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    They say it came out of nowhere: complete, unprecedented destruction. They say a lot of things about T-Day. They can’t all be true…can they?

    The day began with destruction. Most days with Gatekeeper did. Most people said that he couldn’t exist without destruction. White Knight knew better. But White Knight was not most people. He was the sidekick to the greatest superhero in the world: Gatekeeper, the battering man, Atlas, the disaster umbrella. When God wanted to act, he knocked on the door of the Gatekeeper to make sure that it was okay.

    For mere mortals, the sound of a sonic boom was enough. He didn’t actually have to drop out of the sky to stop bank robberies or terrorist acts. The sonic boom terrified them, it let them know he was coming. Most of them threw down their guns and surrendered on the spot. There were even scattered stories of the police forces in urban metropolises creating their own sonic booms, to use to their advantage when Gatekeeper wasn’t anywhere nearby. When someone got ambitious and the big man was needed, there was never a fight. When the blue cape came blowing down among the people, armed thugs with high caliber rifles and anti-tank munitions flew like confetti poppers. Once, someone had tried to use a tank on Gatekeeper. He’d ended up packed tighter than a sardine can, buried under a hundred yards of earth.

    There was no fighting with Gatekeeper, everyone knew that.

    Terrorists knew it.

    Armies knew it.

    Supers knew it.

    Gatekeeper knew it, better than anyone.

    Even White Knight knew it.

    The extraterrestrial beings that descended on Shanghai and sent a population of 24.1 million citizens panicking and running for cover didn’t know. At least, not yet.

    They parked their hovering craft, which was more than a mile wide, directly over the city, close enough to make gravity a problem. The first passerby to see the alien craft had a hard time running away, so much as awkwardly bouncing off the sidewalk and pedaling their feet through the air like they were running on a treadmill. Cars rose from the ground and spun lazy circles in the skies over the streets. The newly weightless had a front row seat to the devastation. The alien ship used a plasma beam as big around as a traffic tunnel. It reached from where they hovered above, down through the Earth’s crust, cutting it like a pizza. It carved into the street, flash-boiling anyone unlucky enough to be within six blocks, and siphoned an arc of land away from its neighbors. The ground opened up and swallowed the southeast end of the city, which slumped gradually to deliver countless people to their death, in Hangzhou Bay. Bodies would wash into the Yellow sea for weeks.

    Thousands of people died in an instant, in the most impossible kind of agony.

    Then the ship from space began to deploy ground troops. They were blobs, really, seven or eight foot space blobs like melted chocolate that could move on its own. None of them looked threatening, so much as amoeba can threaten a human being, but after their hostile greeting, the people of Shanghai fled.

    White Knight arrived first. He had the technology to open wormholes in space. In situations like these, Gatekeeper often sent him in to do recon on their enemies before showing up himself. He opened a portal and walked directly from Gatekeeper’s isolated estate in Cape Cod to the top of the Shanghai Tower, 32 kms away from the devastation. His silver power armor did a lot of things for him: protected him from attack, of course, allowed him to fly, and gave him a high-definition view of the exploding populace of Shanghai.

    Casualty estimation: 35,644 wounded, 15,545, dead. His visor reported. That was a rough estimate, of course, because the numbers were moving too fast for his eyes to get a fix on them.

    He screamed into his visor.

    That got Gatekeeper’s attention.

    White Knight was almost so distracted by this that he forgot to open the portal to allow Gatekeeper to arrive. At the last moment, he tore himself away and threw open a rip in space-time over the city, not wide but wide enough for one man. The sonic boom proceeded him.

    At the sound, the people left to flee turned from terror to outright panic. They began to stampede in all directions, ignoring the ship now. The white-clad blur landed on the roof next to White Knight and materialized as a square-jawed man. He smirked at White Knight, took a moment to comb back his hair, and nodded at his friend.

    “Thank you, Manoj,” he said. It was always first names, with Gatekeeper. It would have sounded odd on their scrambled comm channel for him to say ‘White Knight’, no matter how many times Manoj asked for it. Gatekeeper called the rest of the Moniker Men by their codenames. White Knight got Manoj.

    Manoj sighed and nodded.

    “Of course.”

    “What can you tell me about that thing?” Gatekeeper wanted to know. He pointed in the direction of the invaders, his steely jaw set.

