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Interlude: California, the High Desert
Formally speaking, the establishment was known as the Rancho Oro Verde Fly-Inn Dude Ranch. More familiarly, it was known as the Happy Bottom Riding Club, or simply Pancho's.
It was not the original, which had burned down in the early '50s (somewhat suspiciously, given that at the time the establishment's legendary owner Pancho Barnes had been involved in a serious legal dispute with the Air Force over a proposed runway expansion). But some enterprising individual had, in recent years, decided to revive the name and the location as a tribute to the heady days of yore, when test pilots from Edwards Air Force Base made a habit of pushing the envelope, of strapping themselves into hurtling masses of jet-powered machinery with the intention of poking a hole in the damn sky.
The original Pancho's had been what it said on the tin--an honest-to-God dude ranch, with all the amenities (though it was the bar and restaurant that really attracted business). The present incarnation was basically just a bar, the owners having decided to cut straight to the heart of the matter and provide someplace for jet jockeys to hold beer call.
Beer call was precisely what was in session at the moment, and it was in full swing. It was a hallowed occasion, taking place more or less daily, and vitally important to the psychological well-being of those men (and indeed, nowadays, women) who wore the Blue Suit. It enabled those intrepid aviators to, as they put it, 'maintain an even strain'.
It was a tolerably wild scene, the truth be told, though not (according to legend) a patch on the kind of sessions that had taken place five or six decades earlier. Still and all, it would have been looked at as a little crazy by anyone with a sense of maturity and decorum that had evolved very far beyond college-fraternity levels. One pilot had commandeered the weathered piano in the corner and was doing a creditable Jerry Lee Lewis impression, and he was surrounded by four or five compatriots who were providing suitably raucous backing vocals. Another group of pilots was intently watching a particularly hard-fought game of eight-ball, upon which no small amount of money had been wagered.
In another corner of the bar, several more pilots were attending with equal interest as one of their number held court. He was relating an anecdote which was now reaching its inevitable climax. The pilot poured back a generous draught from his condensation-soaked beer mug before uttering the punchline:
"....we-eell... I don't recommend it, you understand, but it can be done!"
His courtiers howled with laughter, each mentally adding the unspoken coda ...provided you have the right stuff, you miserable pudknocker.
The president over the current proceedings leaned back in his chair, smiled enigmatically, and drained the rest of his beer. He unconsciously brushed aside a lock of brown hair that persisted in dangling rakishly over his right eyebrow. He was a good-looking sort, in his late thirties, perhaps, with an air of old-school cool that many observers thought carried more than a hint of resemblance to a young Paul Newman.
"Goddamn, Highball," a pilot roared. "I can never get tired of hearing that story!"
"Yeah, well," Highball smiled. "I doubt Trainor would say the same." He regarded his empty mug. "Whose round is it, anyhow?"
A certain amount of animated discussion ensued at this question. Highball found himself wondering if a satisfactory answer would be forthcoming anytime soon. Then, suddenly, his expression flickered for a moment. Before anyone noticed, he rose from his chair. "I gotta make a little strafing run, here... try and figure out who's stuck before I get back, huh?" He made his way toward the men's room.
It had not been the pleading of his bladder that had prompted him to excuse himself, however--it was a faint alarm-shock coursing through his nervous system, originating on the middle finger of his right hand and radiating outward. Once he was in the restroom, and satisfied that he was alone, he brought his right hand before his face.
"Go ahead," he said, in a tone of voice far more sober and alert than his previous demeanor might have suggested.
A soft green glow arose, and where the middle finger of his right hand had been unadorned a moment previously Highball now sported a gleaming green metal ring. The ring's face was decorated with a starkly simple graphic icon--a circle with a horizontal bar above and below. A quiet, measured synthetic voice emanated from the piece of jewelry.
"Code thirteen-sixty-two. Location: low Earth orbit."
"Time to clock in," Highball--Captain Hal Jordan, USAF, according to his service record--muttered softly. Though he held a commission in the Air Force, that storied body was not the only organization of which he was an officer, and the blue suit was not the only one he had the privelege and honor of wearing. There was another uniform, of another color entirely...
The ring's soft glow grew a bit brighter, becoming a conical flashlight-beam. The beam stopped a foot and a half or so from its source, and seemed to melt a hole in the very air itself.
Jordan reached through the hole with his left hand. The hand came back holding a good-sized roundish object, hanging from a semicircular handle. The object, which shone with an even brighter verdant light, seemed to resemble as much as anything a green lantern.
The hole sealed itself up. Jordan thrust his right hand, ring-first, into the aperture on the front of the 'lantern'.
The lantern shone more brightly still, and Jordan spoke in a solemn, measured tone:
"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!"
Green brilliance spilled forth from the lantern, washing out the comparatively sickly flourescent lighting of the men's room. Jordan's blue jeans and bomber jacket seemed to burst into green flame, burning away to leave him clad in a close-fitting uniform of black and green; a lick of flame played across his face and left a green domino mask in its wake. In the center of his chest, the ring-icon of circle with crossbars above and below seemed to shine a few inches above the surface of the bodysuit.
Jordan shone the ring's beam again, re-opening the hole in the air, and deposited the lantern into its transdimensional storage pocket once more. The green conflagration settled down into a glowing, flowing sheath of plasma that surrounded his body; he was lifted up off the floor. He angled himself toward the wall. His will told the sheath of plasma what to do, and as he reached the wall the plasma told the wall's constituent molecules to move slightly out of phase with those of his body.
A contrail of green light arced up over the high desert and into the night sky.
And so the senior Green Lantern of space sector 2814 rocketed upwards out of the atmosphere. As his altitude reached the point where temperature and pressure began to drop below levels the ring considered healthy for its bearer, the plasma-sheath solidified enough to maintain life support--sealing in air and heat, and recycling carbon dioxide into oxygen.
