Man of Steel: The Official Movie Novelization (6 page)

Lara stood nearby, at a post in front of a pulsing control panel.

The glow from the starcraft cast Jor-El in stark shadow. With his back to the newcomers, he resembled some mythic hero from Krypton’s illustrious past. If he knew they were there, he gave no sign, A plasma carbine rested in his grip. Powdered silica dusted his hair.

Zod drew his sidearm.

“I know you stole the Codex, Jor-El. Surrender it, and I’ll let you live.”

“Why?” came the response. “So you can pervert our lineage, to your own ends?” Jor-El shook his head. “This is a second chance for
all
of Krypton. Not just the bloodlines you deem worthy.”

What second chance?
Zod wondered. Ignoring his prisoner’s sanctimonious lecture, he searched the scene for clues to whatever audacity Jor-El was attempting. His gaze darted from the adjacent medical suite—where an antique birthing couch had been dragged out of obsolescence—to Lara herself. Her lovely figure was less slender than he recalled, almost as though...

Suddenly an unspeakable possibility forced its way into his mind. It dragged up foggy memories, of certain radical notions Jor-El had once shared with him in private, back when they were young and chafing at the Council’s growing calcification.

Zod’s gaze shifted from the medical suite to the birthing couch, and then to the miniature starcraft, which seemed scarcely large enough to transport anything larger than a child.

A chill ran down his spine. He stared at his former friend in horror.

“What have you done?” he demanded.

“We had a
son
, Zod,” Jor-El said, without even having the decency to deny it. “Krypton’s first live birth in centuries. Free to forge his
own
destiny.”

“Heresy!” Zod felt sick to stomach, but his disgust quickly ignited into rage. He turned to the soldiers, and pointed emphatically at the hovering starcraft and its obscene cargo.

“Destroy it!” he commanded.

That propelled Jor-El into motion. He spun and fired on the soldiers, attempting to provide cover for the craft. The escort fell back, taking up defensive positions, but Zod knew more than they what was at stake.

Heedless of his own safety, he charged into the observatory, desperate to halt the launch. He knew without being told that Jor-El had entrusted the Codex to the abomination he and Lara had conceived. Rao only knew where Jor-El intended to send his son.

Perhaps one of the old outposts?

A plasma burst sizzled past his ear, close enough to singe his hair—a warning shot, perhaps. Zod gambled that Jor-El, for all his mad schemes, wasn’t prepared to murder a friend. So he dashed forward, keeping his head low, only to find himself torn between commandeering the launch controls and attacking the starcraft directly. Or perhaps he needed to remove Jor-El from the equation?

His momentary indecision was his downfall. A well-aimed shot from Jor-El’s rifle reduced Zod’s sidearm to slag. Grunting in pain, he hurled the super-heated weapon away from him.

It splattered upon the floor.

“Lara!” Zod called out, hoping that she was more amenable to reason than her deranged husband. The Lara Lor-Van he recalled had always been highly intelligent, and she might still be that woman, no matter what depravity Jor-El had forced upon her. “Listen to me! The Codex is Krypton’s future!” He appealed to her patriotism and honor. “Abort the launch!”

Then Jor-El was upon him. He pressed the heated muzzle of his rife against Zod, forcing him to his knees. But, as Zod had suspected, he balked at executing the friend of his youth. Instead he merely shouted urgently in Lara’s direction.

“Finish it!”

Her graceful fingers played across the illuminated control screen. The starcraft’s thrusters flared even more brightly, forcing them to look away. Victory—and the Codex—were slipping away from him.

“NO!!!”

Unlike Jor-El, he had been trained to kill. Moving quickly, while their attention was on the starcraft, he drew a concealed dagger from his boot and drove it into Jor-El’s chest, just below his armored breastplate. The carbonized bone blade penetrated Jor-El’s skinsuit, piercing the fragile skin and organs beneath.

Jor-El cried out and collapsed to the floor. His rifle slipped from his fingers.

