Greg Cox - Man of Steel

“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.”

An eerie glow lit up the base of the Black Zero. Gravitational fluxes attracted loose particulates and other debris from the streets below. A halo of levitating dirt, glass, and litter formed around the ship, like the rings of a gas giant.

An incandescent column of shimmering azure energy, at least three hundred feet in diameter, shot down from the underside of the ship. The block-wide beam pressed down on everything that lay beneath the alien vessel. Structures began to crumble, then collapse. Abandoned vehicles were crushed like tin cans.

Gaining strength, the pulsating column expanded outward, creating an ever-widening circle of destruction. Multistory office buildings pancaked, compressing innocent men and women between the floors. Fragile human flesh was vaporized instantly.

On the opposite side of the planet, a reciprocal column was generated by the World Engine. A beam of focused gravity, it flattened all the remaining trees and other foliage on the ravaged island. The surrounding seas parted as if shoved aside by a god-like hand.

Here, too, rings of loose matter orbited the head of the gargantuan device, its gravity beam penetrated deep into the Earth until it met the beam from the Black Zero.

Thus linked, the machines fed each other, creating an axis of energy that traded waves of crushing gravity in a devastating feedback loop.

Huge vents opened along the top of the Engine. Noxious fumes gushed from the vents, spilling out into the atmosphere like the pyroclastic surge of a volcano. Seething clouds of alien vapor jetted forth as the device breathed upon the Earth.

General Swanwick watched in dismay as the two-part assault played out upon the big board’s video screens. Satellite footage offered him—and the rest of the NORTHCOM staff—a front-row seat for the twin cataclysms.

Swanwick tried to fathom what he was seeing.

“Nuclear, chemical, kinetic—no known weapon can cause that type of damage,” he said. Then he turned. “What’ve they hit us with?”

“Looks like some kind of gravity weapon,” Dr. Hamilton theorized. He called up what he referred to as a “gravity map” of Metropolis. Most of the city and outlying boroughs were rendered in orange, indicating regions of normal gravity, while a circle centered on the Kryptonian ship edged into blues and greens.

They watched grimly as the circle steadily expanded.

Hamilton toggled to another screen. A similar graphic depicted the same destructive phenomenon at a location in the Indian Ocean, where the other segment of the ship had come to rest on an insignificant island.

A cross-section of the Earth, extrapolated from seismic readings, showed pulsing “gravity waves” ping-ponging back and forth through the planet’s interior, from the island to Metropolis and back again, growing in intensity with each volley.

“It’s working in tandem with their ship,” Hamilton explained, indicating the anomaly on the island. “Somehow they’re increasing the planet’s mass. Clouding the atmosphere with particulates.” A look of realization dawned on his face. “My God, they’re terraforming.”

“What?” Captain Farris didn’t recognize the term.

“Planetary engineering,” Swanwick translated. He’d read enough science fiction to be familiar with the concept. “Modifying a world’s atmosphere and topography.