by Greg Cox
A chill ran down Hardy’s spine. There was no question as to the Kryptonians’ intentions now. He knew a declaration of war when he heard one. Faora was talking genocide.
Before Superman could reply, a railway boxcar hurtled through the air like an immense steel javelin. The flying car slammed into him, knocking him through the front of Sears. The back of the boxcar jutted from the shattered wall, looking surreally out of place.
Hardy blinked in surprise.
What the—? Where did that come from?
Then the big, mute Kryptonian landed on the parking lot—and he knew who had thrown the boxcar.
All the way from the rail yard!
Hardy scrambled over to the ’copter and fumbled for his walkie-talkie. He hastily keyed the radio, even as he watched Faora get back on her feet.
“Thunder One-Two!” he said desperately. “This is Guardian. For the record, this is my call... my responsibility! Put everything you’ve got just north of me! This will be danger-close. My initials are November-Hotel-Hotel!”
The wingman’s voice crackled over the radio:
“Copy danger-close. Good luck, Guardian.”
The surviving Warthog zoomed down from the heavens. Per Hardy’s orders, the jet fired its last four Mavericks at the Kryptonians, engulfing them in a storm of fire. The missiles devastated the parking lot, instantly reducing it to rubble. He could feel the scorching heat from yards away. Vance and the other soldiers scrambled to escape the blast.
But the ferocious air strike didn’t even singe Faora’s short hair. She staggered away from the flames, assisted by her hulking partner. Hardy cursed under his breath.
Could nothing hurt these bastards?
To make matters worse, one of the Kryptonian dropships joined the conflict. Sweeping in over the town, it blew the A-10 to pieces with a white-hot pulse from its cannons. The blast didn’t leave enough of the Warthog to crash—all that remained was flaming debris, falling from the sky.
Great, Hardy thought bitterly. They’ve got air superiority, too.
The alien ship landed in what remained of the street. Hardy and the other soldiers prepared themselves, ready to sell their lives dearly, if necessary. But the ship had just come to retrieve Faora and the giant. The faceless brute helped the disoriented female into the ship, which then screamed off into the sky, leaving Smallville behind.
The soldiers cautiously lowered their weapons.
Hardy grimly surveyed the destruction. Smoke and flames rose into the sky. Downtown Smallville was a disaster area, entire buildings badly damaged or destroyed. Torched vehicles smoldered atop broken pavement. The remains of a crashed fighter jet and helicopter littered the battleground. The unarmed Kryptonians had nearly wiped out the town without even trying.
And the scary part was, Hardy figured they had all had gotten off easy.
The misplaced boxcar dislodged from the Sears building, and Superman emerged. Like Hardy, he paused to contemplate the wreckage that surrounded them. Vance’s men, reacting to the caped alien’s presence, fanned out to surround him, their guns at the ready. Fear showed on their faces.
Less than an hour ago, Hardy would have done the same.
But not any more.
“This man is not our enemy,” he said firmly. “Stand down.”
He looked Superman squarely in the eye. As far as he was concerned, the flying alien had proved himself more than once during the battle, and not just by saving him from Faora’s thirsty blade. He accepted Superman as a brother in arms.
The soldiers lowered their weapons.
“Thank you, Colonel,” Superman said. “I couldn’t have stopped them without your help.”
Hardy thought that might be overly generous, but accepted the compliment with a curt nod. At least Vance’s team had managed to evacuate plenty of civilians from the combat zone. That counted for something.
Superman didn’t stick around to exchange war stories. He took off like a rocket, flying off into the sky. Vance and his soldiers watched him go with awestruck expressions on their faces.
Hardy knew how they felt.
* * *
The farmhouse looked to be beyond repair. A tractor occupied the living room, beyond the gaping hole in the wall. Daylight was fading as Martha cautiously sifted through the rubble, attempting to rescue her most precious mementos, including a faded Polaroid taken in happier days, when Clark was only eight years old.
