Greg Cox - Man of Steel

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?

Zod 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.