The Last Days of Krypton - Kevin J. Anderson [80]
“No. I have Kandor.” The alien spoke in a matter-of-fact voice, not gloating over what he had done.
“And what do you intend to do with it?”
The alien seemed perplexed by Zod’s anger. “As part of my collection, Kandor will be forever safe. I mean no harm.”
No harm? Zod looked at the huge, deep crater. Even if the population inside the shrunken metropolis somehow remained uninjured, hundreds if not thousands of Kryptonians had been slaughtered in the process of uprooting the city. On the alien’s skull, the red-and-gold disks gleamed, as if amplifying his thoughts. The ship’s hatch opened wider, and the stranger gestured behind him. “You are welcome to see for yourself, if it reassures you.”
Some distance away, Nam-Ek emerged from where he had hidden in the upthrust rubble. He stormed toward the edge of the crater in a misguided attempt to protect Zod. When the green-skinned alien turned swiftly, reacting to the threat, Zod shouted to the big mute. Without thinking, he placed himself between the alien and his big-shouldered friend. “Nam-Ek! Stop! I don’t want you hurt.”
At Zod’s command, the burly bodyguard halted abruptly, as if he had reached the end of a leash. His expressive face was an agony of indecision, ready to tear the alien and his ship to pieces should his master be harmed.
Zod could tell that the fate not just of Kandor but all of Krypton might depend on what he did next. His thoughts raced ahead, calculating, assessing possibilities and discarding them. The eleven members of the Council were trapped in Kandor, completely cut off. Only he, the Commissioner, remained outside. Therefore, this was all up to him.
The open, bright spacecraft might be a looming trap, but the power that this alien exhibited, the audacity of what he had done to Kandor—the Commissioner longed to know much more. If the alien wanted to hurt him, Zod could do nothing about it anyway. He forcibly drove down his inner panic, his natural tendency to fear this powerful vessel and obviously destructive enemy. The only way to take the upper hand would be to show no hesitation.
He gave a cautious signal to Nam-Ek, then gathered his courage and squared his shoulders. He strode toward the alien ship, showing no fear. “I am Zod. I represent Krypton. Explain yourself to me.”
The exotic humanoid gestured toward the hatch. “Come, I will show you all that you wish to know.”
Zod walked up the ramp, determined to radiate an air of confidence. “What are you? Where do you come from?” The interior of the ship smelled of polished metal along with an exotic stew of scents: dirt, vegetation, lightning.
The disks on the smooth green scalp glowed golden. “I am a Brain Interactive Construct, an android. My planet is—was—called Colu. I was created and sent out to catalog worlds for the Computer Tyrants to conquer.”
“So, a spy.”
“A gatherer of data.” With a small gesture of his synthetic hands, the android activated the polished white walls, converting them into projection screens. An image resolved out of many points of light to display a rocky, icy landscape, covered with vast industrial cities and cordoned-off camps on the outskirts where human slaves lived squalid lives. Colu. The image faded after Zod had absorbed it.
As he stepped deeper into the vessel’s watery yellow light, he spotted tiny Kandor in its dome, a carefully preserved model city on display in a museum. And Krypton’s capital wasn’t the green-skinned android’s only prize. He saw a dozen other bottled cities, each one a landmark of unusual architecture, bathed in artificial lights to simulate their respective suns.
One sample city was composed of black rock built up like pieces of a coral reef, and a tiny ocean swirled around the boundaries under the dome; another terrarium contained an intricately grown forest village; a third was filled with dirt and riddled with a labyrinth of tunnels, like a child’s diggerbug farm. One specimen city had buildings that seemed to be made of melting wax; another was a floating cluster of lavender bubbles with butterfly-winged inhabitants