~Chapter One~

"Toyman!" Superman thundered, breaking through the outer wall of the warehouse. "Give yourself up!"

"Really?" Toyman's idiotic, screechy voice echoed from every corner of the space. "You've been doing this for how long, and you still think that will work?"

"Not really," Superman muttered to himself, as giant toy soldiers exploded out of a stack of crates on the far left wall.

He took them down easily—apparently Toyman hadn't been able to get his hands on anything worse that synthetic yellow K, which did little more than sting and scratch.

Superman swatted away the tiny yellow bullets and destroyed the robots. As he ripped into the largest one's mechanical heart, mechanical fluids and gaseous dust exploded in his face. He coughed, waved the cloud away, and dove at Toyman, who he could now see hidden two floors underground.

He tore the doll-man away from the laptop he was holding and flew straight up. At a thousand feet, the air got a cold nip to it.

"Where's the cash?" Superman growled, trying for a bare imitation of Batman (how did that man do it?). "And the nanites?"

Toyman swiveled his head 360 degrees, something that had always creeped Clark out. "Round and round and round it goes—where it stops, nobody knows!"

Superman shook him. "Where are they!"

Toyman's unblinking eyes fastened on him. "You want it? Here."

He pressed a button on his belt, something Clark had noticed too late. Across the city, a building exploded, fire raining down on innocent passerby and two men trapped on the top story.

Superman dove back to the warehouse, tied Toyman to the rail, and flew as fast as he could towards the building.

Clark came up to the Watchtower with soot and smoke clinging to his costume. He'd managed to rescue the two men, the nanite blueprints, and most of the building. When he'd come back to the warehouse, Toyman was gone, with the ropes cut. The three million in cash had yet to be recovered.

There was a headache building behind his eyes. Stress, probably—even Kryptonians weren't immune to that. He was going to take a shower and a nap, but the clock in his dorm room buzzed, and he realized it was time for the weekly Founder's meeting.

When he got there everyone else was already seated. Bruce gave him a look that clearly said You're late, but Clark didn't really want to deal with him right now.

Green Lantern started in with a long report on energy consumption. Clark found himself tuning out almost immediately. The dry equations slipped past his ears too fast for him to even want to grasp them.

"Kent," Batman hissed. Clark gave him the harshest glare he could muster, and rubbed his temples where the pain was.

But he gave in and tried to listen attentively, nodding in all the right places and finally Batman let up.

Despite his better judgment, Clark walked with Batman back to his dorm room. Bruce had the list of monitor shifts for the next four months, and he was going through them one by one. Clark was supposed to be approving them, but he couldn't care less.

He realized Batman had stopped talking. Instead Bruce was studying him intently, with the scrunched look that implied that the gears in his head were shifting at high speed.

"What!" Clark snapped, then he sighed. "I'm listening."

"No, you're not," Batman followed him into his dorm room. Clark sat on the bed and stripped off his boots. He caught a glance at the clock—that meeting had taken three hours. He hadn't slept in two days, no wonder he was run down.

Suddenly he felt a cool hand on his forehead.

"Fever," Bruce said, and put his right glove back on.

"I'm not sick," Clark protested even as he coughed and felt a dull pain below his ribcage. He startedto say I don't get sick but had another fit of coughing. Bruce stood over him, not exactly smug, but more than a little goading.

"All right," Clark said, and took off his cape. The ache that had started in his head had migrated to his back and shoulders. He winced, and saw one of Bruce's eye slits open a fraction wider.

"Stop studying me," Clark glared at him, hoping that it looked like he meant it.

"You can think of it as concern if it gives you warm fuzzy feelings," Batman offered, deadpan.

"Your sarcasm is particularly potent today," Clark said, and leaned back against the pillows without even changing into normal clothes. Batman handed him a glass of water and aspirin. "Oh. You do care."

"Lois will really be on my case if you miss the next press meeting," Bruce watched him swallow the capsules.

"Jerk," Clark said, and half-closed his eyes. He heard Bruce take out a tricorder and scan him (it was pretty unusual, being sick) but he didn't much care.

"You can think of it as a joke, if that—"

"Shut up, Bruce," Clark winced, and waited for the pain meds to kick in. Bruce had given him four, hopefully enough to hit his system with some force. The tricorder beeped.

"One hundred and two," Batman said. "Haven't been flying near the sun, have you?"

Clark was about reply, but another, violent fit of coughing seized him, and this time he couldn't stop. Bruce started at the noise and jumped forward, but there wasn't much he could do.

It felt like his ribs were cracking.

When it was finally over, Clark was curled on his side with one arm around his chest. When he pulled the other hand away from his mouth, Bruce flinched.

There was blood splattered on his palm.

"I…"Clark began, and could come up with no way to explain it.

"What happened today?" Bruce asked, in his normally clinical manner. Clark cleaned the blood away with a tissue.

"I fought Toyman," he said. "That's it really. Hardly dangerous at all—he only had some synthetic yellow kryptonite."

"That doesn't affect you very much," Bruce muttered. "Did you breathe any of it in?"

"It exploded in my face. I couldn't help it."

Batman checked him over with his eyes. Apparently Clark passed the exam, because he straightened up. "The particles probably scratched up your throat and weaken you enough that you caught a bug. You should sleep."

"Take some of that advice yourself," Clark said, but Bruce had already walked out, so he slipped under the cover and dozed off.

Somewhere in the highlands of Tibet, a large telescope focused its gaze on the Watchtower. No one knew of this construction, it had been hidden so thoroughly from all the tax agencies of the world.

The construction of it had taken a painstaking four years, with the materials carted up in single truckloads and with only a skeleton crew of drifters working at a time, to avoid scrutiny.

Inside the facility, there was the observation deck and a single basement level more than a hundred feet underground. Inside this level were two supercomputers, whose contents were backed up on no external servers and that were protected by three levels of encryption; and a laboratory. Inside the laboratory stood a single figure, working under the light of a lone fluorescent bulb.

The man was putting the finishing touches on ten years of work: a capsule the size of a shoebox that contained a brilliant, nearly autonomous computer system and a payload of self-replicating machinery.

Sometime this week, the atmosphere would clear enough for him to launch, and then all of his plans, his great ambitions, his dreams, would come to fruition.