    White Knight queued his visor to scan the ship and provide its analysis.

    “It’s oddly designed,” Manoj reported. “Like a single-celled organism. More of a wobbling blob of Jello than a saucer or a fuselage with wings. It behaves like gel suspended in water, with no visible source of propulsion to keep it overhead. It might have been fascinating to science, had it not immediately announced its intentions as hostile.”

    “All of which I can see with my own eyes,” interrupted Gatekeeper impatiently. “Tell me something I don’t know. Weak spots?”

    “There. Right there, where the troops are emerging,” Manoj replied. “I think it’s kind of a hangar bay.”

    “You think or you know?” asked Gatekeeper.

    White Knight turned to him and shrugged one shoulder.

    “They have to get out of there somehow, boss,” he said. “A door is a door, no matter what galaxy you’re in.”

    That brought back some of Gatekeeper’s smirk.

    “Stay safe, kid,” he told Manoj. “Stay back, where it’s clear. Don’t worry. We’re going to save these poor people.”

    Not 15,000 of them, thought Manoj. He felt sick just for thinking it.

    Gatekeeper nodded at Manoj and shot straight up into the sky. When he reached two or three hundred feet, he boosted himself forward. Seconds later came the sonic boom. White Knight watched him disappear into the enemy ranks, punching shapelessly blobs with enough force to shatter the glass in the buildings around him. It made Manoj cringe. He hated to watch this part. Watching Gatekeeper work was a once-in-a-lifetime event, but the collateral damage was awe-inspiring. If there was anything left of Shanghai when this was done, he would be greatly surprised. So while Gatekeeper was busy cleaning up the advanced troops out here, White Knight decided to get some advanced intel.

    “He’ll call me White Knight after this,” Manoj vowed.

    He took a moment to focus on the supposed hangar bay from which the aliens were emerging, allowed his on-board computer to judge the exact distance for him, and then opened a portal. It was just a tear in front of him: an unnatural thing with jagged edges, hanging in the air just before where he stood. But he could see movement beyond, movement that didn’t correspond with the vista that lay beyond the tear. He could see alien silhouettes, unfamiliar bodies in unfamiliar workstations. He got a running start and jumped through the tear.

    The interior of the alien craft came up before him. The outside may have looked like a blob, but the interior was more mechanical: wires hung in odd tangles all around him, keyboards and viewing screens were scattered throughout. It was clustered, though, unorganized. They hadn’t bothered to hide away any of the inner workings. It was almost a maintenance tunnel, he decided. He ducked under low hanging cables and walked further inside.

    The only illumination was from long banks of red lights overhead. They lit rows upon rows of tubs that were big enough to fit two grown men inside. His visor could make little sense of it, but he had little need for analytics. As he watched, rows of seven foot blobs systematically emerged from the tubs, surging up from inside and worming their way out onto the floor. He moved quickly to one side and hid behind a bundle of cables. They didn’t see him. Or they couldn’t see him. They had nothing that his mind would classify as eyes.

    He waited there until he could judge their pattern of emergence, and then he opened long tears beneath the tubs. With no connection to the floor to support them, the alien factory dropped down through White Knight’s portals. The other end of the portals opened somewhere high in Earth's atmosphere. Gatekeeper would notice their fall and take care of them. It was one of his favorite games: dispatching enemies that Manoj had portaled high into the air. He didn’t give it another thought, simply walking past the empty space where the tubs used to be and up to one of the viewscreens. The echo of his boots on the floor of the newly empty bay was weird, and it made him anxious. He would have to make this quick, before some other alien noticed that their soldier-factory was no longer producing cannon fodder.

    “But why are you here?” Manoj asked aloud, as he approached the viewscreen.

    To his surprise, the viewscreens were already going. There were dozens of them, each aimed toward the gap where the pods used to be. He approached, under the assumption that his on-board computer was going to have to do most of the work for him, in translation and in producing an image that he could understand. Still, he had the sneaking suspicion that this projection, whatever it might be, was going to be invaluable intel. And then he realized what was on them.

