Meanwhile, somewhere in deep space...
An ancient Kryptonian spacecraft drifted alone through the void, moving slowly between stars, searching for something that might no longer exist.
In the command center, General Zod stood at the viewport with his hands clasped behind his back, dressed in standard Kryptonian warrior armor. He stared into the endless dark without blinking, his expression carrying the weight of something too large to name.
He had not been considered a wise man, even before the end. But he had seen it coming. That was the part that never stopped eating at him.
And so had the others. The council, the scholars, all the figures who had worn the title of wisdom like a badge. They had seen the same truth and chosen to accept it. Chosen to fold their hands and wait for the ground to give out beneath them.
Zod's jaw tightened.
He could not understand it. He had never understood it. Why accept extinction when you could fight? Why let an entire civilization die on a collapsing rock, or worse, quietly smuggle your own child into the stars, when you could have led everyone out?
Was it really because that man had stolen a Kryptonian colony, ships and people included, and in doing so exposed how brittle Krypton had already become? Was that enough to make them stop fighting?
He remembered the coup. He had launched it boldly, with full certainty that seizing control from the Elder Council was the only path left open. He had the soldiers, the will, and the conviction.
What he had not had was the codex.
Jor-El had moved faster. By the time Zod realized what was happening, the genetic archive of the entire Kryptonian bloodline had already been encoded into his son's cells and sent into space with him. There was nothing left to seize.
And then, to compound that humiliation in a way that still made Zod's teeth press together, Jor-El, a scholar, a man bred for knowledge and not combat, had physically overpowered him in the fight that followed. Pinned him to the ground. Sent him to the Phantom Zone.
Zod had spent considerable time since then working through every explanation that didn't require admitting he had simply lost. The most plausible one was that the scholars had built something into their own genetic templates, some structural advantage invisible to the eye. It was the only rational conclusion.
The Phantom Zone should have been permanent. But Krypton's destruction had cut power to most of its containment systems, and when those systems went dark, the prisoners inside them didn't stay frozen. Zod and his surviving officers woke up to find their prison failing and their homeworld already gone.
He had found his people. He had also found a handful of scholars who had been sealed away in that same zone since an earlier age, and with their help, they had assembled a working ship from what remained and broken back into open space.
What greeted them on the other side was not relief. It was the full weight of what had happened. Krypton was rubble. Their race was gone. The universe had moved on and left no place for them in it.
Since then, Zod had led his crew through system after system, sector after sector. Every planet Krypton had ever catalogued, every recorded landing site from the old expedition fleets. The result had been the same everywhere they went. Nothing.
Where had Jor-El sent the boy?
During Krypton's Great Expedition era, their ships had reached so far and touched so many worlds that even the Green Lantern Corps had given them wide berth. The number of planets bearing Kryptonian footprints was incalculable, potentially in the millions. And the codex could be on any one of them, encoded in a young man who by now would be fully grown.
Zod's hair had more white in it than it once had. He noticed it more these days.
The command center door opened with a soft chime. Faora's footsteps crossed the floor toward him, and Zod heard it immediately: the pace was different. Controlled, but only just.
He turned.
"Faora. What is it?"
Faora stopped and straightened, but could not quite keep the tension out of her expression.
"General. We just received a signal from one of the long-range scouts. The signal carries an identification tag we recognize." She steadied herself. "The ship broadcasting that tag is the one that carried Kal-El, twenty-four years ago."
Zod looked at her for a moment.
"We found him."
He walked past her without another word, crossed to the bridge, and stood before the star map. A single red dot pulsed on the display, marked clearly against the surrounding systems.
He looked at it for a long moment, then closed his eyes and let out a slow breath.
His right hand came up in a single firm gesture.
"Set course. We leave now."
...
Back on Earth, Clark was beaming.
He stood in the opened cockpit of his Kryptonian spacecraft like someone who had just found a room in their house they never knew existed. The interior had been sealed for over two decades, but the systems inside were still responsive, and what those systems revealed had already made Lex go quiet in the way he only did when something genuinely impressed him.
Kryptonian technology had evolved in a direction that was almost the opposite of what most civilizations assumed advancement looked like. Where others built more, added more, made things more complex and layered, Krypton had stripped everything back. The result was technology that functioned at a level most modern engineers couldn't replicate, using principles so refined they looked almost primitive at first glance.
Lex had spent years chasing nanotechnology as if it were the frontier. The Kryptonians had embedded it into their door mechanisms.
The fact that they hadn't applied the same approach to their battle armor wasn't an oversight. It was a deliberate choice, a philosophical one, about the relationship between simplicity and reliability. Lex was still quietly working through the implications.
For Clark, the ship meant something different.
He stood inside it and felt the weight of a place he had never actually seen. Krypton was a concept to him, not a memory. He had no image of it, no sound, no specific detail he could point to and say that was home. And yet standing in this ship, which had carried him as an infant across light-years, he felt something pull in his chest that didn't have a clean name.
He wanted to go back someday. To see whatever was left of it, or at least the space where it had been. He wanted to understand why his birth parents had put him in this ship rather than coming with him, and whether that had been a choice or the only option left.
He shifted his gaze from the interior of the ship toward the bulkhead, and through it, using vision most people couldn't access, he looked out at the yard.
Harley was sitting on a stone bench, talking to herself at a reasonable volume. Zatanna had gone back to planning her circus and was currently sketching something on a notepad she'd produced from her hat. Selina was somewhere inside the main building. Axel was standing near the edge of the yard with his hands in his pockets, looking at nothing in particular.
