Hal Jordan floated in near orbit above the planet Oa, located at the exact center of the universe, in the far-future relative to his own lifetime, the year 5713. On either side of him were fellow members of the 21st century Green Lantern Corps and the current director of the Earth-governing Solar Council, Pol Manning, piloting a one-man fighter craft; opposing them, ring-bearers of species from a dozen different star systems but chronally native to the era, all of whom claimed to be servants of Parallax, footsoldiers in his new Corps.

Jordan sailed easily through the supra-orbital space and drew within a few feet of Arisia, the young woman from Graxos IV, apparently resurrected by Parallax, who was the nominal leader of the future-based Corps. He approached her with both hands raised palms-out and no ring constructs manifested save for his protective energy aura. "Arisia," Jordan hailed her, hoping that their respective rings would allow communication in the airless void, "I can understand these others being duped, they don't know Parallax, but how can you be doing this?"

"Doing what, Hal?" Arisia demanded hotly. "Defending Oa when it needs me the most? Leading the Corps, just as I was always meant to? Aren't those questions the kind that answer themselves?" Like her one-time fellow Lantern, Arisia showed no offensive constructs growing out of her personal forcefield, but the emerald light around her head occasionally flared in spiky bursts, like predatory teeth.

"Arisia ..." Jordan tried again.

"Or maybe you mean, how can I be living and breathing?" Arisia cut him off. "After all, the rest of you ... everyone I thought were my trustworthy teammates ... my heartfelt friends! You all let me die!" The last sentence was growled and scornful.

"If we could have saved your life, we would have, any one of us," Jordan countered. "You know that."

"Whether you could or couldn't, you didn't," Arisia spat. "You didn't, but Parallax did. He saved me, he gave me my life back and he gave me the Corps back, and now I owe him everything. And if what Parallax says is that the Corps has to stop you ..." She shrugged, and allowed her upraised power ring, crackling with barely-restrained charge and aimed at Jordan's chest, to finish the unspoken thought for her.

"This isn't the Corps," Jordan said, waving an arm to encompass Arisia and the other aliens armed by Parallax. "Deep down, you know that."

Arisia's eyes narrowed, and a furious high-pitched scream tore free from her lips. She blasted Jordan, inundating him with raw photonic rage. The rest of the aliens that had risen up from Oa aimed their rings at Jordan and added their own energies to the assault. The combined emerald maelstrom coalesced around Jordan and then crystallized, in a glowing irregular shape like a luminous jade asteroid, with Jordan trapped at its center.

Then the Parallax Corps turned its attention on the rest of the Green Lanterns from the 21st century.

Two Thanagarians, spreading Nth metal wings but propelled mainly by the green glow of power rings, bore down on Kyle Rayner. He thought of the younger one, an adolescent-looking male clad only in sky-blue trousers and black boots, as Hawkboy, while his counterpart, an older female with long gray hair and wrinkled features, wearing a long dusk-red shift, was Hawkgranny. As the Thanagarians approached, Rayner projected a colossal emerald pigeon to intercept them, its massive wings flapping furiously and battering the Hawks.

The Thanagarians reacted in unison, raising their ring hands and unleashing retaliatory photonic energy. The result was an explosion of blinding verdant light, raw and unfocused but so dazzling that Rayner's concentration faltered and his pigeon construct fluttered away.

"All right, you dumb birds, if that's how it's gonna be," Rayner muttered to himself. He threw his arms out to the sides and willed his power ring to encase his limbs in solid light, which formed the wings of a 767, with a giant jet engine under each arm. Rayner accelerated between the two Thanagarians, sucking Hawkboy into the left turbofan and Hawkgranny into the right. The Thanagarians shot out of the exhaust ends of the jet engines and tumbled wildly through space, completely dazed, their power ring auras flickering.

Nearby, Kilowog had been intent on reaching Arisia. Before he could reach her, however, Kilowog was intercepted by the Hykraian. Despite literally being a fish out of water, with a spherical tank-helmet maintaining breathable water around its head and gills, and additionally boasting a ponderously round physique, the Hykraian moved with surprising quickness. Kilowog's power ring emitted a massive net of green energy, but the light construct passed over the Hykraian's head as the aquatic creature closed on Kilowog and projected a glowing crustacean claw, crudely shaped and searingly bright, which slammed into the Green Lantern's midsection.

