The Last Days of Krypton

by Kevin J. Anderson

  Standing at the base of the vigilant telescopes, Jor-El suddenly wondered if someone else might listen, even though the Council had not. He could alter the big dishes in the great array, convert them into powerful phased transmitters, and shout a signal into the interstellar gulf, begging for aid, for rescue.

  But Krypton had only two days left. Even with a transmission spreading out at the speed of light, no rescuers could possibly hear him and respond soon enough. In the time remaining, Jor-El’s call for help would barely reach the boundary of Rao’s solar system.

  Even so, when he explained his idea, Lara suggested that he try. “At least someday others would know what happened to us. Maybe our tale will save some other race from their own closed minds.”

  “Like the last message from Mars,” he said.

  “J’onn J’onzz may have been very much like you, Jor-El.”

  The plight of the lone Martian survivor had certainly wrenched his heart. He had never imagined Krypton’s fate would be so similar—and so imminent. When Donodon had visited Mars, the blue-skinned alien had found only dust and the echoes of a lost civilization. If only he had Donodon’s help now.

  At that moment, Jor-El would have welcomed a fleet of ships from the kindly alien’s race. With those ships, they might have—

  Suddenly his eyes flew open wide and his heart began to pound. “Lara, we have to get back to the estate! There’s a chance—a small chance, but only if I can do it in time.” He could barely catch his breath as the ideas thundered forward. With a shaky hand, he touched their baby’s face. “Maybe I can save us after all.”

  The estate was quiet and empty. Jor-El had excused his few remaining servants so they could be with their families during the end. Only his chef stayed behind, claiming he had nowhere else to go. “This is my home. I’ll stay here, if it’s all the same to you.” Neither he nor Lara could complain.

  Jor-El hurried to the exotic translucent tower his father had built. Inside, with an intensity brought on by desperation and hope, he plunged into work he had left unattended for far too long.

  All the components of Donodon’s small spaceship sat in the middle of the tower room where Nam-Ek had brought them. Over the months he had made halfhearted attempts to reassemble the vessel, but the Commission had not given him much of the ship’s framework or the “nonessential” pieces. Now, he carefully catalogued and organized the components, separated according to mechanisms that Jor-El understood and those that remained unexplained. Alas, the “unidentified” pile was much larger than the other. When he’d worked side by side with Donodon, Jor-El had learned much about the alien vessel, but the two had been intent on the needs of the new seismic scanner, not on understanding the details of the exotic starship. Now he had to do it himself.

  Kal-El rested comfortably in a crib Lara brought into the tower. Their time was now measured in hours, and Jor-El felt the oppressive loss of each second that slipped away. Every breath he took brought him one breath closer to his last.

  Red-eyed with weariness, Jor-El tried to decipher the alien engines and systems, relying on logical guesses. It would be impossible to manufacture other vessels like Donodon’s to begin a mass exodus from Krypton—but if he was lucky and worked hard enough, perhaps he could reassemble and expand this one, placing the still-functional components in a single ship.

  He remembered when Donodon had originally demonstrated the controls of the vessel, proudly telling him that the spacecraft was so sophisticated it could fly itself, explaining that its life support could adapt to other races. But Jor-El didn’t know how anything worked. He couldn’t unravel it in time.

  “I could install the heart of Donodon’s small ship in the framework of a larger vessel. Large enough for the three of us.” He looked intently at Lara. “Just the three of us. It might work.”

  “What about the rest of the people on Krypton?”

  Jor-El hung his head. “It’s not possible, Lara. In my entire life I’ve rarely admitted that, but this is one of those times. Do I save my family…or do I save no one? Those are the only two choices now.”

  “Tell me how I can help.” Lara assisted him, working herself to exhaustion helping him and taking care of their baby. There was no time for sleep. Fro-Da kept them fed, but didn’t ask what they were doing. Believing his master’s conviction that the end was near, the chef found contentment in his daily routine.

