Devil's consultancy 18

Unlike the last invasion, this one was a bit… more anemic. It started with an interrupted UN event, where a battleship came down and fired a few warning shots. Before the invader could broadcast their intentions, another warship came and destroyed it, with the few members of the Justice League present handling the debris. The warship was Thanagarian, and they brought with them a few dozen ships, projecting a warning of an incoming Gordanian invasion, of which the battleship that had attacked was a mere forward scout for. They offered to fortify the system, both to deny the Gordanians the system’s resources (in particular, the enslavement of Earth’s population; apparently Earth was on the high side for population density) and to further blunt their advance in the interstellar war they had going on with them. 

The information Green Lantern could gather on the relevant parties was… limited. The Gordanian cruiser was genuine, and the Thanagarians were at war with them, for decades at least, that much was confirmed, and apparently the territory controlled by the Gordanians was actually pretty close to Earth, hyperlane travel was the most common FTL method and it would take only two more jumps to reach them… assuming it was a skim lane that didn’t actually enter the sun’s gravitational well. If it was a warp lane, which was the interstellar equivalent of a highway and could cover five times the distance, you could go straight into the heart of the Gordanian empire. 

Well, doing that would make the system unlivable by absolutely ruining the planetary rotations of literally all of the planets, so it would be a horrific war crime to do that here (not making a warp lane, doing so in an inhabited system). Why Green Lantern felt the need to emphasize that to Rhine escaped their understanding, and it was honestly quite hurtful. They were falsely executed for war crimes, thank you! Not that they told him that. That would lead to very inconvenient questions. 

Anyway, their story made sense: this was a strategically relevant location, not in general but for this specific conflict, and it didn’t take a historian to realize that fortifying an ally to act as a buffer state was far cheaper than conducting warfare in your own territory, particularly if that ally could shoulder some of those costs. Even now, there were countless factories and foundries churning out machined parts made out of space-age alloys refined locally for the gigantic generator in the Gobi desert that was meant to power a planetary shield array. The Thanagarians had helpfully retrieved an asteroid from the local system to provide the raw materials, and had tasked the majority of their ships to augment the logistics. The cold fusion plant was to take eight months to construct, which was mind-bogglingly quick by Earth standards. It did disrupt the production of wide swathes of industry, and once it was finished there needed to be a way to use that energy capacity without assigning the output to anything that we couldn’t afford to disrupt in the event that the shield was actually needed. She (through Batman) suggested a hydrogen gas stockpile for fuel cells in UN military craft, but the UN Security Council was still debating ideas on that front. The fact that the most convenient nations to benefit from the excess power being China and Russia (well, the thing was also physically in Mongolia, but… does she really need to finish the thought?) definitely impacted the heat of the debate. 

Batman, of course, was immediately suspicious. Apparently, the Thanagarians were equipped with some kind of anti-psionics shielding cybernetically installed, which J’onn decided not to mention until asked even if Shayera, who as it turned out was not a cop committing insurance fraud but instead an intelligence agent (which made a lot more sense, frankly), was also equipped with it. 

Furthermore, the Thanagarians were rather cagey with the design blueprints for the planetary shield generator. The power source, a colossal cold fusion plant, they were willing to share, but what that building was meant to power? Military secret, they have the necessary components in their cargo holds and will install them themselves. This was admittedly suspicious, but it wasn’t an entirely unreasonable stance to take, and J’onn was able to confirm that the cold fusion technology was legitimate, and it was indeed enough power for not just a planetary shield array, but a rather nice one, with an integrated space fountain that they can build a starport around. Given that Earth didn’t have any starports either, taking that extra step was rational, although more generous than was apparently typical for this kind of arrangement. 

That wasn’t to say that Earth’s leaders were universally open to the Thanagarians, certainly the professional paranoids: the Generals and the Directors of the various spy agencies were right behind Batman in mistrusting them, but that was, as noted, their jobs. 

Tanya didn’t really involve herself in the whole thing: sure, she could do like Green Lantern, Superman, and the Flash and physically help the construction with her magic… but she didn’t want to. If Batman wants support in his investigation, trying to discern whether or not the Thanagarians are legit, he’ll ask for it. She has piano practice. 

