Before the conversation could go any further Clark's head snapped toward the eastern sky.
"Military coming," he said.
The sound was still distant but it was getting less distant fast and the flight path was too direct to be coincidence. They had a signal and they were following it straight here.
Lois.
"Did you turn off your phone?" Daniel said, already looking at her.
Lois opened her mouth and then closed it again. The answer was on her face before she shook her head.
Daniel reached over and took the bag off her shoulder without asking and threw it straight up into the air. It was gone before anyone could say anything about it.
"Next ti your governnt decides you're interesting," Daniel said, "the first thing you do is get rid of everything digital. Everything."
He looked out toward the sound of the rotors cutting across the morning and thought it through. Military on this property was a problem that had nothing to do with Lois.
The Kryptonian pod was sitting sowhere on this farm and if a sweep team stumbled across it accidentally everything Clark had spent his entire life protecting disappeared in an afternoon. His identity. His mother. This farm. All of it gone before the real fight had even started.
That wasn't happening.
"Five minutes," Daniel said. "I'll go deal with them."
He stepped back and dissolved into black mist like he had never been standing there at all.
The Kansas morning went quiet again.
Clark, Bruce and Lois stood in the field looking at the space where he had just been.
"Does he do that often?" Lois said.
"I t him yesterday," Bruce said.
"And yet you trust him?" Lois said, looking at Bruce. "What made you trust soone like that?"
A man shrouded in mystery from every direction, nothing about him verifiable, nothing adding up to anything she could put in a story or hold in both hands and examine.
Bruce said nothing.
anwhile Daniel was standing in open air directly in front of the lead helicopter, two hundred feet off the ground with nothing beneath his feet, tapping on the cockpit glass with one finger like he was knocking on a neighbor's door.
The pilot stared at him with the expression of a man whose entire understanding of physics was having a breakdown in real ti. A person. Standing in the air. No wings. No equipnt. Just standing there smiling at him through the glass.
"How about we explore the area ahead of us later?" Daniel said pleasantly.
The pilot looked at the empty air below Daniel's feet. Then back at Daniel's face. Then at the empty air again.
"At the sa ti," Daniel continued, "you wouldn't mind asking your friends to take a U-turn."
The pilot got on the radio without saying a word back.
"Report to command center," he said, his voice carrying the particular flatness of soone choosing professionalism over the panic currently available to them. "Target is found. He is airborne."
A pause on the other end.
"Say again."
"Target. Is. Airborne," the pilot repeated. "Not in an aircraft. Just. Airborne."
Another pause, longer this ti, the kind that ant soone on the other end was deciding how to write this in a report.
"Can you confirm the target is not in any known aircraft or aerial vehicle."
The pilot looked at Daniel, still standing in the air outside his cockpit, hands in his coat pockets, watching the exchange with quiet amusent.
"Confird," the pilot said. "No vehicle."
The radio went quiet for a mont that stretched too long.
"Capture him imdiately but do not harm," command said.
The pilot looked at that order for a mont and then looked at Daniel standing in open air outside his cockpit and thought about how exactly one was supposed to get out of a helicopter and put handcuffs on soone who was already flying.
Daniel could hear the comm clearly. He tilted his head slightly. They had mistaken him for the alien. Not that it mattered particularly but it was worth noting.
"I would strongly suggest reconsidering before this becos sothing you genuinely cannot imagine," Daniel said.
The pilot relayed the order anyway.
Every helicopter in the formation swung and pointed directly at him.
Daniel looked at them for a mont.
"You just don't listen," he said quietly.
Then the sky went dark.
Not clouds. Not weather.
The light simply left, pulled out of the air like sothing had decided it was done being borrowed. The entire sky above the farm turned pitch black in seconds, a darkness that had no business existing at ten in the morning over Kansas.
Then the air moved.
Hands ca first. Reaching through the black layer from the other side, fingers closing around nothing, pulling themselves through one after another. Then the rest followed.
Skeletons draped in black energy, dead eyes burning with dark fla, crawling out of the darkness and filling the sky around the helicopters in every direction, dozens of them, people Daniel had killed across tilines called back to stand as his soldiers.
Every pilot in every aircraft went completely silent on every channel simultaneously.
On the ground the military convoy took one collective look at the sky.
Every instinct every one of them had ever developed said the sa thing at the sa ti.
Get the fuck back.
And they did.
Every pilot pulled back without waiting for an order. They could handle aliens. Aliens were on the news, aliens made a kind of sense.
But dead things crawling out of a pitch black sky with dark fire burning in their eyes was a completely different category of problem and not a single person in any of those cockpits had signed up for it.
Court marshal was at least familiar. You knew what court marshal looked like. You knew the paperwork.
This had no paperwork.
Every helicopter banked hard and left. The ground convoy reversed without a single word exchanged between anyone. The decision was unanimous and imdiate and absolutely nobody felt bad about it.
*****
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