Clark watched them for a moment and felt the pull in his chest shift into something warmer.
That group of people, every one of them unusual in some way that the rest of the world would call wrong, had made it possible for him to stop hiding. He no longer had to stand still while someone was in danger because moving would reveal too much. He no longer had to absorb being pushed around by people he could have lifted with two fingers. There was no pretense required anymore.
He hadn't been idle since arriving in Gotham. The suit Bruce had loaned him that night in Washington had been modified and was seeing regular use. In the past week alone he had pulled people out of a gunfight in Metropolis, knocked back a structural fire in Star City, helped disperse a protest in Los Angeles that had turned into a crush situation, and extracted a long-haired cat from a tree in New York that had been there long enough that someone had put up flyers.
Over two hundred people, total, in cities across the country. None of them knew who he was.
That part still suited him fine.
And most importantly, somewhere in the main building, Alfred was having tea with his mother, and that alone made everything else easier to carry.
"Clark."
Bruce's voice pulled him back. "Are you planning to stand there, or do you want to look at the rest of the ship's functions?"
"Sorry." Clark shook his head. "I was thinking. It's strange, being inside something that carried you when you were too young to remember any of it."
"That's a reasonable thing to feel," Bruce said, with the brief, slightly stiff warmth that was as close to sympathy as he usually got. "Lex, what did you find?"
"This."
Lex had moved to the main console. His hand was resting on a raised symbol set into the surface, a downward-pointing triangle with the shape of an S marked clearly at its center. He gestured Clark closer.
"It's almost certain your parents didn't send you out here with nothing. Any parent who put a child in a ship and launched it across the galaxy would have left some kind of record. Something to tell you where you came from."
Clark stepped closer to the console and looked at the symbol. Something about it hit him in a way he couldn't immediately account for. His hand hadn't moved toward it yet, but his chest had already responded.
Lex reached over, took Bruce's hand without asking, and pressed it flat against the console.
The console lit up. A holographic sphere assembled itself above the surface, taking the shape of Earth, rendered in light and lines, rotating slowly.
Lex stepped back and studied it with satisfaction.
"Exactly what I expected. The more advanced the civilization, the more it tends to converge on solutions that are physical, stable, and simple. Thought-based interfaces are theoretically possible at certain levels of development, but any race that hasn't abandoned its biological body will always maintain a physical fallback. It's the most reliable method by definition. Krypton understood that."
Bruce was already focused on the hologram. A red dot pulsed at a specific point on the surface.
He and Clark looked at it at the same time.
"The coordinates point to the North Pole," they said together.
Lex turned to look at them, then looked at the ceiling briefly, as if asking for patience.
"I was in the middle of a fairly significant observation about the developmental philosophy of an extinct extraterrestrial civilization, and the two of you looked directly at the red dot."
"The ship's primary function was keeping Clark safe during transit," Bruce said. "Everything else was secondary to that. So any coordinates it provides are going to point to work his parents did on Earth before the launch." He paused. "I also think Clark is not the first Kryptonian to reach this planet. The timeline doesn't add up for it to be otherwise. If we go to those coordinates, we'll probably find evidence of arrivals that predate his by a significant margin."
As he finished, he reached over and patted Clark on the shoulder. It was a habit he'd developed recently, not one he'd had before. Spending extended time in a group that large had forced a certain amount of behavioral adjustment, and somewhere along the way he had picked up a few of Axel's minor tendencies. The shoulder-patting was one. He had drawn a firm internal line at anything involving anyone's backside.
Clark nodded, fingers already curling around the memory of the coordinates.
"I want to go. I've already memorized the location, so whenever we're..." He stopped.
On the console in front of him, the triangular symbol, which had sat flush with the surface a moment ago, was rising.
There was no mechanical sound, no seam that opened to allow it. It simply emerged, the way a bubble surfaces through still water. By the time it had fully extended, it was a six-centimeter columnar object, tapering to a point, etched with the same S-mark along its length.
Clark picked it up.
He held it in his palm and looked at it for a moment.
"A key," he said. "They left me a room somewhere."
Bruce looked at the object, then at him.
"Possibly several rooms. There's one way to find out. Do you want to leave now?"
"Yes, but gear up first. Clark, your suit isn't complete yet, but the prototype has enhanced flight systems built in since that's where you need the most support. Your physical resilience doesn't need the armor the way ours does." Lex was already moving toward the hatch. "Beyond that, I think the North Pole warrants taking Axel. If there's any possibility of encountering a large group of Kryptonians, or any other factor we haven't accounted for, we want him there. Agreed?"
Clark nodded immediately. "Obviously."
Bruce said nothing for a beat. Then, "If you don't invite him, he'll find out and come anyway. Knowing him and then not accounting for him is exactly the kind of mistake you can't afford to make."
He walked out of the ship without waiting for a response, heading directly toward where Axel was standing in the yard.
Lex watched him go, then leaned slightly toward Clark.
"You see that? That walk. That little extra purpose in his step." He smiled. "That's the walk of a man who is deeply invested in demonstrating that he understands Axel better than you do."
Clark considered this.
Lex started laughing.
A few paces ahead, Bruce slowed almost imperceptibly and glanced back at them with an expression that suggested he had heard every word and was choosing not to dignify it, which, given his hearing, meant nothing at all.
===
Read chapters ahead on Patreon, with every chapter organized into collections.
Subscribing a membership gives you access to "ALL" fanfictions,
Or you can buy only the collection you want, to gain access to chapters ahead.
P-a-t-r-e-o-n.com/_Zeph.