Greg Cox - Man of Steel

Explosions rocked the Kryptonian vessel, blowing open its armored plating. Space-time rippled around the injured ship, bleeding unnatural lights and colors into the dusky sky.

A doorway to the Phantom Zone began to open.

Stress fractures spread throughout the Black Zero , beginning at the impact site and branching out from there. Prismatic colors, shining through from the Zone, cast an eldritch glow over the ship’s sprawling interior.

Dark, claustrophobic corridors contracted like shrinking veins. Structural ribs cracked and bled. Catwalks tore away from cellblocks. Viewports splintered, venting atmosphere into the void.

Faora, at ground zero, was the first casualty. She stared aghast as her hand dissolved before her eyes, unraveling at the quantum level. A spectral glow emanated from every cell of her body, lighting her up from the inside out. The lifeless bodies of the human soldiers lay crumpled at her feet as they took their vengeance on her from beyond the grave.

No! she thought furiously. This world was ours!

In a heartbeat, she vanished from the universe, sucked back into the Zone for an eternity.

The Phantom effect raced through the ship, claiming ever more victims. On the bridge, Jax-Ur, Tor-An, Nam-Ek, and Commander Gor exchanged terrified looks as the Zone began to reclaim them. Only Jax-Ur truly understood what was undoing them.

Of course, he reasoned. Kal-El’s original starcraft. They’re using it as a weapon against us. He smiled thinly. How ingenious.

The Black Zero had been designed to make the transition to the Zone in one piece, but only under strictly controlled conditions. The ship was meant to pass through the Projector, not have a Phantom Drive rip open the continuum right in the middle of the ship. Violent dimensional fluxes were already taking it apart before his fading eyes.

Solid bulkheads and supports sublimed away, causing the ship’s myriad chambers and corridors to cave in on themselves. Matter phased into energy, sliding between dimensions. The entire ship was collapsing into a singularity, or so he theorized.

His calculations did not spare him—or any of the others.

The Black Zero imploded above Metropolis.

Its mantle crumbled, while its hanging tendrils were sucked back into the roiling mass of compacted matter the ship had become. Disturbing colors from an alien spectrum strobed the atmosphere, spilling over to distort reality. Actinic flashes hurt the eyes of anyone who dared to gaze upon the hellish spectacle.

Lois glimpsed the ship’s destruction as she plunged through the air, accelerating toward the ravaged cityscape hundreds of feet below. Broken buildings and shattered streets seemed to barrel toward her. Within seconds, she’d just be another piece of wreckage among the many.

But we did it! she thought. We blew up that damn spaceship!

Too bad she wouldn’t live to write the story

The wind howled past her face, blowing her hair back. Resigned to her fate, she took comfort in the fact that it hadn’t been in vain—and that the end would be quick and painless.

Good-bye, Clark, she thought. I wish we —

A blur of blue and red came streaking in from the east, catching her before she hit the ground. She felt a familiar pair of arms wrap around her, holding her close. A bright red cape streamed behind her rescuer.

She clung to him with all her strength, her heart pounding wildly. An overwhelming sense of gratitude washed over her, along with a few other emotions, but Superman’s intense expression told her at once that the danger wasn’t over.

The singularity was approaching critical mass, pulsating above the city like a voracious black sun. The Kryptonian prison ship had been crushed into subatomic particles, leaving behind a sucking wound in the fabric of reality.

A deafening roar, like an extra-dimensional tornado, bellowed from the depths of the aperture. Blinding flashes of phantasmal light offered glimpses of a weird, purgatorial realm that was never meant to intersect with ordinary space. It made Lois queasy just looking at it.

Superman flew away from the vortex, pulling against the relentless forces that were trying to suck him back into the Phantom Zone with the other Kryptonians. Spectral colors glowed beneath his skin. His face rippled and distorted alarmingly; Lois could tell he was fighting with all his might to get them both clear of the singularity’s event horizon, before he was lost forever.

She buried her face against the “S” on his chest, squeezing him tightly.

Don’t give up, she urged him silently. The world needs you.

He strained against the pull of the black hole, barely making any headway. Lois feared the Zone would never them go, but then, just as she was on the verge of losing hope, the vortex began to collapse in on itself.

The eldritch glare faded, retreating back into the rift, while the thundering clamor quieted.

Superman gasped in relief as the Zone’s ravenous pull slackened enough for him to break free at last.

No longer tethered, he coasted to a stop high above the city. He rotated in the air so that he and Lois could watch the singularity’s death throes from a position of safety. Cradled in his arms, she watched it diminish to a pinpoint, and then blink out of existence.

Not with a bang, but a whimper, she thought, already composing the story in her head. Or is that too cliché?

The wounded sky rushed back to repair itself.

Smoke and flames wafted up from the war-torn city, as the sun sank toward the horizon.

Was it finally over?

Descending to street level, he gently set her down at the center of a battered intersection, strewn with rubble and trashed vehicles. Relatively few casualties littered the pavement, although she shuddered to imagine what the final body count would be once all those demolished buildings were excavated. She thought of Hardy and Dr. Hamilton and all the heroes who had sacrificed themselves to halt the Black Zero ’s attack on Metropolis.

Their stories would not go untold, not if she had anything to say about it.

“Lois—” Superman said, and his voice was hoarse.

She looked up at him. To her dismay, she saw that his face was still suffused with an unearthly radiance, as though the Zone maintained a hold on him. Spectral colors leaked from his skin, the last lingering vestiges of the exotic energies he been exposed to as a child, during his long journey from Krypton. His alien past bled into the present, threatening the future.

For a moment, she feared that she was going to lose him to the Zone after all, but he came through for her once again. With a determined expression, he kept himself rooted to the Earth—and reality.

A warm smile promised that he wasn’t going anywhere.

They kissed amidst the ruins, seizing the moment after all they had been through together. The phantom glow subsided, and a much more earthly warmth enveloped them. Lois savored the kiss, grateful that they had finally made it this far. Thank God he kept saving her life—she would have hated to have missed it.

The sun was still setting when their lips finally came apart.

“You know,” she quipped, “they say it’s all downhill after the first kiss.”

Superman smiled.

“I’m pretty sure that only counts if you’re kissing a human.”

Here’s hoping, she thought.

Nervous survivors began to creep from the ruins, cautiously checking to see if it was safe. Bedraggled civilians, along with police officers and National Guardsmen, eyed the couple curiously. Superman’s colorful attire attracted plenty of attention. One soldier’s eyes bulged.