan considered. “Brie designed the bees based on actual biological bee anatomy, but with enhanced stamina. Mr. Schwab received one hundred and thirty-seven of Brie’s bees . . .”

  “Great,” Joe said. “We can start to—”

  “. . . but,” Larvan went on, “he has Brie’s schematics, remember?”

  “What are you saying, Bert?” Joe said.

  Wild Dog answered before Larvan could. “He’s saying Ambush Bug can make more. Probably already has. Right?”

  Larvan hesitated a moment, then nodded once, curtly. “It wouldn’t be difficult. The bees are actually designed to assist in creating more. Given the proper materials, the swarm could double itself every six hours.”

  Joe buried his faced in his hands. “How long has Ambush Bug had these things?”

  “Don’t do the math,” Dig advised. “It’s too depressing.”

  “So,” said Dinah, “what do we do now?”

  Joe had no answer. None at all.

  4

  Sara Lance woke, stretched, yawned, and then remembered that she was in the thirty-first century.

  Waking up in a different time period was not necessarily a new thing for her. As the captain of the Waverider and the leader of the somewhat snarkily dubbed “Legends of Tomorrow,” Sara had roused herself in a plethora of eras. She’d been knocked unconscious and revived in medieval France, passed out and woken up in twenty-second-century Germany, and even groped her way toward awareness in the year 8892.

  But this was different. Everything was different now.

  The guest quarters she’d been assigned were spare, the walls polished silvery metal that curved and enclosed like living inside a large, rounded pyramid. A planter buoyed on antigravity disks hovered nearby, an array of purple and red and white flora spilling from it. Alien plants, she’d been told, from a world called Phlon.

  Flan? she’d asked, imagining a quivering, gelatinous Mexican dessert. Only the first of many comedic and idiotic lingual collisions between her and the members of the Legion of Super-Heroes, her rescuers, her landlords, her guides through the new world of the thirty-first century.

  The bed itself was a cloud. Floating a couple of feet from the floor, it was pure white and felt like silk, cotton, and pudding whenever she climbed into it. She’d been skeptical at first—the thing didn’t look to have the structural integrity to hold a teddy bear, much less a human body—but it was the most comfortable bed she’d ever slept in. It wrapped diaphanous yet sturdy and supportive clots of cloudy material around her, conforming to her body in such a way as to obviate the need for blankets or pillows.

  Welcome to the future.

  She rolled to her side, and the bed accommodated by opening a little niche for her to swing her legs out. “Gideon, what’s the weather today?” she asked the air.

  A small panel of yellow light swimming with orange bubbles throbbed along the wall. “Breep! Captain Lance,” said an almost too-soothing voice, “I’ve told you before that you need not use a trigger phrase to activate me. I use a phonemic processing algorithm along with voice timbre analysis and psycho-historical data to determine if you are speaking to me or to a biological. The weather has been programmed for sun with winds from the northeast at roughly three miles per hour. A nice breeze. Temperature will vary between sixty-two degrees and seventy-one degrees Fahrenheit. Also, my name is Computo, not Gideon. Breep!”

  The Legion headquarters’ built-in AI was a million times more sophisticated than the Gideon AI that Barry Allen had developed/would develop at some point in her past/his future. It automatically spoke to her in what the Legionnaires called “ancient English” (a tongue in which they were all fluent, thank God), and even converted thirty-first-century measurements from something called the Coluan Standard Measurement Scale to things like miles, hours, and feet for the benefit of her cave-woman self.

  As miraculous as this technology was, though, there were certain things it could not do.

  Levering herself off the bed, she did a couple of quick squats, just to get the blood flowing. And then she asked the question she’d asked every morning since arriving here in the thirty-first century more than a month ago:

  “How’s Zari?”

  Sara thought she detected a momentary hesitation before Computo responded to her question. A pause of compassion? Or just a rare, microsecond-long glitch in the AI? No way to tell.

  “There has been no change in Ms. Tomaz’s status,” Computo announced. “Breep! According to telemetry from the medical bay and Dr.
Gym’ll’s notes, she is still comatose. I can, however, inform you that Mr. Palmer and Mr. Rory are convalescing well and expected to make a full recovery.”

  Sara sighed heavily. Her usual morning workout routine suddenly seemed . . . pointless.

  Over a month ago—on her own personal timeline—she and the Legends had been within the temporal zone, the “space” they used to travel through time on the Waverider. An alert had suddenly rung out, and they’d experienced a burst of tachyons from the far, far future. Something very powerful was moving backward through time at incredible speed. What, where, and why, they had no time to determine.

  The next thing she knew, the ship itself was caught up in the temporal ebb tide of the tachyon burst. Trapped in a time bolus, the ship accelerated into the far future, on a collision course with some sort of barrier across the time stream.

  Sara had had mere seconds to figure out what to do, to figure out how to save her crew before they smashed into the barrier at the speed of light.

  When she closed her eyes to sleep at night, she could still remember Gideon counting down, the moments to impact. Could still hear Ray yelling from his seat in the cockpit . . .

  She’d made the only tenable decision: At the last possible instant, she’d cut the Waverider’s time circuits completely, using a kill switch to shut off the ship’s time travel abilities. Usually, the Waverider gently decelerated from time travel mode to space travel mode.

  Not this time.

  Killing the time travel circuits had jerked the ship out of the temporal zone and back into real space with all the violence of a greyhound running full tilt and then hitting the limit of its choke chain. The ship itself could scarcely handle the stresses of the drop into real time; it broke apart, exploding its remains and expelling its crew over a swath of time and space.

  Sara and Zari had ended up on Earth’s moon in the year 3005. Fortunately for them, the moon had been colonized by then and had a rudimentary atmosphere even outside the colony domes. Unfortunately, Zari took a serious blow to the head and had yet to wake up.