In the grip of the energy claw, Kilowog was forced backwards and into the waiting arms of the Khundian member of the force defending Oa. The burly pink-skinned humanoid bearhugged the Lantern from Bolivax Vik, while simultaneously sprouting jagged thorns of emerald brilliance from his arms. Kilowog thickened his own power ring aura into photonic armor resembling jade mechanical plates; two of the plates pushed outward on threaded shafts to separate the Khund's arms, freeing Kilowog just in time to shine a fishhook of emerald light that snagged and flipped the approaching Hykraian.

Salakk waited patiently as the colossal, fiery ring-wielder floated toward him. The elemental Appellaxian had no doubt been recruited from the scant survivors of the armada which Parallax had destroyed en route to Oa. The incendiary alien raised a limb composed of living flames, at the end of which a green power ring floated. A thin line of tightly wrapped light like the fuse on a bomb whipped outward from the ring and coiled tightly around Salakk, then burned white-hot as the Appellaxian sent a blaze coursing along the construct's serpentine length. Salakk kept both of his pairs of arms folded across his narrow chest and seemed totally unperturbed by the conflagration swirling around him. Slowly, a deep green cloud formed above Salakk's pickaxe-shaped head, a rolling thunderhead of emerald ice crystals which grew larger and larger until Salakk hovered in the eye of a supermassive ice storm which expanded outward and engulfed the burning Appellaxian completely.

Umburu, the one-time Green Lantern of Z'Nang, launched himself towards Parallax's Peneloan recruit, and the giant unblinking eyeball braced itself, beckoning Umburu forward with a waving clutch of pale green tentacles. A cone of viridian light rushed outward from Umburu's ring and fanned apart, each individual shaft of light coalescing as a heavy prison shackle restraining one of the Peneloan's undulating limbs. The Peneloan's power ring exploded with intense light of its own, shredding the green steel-like cuff on that tentacle and radiating outward to scourge away the other chains. By then, Umburu had flown close enough to drive his heavy bootheel into the wide black pupil in the center of the Peneloan's globed body.

Like a huge droplet of oily pink wax floating in a dark liquid, the Green Lantern Gpaak bobbed in the supra-orbital vacuum of space as the Durlan member of Parallax's Corps approached from the left side and its counterpart, the bizarre creature whose entire body was an exposed network of pulsing red tubules, approached from the right. Both of the 58th century ring-wielders fired on Gpaak at once, but the amorphous Zoan twisted into an S-shape that allowed the wild, jagged beams of green energy to pass by harmlessly. Gpaak turned its bright scarlet nucleus toward the tubule-creature and willed an emerald vacuole to form around it. A moment later, the Durlan pounced on Gpaak and grappled with the central mass of its amoeba-like body. Multiple pseudopods extended from the Green Lantern's body, but each one was met by another limb growing out of the alien shapechanger's body.

The solid light mass confining Hal Jordan trembled and burst apart, soundless in the vacuum but so violently bright as to momentarily arrest the attention of all the combatants above Oa. All eyes and other alien sensory organs were on Jordan as he flexed his newly liberated arms, took aim with his power ring, and fired a single searing lance of brilliant green. It unerringly struck its target: Pol Manning's craft.

The craft was instantly torn asunder, and Manning floated helplessly amidst the wreckage of his vehicle; he had not been wearing any kind of self-contained flightsuit and could flail his limbs only once before running out of air and going limp. By then, however, Arisia had reached his side, along with three half-machine Linsnarians, the fin-headed Kalanorian female, and the burly Khund. They surrounded Manning protectively, shielding him with their bodies and wrapping him in a ring-generated enviro-field, while their fellow Corpsmen hurried to join them.

The battle seemed to have ended even more suddenly than it began. Kilowog, Salakk and Kyle Rayner arced toward Jordan, each one eyeing him somewhat warily. "I'm not sure what just happened," Rayner admitted, "so you maybe want to enlighten me, Hal?"

"Trying to figure out just how far gone Arisia was?" Kilowog posited.

"If so, that was an extreme test of Arisia's faculties," Salakk observed.

"That's not Arisia," Jordan answered flatly.

"What?" Rayner asked. "Granted, I never met the girl, but you could've fooled me."

"Me too," Kilowog grunted, "and I did know her. Better'n most. So what're you thinking, Hal?"