    The first images were Gatekeeper. A half dozen of his fights, just like the one going on outside, were cut together in a loop of machismo and collateral damage. It was exactly the scene that he’d been hoping to avoid. Here, when Gatekeeper had fought an AI from North Korea bent on forcing the West into submission, there, when Gatekeeper stopped a lethal meteor shower from crashing into population centers. White Knight remembered these occasions and he cringed again, as he had then, as he watched Gatekeeper smashing his way through conflict, unaware of the consequences of his actions. As he watched, his visor was automatically running estimates: by the end of the ninth clip, the death toll from Gatekeeper’s intervention had soared past 100,000.

    No way, thought Manoj, his mouth falling open. That many? In ten years?

    Then he realized that the clips were in chronological order, from Gatekeeper’s appearance to recruiting White Knight as his sidekick, through to the present day. And as of the ninth clip, all of the fights had occurred in the first three years. He thought he might be sick again.

    “Manoj,” came Gatekeeper’s voice over the radio. “Where are you? I thought I told you to stay outside.”

    “Recon,” Manoj replied. His voice cracked. He cleared his throat and started again, not wanting Gatekeeper to notice the discrepancy. “Recon, boss.”

    “You mean you’re inside that thing?!” demanded the senior hero.

    “Yes,” Manoj confirmed. His eyes were glued to the screen. Fifteen clips in now, and another 30,000 casualties. How had nobody noticed this before?! “They’re watching you. They have battle footage playing on a loop in here. I’m going to see if I can-”

    He was interrupted by the tearing of metal. The whole ship rocked under his feet and White Knight smacked up against the far wall, armor or no. The wall buckled inward and then snapped with the force of a hurricane. Gatekeeper found White Knight curled in a ball in one of the back corners, cursing under his breath.

    “I thought I told you to stay outside,” repeated Gatekeeper. He was angry. He didn’t raise his voice, but White Knight could tell it anyway, by the rise of his puffed-up chest.

    “Sorry,” White Knight apologized. He climbed to his feet, fighting a rising surge of vertigo, and walked back over to the viewscreens. After a lasting second of frozen image, the fights started up again, back at fight one. Gatekeeper joined him there, not ready to give up on his lecture.

    “I’m not joking, Manoj,” Gatekeeper said. “You could have been hurt. You could have met all kinds of danger in here.”

    “All the danger was outside, chasing you,” replied White Knight. “I thought this was the safest place to be.”

    “Let’s go,” Gatekeeper commanded. An iron grip landed on White Knight’s arm. He could feel it through the armor. If Gatekeeper squeezed just a little harder, he could tear the arm straight off his body, defenses or no. He flinched and ducked his head, almost imperceptibly. But Gatekeeper saw it. Gatekeeper frowned and looked back at the viewscreen. And he let go of Manoj's arm. “What’s wrong?”

    “Look at this,” said White Knight. “I think they compiled it from Earth sources.”

    “So what?” Gatekeeper shrugged. “Watching tape on your opponents. Every team in American football does it.”

    He paused for a long time.

    “100,000?” he asked, stunned. “That can’t be right. No. No way.”

    “I don’t think they’re looking for your weaknesses,” replied White Knight. “Look.”

    Next to the fight footage, there was a diagram of a very recognizable Earth. When the loop began again, a red spot began in New York, at the site of Gatekeeper’s first fight. The spot spread outward until it incorporated more and more of the city. Then another red spot at the second site, and so on, until the whole globe was drowning in red. But it didn’t stop there. As the footage went on, the red expanded past the world, out into the galaxy, and beyond. White Knight couldn’t gauge their numbers, but he was willing to bet that the prediction was bleak.

    “They’re afraid of you,” he whispered.

    “That’s ridiculous,” Gatekeeper laughed. “Beyond the galaxy? I’m quite content where I am. This is an alarmist’s view.”

    “I don’t know about that,” interrupted White Knight. He turned his head and looked at Gatekeeper, anger flowing from his visor. “15,000 people are dead today, already.”

    “15,000 people that they killed,” Gatekeeper pointed out. “That the aliens killed, not me. The aliens that are supposedly afraid of me.”

    “Maybe if you’d shown a little restraint, they wouldn’t have to be afraid of you!” growled White Knight. “Maybe 15,000 people would still be alive! Maybe 100,000!”

    “Manoj,” Gatekeeper sighed, “You are blowing this out of proportion. I save people. I always have. For more than a decade now. One piece of alien propaganda is going to change that? Do you not want to save people?”

