by Greg Cox
“Don’t leave me,” she pleaded. “Please.”
But Perry wasn’t going anywhere. He glanced briefly over his shoulder, to see the looming column creeping relentlessly toward them. He lifted another heavy slab, but while they were making progress, it wasn’t fast enough. There was no way they could dig her out before the gravity column turned them into greasy smears on the pavement.
Lombard knew the score as well. He glanced sheepishly at Perry, clearly wanting to run, but Perry’s stoic gaze shamed him into staying. The jock nodded and took hold of Jenny’s hand, comforting her in the face of annihilation.
At that moment Perry was proud of the man, who had proved that nobody had braver reporters than the Daily Planet.
We’re in this together, he thought. To the last deadline.
“Oh, God,” Jenny murmured, and she seemed to be going into shock. “Oh God...”
“It’s okay!” he assured her. “We’re going to get you out of here.” Reporting the truth was Perry’s business, but he figured he could be forgiven one little white lie at the end.
Foot by foot, inch by inch, the gravity column crept toward them. It passed over an abandoned food cart, crushing it like a hydraulic press. Lombard cringed, but stayed by Jenny’s side. He closed his eyes, though, probably not wanting to be an eyewitness to his own demise.
Perry kept his eyes wide open.
* * *
The gravity beam pressed Superman to the Earth. Blinding light and a deafening rumble accompanied the extreme pressure weighing him down. Solid bedrock cracked beneath his prone body. Compressed matter swirled around him.
It felt as if a giant was stepping on him, grinding him beneath its heel, even as the World Engine continued to spew its toxic gases into the air. Gravity waves penetrated the Earth, increasing the planet’s mass. Soon the entire world would be fit only for people who didn’t belong there.
No, Superman thought, I can’t let this machine win.
He remembered all the people who were depending on him, all the souls he’d touched and been touched by in his travels—his mom, Lois, Pete, Lana, Captain Heraldson and the crew of the Debbie Sue, the roughnecks on that oil rig, Chrissy the waitress, Colonel Hardy, Father Leone...
And he remembered those who had sacrificed everything to give him the chance to make a difference: Jor-El, Lara Lor-Van, and Jonathan Kent. He couldn’t let them down, not with seven billion human lives depending on him.
Billions of years of terrestrial evolution, millennia of human civilization and progress, generations of men and women fighting to make a better life for themselves and their prosperity, stood to be wiped way unless he came through now—and became the hero his fathers and mothers had dreamed he could be.
“You just have to decide what kind of man you want to grow up to be, Clark. Because whoever that man is... he’s going to change the world.”
Or save it.
He raised his face from the gravel. Incredibly, impossibly, he staggered to his feet. The crushing force of the column made just standing upright a Herculean feat, but that wasn’t good enough. He lifted off from the flattened island, rising slowly against the pressure, then gaining speed.
The gravity deformed his face, making his skin ripple, as he stared up into the infernal heart of the World Engine. His pupils glowed red.
Crimson energy shot from his eyes, meeting the gravity beam head on. For a moment the two forces appeared evenly matched. Then, screaming from the strain, Superman broke the stalemate and drove himself upward into the belly of the World Engine. Turning his own indestructible body into a weapon, the Man of Steel burst through the crown of machine and shot into the churning alien clouds.
Suddenly brain-dead, the World Engine tottered upon its monstrous legs. Its magnetic tendrils went limp. Flames erupted from its perforated head. Unsteady legs gave out as the entire structure collapsed in on itself, crashing down onto what was left of the volcanic island, which suddenly resembled Krakotoa.
The blast from the Engine’s demise knocked Superman from the sky.
C H A P T E R T H I R T Y - T W O
After a few minutes Lombard opened his eyes, and the expression on his face showed that he hadn’t expected to be alive.
Perry knew how he felt. Cradling Jenny’s head, he watched in surprise as the encroaching column ground to a halt. Gravity waves rebounded back toward the hovering starship. The gigantic column, which was looming like Niagara Falls over their heads, evaporated into the ether. The debris ring orbiting Zod’s spaceship fell apart. Perry ducked his head, shielding Jenny with his body, as powdered stone and glass fell like rain.
