The Previous Tenants (Patreon)

The Black Zero, Part One

The first two arrived dead, and were it not for Jax-Ur detecting organic matter in the ship’s proximity, they would have been lost as stray rocks in the Phantom Zone.

Zod stood over them in the containment bay, while Jax-Ur crouched between the bodies with a scanner in each hand. Silently watching his scientist work upon them with his scanners and instruments, Zod took in the subjects that had arrived upon his ship.

A man and a woman. Kryptonian proportions, or close enough that the distinction was academic. The man had fallen badly, one arm folded under him at an angle that bone did not permit, and the woman had landed on her back with her eyes open. Both wore robes of some kind, a material reminiscent of the secretions the worms in Sector-45 had produced before their star had swallowed them. Both had a length of polished wood near the hand, and one of them was still gripping it.

"Cause," Zod said.

"Working."

"Work faster."

Jax-Ur did not look up. He had stopped flinching at that tone somewhere around the third year of their imprisonment, which Zod had noted at the time and permitted. A frightened scientist produced frightened results, and a in place that was meant to trap them until the death of the Universe, Zod would permit a little disrespect than let something endanger their survival.

"Every capillary in the woman's body has ruptured." Jax turned her wrist over, pressed a thumb into the skin, and watched the colour fail to return. "Simultaneously. Not from impact. Her heart is undamaged, and her spine is intact." He moved to the man, tilted the head back, and shone a light into one eye. "The same. They were alive when they entered the Zone, trace remnants of the Zangurs are covering this one’s body…impressive, that they destroyed those beasts without any apparent weaponry."

"How long was that?"

"Uncalculable." Jax sat back on his heels. "I would need another one to answer that. An alive specimen."

Zod walked a slow circle around the bodies.

The containment bay had been designed to hold Kryptonian criminals in stasis, and it held nothing now but two corpses and the smell of a species he did not recognise. Twenty-two years in the Phantom Zone. The Zone had given them nothing in all that time—no matter, no light, no direction, no death. The Zone was a sentence carried out by absence, but the absence of everything but your thoughts.

And then Krypton had ended, and the Zone had shuddered, and things had started falling in.

'The universe is short a world,' he thought, looking down at the woman's open eyes, 'and it has begun sending me refuse in exchange.'

"Their sticks," he turned, and Jax-Ur picked one up, turned it over. Pausing for a moment, he sighted down its length like a marksman.

"Its…organic, not sediment, and my scans show another organic article at the core—hair, or a fibre. It is not a weapon in any sense I can measure. There is no charge in it, no mechanism, no reservoir." He set it down and picked up the other. "And yet the manufacturing tolerance is absurd. This was made by hand, and both of theirs differ. Different molecular structure, different…cores, if you will."

"Ceremonial perhaps,” Zod frowned. Those fools in the council too had liked to keep old remnants of their civilisation in similar care and shape.

"Perhaps." Jax's mouth twisted. "General, I do not enjoy saying this. There is an energy on these bodies that my instruments register and cannot classify. It is not radiological. It is not electromagnetic. It is not any of the four forces." He lifted the scanner, showed Zod a readout that meant nothing to either of them, and lowered it again. "It is fading fast, and already, I am struggling to get a read on its fluctuations and waveform."

Zod frowned and crossed his arms, the solution simple to him. "Then cut them open before it fades."

Jax-Ur worked for eleven hours, meticulous 

"Baseline organics," he said. "Skeletal density, organ arrangement, neural architecture—unremarkable. If I put a sample of this tissue beside a sample from the surface of any pre-industrial world in the catalogue, I could not separate them." He paused. "Remarkable similarity with the Kryptonian physiology, though their internal organs have evolved much differently than ours, especially for energy and waste purposes."

"Explain."

"They are not photoreceptive in a way much beyond their eyes and some reactions on their skin. All manners of energy processes seem to happen through a cellular-level breakdown of carbon-based molecules alongside a combination of what appears to be Hydrogen remnants combined with something unidentifiable…it had eight times the atomic weight of Hydrogen, however."

Zod considered that for a moment. "You will preserve the tissue. All of it. And the sticks."

"General—" Jax hesitated, which he did not often do. "If two arrived, more may. The Zone has been unstable since the collapse. I would like the containment bay reconfigured. Restraints, dampening, full sensor coverage. If the next one is breathing, I want to be recording from the first second."