    “Call me Manoj one more time,” White Knight dared. His hands were curled at his sides now. His armor began to charge to its fullest. The dull hum of electronic energy rose in the confined space. “This is not alien propaganda. This is the cry of a terrified people! They sent their soldiers to confine a megaton warhead that kills his own people, before he can get to their planet.”

    “I save people-”

    “You don’t save people!” White Knight yelled. “You don’t save people, you stop the threat, whatever the cost. It’s not the same thing. The cost is always high. Too high. I remember these moments, Gatekeeper. I doubt our numbers differ much from theirs.”

    “We do good work,” insisted Gatekeeper. He eyed White Knight’s clenched fist and his eyes again began to shine with righteous fury. “I don’t understand where this is coming from.”

    “No, we don’t! Don’t lump me in with this,” White Knight raged. “I was the recon boy! I never spread this kind of devastation! This is your show, Gatekeeper. You never let anyone forget it. Now you want to share the credit?! Forget it!”

    “Fine. You had no part. Whatever you have to tell yourself to soothe your wounded conscience,” replied Gatekeeper. “Just remember: you were right there with me. You could have stopped me, talked me out of it, offered alternate strategies. And you didn’t. I might as well have been out there on my own.”

    “I was right there with you while you destroyed as much as you saved,” White Knight told him. Regret hung in the air between them. He shook his head. “The only thing that you ever held back was me.”

    “If we’re done here,” Gatekeeper said, “There are soldiers out there to take care of.”

    “Stand down,” said White Knight.

    Gatekeeper looked up in surprise.

    The steely armor was facing him now, squaring off. Manoj had made his decision and he was set on it. He could see Gatekeeper thinking it over, trying to decide whether or not White Knight was worth being afraid of. Ultimately, Gatekeeper must have decided that White Knight wasn’t, because he turned his back and hopped out through the hole he’d created smashing in the ship’s wall.

    “Good luck, Manoj.”

    White Knight powered his legs and tackled Gatekeeper out of the air. He hit just behind Gatekeeper’s legs, screaming his fury. The two Moniker Men landed in a heap thirty feet below, on ground strewn with rubble and alien slime.

    Portal him, his mind screamed at him. Don’t tackle him. He’s-

    The very last thing that Manoj saw was Gatekeeper’s fist. His head was plowed clean off his shoulders and landed across the street. Gatekeeper watched the helmet go bouncing away on the sidewalk, trailing a grizzly stream of blood and brain matter. It took a minute of standing there, blood and cartilage on his bare fist, for Gatekeeper to realize what he’d done. He stood there panting and staring down at the decapitated body of his kid sidekick. Then hot tears sprang to his eyes.

    “No,” he muttered aloud. “No, I didn’t mean…it was a reflex! I was defending myself…I was…”

    He could already hear the resolve falling out of his voice.

    “But he couldn’t have hurt me,” he whispered. He shook his head, unable to cope. “What have I done…”

    The endless loop of his carnage played before his eyes. The video from the alien ship was burned into his mind, and he couldn’t escape it. He watched the buildings fall, and the death toll rise, and all the while Manoj yelled at him about being more careful.

    “He…was…right…”

    When he could bear it no longer, he threw back his head and let out an almighty scream that echoed around the devastated city like the call of death. Then he shot straight up into the sky, aiming for the sun. The last the people of Shanghai heard of the great Gatekeeper was the sonic boom as he headed for upper atmosphere.

*                      *                      *

     In an isolated outpost in a far-off galaxy, a dozen aliens watched the live feed of their first landing party on a planet that had produced many beings of unimaginable power. They watched as two such beings, a humanoid clothed in white and blue and a robot, boarded their ship and exchanged words. Their argument grew louder and louder until they began to hit one another. The battle was decided in one decisive blow. Then the creature, the one left standing, flew straight up through their atmosphere and into the sun, perishing quickly in a burning ball of plasma.

    One alien looked at another. Then another head turned his way. And then another, until all eleven heads were looking in the direction of the twelfth. Then piles of coins began to fly in his direction. The angry eleven stalked off to mutter and discuss what they’d seen while the twelfth lavished in his riches. He gathered up the bags of coin and shuffled over to one corner in order to count.

    And then he began to cackle.

