Part 4 — Belief
Prologue
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Consciousness returned the way it does after something serious has happened to the body — not all at once, but in fragments, each one arriving before the previous one had finished settling.
Who am I.
He reached for the answer and found nothing. Not the absence of memory, but something in front of the memory, a wall that gave back nothing when he pressed against it.
Where am I.
The same wall. He was aware of himself — that he existed, that he was thinking — but the context of that existence was completely dark.
There was something important he was supposed to be doing. He was certain of that much. The certainty had no content behind it, just the weight of something unfinished pressing at the edge of what he could reach.
What's the last thing I remember.
The wall began to give.
Not quickly. In small fractures, each one opening onto something — impressions first, then pieces. Pain. The specific kind that comes from the body being pushed past what it was built to survive. Before the pain, he hadn't been on Earth. He was somewhere else. A name tried to surface.
Galvan Prime.
That was right. He'd been on Galvan Prime. Fighting. one of the knights,
Vilgax, or a clone ?
And with that name the wall came down, and everything behind it came through at once.
My name is Maxwell Tennyson.
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Max felt his eyelids move for the first time.
They opened onto an environment he didn't recognize. He was suspended in something — a lab container, the interior filled with a pale gel that carried the particular luminescence of Galvan restorative compounds. A breathing mask covered his face, feeding him air through a sealed line. He was wearing nothing but trunks, and when he looked down at himself his hands were in front of him, fingers spread in the gel.
The lab around him was compact and dense with equipment. A large screen occupied one wall, currently running calculations in Galvan notation. Various instruments were mounted at intervals, their displays lit and cycling. The space had the feel of somewhere that had been organized by a single mind over a long period and optimized entirely for that mind's convenience, with no concession to anyone else's orientation.
"Good," a voice said, from somewhere below the container's visible line. "I was beginning to think you intended to sleep indefinitely."
Max knew that voice. He'd know it in worse condition than this.
"Azmuth?"
"Who else." The tone carried the particular dryness of someone who considers the question its own answer. Footsteps — small, deliberate — approached across the lab floor, and then Azmuth was visible through the container glass, standing at its base, looking up at Max with the expression he generally wore when something had worked out approximately as planned and he was deciding whether to acknowledge the margin of uncertainty involved.
"Azmuth." Max pressed his hand against the inside of the container. "What happened. The Omnitrix — where is the Omnitrix?"
"The Omnitrix is well protected." Azmuth stroked the four tendrils on his chin in the way that meant he was choosing his words. "I think."
"You think."
"There are more pressing things to discuss first." He moved to the container controls. "You were in poor condition when I found you, Max. Poor is a generous word. Approximately half your body had been destroyed by the time I reached you. The brain was intact, which was the only reason any of this was possible. I had managed to salvage my reconstruction device before Galvan Prime fell, and I used it."
Max looked down at himself again, more carefully this time. His hands. His arms. The shape of him, familiar and unchanged, as though the years and the damage had been corrected back to something he recognized.
"Five years," Azmuth said, before Max could ask. "Constructing bone and tissue and organ from base material is not a rapid process, regardless of what the Galvan medical literature might suggest. I worked with what I had and I took the time it required."
Five years.
Max held that number at a distance for a moment before letting it in. "Where are we?"
"Xenon. My secondary facility here is sufficiently shielded that Vilgax's search network passes over it without registering. We are, for the moment, as safe as anywhere."
Max exhaled. "Then you've retrieved the Omnitrix from Earth. Thank God."
Azmuth's expression shifted in a specific way — the way it shifted when he was about to say something he had prepared for but still found unpleasant. "About that."
"What."
"I am afraid what I have for you is largely bad news, Maximilian. I recommend you prepare yourself."
Max said nothing. He waited.
Azmuth began.
"Five years ago, concurrent with the assault on Galvan Prime, Earth was attacked. By Darkseid." He paused, watching Max's face absorb that. "The attack was repelled. A group of Earth's defenders organized during the invasion itself and held. They call themselves the Justice League — the Kryptonian is among them, the one you may know as Superman."
Max processed this. A Justice League — that was new. Five years ago there had been no organized team of that kind on Earth, or none he knew of.
"The repulsion came at significant cost," Azmuth continued. "Casualties. Structural damage across multiple cities." He stopped. When he continued, his voice had shifted into the register of someone delivering something they would prefer not to be delivering. "Your son Carl was among those killed, Max. Sandra survived the invasion but has not regained consciousness. The medical assessment is that the trauma produced the coma, and there is no reliable prognosis for recovery."
Max heard the words. He understood them in the sense that each one was individually comprehensible. The meaning of them together took longer.
Carl was gone.
Sandra was still in there somewhere, in a hospital bed, and nobody knew when or whether she would come back.
He became aware that he was still suspended in gel, still breathing through a mask, and that the gel was absorbing whatever was happening to his face, and he was grateful for that in ways he couldn't have explained.
"The children," he said. His voice came out rougher than intended. "What about the children?"
Azmuth read the undertone in the question and moved quickly to address it. "Alive. Both of them. They are with your second son in a city called Gotham. Kevin Levin is with them as well."
Something in Max's chest released a fraction. Not much. Enough.
"Then what's the problem."
Azmuth turned to the large display screen and brought up a recording. The footage was from a fixed angle, ground level — a ten-year-old boy in the middle of a street during what was clearly the chaos of the invasion, trying to step around a small device on the ground, moving carefully, giving it space.
The device moved toward him anyway.
The boy raised his hands to block it and the force of the thing knocked him flat. When the recording ended, the device was attached to his wrist and the boy was sitting up looking at it with the expression of someone who has just been told something in a language they don't speak.
Max stared at the frozen last frame.
"Ben has the Omnitrix."
"Yes."
"How." The word came out flat. "How did this happen, and why haven't you retrieved it?"
Azmuth folded his hands behind his back. "The pod was designed to seek your DNA. Specifically yours — that was the targeting parameter I set. I did not account for you arriving on Galvan Prime in person, and in the urgency of what followed there was no opportunity to correct the targeting. When you launched the pod toward Earth, it identified the nearest compatible DNA signature and followed it. Your grandson carries enough of your genetic material that the pod accepted him as the intended recipient."
Max sat with that for a moment. The Omnitrix had been meant for him, had been sent by him in a moment of desperation, and had found the closest thing to him available.
He'd sent it to Ben.
"Is he alright?"
"The boy is cautious," Azmuth said, and there was something in his delivery that might have been reluctant approval. "He has used the Omnitrix sparingly. This matters because the device is still a prototype — the energy output under sustained use would be detectable at considerable range. His restraint has allowed me to contain the signature to planetary scale. I monitored him in the early period as closely as I could manage from a distance."
"And retrieving it?"
Azmuth was quiet for a moment. "Vilgax monitors every space for my energy signature. If I approach the planet, I draw his attention directly to it. Given his current resources and his investment in finding the Omnitrix, that scenario is unlikely to end well for anyone on Earth." He paused. "I cannot go to Earth, Max. Not without doing more damage than the Omnitrix's current situation creates."
Max understood the logic. He didn't like it, but he understood it. Vilgax tracking Azmuth to Earth would be significantly worse than the current problem.
He became aware of his consciousness dimming at the edges. Not a sensation he'd experienced before, or not like this — a slow withdrawal, like a tide going out.
"What's happening —"
"Expected," Azmuth said, his voice already sounding slightly further away. "The body has completed a significant reconstruction. It needs time to consolidate. Rest, Max."
Max tried to form another question. The thought didn't finish.
The lab and the gel and Azmuth's face at the base of the container receded into dark, and he went with them.