"You assume there will be a next one?" he raised an eyebrow.

"I assume the universe has opened a door and does not know it." Jax shrugged. "Doors do not close because we would prefer them to."

It took eight months.

Eight months of Faora running the crew through drills against opponents who did not exist, of Nam-Ek waking and sleeping and saying nothing, of Tor-An picking fights in the corridors to fill the silence. Eight months of Jax-Ur in his laboratory, converting a prison hulk into something that might one day move under its own power, and reporting progress in increments too small to celebrate.

Eight months of scavenging what they could in the Phantom Zone, repurposing dimensional charges and monitoring stations into power sources and attachments that Jax-Ur used to experiment a wormhole into creation.

Zod watched his people rot at a rate he could measure.

That was the thing nobody had told him about a life sentence. Not the confinement. The confinement was survivable. It was watching the finest soldiers Krypton ever produced slowly forget what they had been sharpened for.

He was on the command deck when the proximity alarm sounded, and for one full second he did not recognise the noise.

This time, it was two of them, breaching through the improved proximity sensor Jax-Ur had built, and when the containment bay shut behind them, both were breathing.

The taller one hit the deck on his hands and knees, and instantly regurgitated the contents of his alimentary canal. Primitive.

The other one did not fall. He staggered, caught himself against the bulkhead, and stayed upright—a pale creature with pale hair pulled back at the neck, wearing robes that matched the style and colors of those who had come before. He straightened his spine, looking around the bay at the restraints and the sensor booms and the six armoured Kryptonians standing in a loose ring around him.

Then he adjusted his cuffs.

'Interesting,' Zod thought, ‘He has been in hostile conditions before, possibly surrounded too. A combatant, or a diplomat of his species most probably.’

"$&*#HNndk?" the pale one said. 

“Well, now we know their language differs from Kryptonese, so not one of our colonies or outposts,” Faora muttered, and the pale one’s eyes snapped towards her. The man muttered something to himself, and Zod’s eyes snapped towards Jax-Ur as one of his sensors detected something.

"I asked where—"

"You will be examined," Zod said, "and then you will be questioned. In that order. Cooperation reduces the unpleasantness of the first and has no effect whatsoever on the second."

“That was a fast translation, General,” Faora muttered, her voice barely above a whisper. “He is speaking perfect Kryptonese within seconds…are you aware of any sub-Kryptonian species or experiments that look like them?”

Zod only gave silence as his answer, even as the pale man's eyes moved across him, taking in the armour and the four soldiers behind him and he must have reached some sort of conclusion, for his eyes narrowed.

"You are not the Ministry," he said.

"No."

"Then you have no jurisdiction over my person, and I am not obliged to—"

Faora hit him. Blitzing forwards with the agility that had made her the fastest Kryptonian bar him, the strike caught the pale man across the sternum and folded him over her forearm, and she had his wrists behind his back and the wooden stick out of his sleeve before he had finished exhaling.

She held it up, examining it.

"He was reaching for this," she said. "Seems famil—Rao!"

Faora’s curse split the containment bay as she was blasted back into the walls, and instantly, weapons were raised towards the prisoner. "Nott," the pale man wheezed, even as his stick floated towards his hand. Gravity or Electromagnetic attraction? "Nott."

The tall one was still on his hands and knees, no longer sick. He was looking up now, and Zod saw him take in the room in one sweep and arrive somewhere very different from where his companion had arrived.

'One of you is arrogant,' he thought. 'And one of you is afraid.'

"Secure them both," he said. "Separate cells—Jax-Ur gets the tall one first."

The tall one talked.

Not immediately, and not well, but he talked, and after nine hours Jax-Ur came to the command deck with a data slate.

"Their designation is wizard. Not a rank, and not a profession." He handed it across. "It is what they are born as, the name of their species. A concealed population inside a baseline civilisation, on a world they call…Earth."

Zod's head came up.

"Say that again."

"Earth, General."

Nobody on the deck moved, for everyone knew the significance of that planet, of that word.

"The system Jor-El sent the child to," Jax said. "The system with the codex."

"He is certain?"