Description
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    They say it came out of nowhere: complete, unprecedented destruction. They say a lot of things about T-Day. They can’t all be true…can they?

    The day began with destruction. Most days with Gatekeeper did. Most people said that he couldn’t exist without destruction. White Knight knew better. But White Knight was not most people. He was the sidekick to the greatest superhero in the world: Gatekeeper, the battering man, Atlas, the disaster umbrella. When God wanted to act, he knocked on the door of the Gatekeeper to make sure that it was okay.

    For mere mortals, the sound of a sonic boom was enough. He didn’t actually have to drop out of the sky to stop bank robberies or terrorist acts. The sonic boom terrified them, it let them know he was coming. Most of them threw down their guns and surrendered on the spot. There were even scattered stories of the police forces in urban metropolises creating their own sonic booms, to use to their advantage when Gatekeeper wasn’t anywhere nearby. When someone got ambitious and the big man was needed, there was never a fight. When the blue cape came blowing down among the people, armed thugs with high caliber rifles and anti-tank munitions flew like confetti poppers. Once, someone had tried to use a tank on Gatekeeper. He’d ended up packed tighter than a sardine can, buried under a hundred yards of earth.

    There was no fighting with Gatekeeper, everyone knew that.

    Terrorists knew it.

    Armies knew it.

    Supers knew it.

    Gatekeeper knew it, better than anyone.

    Even White Knight knew it.

    The extraterrestrial beings that descended on Shanghai and sent a population of 24.1 million citizens panicking and running for cover didn’t know. At least, not yet.

    They parked their hovering craft, which was more than a mile wide, directly over the city, close enough to make gravity a problem. The first passerby to see the alien craft had a hard time running away, so much as awkwardly bouncing off the sidewalk and pedaling their feet through the air like they were running on a treadmill. Cars rose from the ground and spun lazy circles in the skies over the streets. The newly weightless had a front row seat to the devastation. The alien ship used a plasma beam as big around as a traffic tunnel. It reached from where they hovered above, down through the Earth’s crust, cutting it like a pizza. It carved into the street, flash-boiling anyone unlucky enough to be within six blocks, and siphoned an arc of land away from its neighbors. The ground opened up and swallowed the southeast end of the city, which slumped gradually to deliver countless people to their death, in Hangzhou Bay. Bodies would wash into the Yellow sea for weeks.

    Thousands of people died in an instant, in the most impossible kind of agony.

    Then the ship from space began to deploy ground troops. They were blobs, really, seven or eight foot space blobs like melted chocolate that could move on its own. None of them looked threatening, so much as amoeba can threaten a human being, but after their hostile greeting, the people of Shanghai fled.

    White Knight arrived first. He had the technology to open wormholes in space. In situations like these, Gatekeeper often sent him in to do recon on their enemies before showing up himself. He opened a portal and walked directly from Gatekeeper’s isolated estate in Cape Cod to the top of the Shanghai Tower, 32 kms away from the devastation. His silver power armor did a lot of things for him: protected him from attack, of course, allowed him to fly, and gave him a high-definition view of the exploding populace of Shanghai.

    Casualty estimation: 35,644 wounded, 15,545, dead. His visor reported. That was a rough estimate, of course, because the numbers were moving too fast for his eyes to get a fix on them.

    He screamed into his visor.

    That got Gatekeeper’s attention.

    White Knight was almost so distracted by this that he forgot to open the portal to allow Gatekeeper to arrive. At the last moment, he tore himself away and threw open a rip in space-time over the city, not wide but wide enough for one man. The sonic boom proceeded him.

    At the sound, the people left to flee turned from terror to outright panic. They began to stampede in all directions, ignoring the ship now. The white-clad blur landed on the roof next to White Knight and materialized as a square-jawed man. He smirked at White Knight, took a moment to comb back his hair, and nodded at his friend.

    “Thank you, Manoj,” he said. It was always first names, with Gatekeeper. It would have sounded odd on their scrambled comm channel for him to say ‘White Knight’, no matter how many times Manoj asked for it. Gatekeeper called the rest of the Moniker Men by their codenames. White Knight got Manoj.

    Manoj sighed and nodded.

    “Of course.”

    “What can you tell me about that thing?” Gatekeeper wanted to know. He pointed in the direction of the invaders, his steely jaw set.

