Steve glances at Cody and correctly realizes what's going on. He thinks *Everything is so Obvious with my powers on... good move Cody* and sets up to cover the door with his rifle.

As soon as he has a good shot Steve attempts to shoot to kill.

Kyria twines her mind with Cody's, slipping into the now-familiar meld with him to lend her own powers to his.

Ulric gets up and says,
"It's over except for executing these poor bastards."

He moves over to Joani.
"We don't know what these creatures went through, people. This is murder. The reality of their cannabalism aside, they are not our villians to put aside for any kind of justice."

With that, he goes back into the Computer room.
"Lorean, please keep us abreast of any other novas coming close, and how is Andrew doing. I'm going to start dismanting the computers her for transportation to you asap."

Joani followed Ulric wordlessly to the computer room and stood guard at the entrance. This wasn't necessary she thought to herself but tried to keep a neutral face. Her eyes wandered through the room until she stopped at Meri.

"I have no objections taking you with us, if that is what you wish. I must warn you, though. There is no going back once you've decided to join us.", she crossed her arms infront of her chest in a typical Supergirl pose and smiled at Meri. "Do you know what you are getting yourself into?"

Meredith stares at the 'superman' girl, honestly shocked.

"Look at me!" she blurts, then sweeps an arm around her den. "Look at where I live! Look at HOW I live! How could anything be worse? At least you have other people...real, actual -people-! If there's strict laws, that's okay! I'll follow them!"

Tears start running down her cheeks. "Please don't leave me here alone. I'll do whatever you want."

Joani immediately dropped her pose and changed her stance to a more open and vulnerable position. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to threaten you, Meredith. Please don’t cry, we’re going to take you with us.”, she walked slowly towards Meri and offered her comfort with opened arms.

“Everything’s going to be alright, I promise.”

After a moment the last of the cannibals crawled back into view in the elevator. He moved woodenly and exited the elevator moving slowly towards Cody. As he did Steve brought his weapon up and calmly put shot right through the man's head dropping him instantly.

A moment later Lorean sends over the link, *The one that escaped appears to be running at high speed and has already left the city and isn't slowing down. I think the threat is over.*


*****

Meanwhile aboard Lorean Morgan retrieved a jar of the stem cells that Andrew needs to live and lacking any better plan pours them into the bed in the last place he saw Andrew's mouth. Without reforming the puddle of nova simply absorbed the cells. Morgan looked to Lorean, "From the readings I'd say he is in a bad state. These readings look like extreme exhaustion and I can tell that he doesn't appear to have any quantum to sustain his form." After a minute or so the readings began to change, "Looks like those stem cells did the trick. He's still pretty bad off, but stable now. Should be just a matter of time before he recovers. I'm going to wait here with Andrew in case he needs me. You can go down to the planet now if you want." She nodded and walked out heading for the transporters.

********
Just as reactions began to the final kill, Lorean ported in and looked around.

Omar send back to Lorien and Cody: Is the final target still on his way up? I killed one of them, but the other got away. If the final guy has been neutralized, can I get a teleport back down please.

"Porting you now."

Omar made the usual two jump trip, first to the teleporter room aboard Lorean then to the destination.

Steve says (both over the link and out loud),

"They're dead. Five out of six anyway and the last ran away. We'll be gone before he comes back."

Steve glances at Cody in half apology and continues,

"Sorry if I jumped the gun a bit there. He was a dangerous feral nova we didn't need and who knew we were going to kill him. It would have been simple torture to keep him around. We have Meri, Lorean, and you Telepaths to find other people if we want to."

Cody nearly jumps out of his skin when the shotgun blast breaks his concentration...and violently severs the connection he had made with the cannibal.

*DAMN IT STEVE!* he "shouts" in the pain of it. *You realize I felt that blast hit as if it was me you were shooting at?! Next time bloody warn me if you're going to do something like that...*

As Andrew's body absorbed the stem cells his color quickly recovers from an ashen gray to a more healthy reddish color. As his color returns so too does his body's ability to recover, process, and store quantum. His vitals, such as they are, begin to normalize. *Thank you Morgan ... I think I can recover now. I just need tome to regenerate and rest.* Even over the link Andrew's "voice" seems weak and conveys a sense of fatigue that would be labeled as clinical exhaustion in a non-nova. *How are the others?*

Meri hesitates, then fell into Joani's arms to sob into her shoulder.

"I thought I was the only one," she sniffles. "I thought it was just me in the whole world."

Omar pokes at the scorch mark in his eufiber, and is massaging a red mark on his knee as well. Despite the burns, he appears to be smiling.

"I hope this old suit of eufiber repairs itself when I have my juice back. These things are really hard to find these days."

Omar notices that Joani is cradling a sobbing Meri. The poor girl was probably still frightened.

Morgan looks down at Andrew with a smile, "Glad to see you are out of the woods my friend. You had us very worried there for a bit." At the question he says, "Don't worry about the others, they are fine. They have difficulty with some cannibals, but they took care of the situation. Lorean just ported down to help with the search for data. You should have some good info here pretty soon if they can get them powered up. For now just get some rest and they'll be back aboard before you know it."