  Jor-El took components from several of his enclosed personal vehicles—a dome from a floater raft, seats and cabin from a groundcar, concentrated food supplies, medical kits. He needed to make a structure large enough for two adults and a baby, to last them for the unknown length of an interstellar voyage. Even the expanded ship would be cramped for an extended journey, and he had no idea how long their flight would be or even where they might go. But if Jor-El succeeded, then he, Lara, and the baby would be alive…at least for a little while longer. Alive. At the moment, that was the most Jor-El could strive for.

  Taking precise notes, Lara captured images of his every step to make certain he could put the components back together. Jor-El finished reconnecting the engines, the power source, the navigation grid, and the planetary databases. Those were the most important parts.

  Using a levitator crane, he installed the systems into the makeshift vessel he had constructed, a ship large enough to save the three of them. Though he tried not to, he continued to glance at the chronometer, feeling each moment drop away to vanish forever. He worked faster.

  Meanwhile, Lara tackled another important task. From the library on the estate, she began to load as much of Krypton’s knowledge as she could cram into memory crystals—history, culture, legends, geography, and science. She couldn’t save the planet itself, but she could save its essence. She included the long and detailed journal recordings she had kept for so many years, the story of Kandor, her romance with Jor-El, the dark reign of Zod. The ship would take not only the three of them, but also all the information they might need.

  With very little time remaining, Jor-El hooked up the engines and the power source to the large vessel. With Lara beside him, her expression hopeful and her faith in him complete, he tried to activate the systems.

  When nothing happened, he tried again.

  The power drain was too large. The sophisticated systems that had been precisely designed and calibrated for Donodon’s small blue-and-silver spacecraft refused to recognize the much larger vessel built to accommodate Jor-El and his family.

  The rapidly assembled ship would not function. The engine readings flickered, powered up, but failed to reach sufficient levels. The navigation computers refused to recognize the new framework he had built. Everything automatically shut down.

  The ship would not function.

  Sweating, fighting down panic, Jor-El double-checked all of the systems, reconnected each component. But still nothing. He had made no errors that he could find.

  Donodon’s ship was a marvel that even the alien explorer had not entirely understood. All of the components fit together in a pseudo-organic way, and Jor-El realized with a sinking heart that some part of the old vessel must have been a vital link in the chain. The exotic engines could not simply be pulled out and plugged into something larger.

  It was a disaster. The expanded ship would never fly.

  He slumped back, nearly knocking over one of his tables. Lara didn’t have to ask him what had happened. She saw and understood. “You tried, Jor-El. We all tried.”

  “It isn’t enough! There has to be some other way.” He wrestled with dismay and hopelessness for the better part of an hour, when he did not have an hour to spare. Finally he came to a cold but necessary conclusion. He looked at his wife. “We’ll take it apart—put the components back into a ship as close to the original size and shape that I can manage. They’ll still function the way they were initially built. They have to.”

  “But the ship will be too small, Jor-El. It can’t save all of us.”

  He drew a deep breath.
“No. But at the very least it can save Kal-El.”

  CHAPTER 87

  The red sun of Rao dawned on the last day of Krypton.

  The ground began to shake. All through the previous night, Jor-El hadn’t been able to drive the vivid pictures from his mind, knowing what was happening at the core of the planet. For days, the Phantom Zone had swallowed more and more incandescent lava, and by now the singularity must be dangerously close to its critical point.

  Jor-El did not give up. Even though he knew the energy drain on the cobbled-together components was too great to accommodate two adults and one child, he refused to accept that he couldn’t make it function. He needed to save Lara and the baby; he simply couldn’t imagine—or allow—any other outcome.

  Working feverishly, he stripped out some of the systems, reduced the mass of the vessel’s framework, and recalibrated the life-support controls to work with two passengers. He and Donodon had crowded together in the original tiny vessel…but that had been only for a short flight from Kandor to his estate.

  He was willing to sacrifice himself in order to save his wife and child. But he must save them.