“Lovely.” Alfred complimented as she finished the song: Mozart’s 16th Sonata wasn’t exactly an advanced piece, but it also wasn’t considered basic: managing that much was only expected, given how she’d been learning for four years now: she got started shortly after her third birthday, and it was now just past her seventh. “That’s enough for today, I think.” He commented, checking the time by glancing at the grandfather clock that adorned the music room. This one didn’t conceal a secret passage to the Batcave; there was a chute beneath the piano instead. “You still need to get your exercise in, after all.”

Tanya sighed dramatically, getting up from the piano and pouting as she walked past Alfred. “I don’t wanna skate today…” She whined. She had a witness, so she couldn’t slack on the childish act today. 

“Tough.” Said the aforementioned witness; for some reason Jacob Kane had decided to visit. “Bruce spoils you too much; keeping fit is a matter of discipline, it’s important, and I’m not going to let you slack on my watch.” And she won’t. Just in a different way than he’s thinking. 

Alfred frowned at the man’s unwanted assumption of authority. “Perhaps Miss Tanya would like to play some tennis instead today.” He ordered while pretending it was an offer. “I’m given to understand that you’ve played a game or two yourself back in the day, Jacob.”

He perked up at the idea. “Yeah, I like that.” He said, “I’ve never had the chance to see her play, now that I think about it.” He looked between Tanya and Alfred. “...Is she any good?”

“You’ll see.” Alfred said mysteriously.

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Tanya didn’t actually play a lot of tennis. She pretended she did, of course, but she played maybe every other week for an hour or two to make sure she was still comfortable with a racket in hand, with the rest of the supposed practice instead being taken by duties in other identities. 

Jacob Kane, on the other hand, was on the tennis team at West Point. Given how popular the sport was among the American upper crust, he was presumably quite fresh at the game too. 

“You really should start with competitions.” Kane complimented after a few rounds. While she needed to deliberately reinforce her body with magic to become superhuman while human… The amount of exercise she got combined with subconscious magic use made her pretty much as strong and otherwise physically capable as it was possible for someone of her size to be. Maybe even slightly stronger than that. “She’s a lot better than I expected.” 

Was she winning? No. His longer legs and stronger arms were decisive advantages, and he simply wasn’t a novice, so there was little hope of her high school competition level skills to allow her to circumvent that gap with cleverness. But she was scoring points, and thus making him work for his wins. “Miss Tanya is quite talented, yes.” Alfred casually replied, seated at a small table with a tea service for himself. “Now, Master Dick will be released from school soon, so we must be away to pick him up. Miss Tanya?”

“I can watch her, Alfred.” Kane offered, “We can go for another few rounds.”

Alfred took a moment to consider, and stood up. “Very well, I’m sure Miss Tanya will be on her best behavior.” Which, as he used a passive statement rather than directing anything at her, was code for having his full permission to raise hell. 

The instant Alfred left… “Onetwothree SERVE!” Tanya shouted as she served another tennis ball. Miraculously, Kane actually managed to return that one, but he was sufficiently off-balance that Tanya easily scored a point. “Yattai!” She proclaimed, doing a little victory dance. There was a slice of life anime she saw recently that had a fun one. She sang the first few lines of the song associated with the dance while she was at it. 

Kane’s expression darkened, and he picked up the ball and gave his own brutal serve without announcing it, but Tanya was ready. It may have required a little bit of magical augmentation to switch from dancing to returning the serve fast enough, but it was subtle enough that there’s no way Kane would have noticed without sensing the magic directly. 

She still maintained enough self control to not magically enhance herself more than every three exchanges, but Kane was in his forties. Their respective staminas were incomparable. So she kept playing as hard as she did before, while Kane’s ability declined with every exchange. 

Once she got a large enough lead to be considered the victor, she resumed her victory dance. “What is that song even about?” Kane growled after he drank down a whole water bottle in seconds. 

“Lots of stuff.” Tanya said vaguely, “It’s not very coherent.” It was, however, very catchy. 

Kane grunted in disapproval as Tanya drank her own bottle of sports drink. “Alright, that’s enough exercise.” He said, making an executive decision. “Hit the showers.”

Tanya sarcastically saluted. “Yes drill sergeant…” Kane huffed with laughter at the joke. It was totally worth looking up American military culture. 

