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Hal is cruising about a mile above the Oklahoma-Kansas border when his ring sounds the alarm.

"Attention, Code 13-11 Alert: Power Battery subject to unspecified shock."

Hal Jordan might not feel fear, but there are some emergency codes he'd definitely rather not hear more than others, and this would be near the top of the list. Cut off from the rest of the universe, serious damage to his Power Battery could mean big trouble.

"Ring, can you determine the current status of the battery?"

Monitor link still compromised by unusual atmospheric conditions of the planet, but no serious trauma to the Battery can be determined.

Well, that was something anyway. But now he had to consider the other problem. The Battery had been stowed away in a compartment aboard Bab's--no, Zinda's--plane.

What had happened to the Aerie One?

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Whatever's happened to it, Dinah's not on board.

Dinah is currently cruising the Kansas border on her motorcycle; a job that involves greeting people on their way to the safe zone of Metropolis, and occasionally beating the hell out of various things trying to eat those people.

If anything's happened to her friends, her other friends are going to have to tell her.

Which Hal is already preparing to do, thanks to the Greentooth headset he nearly has finished. Once he has it firmly in place, up to his ear, he puts out a call to Black Canary's usual frequency.

"Dinah, come in, please. It's Hal. Are you with the Aerie? Over."

"Is my ear now a free for all for anyone with a radio?" Dinah asks, when the voice that suddenly appears in her ear isn't Babs'.

But that's just a front for the worry that comes up at the question. "No, I'm on what used to be the 54 south of the Liberal. What's up?"

This could be serious, and they're both professionals. No need to be anything but direct.

"My ring's registered some kind of violent shock to my Power Battery. I'm not able to get a clear reading on what's happened, too much interference, but--."

"Dinah, I think something might have happened to the plane."

The moment's silence is Dinah trying not to completely lose it in worry. When she speaks, she's all business again.

"Come and pick me up. Have you told Oracle?"

"Not yet. I only just got the alert code a couple of minutes ago, and you know her better than I do. Whatever this is, it might be better if she hears about it from you."

Hal makes a slight correction. "Changing course to intercept. Should take less than a minute."

He turns back to the ring for a moment, "Status check on monitor link to the Battery."

"Inconclusive. Signal still encountering unexplained interference from unidentified atmospheric conditions."

"But the Battery is still operational?"

"Affirmative.."

"Open a communications channel to the Battery." If he could establish a two-way mic on the Battery itself, maybe he could find out--.

"Unable to comply."

"Damn."

Dinah continues in the direction she was heading, but slows down as she waits to be ringed up. Meanwhile, she activates the mic in her necklace.

"Oracle? Talk to me, girlfriend."

Thanks to that little trip to Hawaii, Babs actually sounds human through the voice distortion again. "What's up, Canary?"

"You tell me," Dinah says, still scanning the sky for a flash of green.

"Starting with the Aerie. When was the last time you heard from Lady B?"

Back before they found themselves trapped in this world Babs would have known exactly where the Aerie One was. But in a world where there's too much going on to watch everything that needs it, Babs trusts Zinda to take care of herself. Because she's competent. That's why Babs picked her.

"Lady Blackhawk gave me a headsup before she took off," she answers with a frown. Since that trip to Hawaii her voice sounds human again, even through the voice distortion. "Let's see... they're..."

Not on the scope.

"That's not a good sentence to leave hanging, O," Dinah scolds her lightly.

"G.L. and I are going to go look, OK?"

Hal, meanwhile, has been constructing a truck with a trailer, complete with a dock for Dinah's cycle and a ramp extended behind it. It's hurtling down the highway a couple hundred yards ahead and just above her current speed. Hal raises the end of the ramp a couple inches above the highway, just to make things interesting.

He considered lifting the cycle right off the ground, but figures performing a daredevil stunt while talking to Oracle would be more Black Canary's style.

Dinah had settled down on worried about Zinda and Steph for a while, even though she was looking forward to working with Hal.

Seeing the trick he's trying to pull just makes her smile. She picks up speed and darts forward without a break in her conversation, flicking up the front wheel at just the right time so she's flying towards the truck.

Of course, Hal is grinning too as he sees her make a perfect landing on the ramp and then stop on a dime atop the trailer. The ring construct is already in the air by the time she has the bike shut down, and he morphs it into a plane with a spacious cockpit and motorcycle-sized cargo bay to keep himself occupied while Dinah keeps talking to Oracle.

Huh. Well, he's no Kyle Rayner, but he can make a decent-looking plane when he wants to.

"Canary, last transponder check I have logged put them in the north Atlantic. Greenland or the eastern coast of Canada, probably." Because it just wasn't possible for them to have gone down over water and frozen to death.

"We'll had up via Ontario, then," Dinah says as she dismounts, with a glance at Hal to make sure he heard. "Want us to bring you back something from Canada?"

"If you run into any hot mounties..."

That's a no. At least beyond the obvious: bring Zinda back.

"Knowing Lady Blackhawk they'll be slightly used."

Dinah grins at Hal, but then she has nothing better to do than sit against he bike and watch the green-tinted country below her.

"That's OK, right?"

"Just as long as they're in once piece." She isn't talking about the mounties anymore.

With the construct thoroughly streamlined, Hal punches it. A few seconds later a distinctive condensation cloud (http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/bl_sonic_boom2.htm) forms around him and the glowing green plane, and not long after that they break the sound barrier.

Then Hal really puts on the speed.

"The eastern coast of Canada is a lot to cover, ladies, even if we do it this way."

"My connection to the Battery ought to get stronger as we get closer to the plane, but we might not be able to count on that. Any chance of you picking up news of an emergency touchdown somewhere up North, Oracle?"

