*one long incoherent scream that sounds vaguely like 'howdy' if you really listen*

Good afternoon, y'all, how are we doing? I'm tired. I've been traveling all weekend and am very tired of driving and am currently reliving the months last year where I lived out of my car, but otherwise alright. My most sincere apologies in advance if the next chapter doesn't come out quite on time, I am suddenly entering a very busy time of the year and likely will be traveling quite a bit more over the next few months - on the bright side, one of those trips will be to visit my beta!

Please enjoy the chapter, and leave comments and kudos. I just got off the plane and don't a hundred-percent remember what it was about, but beta said it was fine so its fine. See y'all in June!

Chapter 35: The Escape

It had been nearly thirty-two hours since the alien ship had first broadcasted its threat across the globe, and eight hours since the United States Army had surrendered the Kryptonian known as Kal-El, along with investigative reporter for the Daily Planet newspaper, Lois Lane, and an unknown female Kryptonian. The United Nations had called an emergency meeting within hours of the initial message and the First and General Committees had been in session non-stop ever since, but with so little known about the invaders, they were unable to come to any solid concluding decisions. So, like everyone else on the little planet, they were forced to wait for the aliens to leave.

But eight hours after the surrender, the dark extraterrestrial starcraft was still in lunar-synchronous orbit with no apparent intention of leaving with their prisoners, and at 0414 hours, Eastern Standard Time, two bogies were detected to be launching from the ship. The Indian Space Research Association detected them first, having focused their satellites on it, and USNORTHCOM picked up the ping milliseconds later with NASA mere moments behind. Soon all surveillance satellites in the eastern hemisphere were focused on the two objects, which were quickly revealed to be dropships similar to the one that Kal-El and the prisoners left in. The initial assumption was that they were heading for Edwards Air Force Base, the drop zone where the prisoners had been handed over, or even New York to address the world leaders in attendance as the ships appeared to be heading for the United States of America.

A minute later, a third bogie was detected, too small for the satellites to clearly pick up, but moving at a much higher speed than the dropships (at one point it was estimated to reach over Mach 70 during reentry of the atmosphere). All three bogies entered Kansas airspace soon after, slowing significantly upon nearing the Earth, but Jaora remained in hot pursuit.

Despite the reduction in speed, the two dropships were still descending at an incredibly high rate, bursting through the low wintry clouds to soar over the Kansas plains with the female Kryptonian close behind. Detecting the predator, one of the ships suddenly veered south over the frozen fields, it's droning growing louder as its pilot increased power in an attempt to lose her, but Jaora was by no means about to let it get away.

Dismissing the other craft as a non-threat, she chased after the nearest one, following its trail farther towards the south-west, straining her keen eyesight to keep track of it in the dim morning light. She allowed herself to slow down some, still keeping the dropship in her sight, but falling back enough that she was out of its range of detection - and as predicted, once the pilot believed that he was no longer being followed, veered back north to join the other craft. Jaora swore viciously at herself for falling for such a stupid ruse, allowing herself to get caught up in what was clearly a distraction, and raced the ship back to Smallville. She would learn a few moments later that she had been too late - by then, Zod had already reached his target.

V*V*V*V*V*V*V

Lois followed Jor-El's hologram quickly through the sleek passageways of the alien ship, knowing that if she slowed down she would probably start trembling from nerves. It took a lot to shake the indomitable Miss Lane, but today was…

Today was unusual, to say the least.

"Fire to your left," Jor-El spoke up without missing a step as he pointed in that direction. Lois raised her stolen blaster as she passed the open doorway, immediately spotting the two Kryptonian soldiers within at the same moment they saw her, but she was prepared and managed to put them down with a few well-aimed shots.

"This thing kicks," she muttered under her breath, rubbing her sore wrist where the alien weapon tended to recoil painfully. She didn't have time to massage the bruise appearing there as Jor-El continued quickly down the passageway, making another gesture towards a nearby hall and causing the door leading to it to close in response. Just in time too - the door blocked off a third soldier who had no doubt come to investigate the sound of gunshots when Lois' blaster went off.

She heard running footsteps behind her and turned to fire as yet another Kryptonian warrior appeared, missing the first shot in her haste, but the second got him in the hip. The soldier screamed in pain as he collapsed from the wound, though Lois didn't have time to feel sorry for the invader as she hurried after Jor-El.

The hologram moved quickly, leading her down a short flight of narrow steps into the lower levels of the starcraft, then through another maze of corridors until stepping into a small room with secure airlocks covering the walls.

"Secure yourself inside the open vessel," he ordered as one of the airlocks opened with a mechanical hiss, revealing, to Lois' great relief, what could only be some sort of escape pod.

She quickly discarded the neckpiece containing her breather as she climbed into the small craft, still clutching the stolen blaster tightly in her fist while Jor-El gave the pod directions with a few swift gestures.

"Hope be with you, Miss Lane," he smiled softly as she sat down inside the vessel, "It is highly unlikely we will be seeing each other again..."

He trailed off, the hologram's eyes flickering unseeing and Lois assumed the consciousness' focus was elsewhere in the ship when he suddenly turned back to her, "Move your head to the left."

