Man of Steel: The Official Movie Novelization (31 page)

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 the 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?

Z
od 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!”

Holding 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.

Lombard and Jenny both looked to Perry for leadership, but he figured all they could now was hunker down and hope for a miracle.

A lone C-17 had survived the alien ship’s attack. Perry tracked the cargo plane as it angled toward Zod’s mothership for reasons unknown. He offered a silent prayer for whatever brave souls were aboard that plane, taking the fight to the enemy.

Give ’em hell,
Perry thought.

* * *

Explosions ripped through the bridge and Genesis Chamber, throwing Superman and Zod apart. Dormant creches crumbled to ash. Amniotic fluid boiled over, bursting the reservoir. Ripped umbilici bled into the chamber. Gouts of plasma sprayed from severed conduits.

Thunderous impacts battered the hull as the ship crashed to Earth. Flames roared through the Fortress, engulfing the two men in a fiery hell.

* * *

The escape pod arced away from the
Black Zero,
on an intercept course with the worrisome human aircraft. Inside the pod, Faora waited until she was within range of the plane, counting down the last few yards impatiently.

Almost... almost...

Now!

She tore open the pod’s entry hatch and cast it outside, then climbed out of the interior cavity, gripping the ragged doorframe. A foul Earthly wind blew past her as she leapt from pod toward the human’s aircraft.

Beware, humans,
she thought.
Your end is upon you.

* * *

Dr. Hamilton wedged himself beneath the space capsule, still trying to reach the broken coupling. Lois anxiously observed his progress, torn between the technical difficulties in the cargo hold and the apocalyptic battles outside the plane. The scientist muttered as his outstretched fingers brushed against the dangling fibers.