The peace negations on Dressilus were often a strained affair as in-fighting had begun among the members of the Alliance as soon as the wider conflict against Apokolips began to subside. There were hopes, however, that with all of the governments finally meeting face-to-face, a lasting and comprehensive peace proposal could be drafted. A temporary, and somewhat shaky, cease-fire agreement, separate from the truce that ended hostilities between just the Warpsmiths and K’te, was put in effect and gave the negotiators some breathing room, although violence was still common on the boarder between the Skrull and Kree. The negotiations were delicate and conducted in closed session, both for the sake of security and because all sides had vivid tales of atrocity to tell, and no one wanted to risk igniting public passions by re-opening only recently bandaged wounds.

    One of these atrocities was, of course, the rather abominable behavior of the K’te towards the Cholonu, and the rather surprising turn of events it led to. As the presumed extinction of the Cholonu and its effect on the Warpsmiths had become one of the fundamental factors shaping the peace accord, the question of whether the Cholonu were, in fact, truly extinct became a matter of great importance to several governments. There were, for example, scattered, fragmentary rumors of a Cholonu living on a primitive world in the western spiral arm. These reports gained some credence due to a confirmed sighting on Apokolips at the height of the galactic war of a Cholonu traveling in the company of human beings.

    The delegation on Dressilus quietly made a formal request to the Green Lantern Corps to investigate these reports and evaluate the validity of the Cholonu's extinction. This important mission was, in turn, given to arguably the Lanterns’ greatest; a hero of the recent war who also formally requested the assignment.

    Sinestro.

    Even now, the exact motivations that drove Sinestro to his calculated betrayal of the Green Lantern Corps remain elusive. There are some authorities who argue that Sinestro was an Apokolips “sleeper” agent from the very beginning; conditioned by DeSaad to resist Guardian metal scans during recruitment and training, and that his many “victories” were arranged by Apokolips to move him swiftly through the ranks to better strike at the Corps from within when the time came. There are others who believe that it was simply a small, hidden flaw in Sinestro’s own character that was merely brought to light by the glare of the Lantern that the Guardians had unwisely given him; a festering imperfection that grew monstrously as he grew accustomed to the awesome power he wielded, driving him to lust for even more, and opening him to the promises of power that Darkseid’s minions had used to ensnare so many before him.

    Whatever the cause, the results were the same. And when Sinestro returned from his mission, his report dismissed stories of still-living Cholonu anywhere in the galaxy as having absolutely no validity whatsoever. This was neither the first nor the last time he would deceive the Corps and those who relied upon it.

    Indeed, by this point Sinestro had been surreptitiously lending aid to the Green Lanterns’ enemies for several months. It was Sinestro who had helped the fugitive emperor D’Ken and his court elude the other Lanterns and “disappear” from the Shi’Ar capital. Not only that, Sinestro engineered the evacuation of several notables from Apokolips prior to its destruction. With the tales of surviving Cholonu soundly debunked, Sinestro now began to funnel escaping war criminals into the newly formed safe haven for undesirables in the K’te empire. The other governments would, of course, have been predictably outraged to learn of this, but luckily Sinestro also supervised the inspectors who verified that the K’te were abiding by the terms of their truce with the Warpsmiths. Still, the K’te worried that someone might go to Cholonu and uncover the data forging they had performed at the Hall of Warriors. To eliminate this possible incriminating evidence, DeSaad gave Sinestro an experimental Nova Bomb and had him detonate an unstable star in an uninhabited system four light months from Cholonu. When the nova wave reached Cholonu, it would cover the conspirators’ tracks in spectacular fashion, while also appearing to be simply a natural occurrence.

    Ultimately, the only thing the conspirators believed they had to worry about was that there was indeed still a living Cholonu left in the galaxy—DeSaad and Dr. Bedlam knew that for certain. They had faced him on Apokolips, along with several of his allies. A victim of a shipwreck and officially logged in the Hall of Heroes as “Missing and Presumed Dead,” he had adopted (and been adopted by) the planet Earth. A Cholonu warrior, now blessed with extraordinary abilities, he was named  Ig Ahna Ne To, but men called him “Zero Man.”

    He could ruin everything.

    At first, the conspirators plotted to have Sinestro kill him on Earth, but quickly decided against it on the advice of DeSaad and Dr. Bedlam. While Zero Man could be eliminated, his human allies had a tendency to be quite resourceful, and they would not rest until they discovered who had killed him and why. No doubt their efforts would take them off their world and bring about the very scrutiny and publicity that the conspiracy was trying to avoid. No, the Cholonu that men called Zero Man would be allowed to live. It was a risk, but the conspirators considered it a meager one. Zero Man had never left the solar system since his arrival there, seldom venturing any farther that the orbit of the system’s primary gas giant, and the Earth had no interstellar communications to speak of. Besides, Sinestro had detected that a Swarm Mother had arrived at the periphery of the star system and was breeding its forces there: It was short months away from launching an assault on the Earth that would undoubtedly eradicate every living thing from the planet. Humanity was doomed and while Zero Man had the ability to leave the Earth to its inevitable fate, such an act simply wasn’t in the honorable character of the Cholonu.

    If the K’te understood nothing else, they understood the Cholonu. And again planed to profit from that understanding.

    However, the conspirators, for all their planning, had no way of knowing that the insane, artificial intelligence called Brainiac was also aware of the imminent devastation of Earth by the Swarm, and that it was journeying to the planet in order to “save” human civilization.