  Again, though, he could not succeed. While Lara watched, her face pale and drawn, he made a second attempt to power up the internal systems of the modified ship. She bit her lip, rocking the baby in her arms, and she realized what he was doing. “You’re going to stay behind, aren’t you? But you want me to go with Kal-El.”

  “You have to.” His tone had a ragged edge of raw desperation, and it allowed for no argument.

  Even so, the built-in generator systems could not power up to the bare minimum requirements. A tear slid down his cheek from reddened eyes as he just stared at the vessel, feeling as if it had betrayed him.

  “I can’t do it. The only possible craft will be barely large enough to accommodate a baby. I can send Kal-El away from Krypton and pray the life support keeps him alive.” The very idea sounded hopeless.

  “But we can’t send our baby out alone,” Lara said. Her voice was almost a moan. “He’ll be helpless and lost.”

  “That is why I so desperately needed you to go along. I failed.” His whole body shuddered with the enormity of what he faced, what they both faced as parents. “But would you rather we didn’t try? Would you rather we kept him with us so that we die together along with all of Krypton?”

  She shook her head. Her eyes sparkled with tears, but both she and Jor-El knew the answer. “No, he is our son. If there is even one chance in a million that he can survive, then we have to take it.”

  “I was sure you would say that.” He had faith in what Donodon’s technology could do, and he clung to the slenderest hope that Kal-El would find a way to survive, a new place to call home, a people to accept him. “We will do what we have to.”

  Working swiftly together, he and Lara guided the new, much smaller starship out of the tower lab and onto the lush purple lawn. Constructed of a sturdy framework inlaid with the toughest Kryptonian structural crystals, many of which he grew using his father’s best techniques, the ship looked quite different from Donodon’s. During the urgent restructuring, Jor-El had made last-minute improvements to accommodate all of the memory crystals, all of the items Kal-El would need, wherever he went. The craft was as much Jor-El’s design as the alien’s, and the single life-form—the baby—finally did not cause the safety shutdowns to engage. To his great relief, he saw that at last the power levels were stable. The engines functioned.

  There was a chance.

  Jor-El and Lara had spent precious moments on an important task, each recording their heartfelt wishes and advice into a special crystal, dictating letters that their son would hear one day. As he grew older, Kal-El would have only these few hints of who his real parents had been. It had to be memorable.

  With so much to say, Lara found herself at a loss for words when she recorded her message. Jor-El had struggled as well, reminded of how he had lost his own father to the Forgetting Disease and how Yar-El had found the strength and focus one last time to record a poignant message sealed into the wall of his mysterious tower. How could Jor-El do any less for his own baby?

  Standing out in the open beside the small ship, Lara gazed around the beautiful estate, choked with emotion. “This is where we first met. This is where so much has happened.”

  “And now here is where everything is coming full circle,” Jor-El said.

  The ground shuddered beneath them, a wrenching, disorienting twist that made the couple stumble. He and Lara caught each other, kept each other from falling. Jor-El knew it would only get worse—and swiftly. Soon they would have no choice but to send the infant away forever.

  After he had completed his frantic work on the new spacecraft, Jor-El then spent another hour poring over his calculations until his head pounded and his eyes ached. He had to be absolutely convinced he wasn’t wrong, that there was no flaw in his reasoning. If he sent his innocent, helpless baby off into the unknown, and Krypton did not explode, then he would never forgive himself for what he had done. Kal-El would be lost to them forever.

  Lara loaded the last few memory crystals into the strange hybrid ship, remaining brave. “Where will we send Kal-El?”

  He gave her a rare smile. “I think I found the perfect place.”

  She suddenly remembered. “Earth? That beautiful world near Mars. In Donodon’s recorded images, those people looked very much like Kryptonians.”

  “We can’t tell exactly how different Kal-El will be from them. Simply growing up under a yellow sun may impose unpredictable physiological changes. Who can say? But on Earth, maybe our son won’t be alone. Maybe those people will accept him.”

  She forced strength in her voice. “At least it’s a chance.”

