The Legends of Forever by Barry Lyga (free children's ebooks online .TXT) 📗

disks hovered nearby, an array of purple and red and white flora spilling from it. Alien plants, she’d been told, from a world called Phlon.

Flan? she’d asked, imagining a quivering, gelatinous Mexican dessert. Only the first of many comedic and idiotic lingual collisions between her and the members of the Legion of Super-Heroes, her rescuers, her landlords, her guides through the new world of the thirty-first century.

The bed itself was a cloud. Floating a couple of feet from the floor, it was pure white and felt like silk, cotton, and pudding whenever she climbed into it. She’d been skeptical at first—the thing didn’t look to have the structural integrity to hold a teddy bear, much less a human body—but it was the most comfortable bed she’d ever slept in. It wrapped diaphanous yet sturdy and supportive clots of cloudy material around her, conforming to her body in such a way as to obviate the need for blankets or pillows.

Welcome to the future.

She rolled to her side, and the bed accommodated by opening a little niche for her to swing her legs out. “Gideon, what’s the weather today?” she asked the air.

A small panel of yellow light swimming with orange bubbles throbbed along the wall. “Breep! Captain Lance,” said an almost too-soothing voice, “I’ve told you before that you need not use a trigger phrase to activate me. I use a phonemic processing algorithm along with voice timbre analysis and psycho-historical data to determine if you are speaking to me or to a biological. The weather has been programmed for sun with winds from the northeast at roughly three miles per hour. A nice breeze. Temperature will vary between sixty-two degrees and seventy-one degrees Fahrenheit. Also, my name is Computo, not Gideon. Breep!”

The Legion headquarters’ built-in AI was a million times more sophisticated than the Gideon AI that Barry Allen had developed/would develop at some point in her past/his future. It automatically spoke to her in what the Legionnaires called “ancient English” (a tongue in which they were all fluent, thank God), and even converted thirty-first-century measurements from something called the Coluan Standard Measurement Scale to things like miles, hours, and feet for the benefit of her cave-woman self.

As miraculous as this technology was, though, there were certain things it could not do.

Levering herself off the bed, she did a couple of quick squats, just to get the blood flowing. And then she asked the question she’d asked every morning since arriving here in the thirty-first century more than a month ago:

“How’s Zari?”

Sara thought she detected a momentary hesitation before Computo responded to her question. A pause of compassion? Or just a rare, microsecond-long glitch in the AI? No way to tell.

“There has been no change in Ms. Tomaz’s status,” Computo announced. “Breep! According to telemetry from the medical bay and Dr. Gym’ll’s notes, she is still comatose. I can, however, inform you that Mr. Palmer and Mr. Rory are convalescing well and expected to make a full recovery.”

Sara sighed heavily. Her usual morning workout routine suddenly seemed . . . pointless.

Over a month ago—on her own personal timeline—she and the Legends had been within the temporal zone, the “space” they used to travel through time on the Waverider. An alert had suddenly rung out, and they’d experienced a burst of tachyons from the far, far future. Something very powerful was moving backward through time at incredible speed. What, where, and why, they had no time to determine.

The next thing she knew, the ship itself was caught up in the temporal ebb tide of the tachyon burst. Trapped in a time bolus, the ship accelerated into the far future, on a collision course with some sort of barrier across the time stream.

Sara had had mere seconds to figure out what to do, to figure out how to save her crew before they smashed into the barrier at the speed of light.

When she closed her eyes to sleep at night, she could still remember Gideon counting down, the moments to impact. Could still hear Ray yelling from his seat in the cockpit . . .

She’d made the only tenable decision: At the last possible instant, she’d cut the Waverider’s time circuits completely, using a kill switch to shut off the ship’s time travel abilities. Usually, the Waverider gently decelerated from time travel mode to space travel mode.

Not this time.

Killing the time travel circuits had jerked the ship out of the temporal zone and back into real space with all the violence of a greyhound running full tilt and then hitting the limit of its choke chain. The ship itself could scarcely handle the stresses of the drop into real time; it broke apart, exploding its remains and expelling its crew over a swath of time and space.

Sara and Zari had ended up on Earth’s moon in the year 3005. Fortunately for them, the moon had been colonized by then and had a rudimentary atmosphere even outside the colony domes. Unfortunately, Zari took a serious blow to the head and had yet to wake up.

Ray had “landed” three days later on the Saturnian moon of Titan, where the local telepaths quickly located him. Mick had ended up farthest away, arriving two weeks later on the ruins of the planet Trom, where apparently the elemental structure was quite unstable and no longer suitable for habitation.

The Legion of Super-Heroes (and yeah, they actually called themselves that . . . although who was she to judge, leading a group called the Legends of Tomorrow?) had received various temporal alerts when the wreckage of the Waverider exploded out of the temporal zone and into real space. They’d scrambled teams across the galaxy to rescue the time-lost refugees.

But still so many of the Legends were lost, missing somewhere in time: Mona Wu. Nate Heywood. Charlie. John Constantine. All of them scattered across time.

Mick and Ray would recover. Even thirty-first-century science couldn’t say what would happen to Zari. And the others? No one could say for sure. Sara knew they were “out there.” Somewhere.

Slipping into