He shared a baffled look with Lombard. What on earth had just happened?
Not that he was complaining.
* * *
Sirens keened aboard the Black Zero. Faora stumbled as the bridge shook beneath her feet. Her fierce eyes demanded an explanation from Jax-Ur, who was viewing a holographic display with open alarm.
“The World Engine’s stopped transmitting!” he cried out.
Faora knew what that meant. With its link to the Engine broken, the gravity column came apart, creating an energy discharge that rocked the ship. The bridge crew scrambled to stabilize them, even as she tried to make sense of the failure.
“How?” she asked urgently.
Jax-Ur knew better than to keep her waiting.
“It was Kal-El!” he reported. “He’s destroyed it!”
The son of Jor-El? she raged. That womanborn turncoat?
A murderous fury ignited inside her, hotter than Earth’s gaudy yellow sun. The World Engine was essential to their plans to reshape this wretched planet. Kal-El had destroyed more than just a machine—he had murdered the dream of a new world that had sustained Krypton’s only true survivors through all their years of bitter exile.
She shook as her fists clenched at her sides.
The Phantom Zone was too good for such a traitor. Kal-El must pay for his perfidy, along with the miserable human beings he chose above his own kind.
* * *
“He did it!” Dr. Hamilton shouted via the comms. “The gravity fields are out!”
Lois grinned, trading excited looks with Hardy. The view from the cargo plane’s windshield confirmed the scientist’s pronouncement. The punishing gravity column had been sucked back into the Black Zero, while the ship’s halo of levitating debris was being dispersed by the wind. At long last, they had a clear shot at their Kryptonian target.
Thank you, Superman, she said silently. I knew you could do it!
The C-17 banked around for its final run. Two remaining F-35s provided escort.
“NORTHCOM, this is Guardian,” Hardy reported. “We are passing through phase line red. We are good to go.”
“Godspeed, Guardian,” Swanwick replied. “You are cleared hot.”
Hardy glanced at Lois.
“We’re lining up our final run.” he said. “It’s up to you and Hamilton now.”
Finally, she thought. Unbuckling her seatbelt, she scrambled toward the cockpit stairs, clutching the Kryptonian command key. Hardy barked into his headset as she headed for the cargo hold.
“Loadmaster, power panel switch and open doors!”
The rear cargo ramp was just opening up as Lois rushed into the hold, joining Dr. Hamilton, Gomez, and the two armed guards. Strong winds invaded the hold, blowing against her. The Kryptonian space capsule rested securely on the rails, waiting to be deployed.
A quick glance at Hamilton’s gravity map confirmed that the dangerous fields had evaporated entirely.
“Doors are open!” the loadmaster reported.
* * *
The World Engine’s cataclysmic demise knocked Superman for a loop. Crashing back down onto the island, he landed in the shadow of a rocky spire outside the flattened disaster area. Displaced seawater, which had been caught up in the gravitational vortex of the machine, flowed back into the ocean, leaving behind a series of tide pools. The toxic clouds emitted by th
e Engine began to disperse, letting the dawn through. The morning sun shone down on the island.
Thank heaven, Superman thought.
He stirred upon the barren shore, barely able to move. His hard-fought battle against the World Engine had left him drained of energy. A shaft of sunlight, slicing toward him, might have restored his strength, but the spire’s long shadow cut him off from the tantalizing yellow radiance so that it might as well have been miles away. Straining, he groped for the light, but his desperate fingers fell short by mere inches.
Salvation was just out of reach.
“Please—” he croaked, his voice barely a whisper. “Please.”
He stretched his arm as far he could.
* * *
Hardy’s voice rang out over the plane’s PA system:
“We are LZ inbound and two minutes out! Lining up the drop!”
Lois joined Dr. Hamilton next to the space capsule. She shouted over the rushing wind.
“Time to activate the drive!”
