Man of Steel: The Official Movie Novelization (12 page)

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency specialized in developing new scientific technologies for use by the military. Hamilton certainly looked the part of an egghead scientist. He was a professorial type, in his sixties, with a bald pate and neatly trimmed goatee. Lois could easily envision him puttering in a lab somewhere, working on various hush-hush projects.

“We were expecting you tomorrow,” Hardy said gruffly.

She just shrugged.

“Which is why I showed up
today
,” she replied.

Hardy scowled, but Lois refused to be intimidated. She took off her hood and laid her cards on the table.

“Let’s get one thing straight, okay, guys? The only reason I’m here is because we’re on Canadian soil, and the appellate court overruled your injunction to keep me away. So if we’re done measuring manhoods, you want to tell me what your knob turners found?”

Hardy looked as if he would have preferred to assemble a firing squad, but orders were orders, so he and Hamilton led her over to a bank of sophisticated computers and monitoring equipment, where they introduced her to Staff Sergeant Sekowsky. Unlike his tight-lipped superiors, the curly haired technician seemed eager to talk about what his crew had discovered.

“NASA’s EOS satellites pinged the anomaly first.” He pointed to computer screens cycling through false-color portraits of the seabed and nearby glacial topography. The glacial ice was rendered in shades of blue, while the ocean appeared as green above the rocky gray sea floor. Layers of snow were, appropriately, white. “The ice shelf plays hell on the echo soundings... but there’s definitely something down there.”

Lois squinted at the screens. She wasn’t an expert on interpreting images of this sort, but it was evident that that there was a large solid object embedded deep beneath the ice.

“A submarine, maybe?” she speculated. “Soviet-era?” That would be interesting, but not quite the front-page story she was hoping to find.

“Doubt it,” Hardy said. “At three hundred meters, that’s considerably larger than anything we know they built back then.”

Lois did the conversion in her head. Three hundred meters was roughly a thousand feet long.

That would be an awfully big sub.

Dr. Hamilton asked Sekowsky to call up an “aerial reflection radiometer view.” Lois made a mental note to look that up later, and observed that the image on the screen appeared to have been taken from orbit.

“And then there’s this,” Hamilton said. “You’d expect a sub to be buried in the seabed, but this thing’s lodged one hundred feet
above
sea level, at the base of this tidewater glacier.”

Lois saw his point. How would a sub end up frozen in the ice, a significant distance above the ocean?

Unless it dropped from the sky.

“Could an earthquake have moved it?” she asked.

“Maybe,” Sekowsky said. “But that’s not the spooky part. The ice surrounding it is nearly
twenty thousand
years old.”

* * *

Twenty thousand years?

Lois was still processing that as Colonel Hardy marched her across the encampment to her quarters. The Arctic sun had dipped below the horizon, taking with it what passed for warmth. Shivering in her parka, Lois decided she would never complain about Metropolis winters again.

“Here it is,” Hardy said, like a grumpy innkeeper. Joe tagged along behind him, still carrying Lois’s duffle bag. Hardy opened the door to the shelter, then realized that Lois had lagged behind. “Ms. Lane.”

Despite the cold, she had paused to take in the view. Steam rose from the excavation site where the meltdown generator was living up to its name. The Aurora Borealis shimmered high overhead, spreading across the night sky in rippling curtains of green and red. Pristine sheets of ice reflected the aurora.

“Try not to wander,” Hardy said impatiently. “Temperatures drop to minus forty at night. And if a whiteout rolls in, we won’t find your body until next spring.”

Lois tore her eyes away from the heavenly lightshow.

“What if I need to tinkle?”

“There’s a bucket in the corner.”

Lois entered the shelter, which turned out to resemble an industrial cargo container more than a cozy bed-and-breakfast. Sure enough, the accommodations consisted of a cot, a sleeping bag—and a bucket.

Hardy smirked before taking his leave. Joe, the hunky baggage carrier, gave Lois an apologetic shrug as he put the duffle bag down, then left without a word. Lois found herself alone in a glorified shack in the middle of an Arctic wasteland.

Could be worse,
she thought.
Somebody else might be onto this story.

* * *

She waited long enough to let her babysitters to get out of the cold, then cracked open the door of the shelter and peeked outside. As she’d hoped, there wasn’t a guard posted. Where was she supposed to go anyway? Hardy clearly expected her to stay inside, where it was safe and warm.

How little he knew her.

Getting the official story wasn’t enough. If she wanted to find out what was
really
going on, she needed to shake her handlers and poke around on her own.

Slipping outside, she zipped up her parka as far as it would go, then crept down toward the excavation site. Nobody in their right mind was outdoors after dark, so she managed to get a good look at the meltdown generator, which resembled a large steel top hanging from a chain. Hot water circulated through copper lines wrapped around the tip of the machine, which was melting the ice below at a slow but steady rate.

Pumps cleared the melted ice water from the borehole. Lois recalled that a similar gadget had been used to uncover a long-buried WWII fighter plane in Greenland several years earlier. She was hoping for an even bigger discovery here.

Twenty thousand years?

Fishing a digital camera from her pocket, she snapped a few shots of the excavation site. She was looking around for something else worth photographing when she spotted a lone figure moving across a snowy ridge outside the camp. She zoomed in on the figure, using the camera’s telephoto lens, and was surprised to see Joe the baggage handler disappearing into the Arctic wastes.

“Where the hell are
you
going?” she whispered to herself. Intrigued, she took off after him, following his tracks through the snow. It was a daunting trek, through one of the most inhospitable environments she could have imagined. But it never once crossed her mind to turn back. Her reporter’s instinct told her there was a story to be had, and she wasn’t going home without it.