    White Knight queued his visor to scan the ship and provide its analysis.

    “It’s oddly designed,” Manoj reported. “Like a single-celled organism. More of a wobbling blob of Jello than a saucer or a fuselage with wings. It behaves like gel suspended in water, with no visible source of propulsion to keep it overhead. It might have been fascinating to science, had it not immediately announced its intentions as hostile.”

    “All of which I can see with my own eyes,” interrupted Gatekeeper impatiently. “Tell me something I don’t know. Weak spots?”

    “There. Right there, where the troops are emerging,” Manoj replied. “I think it’s kind of a hangar bay.”

    “You think or you know?” asked Gatekeeper.

    White Knight turned to him and shrugged one shoulder.

    “They have to get out of there somehow, boss,” he said. “A door is a door, no matter what galaxy you’re in.”

    That brought back some of Gatekeeper’s smirk.

    “Stay safe, kid,” he told Manoj. “Stay back, where it’s clear. Don’t worry. We’re going to save these poor people.”

    Not 15,000 of them, thought Manoj. He felt sick just for thinking it.

    Gatekeeper nodded at Manoj and shot straight up into the sky. When he reached two or three hundred feet, he boosted himself forward. Seconds later came the sonic boom. White Knight watched him disappear into the enemy ranks, punching shapelessly blobs with enough force to shatter the glass in the buildings around him. It made Manoj cringe. He hated to watch this part. Watching Gatekeeper work was a once-in-a-lifetime event, but the collateral damage was awe-inspiring. If there was anything left of Shanghai when this was done, he would be greatly surprised. So while Gatekeeper was busy cleaning up the advanced troops out here, White Knight decided to get some advanced intel.

    “He’ll call me White Knight after this,” Manoj vowed.

    He took a moment to focus on the supposed hangar bay from which the aliens were emerging, allowed his on-board computer to judge the exact distance for him, and then opened a portal. It was just a tear in front of him: an unnatural thing with jagged edges, hanging in the air just before where he stood. But he could see movement beyond, movement that didn’t correspond with the vista that lay beyond the tear. He could see alien silhouettes, unfamiliar bodies in unfamiliar workstations. He got a running start and jumped through the tear.

    The interior of the alien craft came up before him. The outside may have looked like a blob, but the interior was more mechanical: wires hung in odd tangles all around him, keyboards and viewing screens were scattered throughout. It was clustered, though, unorganized. They hadn’t bothered to hide away any of the inner workings. It was almost a maintenance tunnel, he decided. He ducked under low hanging cables and walked further inside.

    The only illumination was from long banks of red lights overhead. They lit rows upon rows of tubs that were big enough to fit two grown men inside. His visor could make little sense of it, but he had little need for analytics. As he watched, rows of seven foot blobs systematically emerged from the tubs, surging up from inside and worming their way out onto the floor. He moved quickly to one side and hid behind a bundle of cables. They didn’t see him. Or they couldn’t see him. They had nothing that his mind would classify as eyes.

    He waited there until he could judge their pattern of emergence, and then he opened long tears beneath the tubs. With no connection to the floor to support them, the alien factory dropped down through White Knight’s portals. The other end of the portals opened somewhere high in Earth's atmosphere. Gatekeeper would notice their fall and take care of them. It was one of his favorite games: dispatching enemies that Manoj had portaled high into the air. He didn’t give it another thought, simply walking past the empty space where the tubs used to be and up to one of the viewscreens. The echo of his boots on the floor of the newly empty bay was weird, and it made him anxious. He would have to make this quick, before some other alien noticed that their soldier-factory was no longer producing cannon fodder.

    “But why are you here?” Manoj asked aloud, as he approached the viewscreen.

    To his surprise, the viewscreens were already going. There were dozens of them, each aimed toward the gap where the pods used to be. He approached, under the assumption that his on-board computer was going to have to do most of the work for him, in translation and in producing an image that he could understand. Still, he had the sneaking suspicion that this projection, whatever it might be, was going to be invaluable intel. And then he realized what was on them.

