None of you know me, but my name is Rik Sunn. And I’m here to save you.
For decades—since I was a young diplo—I’ve been chasing Karvus Khun, the Great Dictator. The Sauriod halfbreed who wasn't just content to quietly run the universe, but had to completely crush anyone under his heel who looked at him funny.
I never went in for military service. My family joined the Navy and fought for our homeworld of Wolfholme, but I thought I could help more as a diplo—negotiate a lasting peace instead of just holding the line with the Sauroids. Of course, I was wrong. As far as I know, it’s a total coincidence that I was on the last rocket out before the scaly bastards destroyed Wolfholme.
Coincidence. Destiny. Something.
Either way, it didn’t take long after I found out what happened for me to make off with a fighter ship. A ragtag group of dissidents joined me, each of us expecting capture or death. Instead, we got a commission and some cutting edge technology. My bizarre group of angry rocket jocks had become The Sun Devils!
Where I come from—or I guess when I come from—every schoolkid knows the rest. The Weapons of Mass Destruction that Khun used to keep the rest of the universe at bay were eventually turned around on him, thanks to us. The Sauroid Homeworld was destroyed and the Sun Devils went down in history as heroes of the highest order. Only, to make it all work, the official story had to be that Khun was dead. Killed on his homeworld and no longer a threat. It was plausible, not unlikely, and most people wanted to believe it. So they did.
But not me.
All it took was a little detective work around the Diplomatic Corps and I discovered that the Earth government knew exactly where to find Khun. They didn’t consider him worth the trouble or the risk of another war anymore. He wasn’t a threat to them. But that didn’t matter to me—he killed BILLIONS. And that’s just on Wolfholme, not even considering all the other terrible things that he and his regime were responsible for. He needed to answer for that. I tried to get the Sun Devils to rally to my side, but most of them didn’t even believe me. Two of them—including Scyla, our “muscle”—had just had a kid together and didn’t have the taste for putting life and limb in peril again.
Ultimately, the responsibility fell to myself and my lover—Anomie Zitar, herself a former Sun Devil. It was up to us to bring the cur to justice. We found him on a beach on a remote world and very nearly ended him there—but apparently there was some kind of physiological safety catch in Annie’s brain for just such an occasion. You see, she had once been a Sauroid spy—even against the Sun Devils. I should have thought about it; should never have brought her into proximity with Khun.
Bastard.
She never stood a chance—she leapt at him and just kind of…self-destructed. It was really stupid that I stopped to grieve. I sat there cradling her dead body and not only did Khun get away, but I’ve never figured out why he didn’t just kill me then and there. That’s HIS mistake.
It took years to find him again, but you’d be shocked what you can do with enough determination. Even the universe isn’t as limitless as it seems when you’re driven by rage like I had. By then Scyla, with her nine-year-old in tow, couldn’t let Anomie’s death go unavenged. Her mate had been a clone, and his lifespan was pretty short. Suddenly I had a woman and child keeping me company on my hunt.
Somehow, the son of a bitch got his hands on a Time Sphere. It was all we could do just to catch up with him before he took off, but we ended up bouncing through time. In the 25th Century, we teamed up with a caped superhero named Booster Gold while Khun found himself a wife. She gave birth and, as tends to happen with Sauroids, the kid ate its mother—but now he had a partner too. We ended up in some of the strangest places chasing the bastard. In 1999, we worked with a revolutionary, underground group called The Invisibles while Khun tried to enlist the aid of a bizarre secret government organization to help take over the world. He almost succeeded. In the 27th Century, we managed to get the sphere away from him altogether but he had somehow figured out how to time travel under his own power. Our battles kept coming back to Earth—it was this planet he hoped to destroy when ultimately we Sun Devils were able to finally put a stop to his empire, and it holds some special place in his blackened, twisted heart. He wants to take it over, or destroy it, or something, in the worst possible way. Over the years, we met some remarkable people here. In the 1940s, we encountered a black man who single-handedly defeated the Khuns with nothing but a sledge hammer. There was another Green Lantern, who we saw swallowed into a wave of antimatter. Not the one you guys have running around here—this one had brown hair with gray temples and a slightly different costume. He was trying to save some people in your distant future. We encountered the man you call The Flash while traveling through the timestream. At the dawn of humanity we were helped by a boy named Kamandi, and in the distant 853rd Century we fought alongside an intelligent robot who aged Khun almost to death before his grandson—his son had mated back in our own time but the female he chose for his made overpowered him and it was she, not he, who survived being a parent this time—grabbed him and whisked him off to their ship. We thought it was just going to be a beeline through space, but they made a time jump suddenly and we were obliged to follow. We’ve long since incorporated what remained of the damaged time sphere into our craft.