He nodded enthusiastically, looking as excited as a kid on Christmas morning. Never mind saving humanity from extinction, the scientist clearly saw this as the experiment of a lifetime.
Lois took the command key and tried to insert it into the matching control port, just as Jor-El had instructed. She wished Clark’s birth father was around to supervise the procedure, but apparently Boeing hadn’t equipped the Globemaster with holographic projectors.
She fitted the key to the port and pushed gently, as she had in that detention cell aboard the Black Zero.
But the key refused to go in the whole way.
“Are you kidding me?”
Hamilton observed her difficulty. He tugged on his goatee worriedly, as though recalling that the fate of mankind depended on everything proceeding as advertised.
Frustrated, Lois whacked the key with her fist.
No dice. It still wouldn’t budge.
“Let me try,” Hamilton volunteered. Squeezing past her, he wrestled with the recalcitrant object, trying to force it into the port, but with an equal lack of success. “The mechanism is jammed! It must have been damaged.” Stepping back, he examined the Kryptonian capsule. “Help me check the fittings, the cables... anything!”
Lois wondered when the capsule had been damaged. During Zod’s attack on the Kent farm, or when the ship had first crashed to Earth, thirty-plus years ago? Or had it been struck by an asteroid or comet during its long voyage from Krypton?
Not that it mattered. Fixing the port took top priority now.
Working together, she and Hamilton pored over the alien capsule, examining every inch of the craft’s extraterrestrial carapace and inner cavities. She took off her flight helmet to get a better look, even though she had no idea what she was actually searching for.
What did she know about the workings of a Kryptonian Phantom Drive?
She could barely change the toner in her printer!
* * *
In the cockpit, Hardy wondered what the holdup was. He hit the comms.
“This is Guardian,” he asked, wanting an update. “What’s our load status? Are we ready to jettison?”
“That’s a negative, Guardian,” the loadmaster replied.
Hardy didn’t like the sound of that. Deciding he needed to see just what was going on in the hold, he turned the flight controls over to Brubaker.
“Co-pilot’s airplane!”
He unstrapped and hurried for the flight deck stairs.
* * *
Faora watched from the bridge as the bulky aircraft approached the Black Zero, escorted by two sleek airborne fighters. She gave the human pilots credit for persistence, but was in no mood to tolerate their feeble attacks. She felt like killing something, preferably with her bare hands.
Handing the bridge off to Commander Gor, she raced to the nearest escape pod. She climbed inside the pod and sent it hurling down the launch tube. Unlike the dropships, the unit lacked weaponry and long-range flight capabilities, but that didn’t matter to Faora. The enemy was right outside, and she didn’t need plasma cannons to destroy them.
Maybe she couldn’t bring back the World Engine, but, by Rao, she could make the humans pay
* * *
Hardy dashed down the stairs and into the cargo hold.
“We’re inbound for the drop!” he said urgently. “What the hell is going on here?”
Lois and Dr. Hamilton looked up from the balky space capsule.
“We’ve had a setback!” the scientist reported unhelpfully. With no time to offer a fuller explanation, he dropped to his knees and peered beneath the tethered starcraft. His eyes lit up as he spotted something.
“Ms. Lane!”
Crouching down on the opposite side of the capsule, Lois saw what he was pointing at. Two dangling filaments appeared to have uncoupled on the underbelly of the craft, just out of easy reach. Marginally closer to them, Hamilton tried to squirm beneath the ship. His trembling fingers groped for the strands.
Lois crossed her fingers, wishing him luck, only to be distracted by a sudden explosion outside the plane. Her head pivoted toward the open ramp at the end of the hold. Through the gap, she saw one of their F-35 escorts blown apart by white-hot blasts of plasma.
The crippled fighter came apart before her eyes. A fireball erupted in the sky where the plane had been.
What—?
Her eyes widened in shock and recognition as the Kryptonian scout ship from the Arctic descended from above, its cannons blazing. Another volley of blasts tore apart the last remaining F-35, leaving the C-17 on its own.