(It was not a true 'plasma' in the sense of being ionized matter; indeed, it was not matter at all, nor indeed energy precisely. It was a field of pure consciousness made manifest, innumerable quanta of the fundemental force of sentience. The quanta that composed the field were the particles that carried out the interaction between consciousness on the one hand and time, space, matter, and energy on the other. This was the product of the impossibly advanced science of the Guardians of the Universe, who had long since conquered the secrets of the mind itself. Under most circumstances, with most sentient beings less advanced than the Guardians, the quanta of consciousness carried information about the universe to all living minds. The Guardians had come to a complete understanding of this process and learned how to make it work in the other direction--to cause the quanta to carry instructions on how to behave to the universe from a living mind. The Power Rings they had created for their Green Lantern Corps served as a kind of psionic prosthesis, to allow less-developed minds to make use of this power. It transpired that quantum consciousness had its own spectrum of different frequencies, just as electromagnetic radiation did. The frequency that the Guardians had chosen was that of pure willpower, unadulterated by other emotional states. The quanta of consciousness are short-lived, and when focused in coherent form tend to degenerate into electromagnetic radiation. Quanta in the willpower band degenerate into visible light in the green portion of the spectrum.)
"All right, ring, point me in the right direction," Jordan said quietly. The verbal request was wholly superfluous; the ring had already detected Jordan's desire to be navigated to the crime scene and adjusted his trajectory accordingly.
A thirteen-sixty-two, as Jordan was perfectly aware, was the incursion of a spacecraft originating from another sector into an officer's assigned jurisdiction. There was no law in the Book of Oa prohibiting trans-sectorial spaceflight, of course, but it was a situation that required the investigation of the sector Lantern as a matter of course. Jordan's partner, John Stewart, was looking into something in the Rigel system; Jordan, being the nearer of the two officers assigned to sector 2814, was therefore obligated to look into the matter.
"Ring, I'm not seeing anything," Jordan said.
"Contact is obscured by total EM cloaking," the ring's voice droned. "Tracking via gravimetric distortion."
"Show me."
A searchlight-beam issued forth from the ring and 'painted' the contours of spacetime around the invisible spacecraft. With visual contact now established, Hal took a more active role in directing his flightpath. He dove toward the center of the green-lit framework of gravitational curves. Presently he passed through the outermost extent of the cloaking field, and was able to see his quarry.
The spacecraft was tolerably big; not notably so--in his time, Jordan had more than once encountered spacegoing vessels that were, for all intents and purposes, planets with engines. He ballparked it at roughly the size of an aircraft carrier. Its design was... unusual. It had an almost organic curvature to it. Almost feminine, in its way. At a glance, the engines looked like gravity polarizers--at low power, they could 'sail' the ship around through interactions with existing gravitational fields, attracting or repelling as needed to move the ship at sublight speeds. At higher power levels, they could tear right through the normal geometry of spacetime and plunge the ship into hyperspace for superluminal flight. Nothing too fancy--his ring's propulsion system did basically the same thing.
Jordan continued on his path, phasing effortlessly through the ship's hull. He set down in the middle of a long corridor and looked around. Much as with the outside, the ship's interior had a decidedly organic look to it despite being constructed from gleaming metal.
The ring's life-support field faded away to standby power, having detected suitable environmental conditions. There was a perfectly comfortable shirt-sleeve environment within the ship. Well, whoever's driving this thing isn't too alien, apparently. At least they breathe the same stuff that I do. Gravity seems about Earth-normal, too.
"Any life signs?" he asked.
"Life signs negative," the ring said. "Vessel appears to be automated."
Jordan lifted gently off the deck and glided down the corridor toward what looked like some kind of door. At his approach, the rounded portal irised open. He drifted through the aperture.
He found himself in a cavernous bay, lined with several levels of what looked like catwalks. Along the catwalks were a series of softly glowing cylindrical chambers.
Jordan drifted closer to one of the chambers and alighted on the deck once more. He looked the chamber over.
No clue. The only thing that stood out about the cylinder was that it seemed to be about the right size to acommodate a full-grown human being.
Hal was about to will the ring to analyze the structure when the cylinder suddenly opened, its front half revolving to one side to expose its contents.
Its contents were an extraordinarily beautiful woman.
She was tall, just a bit short of six feet, it seemed. In spectacular physical shape, to say the least, with a lean, toned figure and breasts that could scarcely be described as anything but perfect. At the juncture of her lithesome thighs was a perfectly groomed strip of golden pubic hair. The hair on her head matched, falling in loose waves just a bit past the shoulder. Piercing blue eyes, full lips, a perkily upturned nose.
"Hello," she said. In perfect English, with a decidedly neutral midwestern American accent.
Out of pure reflex, a confident, lopsided grin appeared on Hal's face. "Hi there," he said.
"You are an officer of the Green Lantern Corps," the woman said.
"That's right," Hal said. The grin faded by a notch or two. How does she know that? She looks human. Very human. Very nicely human. Must be from a species that gets around, if she knows about the Corps.
"The Green Lantern Corps could create unwelcome interference with the mission at this juncture," she said. "That cannot be permitted."
Hal was just registering the fact that her statement, though delivered very calmly and without rancor, carried an implicit threat when another thought entered his mind. Didn't the ring just say that it couldn't detect any signs of life?
He was just beginning to tense himself, to will his ring's defensive field into being, when the woman's right arm swung around with shocking speed and force. The edge of her hand impacted the side of his head. A flashbulb seemed to go off behind his eyes.
Hal crumpled involuntarily. As consciousness winked out, he caught a glimpse of blonde hair.
Yellow. My one weakness...