******

Meanwhile back on the surface.

Lorean moves to the computer room and attaches a small hypercombustion generator and powers up the systems. A moment later she calls out to the other room, "Looks like there is some pretty strong security, Cody do you want to assist?"

Meri pulls back from Joani, clearly embarrassed, though also grateful. "Sorry about that. I've been, well, anyway. Sorry. Thanks. I should..."

She hears Lorean talking, and looks around to see where the voice is coming from.

Her face pales.

"Oh. Uh. Wait!" Meri waves a hand and nearly stumbles in her haste to get to the computer room. "Wait! Did I warn you about the bomb? There's a bomb!"

Lorean freezes with her hands poised just above the keyboard about to type. "Bomb?" She quickly scans the room but not seeing anything noticeable looks back to Meri. "What bomb, I don't see anything in the room."

"It's not in the room, it's under the building," Meri explains quickly. "Trying to breach security will set it off. You might be able to break it and stop the explosion, but I know I'm not good enough, so I didn't try. It seems like the only thing it's wired to is the computers, so I left it alone. I was worried the bomb might be sensitive to nova powers, so I didn't try to change it."

Kyria reeled back from the daze of feeling someone die violently in her mind, landing hard enough on her ass for that pain to snap her back out of. She swallowed several times while she got her bearings.

Link: *Do we have what we need? Can we get out of here yet?*

As soon as Joani heard something about a bomb she followed the others into the computer room. "Can you be a little more specific about the location of the bomb? Maybe I can absorb most of the blast effect in case we set it off."

Ulric gives this look to Lorean as she shoulders him aside and then stands up and gets out of her way. Upon hearing the mention of a bomb beneath the complex, he gives a weary grin.

"Makes sense," he says. To Lorean, he adds, "I'll be outside if you need me."

He knows he is one of the best computer people on the team, but not so much with the conter-measures that might be in place. Not needed here, he goes over to Joani and Meri and stands close by.

"Meri, is there anything else about this complex and it's defenses you can tell us?"

Meredith shrugs at Ulric.

"As far as I know, this is all that's left that I couldn't remove, or fix so I controlled. It had already been partly looted when I found it. I don't know why they didn't take everything else."

Steve looks considerably more sorry and says,

"Oops. Sorry about that. Next time I'll know better."

To Meri Steve says, "Welcome to the Lorean. That's the ship's name as well as hers." Steve nods towards Lorean and continues,

"Joani was only partly serious about not being able to leave. We have people do that occasionally. There are communities where we could drop you off if it doesn't work out. Not at what we call home, but much better than this. No offense, but this is hard core bad."

To Omar Steve says, "Morgan could fix that."

(After the news of the bomb)

Steve says,

"Any reason why we can't power down the facility, take everything that isn't nailed down, then dismantle the computers and deal with them on the ship?"

Lorean speaks up, "The networking on these servers is very complex. We could take them but it would be very difficult to put humpty-dumpty back together again. I also suspect that if a server is removed from the cluster it might trigger a security routine when it is powered back up that could cause loss of data. Don't worry though, I can hack this system. It will just take some time."

"I'm not hurt." Omar says as he continues examining his eufiber. "The laser blasts only burned a few hairs. It's my eufiber I'm more worried about."

He raises his head at the mention of a bomb. "If we can find the bomb, Joani or I can take it to the surface. Once it detonates, we have all the time we need to search this place."

Steve tries again,

"That's what I mean. The suit is alive enough that his powers will work on it."

"And maybe everyone but Lorean should take some gear and go back up. I for one am really tired and Meri would probably like to take a look at what we have to offer."

Confused for a moment by the conversations and questions, Meredith waits for a lull before speaking.

"Okay...lemme clear this up. I was kind of in a hurry before, and I didn't explain it right. In the floor, and even in the walls, are a whole bunch of bombs. I started thinking of it as 'the' bomb, but really it's a lot of them. They're all linked together, and meant to go off if anyone tampers with the computers. They'd pretty much wipe out everything in this room if they go off."

She takes a deep breath.

"I'm pretty sure messing with one would set the rest off. Disconnecting anything would too. So I don't know exactly how to disarm them. It's the only security system in here that I haven't been able to deal with, so I just leave it alone."

"Now...what are you talking about? Other communities? Ship? You can teleport around, but you came here over the sea? And...how many communities are there? I've never heard of a single one all this time! You're the first real people I've seen since...since it all started!"

Steve nods as Meredith talks about the bomb(s) and then says,

"In broad strokes and skipping a ton of history and physics, our ship is in orbit. The Lorean is a big ship, think aircraft carrier. We already have roughly two hundred baselines and a dozen novas, we'd be pleased to add you to our number. We weren't here for the war and we're looking into what happened after the fact."

Steve waits a moment to see how Meri reacts to that.

Kyria stood up after a moment and approached the rest of the group, figuring that the quicker they were done with these Proteus computers, the quicker they could leave.