  When the crystal-inlaid ship was prepared, they had only to pack up the baby, say their farewells, and make sure that Kal-El got safely away before it was too late.

  The ground shuddered more violently than before, and Lara fell to her knees on the grass. The surface heaved as if some monstrous subterranean thing were squirming, breaking free. The baby began to cry. These tremors were just the precursors. All of Krypton’s continents were buckling, twisting as the world’s interior spasmed.

  Fro-Da came running out of the large manor house still wearing his apron; flour and cooking oil had spilled down his chest. The chef blinked as a jagged black crack snaked its way up one thick wall. Then, for reasons he must have considered urgent, he rushed back into the building. Jor-El shouted a warning, but his voice remained unheard as the load-bearing pillars buckled. The entire wing of the house fell in upon itself, burying Fro-Da with his kitchens.

  In the Redcliff Mountains by the now-abandoned Rao-beam outpost, the cliffsides cracked, and avalanches slid down the slopes. House-sized blocks of stone broke free and tumbled into the valleys.

  The sky overhead became a turmoil of spoiled-looking clouds, dust, and fire mixed with a fresh outpouring of gases from volcanic eruptions in the southern continent. Monster storms had begun to brew in the atmosphere, tumbling over one another as they raced across the landscape like unleashed hrakkas.

  The whole engine of the planet’s core shut down.

  On the nearby plains, the telescopes and observation arrays shuddered and groaned. Girders and support stalks snapped, and the broad dishes slowly collapsed to the ground, breaking apart and crumbling under their own weight. In control rooms, all the images crackled into static and went off-line.

  Fissures split the grasslands, spreading like fanged mouths. The floor of the crater of Kandor swelled into a huge dome much larger than Zor-El’s force-field cap, and then split like a festering blister. The reawakened lava geyser shot a pillar of liquid orange fire to the sky.

  A flat communication plate mounted on the curved wall inside Jor-El’s tower laboratory crackled to life, sending an urgent transmission. Though he and Lara stood outside on the open lawn, Jor-El could hear the shouts and pleas of people begging him to help. But it was too
late. As the ground heaved with another sharp shock, the tower twisted. A long, jagged crack shot up the side of the curved wall, and the communication plate tumbled over to shatter on the floor.

  “It’s time,” he said to Lara, who clung protectively to their baby. “We can’t wait any longer.” Tears ran down her face, and Jor-El realized that he was weeping, too.

  Lara wrapped their son tenderly in the blankets of their great house, the finest blue and red fabric emblazoned with the prominent symbol of Jor-El’s family. “Kal-El, you have to go, or you’ll die with us.” She trembled, then straightened. This was their only hope.

  Now that the baby was to be the only passenger, they had outfitted the interior of the ship like a cradle, a protective nest that would be monitored by the alien’s life-support systems. Kryptonian crystals surrounded the cradle, memory crystals with the cultural and historical recordings Lara had copied, the seeds of Yar-El’s architectural crystals, and the crystals that held Lara’s journals. As the last item, she placed the special shard with the messages from both of them in with the baby. “This is so you’ll know we loved you, Kal-El.”

  Lara gave her infant son a final kiss, brushing her lips against the delicate skin of his forehead. Her voice hitched as she said, “I wish you well on your new planet, Kal-El. I hope you find your way among the people of Earth. I hope you manage to be happy.”

  The planet continued to tear itself apart. “It has to be now,” Jor-El said. Thunder in the sky competed with the cracking explosions and eruptions. The ground shook, and another split opened the wall of a nearby building, causing it to collapse. “We have to save him.”

  Lara desperately reached forward to touch the baby one final time. Suddenly thinking of his father’s last utterance, Jor-El leaned in and whispered, “Remember.” Then he took his wife’s hand and drew her back from the ship so that he could close the hatch. Kal-El’s blue eyes stared at his parents as the humming mechanism sealed the craft. The life-support systems switched on, ready to provide warmth, food, light, air.