Jor El struggled to right himself on a floor still pitching from the last quake.
Grabbing the frame of a nearby view port, he pulled himself up, head still spinning from his fall. Despite the rigor of his Kryptonian physiology, Jor El was shaken. So it is little wonder that, once fully upright, he had trouble believing what he saw through the view port.
Or, more the point, what he didn't see.
Argo City…
Argo City was gone!
From his complex atop the central peak of a large, crescent shaped ridge, Jor El should easily be able to see Argo City.
And he had seen it. Just a short time ago, through this very port, when he had rushed down this very corridor to fetch the items that now lay scattered on the floor, shaken from his powerful grip when he fell.
It had been there. Peaceful, lovely, suspended above the northern arm of the ridge, its protective shield tinted by the ruddy rays of Krypton's setting sun.
Argo City had been the crowning achievement of Kryptonian engineering. A self contained city, encased in an energy field and kept aloft by massive anti-gravity generators.
And now it was gone.
More than fifty thousand people lived there. His brother, Zor El, lived there.
And now they all were gone.
No wreckage. No smoke. No debris. Just nothing where something very special once was.
Jor El tilted his gaze higher, where the darkening sky was beginning to show stars. The old, familiar constellations were disfigured and incomplete. Dozens of worm holes, tears in the fabric of space, had appeared around the planet, blotting out the celestial patterns.
A smaller aftershock jolted Jor El back to reality. Still reeling from the loss of an entire city, he moved his gaze to the valley below. There Kryptonopolis had been built, the largest and most elaborate habitation on the planet. Already, much of its greatness lay in ruins.
The failing light of the setting sun was still enough for his Kryptonian vision to make out details. Many buildings were damaged, some completely destroyed. Overhead walkways and vehicle platforms had fallen. The millennial spire, the tallest structure in the city, had been one of the first casualties of the ground quakes, taking several other structures with it when it fell.
Any inhabitants he could see from his mountainside perch were in one of two postures; Fleeing in terror, or lying dead in the streets.
All but one, a lone figure, standing steady in a public square, motionless and resolute. An anomaly of calm in a sea of chaos and death.
The multiple lenses of his Kryptonian eyes adjusted themselves to magnify the image.
Female, elderly, in simple but somewhat outmoded Kryptonian dress. Even at this distance he could make out her eyes. They were a deep, mysterious grey, unheard of among natives of his world.
She did not seem injured or dazed, or even fearful of the calamity that surrounded her. Rather, she was staring right back at him, with a stern look on her face, as if to remind him of the job he had to do.
Startled, Jor El turned away. He did have a job to do. A job both vitally important and almost certainly futile.
Scrambling for the items he had dropped in his fall, Jor El turned back towards his original destination.
Had he paused to look again at the crumbling city below, he would have noted that the old woman had disappeared.
Quickly, but with greater care, he ran down the corridor, this time doing a better job of compensating for the tremors that continued to rock the complex.
Neither Argo City nor Kryptonopolis continued to occupy his thoughts.
One city was gone. The other was doomed.
The planet was doomed. He and his wife Lara were doomed.
But their son just might live on.
Jor El turned the final corner into a large room. Here he had worked to create a way for his people to escape their fate. He noted without remark that someone was already there, sitting in a corner.
She was dark haired with an amber cast to her skin. To all external appearances she was identical to the female natives of the world we call Earth, even though she was born on a planet many, many parsecs away. She was lovely, by both Terran and Kryptonian standards.
In her lap was a large, round object which she cradled gently, lovingly, sadly.
Without a word, or even a look, he rushed past the seated woman, continuing on to the launch area.
Jor El was not snubbing his wife. There would be time for acknowledgment and comforting later.
Or not.
He arrived at the launch rack, where a more or less cylindrical vehicle waited with hatches open. It was a tiny spaceship, less than 15 feet long, as many inhabitants of Earth would measure it, and no more than 4 feet wide at any point. It was held in a nearly vertical attitude, with a rounded, slightly pointed end aimed at a gap in the chamber ceiling.
The shape was chosen to make it easier for the vessel to exit and enter planetary atmospheres. Something it would need to do. Soon.
The area around craft was littered with debris. Emergency supplies and equipment discarded to make room for more important cargo.