Zod lunged for the fallen weapon, praying there was still time to halt the launch. Leaving his dagger lodged in his friend’s chest, he snatched the weapon as he rolled across the floor and scrambled into firing position. He took aim at the departing starcraft...

But he was too late. With a sudden burst of ignition, the capsule blasted off at an angle that took it toward the open ceiling of the observatory. He fired desperately, but the plasma burst fell short of its target, which rocketed beyond the roof and into the dusky red sky.

Frustrated, Zod wheeled around to glare at Jor-El, who lay bleeding upon the floor. His wound was mortal, of course, but a smile played upon the dying scientist’s face as he watched the starcraft escape the Citadel. Proud eyes tracked the ship’s ascent.

Then they clouded over. Eyes that had once probed the secrets of the universe saw only oblivion.

“Jor-El!”

Lara rushed to his side. She cradled his lifeless body in her arms, sobbing inconsolably. Zod felt a twinge of sympathy for the woman, who had just lost both her husband and her child, but forced it aside in order to focus on the crisis at hand.

“Your
son,
Lara.” He spit out the obscenity. “Where have you sent him?”

Tear-filled eyes met his, but they were hard, as well. Her defiant voice held neither fear nor regret.

“Beyond your reach,” she replied, her words filled with irony.

We’ll see about that,
he thought. But as he loomed over the forms of the grieving widow and her dead mate, he was briefly transfixed by the sight of Jor-El’s corpse. Remorse threatened to unman him, as the awful weight of this particular killing settled onto his shoulders.

But he shook it off and wiped the blood from his blade. Gathering his soldiers, he moved quickly out of the observatory, leaving Lara alone with her grief.

Let her mourn for both of us,
he thought.
For Krypton’s future still depends on me, and if I fail, we all will suffer.

He had to find a way to abort Jor-El’s unholy enterprise. Zod raced back to the battle-scarred terrace, where he found Faora and the others staring up in confusion at the ascending starcraft. It was gaining altitude by the instant, trailing a vaporous white contrail as it flew toward space. Within moments it would achieve escape velocity and exit Krypton’s atmosphere altogether.

If that occurred, the Codex would truly be beyond his reach, just as Lara had foretold.

“We have to retrieve that ship!” he shouted. “Shoot it down!” Doing so might destroy the object of his desire, but even that was better than letting it vanish into the depths of space. He would have to hope that Jor-El had shielded the Codex sufficiently.

Tor-An relayed the command to a hovering gunship. Zod watched anxiously, wishing that he could personally man the weapons controls as the craft turned and accelerated. It was almost within firing range when a coruscating particle beam blew the craft apart.

What the
—?

Flaming wreckage rained down on the Citadel, forcing Zod and the others to dive for cover.

A blinding searchlight found them where they crouched. Peering up into the glare, shielding his eyes with one hand, he spied a huge hammerhead frigate descending toward them. The immense ship dwarfed his smaller fighters. A commanding voice boomed from the behemoth.

“SAPPHIRE GUARDS! DROP YOUR WEAPONS!”

Platoons of heavily armed guardsmen and women dropped from the hammerhead onto the debris-strewn terrace. Faora leapt forward, ready to fight to the death, but Zod held her back. A wise general did not waste his forces on suicidal displays of bravado.

Glancing around at what remained of his band of rebels, he realized that the game was up... for now. Surrender was the only option. Slowly he raised his hands above his head.

Peering past the searchlight, he watched grimly as the fleeing starcraft carried the Codex away. By now, the vessel was only a glowing speck high in the sky.

A prismatic distortion field enveloped it as it reached the upper atmosphere. Space-time rippled around the craft, wavering like a mirage, before it blinked out of existence, passing into another dimension.

Gone,
Zod thought.
But to where?

He offered no resistance as the guards took him into custody. Without the Codex, Krypton’s future was lost. There was no point in fighting for a doomed world.

Not today.

But perhaps someday, a new battle might be waged...