Lois gulped as the ancient UFO swept in toward the defenseless cargo plane.
This doesn’t make any sense, she thought. I thought Clark had inherited that ship! What was it doing here— and why was it attacking them?
C H A P T E R T H I R T Y - T H R E E
Zod piloted the captured scout ship. Despite its age, the venerable craft handled well, and its weapons proved more than sufficient to dispose of the primitive human aircraft that were harassing the Black Zero.
Having eliminated the jet fighters first, he turned his attention to the lumbering aircraft they had been guarding. He eyed the freighter suspiciously, wondering what the human pilots had died to protect. It was hard to imagine that any Terran weapon could pose a significant threat to the Black Zero, but it was best not to take chances— especially now that the gravity field had been disabled.
That had to be Kal-El’s doing, he thought darkly. If only he was in my sights instead.
“Target that aircraft,” he ordered the ship.
“Targeting, sir.”
A tactical overlay appeared upon the viewport as the weapon systems acquired the plane. Whatever the humans hoped to accomplish, they would soon be reduced to atoms.
Along with their future.
* * *
From the aft of the cargo bay, Lois saw the Kryptonian scout ship coming in for the kill. Having already watched the alien ship wipe out two of the jet fighters, she held little hope for the defenseless cargo plane.
Unless...
Her prayers were answered as an unmistakable blue-and-red figure came streaking down from the sky. Hope restored Lois’s spirits.
It’s about time, she thought. This looks like a job for Superman.
* * *
Superman slammed into the scout ship only seconds before it could fire on the C-17. He breached the hull, invading the bridge even as Zod rose from the pilot’s seat in surprise.
But he didn’t give the genocidal general a moment to recover from the attack. Out for blood, and determined not to let Zod hurt anyone else, he lunged at his father’s murderer, driving him back through a bulkhead and onto the floor. His fingers closed around Zod’s throat as he pinned him to the tiles. After what he had just seen of the damage inflicted on Metropolis, he figured the kid gloves were off.
“It’s over, Zod,” he said grimly. “I’m sending you back where you belong!”
Ho
lding onto his enemy with one hand, he began tearing apart the craft’s lustrous interior panels and neural networks. Part of him regretted trashing his Kryptonian legacy like this, but he couldn’t risk Zod turning the scout ship and its technology against Earth again. Without the Genesis Chamber, Zod couldn’t use the missing Codex to spawn hordes of Kryptonian conquerors.
As he understood it, the exiled fanatics would sooner die off than breed the old-fashioned way.
Caught in Superman’s grasp, Zod fought to halt the destruction.
“You fool!” he ranted. “The Codex is inside you!”
Superman froze, caught off-guard by the revelation.
Is this some sort of trick? he wondered.
“All you need is the Genesis Chamber!” Zod insisted, half-pleading, half-threatening. He railed at Superman, frantic to get through to him. “If you destroy this ship, you destroy Krypton!”
“That’s what I’m banking on!” Superman said.
Heat rays shot from his eyes, incinerating a molded control module that was rooted to the ceiling. The bridge pitched beneath them as the ship went into a tailspin.
Zod’s face went pale as he felt the ship—and the Genesis Chamber—plummeting toward doom. An agonized cry tore itself from his throat.
“NO!!!”
* * *
The scout ship whirled past the C-17, barely missing the plane, before crashing into a skyscraper. Lois watched in horror from the back of the cargo hold as the Kryptonian ship ploughed through the building and kept on going, scraping against nearby high-rises and sending avalanches of glass and steel and stone into the streets below.
Peering out the open loading ramp, she saw that the Daily Planet building, with its trademark globe, was still standing, but for how much longer?
She was starting to wonder if there was going to be anything left of Metropolis before Zod and his troops were stopped.
* * *
Down on the street, Perry and his colleagues gaped at the aerial combat being waged overhead. They ducked for cover as a spiraling Kryptonian ship, which looked suspiciously like the one Lois had described in her article, took out two blocks of buildings before slamming into the streets far too close for comfort.