Confused, Lois obediently leaned to her left mere milliseconds before a gauntleted fist was thrust through Jor-El's shimmering form, missing Lois' head by a hairsbreadth. The Kryptonian guard let out a feral growl as she pulled her fist back for another strike as the hologram vanished in a flash of light, temporarily blinding her while Lois was able to cover her eyes just in time. She quickly acted on her advantage, raising the blaster to fire at her attacker, but the plasma charge failed to penetrate the alien armor and only threw the warrior off her feet. The Kryptonian growled and pulled a similar sidearm from the holster on her hip, firing at the pod at the exact moment the airlock doors slid shut with a sharp hiss and locked Lois in the darkened escape pod.

She tensed, frozen to the spot and gripping her weapon tightly as something shifted and a small scream left her lips as a falling sensation overcame her, the pod dropping from the alien mothership on a trajectory for Earth.

Lois knew immediately that something was terribly wrong when her tiny craft began to corkscrew violently through space, throwing her out of her seat. She swore viciously as gravity tossed her against the wall with enough force to cause a nasty bruise on her shoulder, realizing that even if the Kryptonian warrior's shot had missed her, it had more than likely hit something else on the escape pod - a stability or steering fin, it seemed like. Damnit.

The craft twisted again, now tossing her against the other wall and this time Lois found herself screaming Clark's name as she gripped one of the few safety handles in the pod and prayed he would save her before she crashed in a fiery inferno. At least it'd make a more interesting obituary than 'died fighting a freaking alien robot with a plasma tail while hemorrhaging inside an ancient ice-bound spaceship'.

V*V*V*V*V*V*V

Kal snapped the other restraint that bound him to the examination table, flexing his fists experimentally as the familiar warmth of sunlight began to seep back into his veins. The headache that had been pounding at his temples since boarding the starship was finally beginning to ease, and he felt that he could breathe a lot easier now. With no captors nearby and his strength returning, Kal only had two things on his mind: get the hell out of there, and stop Zod from laying a finger on his mom.

He turned towards the door the scientist had just exited through only to come face-to-face with another long-robed Kryptonian wearing a familiar crest and a soft smile - Jor-El.

A hundred questions swept through Kal's head at the sight of his father, all clambering for his attention and answers, and too caught up on adrenaline and panic to clearly sort them out, Kal asked the very first one that came to mind, "Is it true what Zod said about...' you, himself, Krypton, your death, my escape ,"... the Codex?"

His father's holographic consciousness seemed to waver slightly at the question, considering it carefully before replying.

"It's true," Jor-El admitted quietly, "The Codex left Krypton with you in hopes that one day, when the time was right, our race might be saved from extinction. But your mother and I wanted you to learn what it meant to be human first, to understand the importance of differences so that you could be the bridge between our two peoples."

With a slight nod of his head, the hologram indicated the curving bulkhead that made up one wall of the small medical room, "Strike that panel."

Confused, Kal pressed firmly on the indicated wall, half-expecting a door to appear or some mechanism to activate when he recognized his father's emphasis on the word strike . He pulled back his arm, fist cocked with the thumb outside just as Darcie had taught him, and hit the bulkhead with enough force to send the stony material it was composed of crumbling into space beyond. Kal found himself gasping in reaction to the sudden decompression, the vacuum outside invading the small room and tugging violently at him like an unseen wind, but what really took his breath away was the bright sunlight streaming in through the broken wall.

The view of the Earth from the bridge of Zod's starcraft had been splendorous, though Kal hadn't had much time or energy to truly enjoy it. Now he saw it in its full glory, spread out below him like a tapestry of life with its colorful landmasses and bright oceans, bright city lights dotting the horizon and giving the planet a shimmering glow.

"It's beautiful," Kal whispered, his voice barely carrying in the near-vacuum.

Jor-El followed his gaze, nodding silently towards the awe-inspiring sight, "Look closer."

Kal obeyed, his keen eyesight flitting over the blue planet spread out before him and taking in the minute movements of life below - the swirls of oceans and clouds shifting, the distant specks of airplanes and satellites in flight, lights flickering on as night passed over continents to the east… and the small, dark blot which Kal suddenly realized was a Kryptonian escape pod moving through the upper atmosphere.

A Kryptonian escape pod, likely ejected from the Black Zero only a few minutes ago.

A Kryptonian escape pod, containing not one of Zod's loyal soldiers, but…

" Lois ," Kal breathed despite himself, a surge of panic rising up in his chest at the sight of her in trouble. Nononono, he had promised himself that he would protect her, that he would make sure she returned safely, not like this...

"You can save her, Kal," Jor-El urged him, his voice breaking through his son's fearful thoughts, "You can save all of them."

His father's consciousness had said something similar when they had first met on the ancient Kryptonian scout ship, only a few weeks before. Kal had been sent to Earth not only to escape the death of his people, but to bring hope to the people of Earth, to give them an ideal they can strive to make reality . Though he might not have recognized it before, Kal had been doing exactly that years before he discovered his origins - even Lois had recognized it, his natural instinct and willingness to step up and lend a hand, to put himself in the line of fire simply to save people without asking for any sort of recognition. Kal's entire life had been one long string of helping and saving and lifting others up - and now it was time for him to do it again.