T
he walls of the Council Chamber opened like the petals of an enormous ceramic flower, revealing the night sky—and the ominous prison barge hanging just above the exposed amphitheater.

The
Black Zero
resembled a gargantuan cephalopod, with three huge tentacles hanging down from its bulbous black mantle. Each tentacle was nearly as long as the council tower was high. The ship’s massive shadow fell over the arena where Zod and his top lieutenants awaited judgment.

The prisoners had been stripped of their armor and uniforms, so that they wore only stark black skinsuits. Energized shackles bound their wrists and ankles. They stood before the Council of Five, much as Jor-El had done only a few days before.

A new solon had been elevated to replace the martyred Ro-Zar. Lor-Em had taken his predecessor’s place as High Eminence. His saturnine countenance offered no promise of mercy.

“General Zod,” he said with stentorian gravity. “For the crimes of murder and high treason, the Council has sentenced you and your fellow insurgents to three hundred cycles of somatic reconditioning.”

Gasps arose from some of the prisoners, as well as from a small party of onlookers gathered at the perimeter of the amphitheater. Zod spotted Lara among them, representing the House of El. In the tumult surrounding the aborted insurrection, Jor-El’s own transgressions— including the theft of the Codex—had been hushed up in order to avoid troubling the populace any further. Even the existence of his unnatural offspring had been kept from the public. Lara herself had escaped prosecution, so far.

She was dressed formally, wearing a silken red cloak over an elegant gown—in marked contrast to the humiliating prison garb to which he had been reduced. Zod tried to catch her eye, but she steadfastly refused to look at him.

“Have you any last words?” Lor-Em demanded.

Zod regarded the Council with scorn. He alone would speak the truth, even if these craven figureheads lacked the courage to do so.

“Krypton is dying,” he replied. “And you respond by clinging to
protocol?”
He scoffed at their farcical pretenses, and confronted them with the unpalatable reality they seemed unwilling to acknowledge. “The Phantom Zone is a death sentence! Who will be left to release us when our ‘conditioning’ is done?”

Lor-Em scowled down from his throne.

“We are discussing your punishment today, Zod. Not your release.”

Zod gave this cowardly evasion all of the derision it deserved.

“You won’t kill us,” he said. “You wouldn’t sully your hands... but you’ll damn us to a black hole for eternity.” He spit upon the floor. “Jor-El was right. You’re a pack of fools. Every last one of you!”

Apparently Lor-Em had heard enough. He signaled the master jailer to carry out the sentence. Cryostasis cells, composed of shimmering force fields, rose from the floor, encasing each of the conspirators in an individual sarcophagus.

Preservative gel began to fill the cells, spurring the condemned rebels to panic. Tor-An pounded uselessly at the translucent walls of his sarcophagus, while Faora screamed in rage. Nam-Ek required a larger cell than the others, but even his mammoth fists were unable to break through the rectangular force field that contained him.

Zod wheeled about to confront Lara while he still had the chance. He hadn’t forgotten her role in banishing the Codex to space, nor the child to which she had obscenely given birth...

“And
you!”
he snarled. “You believe your son is safe, but—” He took a menacing step toward her, but the energized walls of his cells held him back, even when he shoved against them with all his strength and fury. “—I
will
find him! I will reclaim what you’ve taken from us.”

She flinched at the vehemence of his words. Her hand went to her chest, which bore the emblem of the House of El.

The gel rose to choke him, stinging his eyes and throat, but he shouted over the screams of his fellow prisoners. He would not be silenced—not by the Council, and not by the accusing eyes of Jor-El’s beautiful partner in crime.

“I WILL FIND HIM, LARA!
I WILL FIND HIM!”

The gel rose past the level of his face, filling the cell completely. He clenched his jaws, stubbornly fighting the effects of the gel, but it was a lost cause. It invaded his nose and lungs. An icy numbness spread through his body, while his senses dimmed. Unable to speak any longer, he could only stare at the translucent gel obscuring his vision.