The photo showed the boy and Jonathan, posing with a paper-mache volcano at a school science fair. The boy beamed happily beside his father.
A breeze stirred the debris littering the floor.
“Hello, Mom.”
Superman touched down behind her. Her eyes briefly registered surprise at his unorthodox attire, but then she rushed forward to embrace him. He held her tightly, just as relieved as she was that they were both still in one piece. He scanned her discreetly with his X-ray vision, but found no broken bones or internal injuries. Zod’s goons must have left her alone to chase after him.
“Thank God,” she murmured. Reluctantly letting go, she glanced around at the wreckage. “I was thinking I might take you up on that offer to remodel now.”
He wished he had half her spirit.
“I’m so sorry,” he said.
“It’s only stuff, Clark,” she replied. “It can always be replaced.”
“But you can’t be,” he said, horrified at how close he had come to losing her. Zod and his confederates had proven that they had no respect for human life, and would stop at nothing to get what they wanted. “This Codex they’re looking for. Zod says it can bring my people back.”
She examined him closely, not quite understanding.
“Isn’t that a good thing?”
“I don’t think they’re interested in sharing this world, Mom. And I’m not sure I know how to stop them from taking it.”
“I do,” a voice intruded on their conversation. Superman turned to see Lois approaching from the road, where a police car with a flashing light had just dropped her off. Caught up in the emotional reunion with his mother, Superman hadn’t even noticed her arrival.
Now he wondered what she had in mind.
C H A P T E R T W E N T Y - S E V E N
The dropships docked with the Black Zero, where Zod and the landing party hurriedly returned to the bridge. The ship’s Kryptonian environment was a relief after their ordeal on Earth.
A visible hull breach outside the science ward had explained Kal-El’s escape from the ship. Clearly, Jor-El’s heir was more resourceful than anticipated.
Zod resolved not to underestimate him again.
Jax-Ur was waiting for him on the bridge.
“What happened down there?” the scientist asked.
Zod chose not to rebuke him for allowing Kal-El to escape.
“He exposed a temporary weakness,” Zod admitted, now fully recovered from the sensory onslaught that had undone him on Earth. Although the memory of that galling defeat still gnawed at him.
Jax-Ur shrugged. “It’s of little consequence.”
“How can you say that?” Faora responded furiously, her eyes still rimmed with red. “He humiliated us!” Zod had never seen her so angry—not even when they’d been taken into custody by the Sapphire Guard, back on Krypton.
The scientist smirked.
“Because I’ve located the Codex.”
His words sent a surge of excitement through Zod. Recovering the Codex was their primary objective, more important than recapturing Kal-El.
Jax-Ur waved them over to the holographic orb that hovered above a command cylinder, where he called up his findings. Kryptonian blood cells, magnified by many orders of magnitude, were displayed in three dimensions. Red and white corpuscles drifted within a drop of briny serum.
What does this have to do with the missing Codex? Zod wondered.
“It was never in the capsule,” Jax-Ur explained.
Faora gave him a puzzled look.
“I don’t
understand.”
“Jor-El took the Codex—the DNA of a billion people— then he bonded it within his son’s individual cells.” Jax-Ur was clearly impressed by this accomplishment, and the ingenuity that lay behind it. “It was a brilliant solution. All of Krypton’s heirs living, hidden, in one refugee’s body.”
He increased the magnification. Digitized information danced through the individual blood cells. The genotypes of future generations—crafted to populate a meticulously designed social order—all waited to be harvested.
Zod instantly grasped the notion.
“And you found this in the blood sample you took from him?”
Jax-Ur nodded, looking quite pleased with himself. Zod decided this discovery easily outweighed Kal-El’s escape from the science ward. He stepped over to a viewport, and gazed at the planet below. Yellow sunlight shone upon his face.
“Tell me,” Zod asked. “Does Kal-El need to be alive for us to extract the Codex from his cells?”
Jax-Ur grinned as though he had anticipated the question.