Hal is damned if he's going to use the word 'crash.'

"I've got my data crawlers combing through what limited stuff is out there, but there's even less news coming out of that part of the world than usual." She doesn't really expect to turn up anything.

Hal doesn't miss a beat.

"Roger that, Oracle. We'll make it happen, anyway."

While it's nice to have friends who can do this, it doesn't stop being frustrating when the brains and the magic rings are busy looking to something for Dinah to hit. She contents herself from sitting in the cockpit, leaning against the windows and staring, as if her eyes will pick up what satellites and rings can't.

She switches her mic off, though. She doesn't want Oracle to hear the worry in her breathing.

If there's one thing Hal understands, it's frustration when you're stuck with nothing to do.

"Ok. You know Zinda a lot better than I do."

"So: her plane is down. Probably needs repairs, which means she can't get back into the air. Communications are down, so she can't contact us."

"What do you think she would do? Give me a walk-through. Maybe that'll give us something we can use."

Hal knows he doesn't have to tell Dinah what he's up to here. But it might help, and if nothing else, it'll pass the time.

It will, and it might even help the effort.

"She'll try and fix it," Dinah says. "Failing that, I'm guessing a search for parts, but she won't leave her plane very long. Figuring a hostile arctic environment, they;d be better off staying in the plane.

"So expect to see them hiking out into a blizzard trying to recude themselves."

Hal looks thoughtful. "It's what I'd do."

"I'm guessing the Aerie must have survival gear aboard. Cold weather gear too?"

"Yeah," Dinah says. "We like to be prepared.

"Well, not me, but Babs thinks ahead."

Hal grins.

"And Zinda will probably have a bottle of something to take the chill off."

They are moving fast now. If Hal expected a fight at the other end, he wouldn't be burning ring power as fast as he is, but right now getting there seems like the most important thing. And at this rate, that won't be much longer.

"Did Oracle mention any towns or villages near that last transponder signal? Assuming the maps are any good up there."

"None with working radios," Dinah says. "A few possible settlements, though."

Hal glances at his ring, apparently because it just told him something.

"Ok, Dinah, we just crossed into Ontario."

He pauses. Listening again.

"Ring's picking up a much stronger signal from the Battery now. Which is good because I hadn't planned on this today. Starting to run a little low on power."

Hal changes course slightly, but they're going so fast it takes a very wide curve just to do that.

"Just about there."

"Uh," Dinah says, peering out of the window again. "Hal, we're over the coast. Why are we flying out to sea?"

Hal is quiet too long. And when he finally answers, the tone of his voice is all business.

"Whatever happened must have compromised their forward air speed. A lot. The Aerie should have had a decent glide ratio, but at reduced speed, with all that electronic equipment, fuel, supplies... Must have one hell of a sink speed."

He stops, glances at Dinah. "Sorry. Thinking out loud."

Overcoming fear might be a matter of habit for Hal Jordan, but he's not a robot, and some ways he has of pushing away worry are not as effortless as others.

He lets out a slow breath and they come to a halt above the waves. "Here. One hundred feet down."

Dinah's quiet during Hal's 'thinking'; as always she understands far more than her mouthy blonde image will let her admit to. When he stops, her only real reaction is to look over at her bike with a resigned sigh. If Hal needs to break up the fake plane to pull out the real one, she'll miss that bike.

"So pull it out."

"Ring, power status."

Hal waits for a reply, and when he gets it, shakes his head.

"I'll have to recharge first." He eyes the green plane.

"Tricky. But the not the first time I've done it. I'll be back in a few minutes."

The construct with Dinah and the cycle stays hovering in mid-air as Hal drops like a stone and plunges into the ocean.

"Hal..." says Dinah, meaning to get more information out of him first.

Then, "Hal," she says irritably when the green flickers and for a second she's sitting on nothing.

Only Diana's plane is allowed to do that.

It takes more than a few minutes, but not too many more, for a green, oval shape to rise up from the ocean. It turns out to be an enormous inflatable raft, bearing the sad remains of the Aerie.

The right half of the fuselage is heavily damaged, and accordioned almost as far back as the wing. Most of the right wing is shorn off, and rests now as a separate piece, next to the plane.

The left half isn't looking much better.

Dinah and her cycle slowly sink down to the raft. The bottom half of the plane is a mess, probably from when it touched down on the ocean surface.

Hal's voice finally comes back on the comm. "I think I got all of it."

It's not until she sees it that Dinah realises it was a bad idea for her to come out here.

It's not that it's the plane that's been her home for far too long, so much as that it's any plane crash at all.

She needs to force herself to approach the wreckage on the raft, scanning what she can see for any evidence of survivors at all.

Her voice is strained when she speaks. "Any sign of them?"

Hal's voice is flat.

"Nothing around the plane."

"I haven't looked inside."

The rush of water when the plane first appeared has already slowed down, but there are trickles of water everywhere as it leaks out from inside.

So as soon as the torrent gets to the point at which she won't be washed away, Dinah runs inside.

First scan fails to confirm her worst fears at least. And when she finds the emergency parachutes, and the tell tale absence of two of them, she almost collapses under the weight of relieved tears.

"They're not here," she tells him.

Hal lets out a sigh of relief, then joins Dinah inside.

The giant raft flashes a brighter shade of green for a second, then begins moving toward the shoreline.

The interior of the plane is almost as much of a mess as the exterior, but after taking a minute to look things over, Hal agrees. Parachutes gone, no trace of anyone inside.

He puts a hand gently on Dinah's shoulder and gives it a squeeze.

"So now the question is, where are they?"

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