"What about encasing the servers in as much concrete as," she gestures to the new nova, who seems handy with stone, "you can, or whatever better heat-and-pressure resistant material could be used. Then we open a portal as close to the servers as we could, multiple ones if possible, into space. We blow the bombs, let the warps take most of the blast and heat out of the room, and then move the computers." She tilts her head to the side, obviously still thinking. "That is, unless the computers are internally rigged to wipe if the bombs go off." She shrugged and glanced around at the others. "It's a first idea, at least. Anyone got something better?"

He had forgot the eufiber was a living thing. "I guess I could have Morgan fix it for me."

When he heard Meri explain the set up of the various bombs, he figured that his usefulness on the surface was limited. He looked at Meri with a smile, and held out his hand. "I am going to the ship. If you want to come with me, I can show you where you take a bath and get some food."

Before he leaves, Omar says to the rest. "If you need me, let me know."

Meri looks from Steve to Omar, then says, "I'll stay if you think I can help...but I'd love to see a spaceship. It seems impossible though, something that big. Wouldn't we have heard about it being launched? It must have been before the impact."

Then she does a doubletake. "Wait a second. War? What are you talking about?"

Steve replies,

"...I'm working on it... Whatever we do, I think we want to ask Amber whether or not it will work."

Steve says,

"This wasn't... ah. We'd just assumed there was a nuclear war. What did happen here? And how long ago?"

"I will head out then and have Morgan look at my eufiber." He says to the rest of them.

He turns to Steve. "I will tell Amber to come down and help. I will return in an hour or so."

Meri stares at Steve as if he was growing a second head.

"You...must be joking," she says. "Even if you were in space you must have seen it. The -asteroid-. The...it was a giant meteor. Somehow they missed it until just like, a day before it hit. There was no time to stop it."

She looks around at the others, clearly deeply disturbed.

"How could you not KNOW?"

Joani looked at the others and sent over the link *Someone should tell her who we really are. I'm against leaving her here alone to herself. She seems sane to me. I suppose if Cody and Michael scanned her we should be on the safe side that she won't pose any threat to us and our goals. Any objections?*

"That's a long story, Meri. You'll understand once we've explained but we need to solve the problem with the Computer here first. How did you survive?", Joani tried to distract her a little and gave her a confident smile.

Onboard Lorean Andrew rests in a way that any stessed out person would envy, as little more than a pool of gelatinous goo. After a while he requests an update on the situation planetside from Morgan. After assurances that he's just fine Morgan finally relents and fills Andrew in on the issue with the computers and the bombs. Andrew tunes his transmitter and sends the following:

*Hey guys, try not to blow that stuff up ok? I'd rather like to think that maybe I can get up and walk away from this with the data I need. Lets table the issue with the explosives for a minute and try and figure out how to access the data, if we can do that we can just download it and avoid the explosive unpleasantness. What are we looking at? Biometric? That'd be nice and easy but it's probobally still going to need a password or clearance. See if you can't find any bodies down there or maybe in the building proper. Somebody has to have a key card or something that'll give us an idea on what kind of security systems we need to breech.*

Andrew stopped and "sat" there wishing that his taint had never gotten to far progressed. Almost as an aftertought he added, *Oh and I'm ok, just need some rest.* And more of that sweet sweet stem cell cocktail. Seems to do wonders for mind and body. If he could have smiled Andrew would have.

Meri looks away with a haunted expression.

"I...erupted," she says quietly. "I didn't know it at first. There were a few of us...locked in a bunker underground. An old bomb shelter under the school library."

She shakes her head, pushing the memory away.

"After I erupted, I moved around...but only a few novas survived. There was poison gas from the volcano...and ash. Novas that had to eat started...well, they got a bit crazy once they'd stripped the stores. I started looking for a safe place to sleep...and I found this. I still go up sometimes to look around. It's not really safe to try to go far though."

She gives Joani a shy smile. "I guess that's not a problem if you can teleport. You know, and...have a spaceship." Abruptly something dawns on her.

"Are you guys...from another planet?"

Steve sends back,

*We are telling her who and what we are. We're just doing it in digestible amounts. And I agree. At a bare minimum we can relocate her... although I'm not opposed to her joining us.*

Steve says,

"We weren't close to the planet when the meteor hit. We've only known about it for less than a day. And... and I'd like to table this until we get some juice back. Is everyone ok with a rest break?"

Joani smiled at Meri, "That's the closest to the truth I can offer you right now. I'm really sorry that this has to suffice for now."

Joani was still close to Meri and put one hand on the side of her arm, "I'm sorry what happened to you. That must've been a terrible experience for you. Is there anything I can do for you?"

"Meri, I believe you are going to be okay if you come with us. You've been a big help. I take it there is no place on the planet that you want to go to, right? No place is safe with the resources needed to survive that you are aware of?"

* She has fought at our side and given us useful information. It would be wrong for us to leave her behind. She has my vote,*He thinks to the assembled.