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One thing that she had needed to get used to as part of being rich was the idea that going through six or seven outfits a day was not just for messy toddlers, but instead just an expected consequence of owning more outfits than there were days in the year. At least Alfred was practical enough that wearing outfits only once then throwing them away wasn’t expected, but changing clothes to match her fashion to her current activity was. So it was in her fourth outfit of the day (fifth if you count the pajamas she woke up in) that she let Kane take her into what she understood was Thomas Wayne’s study, a room that Bruce typically avoided disturbing, even though it was never declared off limits. 

“Tell me, Tanya.” Kane began as he looked out the window to one of the gardens, swirling a shotglass of whiskey that he pilfered from the liquor cabinet. “Have you ever heard a nursery rhyme that goes a little like this?” He hummed an unfamiliar tune. 

Tanya frowned. “...No sir.” 

“I thought not.” Kane said derisively. “Beware the Court of Owls, that watches all the time,” He quoted, “-ruling Gotham from a shadowed perch, behind granite and lime. They watch you at your hearth, they watch you in your bed. Speak not a whispered word of them or they’ll send The Talon for your head.”

Hm. Local superstition? Why bring them up? “...I’m too old to be scared of nursery rhymes.” Tanya deadpanned. 

Kane chuckled indulgently. “Well, you’re still young. Well, I should probably ask you this, then: What do you think of how Bruce spends his money?”

Talk about a non sequitur. Well, if she was confused as to what he was getting at normally, an actual seven year old would be completely lost. So… “He spends a lot of it on me?” Tanya offered. 

“No, he doesn’t.” Kane corrected, accurately. There is only so much you can spend when it comes to making one child happy, and she didn’t exactly go around demanding him pay for her to guest star in her favorite cartoon or anything absurd like that. “But I’m talking about all those… bad businesses. The low income housing, the homeless shelters, the clinics. All that waste.”

Ah. She understands now. As another rich executive, he didn’t like how Bruce’s philanthropy eclipsed his own and wanted to implant ideas in the impressionable heir to scale back on that stuff. Why bring up a nursery rhyme, though? Was he threatening her? “Daddy says that money is like water, it must move or it gets stinky.” It was a reductive explanation about a basic economic principle, but it wasn’t wrong. Money in a vault was useful to a point; liquidity was an important thing for an enterprise to possess, but when you owned as much money as Bruce Wayne, the spending of one man can influence the local economy substantially. “Daddy also says that charity is expected of us, because we’re rich.” She added, to give Kane an easy rhetorical target to attack. 

“Bruce overdoes it.” Kane insisted, “Of course he’d call money like water, he certainly spends it like it is.” He takes a cleansing breath. “The Waynes have been in Gotham since the beginning, with Solomon Wayne. You don’t stay wealthy for that long by making poor financial decisions, and Bruce…” He takes a drink of his whiskey. “Well, I’m worried that by the time you grow up, there won’t be anything left.”

“I have a trust fund.” Tanya pointed out, “I’ll be okay even if we lose everything else.” Bruce started it with a billion dollars the instant they came to the agreement that she would become his child in public view. If the trustee had invested solely in an index fund, it would be pushing two billion by now. They had instead invested half of it in Wayne Enterprises and continually taken that growing money out of it into diversified interests to make sure that only half of it would be lost if Wayne stock magically became zero one day (Bruce may be agreeing with Lex Luthor about current events right now, but she wouldn’t put it past LexCorp to engineer such a thing) Last she checked, it had reached eight billion, due to the massive moneymaker that was the smartphone market. At this point, if she ever became anything but set for life, there were bigger problems going on than her own personal comfort. 

Kane scoffed. “Bruce has no respect for culture, for tradition. He pretends in public, but he mocks them with his actions.”

…He was very bad at communicating with children. Sure, if she was some impressionable teenager, she may be taken in by his commanding voice and conviction, but… When you look at his actual arguments, he just seemed whiny. “...’Kay.” She said, giving him her perfected ‘no thoughts, only cuteness’ look. She idly kicked her legs as she sat in the plush chair that was at Thomas Wayne’s desk. 

Bruce’s uncle was not swayed, however: that would require him to be paying attention to her instead of looking dramatically out the window while sipping whiskey. “He’s naive, thinking that he can buy power by giving money to the poor, while ignoring the ones with true power.” Political campaigns were expensive, and Bruce had always monofocused on Gotham; getting him to care about the state government was hard enough, national campaigns he just let the board of directors do their usual thing to ply Congress with the appropriate bribes. 