“No.”
So be it, Zod thought. He turned his attention back to Earth, where the sun was just cresting over its western hemisphere. Now that he knew where the Codex was to be found, he could proceed with the next phase of the operation.
“Our new home awaits us,” he announced. Then he turned toward Commander Gor, who was manning the Black Zero’s controls. “On my word, Commander, release the World Engine.”
The soldier inputted the go-code.
“Now.”
The bridge shuddered as explosive bolts burst, disengaging the World Engine from the Black Zero. A three-dimensional schematic, projected above the command console, showed the bottom one-thirds of the composite vessel’s bulk detaching from the original prison barge. No longer mated to the ship, the massive device ignited its independent thrusters and took off on a trajectory bound for the planet’s southern hemisphere.
At last, Zod thought. It has begun.
* * *
A new icon appeared on the big board at NORTHCOM, vectoring away from the Kryptonian mothership. General Swanwick jumped to his feet.
“What just happened?” he demanded.
“Their ship’s splitting in two!” an analyst reported. “Track 1 is heading east. Track 2 is deploying toward the southern hemisphere.”
The analyst rolled back the satellite footage to show the events of a few seconds earlier. A hush fell over the ops center as the assembled personnel watched a huge black tripod detach itself from the upper tier of the mothership. The liberated module rocketed away from a significantly smaller version of the original UFO.
“Get me orbital data!” Swanwick ordered. “How fast is that bogey going?”
“Approaching Mach 24 and accelerating. Inclination TBD.” He hastily called up more stats. “Looks like it’s going to impact somewhere in the South Indian Ocean.”
Swanwick’s brow furrowed. What on Earth was Zod after on the other side of the world?
* * *
The volcanic island was little more than a clump of jagged rocks, sparsely dotted with vegetation, jutting up from the sea. It was one of hundreds of islands dotting this corner of the Indian Ocean. Remote and uninhabited, it slept quietly in the predawn hours.
Until the World Engine slammed into it like a gigantic meteor, throwing up a mile-high plume of dirt, dust, and pulverized bedrock. Seismometers across the planet registered the earth-shaking impact, even as the colossal mechanism rose up from a newly formed crater.
Supported by legs over a thousand feet high, the Engine towered above the devastated surface of the island. The tropical climate was very different from the ice planet upon which the World Engine once had languished, prior to Zod’s arrival.
It paused briefly, waiting.
* * *
NORTHCOM analysts scrambled to stay on top of the rapidly changing situation. Swanwick and the others kept their eyes on the big board, where the icon representing the original dreadnought began dropping vertically toward the Earth.
“Sir!” an analyst cried out. “The rest of their ship is descending!”
I can see that, the general thought. He didn’t know what it meant, but knew it couldn’t be good. “Put it on the board now!”
* * *
Clouds boiled away above Metropolis as the ship descended toward the city. Its massive weight pressed down on the air, creating violent turbulence in the concrete canyons below Skyscraper windows imploded. Sirens and car alarms went off all across the city. A shadow fell over downtown.
“My God,” Perry whispered.
Along with Lombard and the others, he stared out the windows at the alien spacecraft. No longer just a distant shape in the sky, the ship now hovered directly overhead, resembling a monstrous artificial squid. It filled the sky, blotting out the bright afternoon sun.
Down in the street, thirty stories below the Planet’s bullpen, traffic came to a standstill. Panicked citizens and tourists alike abandoned buses, taxis, trucks, and automobiles to run for their lives. People stampeded the subway entrances or sought shelter in the nearest building. Shopping bags and briefcases were left discarded on the sidewalks. Perry had never seen anything like it.
A veteran newsman, he had covered blackouts, blizzards, hurricanes, terrorist attacks, and riots, but he had never witnessed an entire city driven into hiding by the onset of what appeared it to be an honest-to-God alien invasion.
It was the story of the century—if anyone would be around to read it.
