The Last Days of Krypton - Kevin J. Anderson [164]
And they did.
Then the army saw the huge flare high in the sky. Even in broad daylight, the searing blue-white detonation cast second shadows, overwhelming the red sunlight. Blinking and rubbing their eyes, the anxious rebels stared in awe at the spreading glow that marked the destroyed comet in space. They cheered and whooped, but Zor-El allowed them no time to celebrate. “Onward! We can’t slow down now.”
When at last they reached the city, Zor-El took in the breathtaking view of the rebuilt capital now encased under a nested set of shimmering domes—exactly as he had hoped to find it. General Zod’s supporters were all bottled up inside the force fields. “Now it’s time to do some mopping up.”
The rebel army encountered several hundred stragglers around the perimeter of the outermost dome. They were trying to batter their way in, assuming that Zod had shut them out. Zor-El smiled at the irony as his troops quickly rounded up the confused men and women. Most surrendered without a fight; some struggled, but they were easily disarmed and taken prisoner.
Zor-El had brought several dozen smaller force-field generators, which his army used as holding domes to keep the groups separated. Afterward, it would be an arduous task to sort out which of these people belonged fanatically to Zod’s cause and which had been only reluctant fighters.
By the time the rebels overwhelmed the stragglers and encircled the outermost dome over the city, Zor-El’s rebel army had acquired twice as many weapons as they had arrived with. Then, fully armed, they prepared for the next phase, spreading out around the force field’s perimeter. When Or-Om, Korth-Or, and Gal-Eth announced that their separate groups of soldiers were ready, Zor-El found the hidden shield generator exactly where his brother had told him he intended to install it.
With a last glance around to be sure his fighters were prepared to face Zod’s men trapped between the next two domes, he deactivated the outermost shield. Because of the large area between the two shells, Zor-El knew that this would be the largest single crowd of enemy soldiers; each successively smaller dome would contain fewer and fewer fighters. Divide and conquer.
Several frantic members of the Ring of Strength were inside, cut off and struggling to understand what had happened. As the force field vanished, Zor-El’s troops pushed forward, but Zod’s Ring members rallied their followers to attack. Some fired their weapons indiscriminately, but many of the reluctant soldiers simply surrendered.
Zor-El’s rebels isolated the hot spots and disarmed the numerous men and women who obviously had never wanted to join Zod’s army. Working inward, he deactivated another force-field dome and advanced to the Square of Hope, where the bisected Zod statue lay like a fallen idol on the ground, and within an hour, the newcomers had subjugated all the people inside that shell. By now they had disarmed the majority of the opposing army, and their own casualties were minimal.
However, when he shut down the subsequent dome that encompassed the government palace, a sudden fury of armored Sapphire Guards led by a screaming Koll-Em nearly overwhelmed them. Some of Zod’s loyalists used beam lances, new weapons corrupted from Jor-El’s original designs, to incinerate the first line of rebel soldiers. The sheer violence drove back Zor-El’s fighters, and they were forced to leave their dead on the ground.
He cried out, “Pull together! Take them out before they kill any more of us.” Ten of his fighters had already been cut down.
“For Borga City!” Korth-Or shouted, still pushing forward.
“For Krypton!” Gal-Eth added.
Ferret-faced Koll-Em had no interest in surrendering or even surviving. The Sapphire Guards continued to