Chương 6: Nothing at All

Batman tapped the console once, and the silence in the cave broke around it. His brow drew in. There was nothing in his eyes but assessment and doubt.

"Never appeared in any known alien civilization database." He hit a key as he said it, and the display swapped over to a massive database interface. Thousands of known alien civilizations, sorted by threat level from highest down, each one carrying a full file. Species characteristics. Technological tier. Civilizational structure. Whether they had a history of aggression. He ran a search on Viltrum, and extended it to cover every plausible near-match and homophone the system could generate.

The screen kept returning no results. Batman didn't stop. No record didn't mean it didn't exist. It could just as easily mean the civilization was extremely well hidden, or came from some region of the universe nobody had mapped. He pulled the files on known dangerous civilizations and started going through them one at a time. From a world that worshipped killing, to interstellar pirate crews that lived off raiding resources, he read every dangerous-civilization entry in the system.

"Not even a close match." His brow twisted down like rebar. Bloodthirsty. Takes pride in conquest. The words the kid used. And three days ago, when the man who dropped him off had been describing him.

"The kid's built solid. Honestly, at that age, I don't think my body was anywhere near that strong." All of it put the boy straight onto Batman's high-threat list. A species that had carved slaughter and conquest into its own genetics. A single individual from that species showing up near Earth was a potential catastrophe on its own. And if one teenage defector had a body like that, then a regular Viltrumite soldier would be something worse.

Batman's expression got heavier as he started building a combat model for Viltrumite physiology and running out what they could do to this planet. Unfortunately, for three straight days, the man who'd delivered the kid had watched him the entire time. Unlike that sweet blue idiot over in Metropolis, the one in the black battlesuit hadn't given Batman a single opening to collect more biological samples from the boy. One drop of blood. That was it. This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval.

Report any appearances on Amazon. That drop was currently several levels deeper underground, sitting inside an analyzer that filled the room with noise. But with a sample that small, most tests couldn't be run at all. Working out what the kid actually was would take a long time.

"A defector who ran from his own homeworld?" Batman's eyes stayed on him, weighing.

"Vocal stress consistent with tension and fear. Heart rate within normal range. Respiratory frequency shows no clear anomaly. Doesn't rule out trained deception." His gaze moved to the window displaying the kid's physiological data, working through every fluctuation. When Kaelvorn had been describing Viltrum's brutality, his heart rate did tick up slightly and his breathing did get faster. Textbook responses for someone recalling a horror. Batman wasn't going to relax on that.

He'd met too many enemies who were good at this. There were operatives trained to control physiological responses so completely that nothing showed on the surface at all. And a boy raised from infancy in an environment like the one he'd described would have been through rigorous training of his own. So were those responses genuine emotion, or were they engineered? Batman couldn't be sure, and he wasn't going to guess.

As far as he was concerned, any individual from an unknown alien civilization warranted maximum caution, even one who presented as a badly injured teenager. He didn't believe a word of it. He'd already prepared for the worst case. What if the boy was a Viltrumite plant, laying groundwork for an invasion? What if every line of it was fabricated, the whole escape a cover story, and the actual objective was to embed himself on Earth? Both possibilities existed. Both needed to be verified.

Batman never took anyone's word on anything. He took evidence.

"Initiate tier-two surveillance protocol. Track the target's movements closely." He gave the order to the console.

"And contact Green Lantern. Have him query the Oa database for a civilization designated Viltrum." The console chimed softly, confirming both commands. Surveillance came online, and a small army of hidden devices around the attic started running full coverage. The signal to the Corps went out and sat waiting on a response. A moment later a voice with far too much bounce in it opened a channel.

"Knock knock? Bat home?" Batman leaned back a fraction and listened to the low roar bleeding through the earpiece. Then, with nothing in his voice at all:"Sounds busy over there."

"Yeah, buddy. It is." Hal Jordan was breathing hard around the words.

"You know how it goes. Space cop, space criminal, standard Tuesday. Except this one's slippery. Guy can move." Batman's face darkened. He waited until Hal ran out of things to narrate before speaking.

"The information I asked for."

"Ah, always in a rush. Bet you're like this on dates too, huh, do you also just..." Batman made a single cold sound in his throat, and Hal shut up and pulled it in a little.

"No, Bats. Nothing."

"What?" Batman's expression sharpened.

"I said nothing. There's no Viltrum. No such planet. Nothing in the Oa database. Nothing going back a thousand years. Forward a thousand, who knows." Batman found himself sitting upright. One touch and the display cut back to the surveillance feed of the boy hunched over his soup. He stared at the kid, and asked again anyway.

"Are you certain you actually checked?" On Hal's end there was another dense run of explosions, followed by Hal screaming, followed by the sound of a body going hard into dirt. It took a while before Hal came back, sounding significantly more tired.

"Buddy. You think Oa's supercomputer is Earth hardware?" Thud. Hal seemed to punch something, and told it to behave.

"The second your signal came in, I pushed the Viltrum query straight to Oa's central data core. Oa's integrated intelligence takes three seconds to sweep everything on record from the dawn of history to right now. Result: no Viltrum." Batman went quiet. Hal said hello a few times, got nothing, and sighed.

"Come on, think it through. Even if Oa doesn't hold literally every scrap of knowledge in this universe, a planet whose entire civilization runs on war and bloodshed is going to interact with other civilizations. By which I mean war!"

"And we can't find a single trace of Viltrum ever existing. So either your source is lying to you, or I need to file a request for the League to evaluate your mental state. Did the Joker get to you?"