    The first images were Gatekeeper. A half dozen of his fights, just like the one going on outside, were cut together in a loop of machismo and collateral damage. It was exactly the scene that he’d been hoping to avoid. Here, when Gatekeeper had fought an AI from North Korea bent on forcing the West into submission, there, when Gatekeeper stopped a lethal meteor shower from crashing into population centers. White Knight remembered these occasions and he cringed again, as he had then, as he watched Gatekeeper smashing his way through conflict, unaware of the consequences of his actions. As he watched, his visor was automatically running estimates: by the end of the ninth clip, the death toll from Gatekeeper’s intervention had soared past 100,000.

    No way, thought Manoj, his mouth falling open. That many? In ten years?

    Then he realized that the clips were in chronological order, from Gatekeeper’s appearance to recruiting White Knight as his sidekick, through to the present day. And as of the ninth clip, all of the fights had occurred in the first three years. He thought he might be sick again.

    “Manoj,” came Gatekeeper’s voice over the radio. “Where are you? I thought I told you to stay outside.”

    “Recon,” Manoj replied. His voice cracked. He cleared his throat and started again, not wanting Gatekeeper to notice the discrepancy. “Recon, boss.”

    “You mean you’re inside that thing?!” demanded the senior hero.

    “Yes,” Manoj confirmed. His eyes were glued to the screen. Fifteen clips in now, and another 30,000 casualties. How had nobody noticed this before?! “They’re watching you. They have battle footage playing on a loop in here. I’m going to see if I can-”

    He was interrupted by the tearing of metal. The whole ship rocked under his feet and White Knight smacked up against the far wall, armor or no. The wall buckled inward and then snapped with the force of a hurricane. Gatekeeper found White Knight curled in a ball in one of the back corners, cursing under his breath.

    “I thought I told you to stay outside,” repeated Gatekeeper. He was angry. He didn’t raise his voice, but White Knight could tell it anyway, by the rise of his puffed-up chest.

    “Sorry,” White Knight apologized. He climbed to his feet, fighting a rising surge of vertigo, and walked back over to the viewscreens. After a lasting second of frozen image, the fights started up again, back at fight one. Gatekeeper joined him there, not ready to give up on his lecture.

    “I’m not joking, Manoj,” Gatekeeper said. “You could have been hurt. You could have met all kinds of danger in here.”

    “All the danger was outside, chasing you,” replied White Knight. “I thought this was the safest place to be.”

    “Let’s go,” Gatekeeper commanded. An iron grip landed on White Knight’s arm. He could feel it through the armor. If Gatekeeper squeezed just a little harder, he could tear the arm straight off his body, defenses or no. He flinched and ducked his head, almost imperceptibly. But Gatekeeper saw it. Gatekeeper frowned and looked back at the viewscreen. And he let go of Manoj's arm. “What’s wrong?”

    “Look at this,” said White Knight. “I think they compiled it from Earth sources.”

    “So what?” Gatekeeper shrugged. “Watching tape on your opponents. Every team in American football does it.”

    He paused for a long time.

    “100,000?” he asked, stunned. “That can’t be right. No. No way.”

    “I don’t think they’re looking for your weaknesses,” replied White Knight. “Look.”

    Next to the fight footage, there was a diagram of a very recognizable Earth. When the loop began again, a red spot began in New York, at the site of Gatekeeper’s first fight. The spot spread outward until it incorporated more and more of the city. Then another red spot at the second site, and so on, until the whole globe was drowning in red. But it didn’t stop there. As the footage went on, the red expanded past the world, out into the galaxy, and beyond. White Knight couldn’t gauge their numbers, but he was willing to bet that the prediction was bleak.

    “They’re afraid of you,” he whispered.

    “That’s ridiculous,” Gatekeeper laughed. “Beyond the galaxy? I’m quite content where I am. This is an alarmist’s view.”

    “I don’t know about that,” interrupted White Knight. He turned his head and looked at Gatekeeper, anger flowing from his visor. “15,000 people are dead today, already.”

    “15,000 people that they killed,” Gatekeeper pointed out. “That the aliens killed, not me. The aliens that are supposedly afraid of me.”

    “Maybe if you’d shown a little restraint, they wouldn’t have to be afraid of you!” growled White Knight. “Maybe 15,000 people would still be alive! Maybe 100,000!”

    “Manoj,” Gatekeeper sighed, “You are blowing this out of proportion. I save people. I always have. For more than a decade now. One piece of alien propaganda is going to change that? Do you not want to save people?”