* * *
Zod remained upon the bridge, gazing down on the humans’ sprawling metropolis. It was impressive enough, in its own primitive fashion, but it in no way rivaled the grandeur of Kandor.
The city would have to be leveled to make room for a new seat of power, but perhaps there would be some artifacts left over for Kryptonian archaeologists to study. The humans deserved to have some record of their existence preserved, if only for posterity.
He turned toward Jax-Ur, who was viewing remote schematics of the World Engine. It had successfully made planet fall, and was awaiting further instructions.
“Bring the Phantom Drives online,” Zod ordered, “and activate the carrier beam.”
Jax-Ur relayed the commands to his subordinates.
* * *
On the distant island, the World Engine powered up. Flocks of birds took fight in a roar of flapping wings, as if they sensed what was to come.
Indicator lights pulsed along the device’s head.
* * *
“Carrier beam is synchronized,” Jax-Ur confirmed. He double-checked the readings, simply to be sure. “The World Engine is now slaved to our drives.”
Then all was in readiness. Zod saw no need to delay any longer. They had travelled too far, sacrificed too much, to wait a moment more.
“Fire.”
C H A P T E R T W E N T Y - E I G H T
An eerie glow lit up the base of the Black Zero. Gravitational fluxes attracted loose particulates and other debris from the streets below. A halo of levitating dirt, glass, and litter formed around the ship, like the rings of a gas giant.
An incandescent column of shimmering azure energy, at least three hundred feet in diameter, shot down from the underside of the ship. The block-wide beam pressed down on everything that lay beneath the alien vessel. Structures began to crumble, then collapse. Abandoned vehicles were crushed like tin cans.
Gaining strength, the pulsating column expanded outward, creating an ever-widening circle of destruction. Multistory office buildings pancaked, compressing innocent men and women between the floors. Fragile human flesh was vaporized instantly.
* * *
On the opposite side of the planet, a reciprocal column was generated by the World Engine. A beam of focused gravity, it flattened all the remaining trees and other foliage on the ravaged island. The surrounding seas parted as if shoved aside by a god-like hand.
Here, too, rings of loose matter orbited the hea
d of the gargantuan device, its gravity beam penetrated deep into the Earth until it met the beam from the Black Zero.
Thus linked, the machines fed each other, creating an axis of energy that traded waves of crushing gravity in a devastating feedback loop.
Huge vents opened along the top of the Engine. Noxious fumes gushed from the vents, spilling out into the atmosphere like the pyroclastic surge of a volcano. Seething clouds of alien vapor jetted forth as the device breathed upon the Earth.
* * *
General Swanwick watched in dismay as the two-part assault played out upon the big board’s video screens. Satellite footage offered him—and the rest of the NORTHCOM staff—a front-row seat for the twin cataclysms.
Swanwick tried to fathom what he was seeing.
“Nuclear, chemical, kinetic—no known weapon can cause that type of damage,” he said. Then he turned. “What’ve they hit us with?”
“Looks like some kind of gravity weapon,” Dr. Hamilton theorized. He called up what he referred to as a “gravity map” of Metropolis. Most of the city and outlying boroughs were rendered in orange, indicating regions of normal gravity, while a circle centered on the Kryptonian ship edged into blues and greens.
They watched grimly as the circle steadily expanded.
Hamilton toggled to another screen. A similar graphic depicted the same destructive phenomenon at a location in the Indian Ocean, where the other segment of the ship had come to rest on an insignificant island.
A cross-section of the Earth, extrapolated from seismic readings, showed pulsing “gravity waves” ping-ponging back and forth through the planet’s interior, from the island to Metropolis and back again, growing in intensity with each volley.
“It’s working in tandem with their ship,” Hamilton explained, indicating the anomaly on the island. “Somehow they’re increasing the planet’s mass. Clouding the atmosphere with particulates.” A look of realization dawned on his face. “My God, they’re terraforming.”
“What?” Captain Farris didn’t recognize the term.