"Up until I was trapped in that construct, I wasn't thinking. None of us were. But as I was trying to bust of there, I finally had time to think about what got us here. It was all a little too perfect, wasn't it?" He pointed at Salakk, and went on, "Iona Vane shows up, that's going to push your buttons, and she tells a story about Parallax on the rampage, that's going to push mine. We get to the future to find a heavily damaged Solar Council headquarters and start making our way to Oa, and when we get here we find Arisia, who Kilowog loves like a little sister, and who reminds Kyle of …"

"Alex," Kyle nodded grimly. "Because Major Force murdered them both."

"Exactly," Jordan affirmed unflinchingly. "We're all keyed up and put off-balance by all of these things, so much so that we don't even think to wonder how utterly improbable it all is. Evil Star still alive after thousands of years? The Solar Council drawing Parallax into the future accidentally? Parallax giving out power rings which he has to fuel with his own energy reserves? That was what really drove it home for me. Parallax has always been obsessed with fixing things, with setting the whole universe into what he deems the proper patterns. Creating a Corps, even in his own image, is superfluous."

Rayner frowned, "I don't get it. Parallax had a different angle, one he was working with Manning?"

Jordan shook his head, "Parallax has nothing to do with it, he never did. That was just a lie, outrageous enough to be believable. This whole scenario is a set-up. It has to be."

"A set-up for what?" Kilowog growled.

"That's what Manning needs to tell us," Jordan answered, moving in the direction of the Solar Council director. Kilowog, Salakk, Rayner and the other Green Lanterns followed him, and formed a ring around the ersatz Lanterns who were huddled about Pol Manning.

"Has Hal Jordan seen through you at last, then, Pol Manning?" Salakk asked, communicating via ring energies to the crude life support cradling Manning. "Is it true that we were brought here under false pretenses?"

Manning's eyes had a wild, hard gleam, at once resigned and bitter. "I apologize for nothing," he hissed.

"Ain't looking for an apology, poozer," Kilowog rumbled. "But an explanation would go a long way. Why lie to us? Green Lanterns have always helped the Solar Council before. Whatever it was you wanted, why not just ask for it straight out?"

"Your masters would never allow it," Manning sneered.

"How do you know that?" Rayner pressed.

"Because they would have to choose between my continued existence and their own," Manning insisted. "And damn them, the Guardians of the Universe will always choose to propagate their own existence above all."

"You're not making a lot of sense, Manning," Jordan interjected. "Why this elaborate ruse to get us to this time and place?"

"I required Green Lanterns, and although I suspected who among you might answer the summons, I cared little of the specifics," Manning replied truculently. "In this time the Guardians are long gone, and their secrets lie buried deep beneath the sands of Oa. In order to breach those vaults I need more power and knowledge than is available to me. If I could convince you that Parallax was indeed in those hidden catacombs, I believed you would stop at nothing to reach him, and I could follow in your wake."

"And then once we got there and saw there was no Parallax?" Rayner asked. "How would you have dealt with that?"

"In the same manner in which I armed these servants," Manning explained. "The energy device of Black Hand. It was recovered centuries ago, an archeological curiosity. It did not contain enough Oan energy to allow me to probe every locked door left behind by the Guardians, but just enough for the crude simulacra of power rings with which I armed this Corps. I thought their presence added a nice touch to my tale of Parallax's return. The device itself would drain all of your rings and render you helpless once we had reached the innermost sanctums of the Guardians."

"So you engineered everything, start to finish?" Jordan pressed. "You faked Parallax's attack on your headquarters, you ginned up a Corps to confront us at Oa, all so that we would think Parallax was down there and would blast our way into what you think is some magic treasure trove?"

"When we first arrived here in the 58th century, the Solar Council guards attacked us," Salakk observed. "Had they too been duped by your tale of Parallax's accidental summoning?"

"Not at all," Manning countered. "They were playing their parts, just as these creatures are," he indicated the Corps huddled around him.

"And her?" Kilowg indicated Arisia. "Where'd she come from?"

"A bio-restoration, or what you would call a clone, based on historical records and the Graxosian gene sequence. Child's play, really," Manning said dismissively. The Arisia impostor glared at the Green Lanterns defiantly.

"What could be so important that all of you would go through all of that?" Rayner asked.

"A way to stop oblivion!" Manning cried, then sagged, deflated. When he resumed speaking, he sounded lost. "This epoch knows neither Guardians nor Green Lanterns, which is why we often borrowed the help of ring wielders from the past. But this epoch … is dying. It is no longer coming to pass."