Hopefully it would be worth a touch of frostbite.

* * *

She trudged across a huge shelf of floating ice, hugging herself to keep warm. Ellesmere Island, her research told her, had the largest ice shelves in the world, some of them extending for more than a hundred square miles. She assumed Joe wasn’t planning that long a hike, since nobody human could stay out in this cold too long. But where did he think he was going?

The aurora barely provided enough light to see by. She lost sight of her quarry amid the rolling hills and depressions, but his tracks led her on. Rounding a stony outcropping, she spied an enormous glacier looming ahead. A bright ruby light, not unlike a laser beam, glowed at the base. Clouds of steam obscured her view.

What have we here?
she wondered.
Another excavation site?

Her face seemed frozen and she couldn’t feel her toes anymore, but she made her way to the base of the glacier. A crystalline white cliff, glistening darkly in the night, towered above her where the glacier wall met the ice shelf beneath her feet.

A tunnel entrance, which looked as though it had been newly carved, stood before her. Rivulets of fresh water dripped from the ceiling and ran down the slick walls, continuing the length of the tunnel. Her boots splashed through puddles of slush.

The sloping tunnel appeared to lead deep beneath the glacier. Despite her professional curiosity, Lois hesitated before entering. She didn’t feel like getting buried in the ice for another twenty millennia or so, like some long-dead Siberian mammoth.

But she had come too far to turn back now. She swallowed hard, took a deep breath, and started down the tunnel.

All right, Joe,
she thought.
Let’s find out just what you’re up to.

C
lark’s eyes glowed like twin red suns. Scalding clouds of steam billowed around him as his fiery gaze melted away the thick sheets of ice. The tunnel he had drilled had brought him to a huge cavern far beneath the ancient glacier. Now only a final layer stood between him and what had he had come so far to find.

His eyes dimmed and the steam cleared, revealing...

An immense alien spacecraft, many times larger than the one in which his parents had found him. The size of a cruise ship, the vessel was distinctly organic in appearance, resembling the fossilized shell of some gargantuan horseshoe crab. Icy water tricked down its flowing contours. Although longer and more streamlined, it was unmistakably akin to the capsule hidden beneath the old barn.

Clark stared in wonder at the ship, which had been buried under the ice for millennia. Alien glyphs were etched into its smooth, ceramic hull. The exotic characters were unfamiliar to him, except for one that resembled a capital “S.” Excitement surged through his veins as he fished out the strange black key his father had given him, so many years ago. He compared the symbol on the head of the key to the mark on the spaceship’s hull.

It was a match.

He couldn’t believe it. Might this forgotten starship actually hold the answers he’d been searching for all his life? Was he finally about to discover the truth about his past—where he came from?
You have another father,
his dad had told him.
Another name.
At long last, the truth seemed within reach.

Clark didn’t know whether to be thrilled or terrified.

Maybe a little bit of both.

Working up his nerve, he stepped forward and touched the hull of the sleeping vessel, then jumped back in surprise as polished ceramic plates slid open before him. He peered inside the silent ship, then gulped and stepped inside.

The interior had the same oddly organic appearance as the craft that had brought him to Smallville. Walking through its ribbed corridors was like exploring the fossilized remains of some gigantic mollusk, or crustacean. Curved arteries, disdaining right angles, branched off in unexpected directions, including up and down. The further he went, the more convinced he became that this ship had originated somewhere light-years away. The unearthly architecture was strange, unsettling, and alien.

Just like me?

He’d assumed that he had the empty ship to himself, but suddenly he heard servomotors whirring behind him. He spun around in time to watch a robot drop from a valve in the ceiling. The metallic creature wasn’t humanoid in appearance—it resembled a large rectangular lantern, and had an illuminated three-dimensional display screen at the center of its chest. Glowing tendrils sprouted from its base.

Some sort of automated sentry?

Clark backed away cautiously as the levitating mechanoid scanned him with a beam that shone from its central monitor. He raised his hands, showing empty palms, in what he hoped would be seen as a universal signal of peaceful intentions.

It didn’t work.

The robot zipped toward him aggressively, lashing out with its white-hot tentacles. Clark moved to defend himself, and a tendril whipped around his upper arm, burning right through his winterwear to sear the pink flesh underneath.

He cried out as he experienced something almost entirely new to him.

Pain.

A welt formed across his arm. He panicked and stumbled backward, glancing about frantically for a way he might protect himself. His desperate gaze fell upon a small diamond-shaped port in the wall above his head. It was shaped like the S-shield on the head of his key.

Still the hostile robot advanced toward him.

Acting on instinct, Clark jumped up and plugged the key into the slot. It slid in effortlessly, fitting perfectly. The port pulsed in response—and the robot froze in midair, halting its attack.

Clark gasped in relief, thanking his lucky stars that he had held onto the key all this time. He clutched his arm, which was still stinging like blazes. Was this what ordinary people felt, whenever they were hurt? His heart went out to them. He had never quite realized what it felt like to be... vulnerable.

Dropping back down, he circled the immobile sentry warily. He kept his guard up, but apparently the ship’s long-dormant security system had recognized the key, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was somehow connected to the vessel.

Now what?
he wondered.
Where do I look first?

A flicker of movement appeared in the corner of his eye.

Another robot?

Turning quickly, he glimpsed a tall, bearded man, standing at the end of the corridor. He wore a textured robe over what looked like a blue, skintight wetsuit. Clark started toward him, but the figure ducked silently around the corner, vanishing from sight. He shifted his vision to peer through the walls and find him, but the alien substance resisted him along the entire spectrum, from infrared to ultraviolet. Further evidence that it was not of this world.