"I mean, rescuing the Forever Children from Apokolips must have irritated him a bit."
Barda's face hardens. "I doubt it."
I'm sure whoever was in charge of them at the time was
upset. But it would hardly be a blip in Darkseid's radar.
"Powerful aliens attacking Apokolips and taking his stuff wouldn't irritate him?"
"Not unless it somehow made him know less about the Anti-Life. He'd already destroyed Infinity Man. Beyond that, all they had to offer him was another lesson in how to break a New God's spirit. Letting them go and learn to hope again will just make it more educational when he finally gets them."
Gee, such a long-term view of things... He makes it sound
inevitable.
"So you don't think it was him?"
"If-" And Mr. Free is now out of his restraints, glancing at the timer with an air of mild disappointment. "-he were on Earth, we'd all know about it."
I'll bet he's annoyed because he was
one second slower than his personal best...
"You sure? I'm sure that Apokolips has hush tubes, and… We wouldn't necessarily spot them if he came through somewhere remote. We didn't know about Desaad for months."
Mr. Free shakes his head. "Darkseid's telos won't allow it. When he moves, there's nothing subtle about it. Desaad can sneak around. Darkseid… Can't."
Telos being his goal or raison d'etre. In this case,
Tyranny. And a quiet,
discreet tyranny is not his style. Like the classic quote about three billion voices and six billion fists, he
needs to be seen as total dominion, absolute rule, the master of all things...
"Okay, what about someone taking… Ms. Carlyle to Apokolips for an anti-lifing?"
"I… It's not impossible. But the demons didn't say anything about going to Apokolips, did they?"
...OL didn't
ask. But they certainly didn't seem as.. broken.. as you'd expect something exposed to Darkseid to be.
"No. They didn't. But I didn't specifically ask, and they are demons." Barda and Mr. Free share a glance. "No? Not something that could happen?"
Barda shakes her head. "Darkseid has captured magic creatures before. If he had broken these demons, they would not have recovered so easily."
Which isn't good to hear. I shudder to imagine Apokalips' Hell, if it even
has one.
"But the demons said-."
"Demons can be broken." Another nod from Barda. "I have seen demons afflicted by the Anti-Life."
Please, don't elaborate... I don't think we want those nightmares.
"The demons said that their voices went somewhere, and a dull echo came back."
Mr. Free frowns. "Yeah, that… Sounds a little like Anti-Life, but… Anti-Life is a memetic hazard. You can't touch a mind infected with it without getting infected as well." He considers me for a moment. "Usually. You remember our fight with The Key?"
When OL no-sold it by sheer obliviousness and Avaricious focus?
Indeed.
"Yes. So, someone else acting as a relay, like he was? None of the survivors described him the way the demons described whoever this was."
He shrugs. "It might not even have been that at all. There are other ways to control someone's mind. Did you get someone to do a telepathic scan or make a detailed thaumic map?"
...Well, now OL sounds a bit
lazy. Then again, he's hardly equipped to do
that sort of thing.
"No."
Barda nods. "I have seen legions of Justified soldiers. This woman did not behave like them. She had no helmet to keep her connected to the broadcast or give her orders. No New God of Apokolips was giving her commands. We have seen no sign of other New Gods on Earth. I don't think this was Anti-Life."
...Unless they've discovered a new way to employ it without any of those things.

Which is far more
terrifying.
"Of course, this is Earth. If anywhere could find some new way to administer an Anti-Life infection, this would be the place."
I nod. "Yes, but… I suppose you're right. Thank you for seeing me at short notice."
And OL realises
just that. Still, better Anti-Life than the much worse
alternate.
Mr. Free smiles as Barda picks him up, turns him upside down and puts him back into the harness. "Thank you for putting up with Canis."
I nod, raise my right hand in a farewell wave and
To be fair, OL doesn't have
that much to do with him these days.
step out, appearing
in the Mountain. Most of the team are out on their assignments, but Richard and Beryl are using the cave's main computer to… Render all of our data in three dimensional space to allow them to take all of it in.
Taking the old 'corkboard and push-pin' method to its logical, digital-era extreme, eh?
Richard doesn't look around. "Anything new?"
"The Frees don't think it was Anti-Life. But they can't rule it out."
So, nothing they couldn't work around in their theorising.
"Oh?" Beryl looks around with a smile. "We not important enough for Darkseid?"
"We're an utterly insignificant little blue green planet in-."
Ford Prefect, you are
not, OL. Even if you probably
do know where your towel is...
"In the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy, yes, we've all read Douglas Adams."
Richard looks slightly awkward for a moment. "Ah..?"

Bloody uneducated American
lout. He probably only watched the
movie.
"I'll get you a copy later. But he's got a point. We're probably not important enough for Darkseid."
"Apparently there's something about Darkseid that means he won't ever be personally subtle."
Given
other appearances He's made in fiction,
yes.
Richard smirks. "Guess you can relate, huh Oh El?"
…
I mean…
...Oh, don't
try to deny it.
"So we know that the guns are out of circulation, and that something really mystically suspicious is happening. Have you learned anything?"
Richard shakes his head. "We're trying to find points of commonality between all of the victims. At the moment, all we've got is that they're slightly more likely than average to drink orange juice with their breakfast."
No skeletons in their closets at all? I find that hard to believe.
"And that could just be because they have a more active lifestyle than average."
"No, we took that into account."
Heh. Tracing
every possible lead, eh?
I throw up my right hand. "I guess I'll go and interrogate the head of PepsiCo, then."
"I might have got something." Beryl doesn't sound particular certain, but she's standing in the middle of a lot of holographic screens. "It's not exactly solid-."
Ah, the super-hunch comes through.
"Putting things together like that is your super power. What have you got?"
"The lists the Alliance gave us cover everyone who's signed up with them. But it doesn't cover people who just went to a couple of meetings. Because superheroes don't like people keeping track of their movements. But that means that there are some pretty big spaces in their timelines. And every one of them has a gap big enough to have gone to an Alliance seminar. Like…" She pulls up a file. "Wrench Wench."
...Yeah, sure, not
every name can be a
winner. And after a certain amount of time, all the
good names would be taken fairly quickly.
I don't say anything about the name. She was shot seven times.
"Back in September, there's a gap where she was supposed to be visiting her aunt. But we know she wasn't. I didn't think much about it the first time we went through the files; superheroes make stuff up about where they're going all the time. But there was an Alliance conference not all that far away that matches. See?"
Sounds like a solid hypothesis. I expect the data checks out?
Richard nods. "And that's the same for all of them?"
"Yes it is."
All right, then. There's
a lead.
"Do we have the full guest list for those meetings?"
She shakes her head. "Only for the people who actually signed up."
"Might as well check it anyway. Not as if we've got any other leads."
So, face-to-face meetings with the administration team for each possible contact. ...And OL's on it. Hoo-boy.