    “Call me Manoj one more time,” White Knight dared. His hands were curled at his sides now. His armor began to charge to its fullest. The dull hum of electronic energy rose in the confined space. “This is not alien propaganda. This is the cry of a terrified people! They sent their soldiers to confine a megaton warhead that kills his own people, before he can get to their planet.”

    “I save people-”

    “You don’t save people!” White Knight yelled. “You don’t save people, you stop the threat, whatever the cost. It’s not the same thing. The cost is always high. Too high. I remember these moments, Gatekeeper. I doubt our numbers differ much from theirs.”

    “We do good work,” insisted Gatekeeper. He eyed White Knight’s clenched fist and his eyes again began to shine with righteous fury. “I don’t understand where this is coming from.”

    “No, we don’t! Don’t lump me in with this,” White Knight raged. “I was the recon boy! I never spread this kind of devastation! This is your show, Gatekeeper. You never let anyone forget it. Now you want to share the credit?! Forget it!”

    “Fine. You had no part. Whatever you have to tell yourself to soothe your wounded conscience,” replied Gatekeeper. “Just remember: you were right there with me. You could have stopped me, talked me out of it, offered alternate strategies. And you didn’t. I might as well have been out there on my own.”

    “I was right there with you while you destroyed as much as you saved,” White Knight told him. Regret hung in the air between them. He shook his head. “The only thing that you ever held back was me.”

    “If we’re done here,” Gatekeeper said, “There are soldiers out there to take care of.”

    “Stand down,” said White Knight.

    Gatekeeper looked up in surprise.

    The steely armor was facing him now, squaring off. Manoj had made his decision and he was set on it. He could see Gatekeeper thinking it over, trying to decide whether or not White Knight was worth being afraid of. Ultimately, Gatekeeper must have decided that White Knight wasn’t, because he turned his back and hopped out through the hole he’d created smashing in the ship’s wall.

    “Good luck, Manoj.”

    White Knight powered his legs and tackled Gatekeeper out of the air. He hit just behind Gatekeeper’s legs, screaming his fury. The two Moniker Men landed in a heap thirty feet below, on ground strewn with rubble and alien slime.

    Portal him, his mind screamed at him. Don’t tackle him. He’s-

    The very last thing that Manoj saw was Gatekeeper’s fist. His head was plowed clean off his shoulders and landed across the street. Gatekeeper watched the helmet go bouncing away on the sidewalk, trailing a grizzly stream of blood and brain matter. It took a minute of standing there, blood and cartilage on his bare fist, for Gatekeeper to realize what he’d done. He stood there panting and staring down at the decapitated body of his kid sidekick. Then hot tears sprang to his eyes.

    “No,” he muttered aloud. “No, I didn’t mean…it was a reflex! I was defending myself…I was…”

    He could already hear the resolve falling out of his voice.

    “But he couldn’t have hurt me,” he whispered. He shook his head, unable to cope. “What have I done…”

    The endless loop of his carnage played before his eyes. The video from the alien ship was burned into his mind, and he couldn’t escape it. He watched the buildings fall, and the death toll rise, and all the while Manoj yelled at him about being more careful.

    “He…was…right…”

    When he could bear it no longer, he threw back his head and let out an almighty scream that echoed around the devastated city like the call of death. Then he shot straight up into the sky, aiming for the sun. The last the people of Shanghai heard of the great Gatekeeper was the sonic boom as he headed for upper atmosphere.

*                      *                      *

     In an isolated outpost in a far-off galaxy, a dozen aliens watched the live feed of their first landing party on a planet that had produced many beings of unimaginable power. They watched as two such beings, a humanoid clothed in white and blue and a robot, boarded their ship and exchanged words. Their argument grew louder and louder until they began to hit one another. The battle was decided in one decisive blow. Then the creature, the one left standing, flew straight up through their atmosphere and into the sun, perishing quickly in a burning ball of plasma.

    One alien looked at another. Then another head turned his way. And then another, until all eleven heads were looking in the direction of the twelfth. Then piles of coins began to fly in his direction. The angry eleven stalked off to mutter and discuss what they’d seen while the twelfth lavished in his riches. He gathered up the bags of coin and shuffled over to one corner in order to count.

    And then he began to cackle.