Man of Steel: The Official Movie Novelization

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

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.”