Jor El paused as he glanced at the primary Phantom Zone Nexus Chamber which lay on a nearby work table. It was the largest of all the pieces torn from the vessel.
Regret pulled at Jor El's heart. This chamber alone could have carried Jor El, his wife Lara and their unborn son Kal El, along with thousands of other Kryptonians, safely away from their doomed world.
Now it was a useless metal sphere.
But in its place, perhaps one member of his race would survive.
Slung carelessly across the table near the nexus chamber was a green tunic, its chest emblazoned with a caricature of a sun, the symbol of Jor El's rank as a member of the Council of Scientists. He had abandoned this formal garment for more practical working clothes, for his current task relied as much on physical effort as the brilliance of his intellect.
Jor El approached the vessel. The sleek shape of the body was marred by rocket tubes hastily attached by a frame to the hull near its base.
Due to the energies that were tearing apart the planet, the ship's anti-gravity generator could not create a field strong enough lift the ship off the launch rack. The crude chemical propellants would, he hoped, help boost the ship far enough above the interference for the gravitic drive to fully take over.
Jor El quickly stowed the items he had brought in a bay that was originally meant for emergency supplies. He then began to line the largest empty area with soft, colorful fabrics. Originally meant for the nexus chamber and a host of Kryptonian souls, this compartment would now hold his only child.
While he worked, he sensed the presence of Lara as she approached the spacecraft.
They did not speak. Circumstances had long since moved beyond the limited capacity of speech.
With a loving touch, she gently placed the burden she carried into the freshly padded space. Her fingers moved softly along its tough, curved surface, reluctant to draw away.
Kryptonian children are born through ovogenesis, spending the first part of their lives outside the mother's body, encased in a protective pod. In this pod, Kal El, the sole son of Jor El and Lara Kal Tiar, slumbered in peace.
The son Lara had talked to, sung to and rocked, rested, unaware of the devastation all around him.
The son she had seen dimly through the birthing pod wall, but would never get to touch. Her last contact with Kal El would be the infusion of blood she had just delivered, a last bit of nourishment for the journey ahead.
Lara shuddered as her mate quickly closed and sealed the hatches.
Jor El turned to the control console and began making the final adjustments to the trajectory and mission sequence. The ship needed to clear the atmosphere of Krypton and navigate to a specific spatial anomaly among the many now surrounding their planet.
This special wormhole in space had appeared periodically above Krypton many times before. By using probes over the past several decades, Jor El knew this interstellar pathway terminated in a star system out on one of our spiral galaxy's arms, far away from Krypton's location near the galactic core.
A star system with a planet that could support Kryptonian life.
He had often puzzled on the seemingly chance resemblance of the natives of that world and those born on Krypton. He would now never know the answer to that puzzle, but was grateful that his son would grow to look like those around him in his new home.
He had hoped that all of Krypton could have made this trip, to this planet or another like it. Had the leadership of his doomed world heeded his warnings and accepted his plan, they could all have been saved.
Now, for all but one, it was too late.
While Jor El worked, Lara was far from idle. She checked and rechecked the automated message that would be displayed when the ship landed. An expert in the ancient languages of her world, she had cobbled it together from information gleaned by her husband's probes through the wormhole.
The words were, she hoped, representative of the area where the ship would touch down. A region of relative peace on a somewhat troubled world, the third planet orbiting a small, yellow sun.
It had taken her some time to realize that this planet had not one but hundreds of distinct languages. This was a trait that is not shared by the natives of Krypton, whose original 6 dialects had evolved over centuries into a single, planetary language.
She hoped that this simple message would convey to whoever found the ship the urgency of its mission, and the value of the cargo it contained.
Time had run out. Their complex was built by the far seeing scientist to maximize survival when the end of the world finally came. Nevertheless, it was now beginning to fall.
Jor El activated the final launch sequence. No time for countdowns, the booster rockets began to ignite almost at once. Jor El jumped away from the console, grabbed his startled wife in his arms, and dove behind a makeshift protective wall.
Singed, dazed and choking on the exhaust from the rockets, Jor El and Lara looked at each other as they huddled in a corner.
Stricken deaf by the launch, they could not hear the sound of their son's rocket powered craft speeding through the atmosphere, nor the sound of the ceiling as it crashed in upon them.