The Last Days of Krypton - Kevin J. Anderson [163]
Zod laughed with scorn now. “A ragtag handful of poorly armed rebels? They can’t possibly stand against me. I have been building my military defenses for months, and my whole army is here. We have weapons based on your own designs and wave after wave of expendable foot soldiers.”
Jor-El smiled. “Perhaps. But I have better technology and greater imagination.”
Zod looked at Aethyr and Nam-Ek, suddenly uncertain. Jor-El touched the controls hidden inside his loose robe.
The force-field generator he had placed near Zod’s throne activated. A small dome immediately appeared, trapping Zod, Nam-Ek, and Aethyr inside a hemispherical prison three meters in diameter. Nam-Ek roared and threw himself at the curved wall, but his blows bounced off ineffectually. Zod also hammered and shouted, but it did him no good.
“Zor-El smuggled me the plans,” he explained to Lara. “The field will contain the General until my brother and his army arrive.”
Her beautiful eyes were still troubled. “But the rest of Zod’s forces are out there. Even if a rebel military is coming, they can’t defeat all of Kryptonopolis.”
“They can if we divide the General’s followers into much smaller groups.” He pressed another button, and a second force-field dome appeared, greater in circumference. This one slammed down over the whole government palace.
Then he activated the third dome, larger still, stretching halfway across the Square of Hope and capping the others like a set of nested eggs. There, it cut off the hundreds who had gathered out in the streets, separating them from their weapons and military equipment. By design, the force-field barrier crashed into the tall statue of Zod, severing it in two, and the pieces toppled to the flat tiles.
Two more domes extended in stages out to the perimeter of Kryptonopolis, again dividing the remaining soldiers.
Watching the furiously cursing Zod in his shimmering prison, Jor-El felt tremendous satisfaction. He held Lara, pressed her rounded belly against him, and knew that his son would be born on a free Krypton after all, a world that no longer faced the threat of imminent annihilation.
“Now we wait, Lara. You and I, here together.”
CHAPTER 78
Zor-El’s allied rebels were converging on Kryptonopolis when they saw the nova javelins streak into the sky. He paused to stare up at the curving vapor trails while his companions gasped in dismay and awe. He swallowed in a dry throat. Within moments, if the missiles found their target, all of Argo City might be vaporized. When Zod’s armies had departed, unsuccessful, Zor-El had deactivated the force-field dome. Seeing the missiles approach, they could always switch it back on again, but would it withstand nova javelins? Alura could be dead, and his mother, all his friends and acquaintances, all of Argo City’s great works—gone in a few moments.
But he trusted Jor-El would do as he had promised.
Now, as the golden missiles vanished into the distant sky, Korth-Or spoke, his lisp growing more pronounced with his agitation. He had already lost his own city. “So Zod really did it! The bastard.”
“Should we wait? If the world is going to end today, what good does it do for us to attack Kryptonopolis?” Or-Om shook his shaggy head in disbelief.
Zor-El drew his dark eyebrows together. “Because if the world doesn’t end, then every moment will count.” They had gambled everything on this surprise turnabout, and he would hold on to hope.
His multipronged army continued toward the capital city with its hodgepodge assembly of vehicles and equipment—tools that had been hastily converted into weapons, passenger craft refitted to become military