The Last Days of Krypton - Kevin J. Anderson [78]
Lifting the floating raft again, he accelerated toward the ever-growing crater as Kandor continued to shrink. By the time he reached the edge, Zod could no longer see the alien vessel. The city had all but vanished deep inside the giant ragged hole, shrunk down to an unimaginably small size, and the enemy ship had followed it down into the depths.
Zod brought the craft to a lurching halt just before the abrupt drop-off, smelling the smoke and sulfur rising up into his face. He felt disoriented by the unreality of what he had just witnessed. Kandor…gone! He stepped off the landed platform and walked cautiously toward the edge, then stared down.
He was so shaken that at first he didn’t see the bright light sweeping up toward him. Having done its awful work, the ominous alien ship began to climb out of the great pit. Zod staggered, pinwheeling his arms to get back from the edge.
As the ship rose above him, Zod stared up into the white light that still shone from the bottom of the complex craft. Dangling by an invisible thread beneath its hull, miniaturized Kandor hung like an absurd toy, a city in a bottle. The flat metal surfaces of the outer armor shifted and opened again like geometric petals, showing the interior of the strange vessel. Zod watched it draw tiny Kandor up through the gap, and then the plates folded shut like mandibles, swallowing the capital city.
Far off, other survivors milled about where severed bridges and roads led only to the smoking hole. But Zod had not followed the main route back home, taking his own path, as always. And now he seemed painfully vulnerable and obvious out in the open. He stood alone.
And after slowly circling the deep crater, the ominous vessel came toward him.
CHAPTER 32
The palace of solitude in the arctic snowfields was breathtaking. Seeing it, Jor-El was reminded of his father’s original genius and creative imagination, before he had degenerated into forgetfulness.
As their enclosed two-person skimmer raced over the icy wasteland, he and Lara came over a line of jagged black peaks buried in glaciers. Various shades of red sunlight dappled the textures of blown snow and polished ice. They saw the exotic angled structure of the palace nestled against a cliff, like a spiny bush grown out of precious gems. Steam wafted up from a fissure where volcanic heat created a warm oasis even in the ice cap.
Lara caught her breath. “Everyone says Yar-El was such a brilliant scientist—but he was an artist, too! Just like my father said at the wedding. It’s beautiful.”
Lara’s parents and her little brother had rushed away from the dacha immediately after the ceremony, called back to their sensitive project in the city. Apparently the crystalsilk weavings had to be monitored precisely, or else the whole web would unravel and they would be forced to start over. Lara insisted that she understood why they had to leave so soon; after all, she had grown up in a family of artists.
“My father was a mathematical artist.” Jor-El knew, however, that simple equations without inspiration could not account for the marvel he saw in the mountains of ice. Thin crystal sheets balanced against one another at low angles, green and white structural columns that at first looked like a randomly stacked pile of broken glass, but further study showed a complex order. As a counterpoint to the low angles, straight pinnacles like watchtowers jutted vertically above, yielding a perfect view of the clean, pristine arctic.
The fortress had remained untouched in the cold, white wasteland for years. He and Lara had the ice cap all to themselves in perfect peace, perfect shelter. They would keep each