“...He just likes helping people.” Tanya corrected, “He has power. Lots of it.”

“He’s inherited power.” Kane retorted, “From the Wayne name. He has less every year.” Tanya disagreed. “Nevertheless, perhaps you’re too young to understand. Just know that there’s more to Gotham High Society than he’s taught you, and when you’re ready to learn… I’ll show you what it means to truly control this city.”

Tanya’s phone pinged, the manor’s system informing her of Alfred and Richard’s arrival. That’s a great excuse to escape this awkward conversation. “Ooh! Alfred brought Bat Burger!” She exclaimed, spotting the distinctive bag in the butler’s hands through the camera feed her phone brought up. He must have picked it up on because Richard insisted on stopping. “Gotta go!” She said, running at full speed through the manor’s hallways towards the front door. 

Kane didn’t even feed her; worst babysitter, 3/10. 

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“The Gordanian cruiser was a false flag attack.” Bruce announced with conviction as he entered the Batcave. “The Thanagarians are lying to us.”

“Where did they slip?” Tanya asked idly. She was in her magic nook, reading a new book that Professor Blood had provided now that her own involvement in the development of ArcWayne’s products had largely finished. With the ability to turn any astrologically significant event into a portable reagent, she had requested that he track down rituals that were useful but held back by such limits. 

“They let us examine the bodies, but the records indicate that they were deliberately preserved. At least, they did once I cross-checked the findings with information on Gordanian biochemistry that wasn’t provided by the Thanagarians.” He said, going to the Batcomputer and bringing up the report he was presumably going to send to the other members of the Justice League, and maybe the UN. 

Hm, yeah, she can see how this operation would go. Buy time with the false flag operation to create infrastructure for an occupation force. A planetary force field can project enough energy into the upper atmosphere using measures normally reserved for nuclear detonations, it’s not much of a stretch from there to assume it could use that energy to, say, create a weapon that could delete grid coordinates anywhere on the planet. “What now?” She asked, “Our last invasion was unexpected, but also easy mode. This force presumably has redundancies in command, so we would need to secure the surrender of General…” What was his name again? 

“Hro Talak.” Bruce finished. “It won’t be easy, but with the Justice League’s full cooperation, we should be able to capture the flagship. But first, I need more information about what they’re planning. There’s an assembly of important people on that ship tomorrow, and I’ve arranged to be on there.” He grimaced. “Not looking forward to rubbing shoulders with Luthor again, but needs must.” 

“Do you want me to hide in your shadow?” Tanya asked. 

“No.” Bruce said firmly, “You’re my backup plan. If they are going to betray us, Shayera’s shared all of our weaknesses with them. She’ll be ready to contain a demon. How many of your projects haven’t joined the League yet, and are able to contribute?”

Tanya hummed. “Not many.” She admitted, “I can think of… six. Static, Gear, Beast Boy now that the Doom Patrol’s broken up,” Garfield was fourteen, and was currently being paid through a discretionary fund that Bruce gave her to help underage metas to go to high school in Jump City. “That cyborg that still hasn’t picked a name,” Victor Stone had chosen ‘Cyborg’ as his nome de gurre, but she was still holding out hope that she could convince him to change it. He was a very large fifteen year old, was also in high school, and was roommates with Garfield. She had compromised more with them on their living situation than she was really comfortable with, but that’s why she checks up with them more often than her other projects. “Plus Mas y Menos, although I’m not sure they’ll be useful, given that the Thanagarians would likely be ready for speedsters.” They were also eleven, which… well, she was just glad their mother was still around to keep them in line. Wally didn’t interact with them a lot, but what little there was did not help their discipline. 

“Contact them with backchannels, and if the Thanagarians show their hand, figure something out.” Batman instructed, and given that he just literally ordered her to use underage metahumans against a literal alien military, he was a lot more rattled at his daunting odds than he was comfortable saying directly. “Good odds they’ll just get themselves shot if you don’t direct their energy anyway.” He added as an afterthought, which, while not wrong, was distinctly not him telling her to keep them safe. 

Good thing Shayera doesn’t know her actual secret identity.