"What's that mean?" Kilowog asked.

Manning sighed. "Time travel makes for incomprehensible assertions, more often than not. From your chronologic perspective, our future will not … cannot … exist. In our history, your present did not exist, and cannot as well. The Guardians live, for you, though they are dead to us. The Green Lantern Corps shines on in you and your successors, though it is extinguished for us. Our timelines cannot co-exist. Only one can prevail. And of course it will be the one with the Guardians alive, for they will see to that. I had hoped that if I could penetrate the mysteries of Oa, I could reverse whatever temporal anomaly had cut off this future. It would have meant the end of the Guardians, and likely all of you as well. That was a sacrifice I was willing to make."

"It wouldn't have worked, you know," Jordan avowed. "Alterations to the timestream aren't in the Guardians' bag of tricks. Even if you had conned us into plowing straight through the heart of Oa, laying open every chamber and hiding place, you wouldn't have found anything that could save you."

"Assuming that what you tell us now is true, after all of the previous lies," Salakk added.

"Yeah, the end of your timeline or whatever sounds tragic, but if the past, your past, was altered, then wouldn't you all have just blinked out into nothingness already?" Rayner asked.

"Apparently not," Manning answered. "The threat first came to the attention of our tachyon-astronomers, who detected a conformal boson string approaching Earth from the very limits of the observable universe. At first it could only be seen in one direction, but it is collapsing, accelerating, tightening around us like a cosmic noose. It is not an instantaneous phenomenon, but there is little doubt it presages the end of everything."

For several long moments, no one spoke. Finally, Umburu of Z'Nang said, "You have ill used us, Pol Manning. I understand your trepidation, however, for while sacrifice is not at all unknown to either the Guardians or the Green Lanterns, it would be folly to suppose we would sacrifice one reality to save another, our own for years. Still … is there nothing we can do? Might there be some third option which can save both our time and yours?"

Apros, the distinguished member of the Corps Honor Guard, answered in its utterly alien tongue, a burst of sounds like singing tympanis, modulated tones and rhythms conveying meaning which was in turn translated by the others' power rings. "Hal Jordan spoke truly," the old Green Lantern drum-spoke from its squat, wheel-shaped gourd body, underbelly tendrils swaying. "The powers of the Guardians, from which our own naturally derive, are vast, but the fundamental forces of time are far stronger. This era once proceeded from possibilities which have become impossibilities. The chronal contradictions cannot be resolved."

"It's an impossible choice," Rayner lamented.

"Not a choice at all," Salakk asserted. "The timestream asserts its own inherent nature. Our present continues toward a future, but not this one. Whatever control we might imagine can be exerted over that may well be nothing but an illusion. The tachyon collapse in this time is unassailably real."

"So I can't fix anything, and I never could," Pol Manning declaimed hollowly. "I suppose Parallax and I have that in common. Perhaps that is why I thought of him when I spun my lies to lure Green Lanterns here and now. Illusions of control."

In the courtyard of the Guardians' Citadel in Coast City, in the early 21st century, a shimmering viridian light heralded the return of seven Green Lanterns mere moments after the same potent energies had transported them forward in time nearly four millennia. Ommek Obobo Ok addressed Hal Jordan, saying, "The cosmic tethers anchoring you to the Guardians in this time conveyed to us a grave peril. We hope that you were able to negate the menace of Parallax before we were compelled to return you to this time."

"Parallax ain't menacing anyone in that future," Kilowog answered gruffly.

"No," Jordan added, "not anymore."

The Guardians collectively paused, exchanging the briefest of glances with one another, which for the oldest beings in the universe could very well contain ideas and impressions beyond reckoning. Then Zafaacha Ziz Zo stepped forward and said, "Green Lantern Salakk of Slyggia, we regret that the future-Earthling Iona Vane is no longer with us. Her corporeal existence ceased, which added to our impetus to retrieve you and your fellow Corps members at once."

"I … understand," Salakk said stonily.

"Let me guess," Rayner ventured. "Was she swallowed by a localized conformal boson string?"

Zafaacha Ziz Zo arched a bushy white eyebrow. "That is an apt description, Green Lantern Kyle Rayner. Startlingly apt."

"It's been a startling kind of day," Rayner shrugged. "Or days. Today and tomorrow." With that he moved off toward the Citadel, followed by the other Green Lanterns, leaving the Guardians to watch them wonderingly.

END