It was with only the briefest flicker of hesitation that Kal allowed himself to resist the Black Zero 's gravity and float freely, silently, slowly out into the void beyond the ship, taking a deep breath of nothingness as he did to calm his nerves. Suddenly the Earth wasn't the only thing in space and Kal was surrounded by millions of dim, twinkling stars obscured only by the dark monolith of Zod's ship with Jor-El's consciousness smiling at him from the broken bulkhead, and by the small black dot miles below, hurtling towards the merciless ground with every passing moment. Kal swallowed his fear and soared after it.

The pod was traveling at a speed many times faster than sound, fast enough that flames were starting to flicker around its edges due to the sudden friction caused by Earth's thick atmosphere. Kal grimaced at the sight and put on a burst of speed to catch up just as the heat became too much and one of the pod's stabilizing fins broke off in the onslaught of forceful winds. The pod began to pitch dramatically, tumbling through the air at a dangerous rate and Kal swore he could hear Lois screaming inside, panic surging through him once more at the sound of her pained voice. He had to help her, and fast.

Kal wasn't a scientist like his birth father, or even a halfway decent engineer like his dad had been, but he still knew how to tell when something was moving too fast for him to safely catch it. He made what he dimly recognized as a life-or-death decision, and grabbed the edge of the Kryptonian escape pod where its stabilizing fin had broken off while matching its velocity. It was still spinning violently, but Kal allowed himself to spin with it, slowly decreasing the roll as much as he could without injuring Lois inside.

The pod was still traveling at high speed - much too fast for him to simply grab it and stop its sudden descent without doing some damage to its passenger, but at least he had managed to get it to stop spinning. Kal glanced at the ground, watching as it grew closer with every passing second, then tore his gaze back to the pod in his grip. The air was quickly getting thicker and the armored hull of the pod getting hotter because of the friction caused by the change in atmosphere - the danger was growing closer with every passing second, and Kal knew that he had to get Lois out of there now .

His fingers found the edge of the pod's door, sealed tight against the vacuum of space it had passed through earlier, but Kal was able to rip it off with surprising ease and toss it aside as he gained access to the inner compartment. And there sat Lois, trembling slightly and gasping from a combination of fear and a sudden change in atmosphere, but alive . She didn't hesitate when Kal reached in to grab her, immediately jumping into his arms and grasping at his cape as they continued to fall swiftly through what she now realized were clouds - she barely saw them, her eyes shut against the wind whipping at her body as Kal released the pod in favor of holding her securely as they flew. The violent breeze buffeting her from all sides gentled some, and Lois was dimly conscious of an explosion going off far below her at the same moment that Kal twisting suddenly midair, protecting her from what she realized must have been the blast from her escape pod colliding with the ground.

Lois vehemently refused to open her eyes until she sensed that they were safely on the ground, and the first thing she saw was black smoke billowing from the crashed remains of what a few minutes ago had been her escape pod, now lying in a cratered cornfield on the other side of the road, and the second thing she saw was Kal watching her with deep concern as she clung to him so tightly, if he had been a human she might have crushed his ribs.

"Are you all right?" Kal asked, sensing her nervous apprehension as he gently freed himself from her tight hold. Lois found herself shaking her head, adrenaline still coursing through her veins at warp speed. She was fine - a bit banged up, yet nothing that wouldn't heal in a few days - it was the entire situation surrounding her capture that wasn't 'all right'.

"Shit, Clark, I-I'm sorry, I didn't want to tell them anything but they did something to me - they looked inside my mind and were reading my memories-"

It was then that Lois realized she likely wasn't making much sense, tripping over her words and almost on the verge of trembling from the shock of the last few hours. But Kal didn't seem to mind at all, even putting one arm around her shoulders in a comforting gesture as he hushed her panicked explanation.

"It's okay, Lois," he told her soothingly, "I think they did the same thing to me."

Or at least he was pretty sure they had. Kal had no idea how long he had been knocked out on Zod's ship, though now that he thought about it, he could dimly remember thinking of the farmhouse he had grown up in and his dad while he should have been thoroughly unconscious. If it was just his brain replaying old memories or some form of Kryptonian mind-reading, Kal couldn't tell, yet not for a moment did he doubt that Lois was telling the truth.

"We should get moving," he spoke up now that she seemed a little bit calmer, "Zod's planning something - I have to find him before he hurts-"

He stopped suddenly, head tilted to one side as he listened to something only he could hear and he tentatively took a step away from Lois, his eyes alight with fear.

"Clark?" she asked, sensing his unease. He shook his head in response, panic washing over his face and he took another step back.

"I-I have to go," he said quickly, turning on his heel and launching himself into the air before Lois could respond. The last she saw of him was a glimpse of red cape against dawn's blue sky just as the sudden wind from his departure died down. Something, she could tell, was very wrong.