We arrived in your time—he was close enough that I could have just boarded his craft and crushed him to death with my bare hands—and your Green Lantern wouldn’t let me take the bastard down. I had to stand there explaining myself over and over, until finally—in a bizarre and fortuitous coincidence—Booster Gold arrived. I asked him to explain it all to Green Lantern, and I reminded him what had happened to the Blue Beetle of the 27th Century the last time he had doubted me. The little android that floats around with him—I think he calls it Skeets—it tried desperately to convince him not to get involved.
“No, Michael! Say nothing!” It told him, but he’s a good man.
“He’s right, GL,” Booster told Green Lantern. Rik Sunn is exactly who he says he is.” Then he told Skeets that he knew “his limits.”
“I know,” Booster said. “But Khun has to be brought in. We both know this is the time it has to happen. Now, before he…” but then the robot successfully shushed him.
Finally, Green Lantern relented. The throng of your heroes who had gathered to clean up the mess in the streets where Khun had crash-landed gathered to his side, and they cut a hell of an impressive figure in the sky and the streets.
“Okay, all,” Green Lantern told them. “You heard Booster—let’s go!” And they took off. There was a woman whose whole body looked like glass, with light and color refracting in and around it in all directions. She was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. There was a boy whose head caught fire. He, and a boy with long blonde hair, and a female with very white skin and very black hair and eyes, all wore matching uniforms with Saturn on them. Those seemed to be accompanied by a few older women in suits, who carried rather large guns. There was a whole other cult, too—a young man with a black-and-blue uniform, and a blonde girl with wings of fire, and a robot or a man in armor or something (he too carried a sledge). All of these wore red capes and a pentagonal shield with the letter “S” on their chests. There was a crazy-eyed red-haired man whose body seemed to sweat weapons and who had strange tattoos all over the place. A black man with a power suit of some kind and a big star on his chest—like the one on my jacket, except without the devil on it, and black with red trim. There was a 90-pound girl who had a giant energy demon of some kind, too. The demon claimed to be Animus, something out of The Dreaming or some such thing. God only knows what he actually was, but she was intimidating enough. Even at her tiny size, she had an intensity that not many men I’ve ever fought have been able to muster. There was Booster himself, and some other man in gold armor. He wore a helmet and a leather skirt. I’m sure you can ask the android to play you back tapes of the whole deployment, because he seems to always be recording Booster’s good deeds for posterity. I followed behind them as fast as I could.
Of course, my readers, you do know what happened next. Khun had already figured out he was in trouble—he probably saw Booster coming and decided to get going while he still had legs to walk on. His grandson had already activated whatever it was that allowed them to time-travel, but at least with Skeets by our side, we were able to track them. With that horde of force, they got into the room just in time to see how they’re able to run, too: Apparently after killing the Blue Beetle in the 27th Century, Khun’s grandson had acquired the scarab that had given him his powers. Its technology is…not unfamiliar…to the Sauroids. The Reach and the Sauroid Empire came to an accord decades before Khun’s fall.
At any rate, using the Scarab, and some form of magic or pseudo-science acquired from Sir Miles Delacourt, the government toady who took arms against us when we were with The Invisibles, the younger Khun just shouts, “Time machine GO!” and the Scarab lights up and they’re off. And so there we stand—that show of overwhelming force having missed Khun just as effectively as I could have done on my own.
Booster cursed under his breath, the android sympathized, and I just about killed your Green Lantern, who asked, “What now?”
The young man with the “S”—he called himself Superman, but he’s not the one I recognize from the history books, is he?—he suggested coming here. And that’s why I’m asking you for authorization to take this task force back to my time.
Mister Munro, I cannot stress how urgent the need is to approve this now and move things forward. Risk, Green Lantern, Miss Chase and Booster are ready to go, but my craft is badly damaged and we need access to your organization’s Time Sphere; Booster says it’s the only working one he knows of at this point in the timeline. We have seen where Karvus Khun is going and I guarantee it is BAD NEWS. After all these years bouncing through time and space just a step ahead of me, he seems to have returned the the scene of his greatest defeat—the moment when I and my Sun Devils were able to stop his greatest weapons from obliterating earth, and with it all opposition to Sauroid rule.
I’ve been all through the universe, and all across time. And I remember talking about time travel with probably the wisest man I ever met. The Invisibles had just missed helping me get Khun, and left town, and there I was all alone in Gotham before setting out on the next leg of my adventure, and this man was there in the shadows, claiming to have watched the whole thing. I asked him if he thought that it was all a waste of time. Khun had gotten away again, and he was 20,000 years or something in the past and I just wondered if I ought to leave him there. I figured I could move on with my life and maybe he’d just be so tired of running that he wouldn’t create any more havoc or stryfe. But this mystery man, he told me, “People only travel back in time for one thing:
“To change it.”
To Be Concluded...