"Absolutely, and he is terrified. That is better in my opinion." Jax took the slate back and scrolled. "He does not know what a codex is. He does not know what we are. His people have hidden inside their own species for as long as their records run, under a separate body of law, which sentenced both of them to death six weeks ago as per his words. However, we cannot be certain whether the timeline matches exactly, owing to any time stream differences and hallucinations."

"Time stream differences…you mean they are interdimensional or wormhole-induced travellers?” Zod frowned, “Method?"

"An archway. A stone arch with a veil in it." Jax's jaw shifted. "They push the condemned through and consider the matter closed. Recorded four hundred years of it, and nobody has ever asked where the arch goes. Before that, there is no record of how long it has been used."

Zod looked at the grey.

Four centuries of a species emptying its worst into the Zone. Bodies arriving dead because the crossing killed them, into a desolate place with nothing to find them. Then Krypton had ended, the Zone had shifted, and some of them had begun arriving intact.

"I want the sensor net extended along the full hull," Jax said. "Two in one week after eight months of nothing. If the aperture is widening I would like the rate."

"Granted,” Zod grunted, before meeting Jax-Ur’s eyes, “The pale one. What is he?"

"The same, a wizard. Name is Lucius Malfoy. Inherited wealth, inherited standing, political influence purchased across generations." Jax scrolled. "Nott is the same, one tier lower, and aware of it. They served the same commander. The tall one will not name him and becomes incoherent when pressed. I have logged that as an observation, there is also a faded mark on both of their forearms, a skull through which some sort of invertebrate lifeform passes through, that needs a deeper examination."

"They lost."

"Twice." Jax set the slate flat, and his voice carried a waver Zod had not heard since he had declared that they would restore the Codex and recreate Krypton, "General…He described what the sticks do."

"And?"

"Sixty applications in four hours, and he was not performing. He was buying hours in instalments." Jax kept his voice level. "Matter into other matter. Two points crossed without traversing the distance, localised time-space ruptures on inter-continental distances. Memory altered inside another mind. Tissue restored. A body operated from outside it, over the will of the occupant." A pause. "The dead raised. Mentioned in passing. As a thing that exists and is frowned upon."

"He is inflating his value." he scoffed. He had travelled far and wide across thousands of star system and dozens of galaxies. And while many species carried a talent for manipulating one or more of the fundamental forces, and some that operated out of it… the sheer breath and fallacy of these abilities was beyond his comprehension.

"Two corpses in my freezer are covered in Zangur residue and carry nothing I can classify as a weapon. Both spoke Kryptonese four seconds after arriving and I have no recording of either one learning it—and a stick put your second through a bulkhead with no incantation on any channel." Jax pushed off the console. "I would prefer he were inflating. I have nothing that supports it."

Zod turned from the viewport.

"Bring them both to the bay."

"Both, General?"

"The tall one has been cooperative, and is about to watch what cooperation purchased him." He walked. "Restrain him where Malfoy can see him."

Faora objected in the corridor, and while her voice was down, her tone left no doubt in Zod’s mind that she was disagreeing with him.

"You are returning a hostile's weapon."

"Yes."

"It put me through a wall while he was face down with his wrists behind his back. I did not see him use it. Jax-Ur logged nothing, there was no visible trigger mechanism, no heat, no output of energy that should have lifted me with such velocity." Her hands stayed at her sides. "We do not know the full breadth and capability of this weapon, sir. Returning it might be detrimental without further study."

"Eight months of speculation and one frightened creature's account. I need to know whether a thing that size can hurt a Kryptonian—in a room I control, at a time I choose." He looked past her at the hatch. "I will not learn it from a corpse."

"Permission to be present in standard interrogation procedures?"

“Granted.”

Lucius Malfoy had spent nine hours in a cell and used them, just as he had used the seven years spent in Slytherin common rooms or the Ministry and manor events. There was a reason, that despite his lack of power against monsters like Bellatrix and Augustus, he still had stood at the Dark Lord’s sides, not behind. Now, displaced and disgraced, he had found himself in some mechanical construct that drifted through the dark of the cosmos where the Veil had deposited them, found by beings who appeared muggle in all but name.

He had learned however, that they were far stronger, faster, and definitely much more ahead in their technology. Last he had checked, the muggles on his planet had reached the moon and called it leap for their species.

Cute.

But these were not muggles, and this was not his Earth. And yet, the one thing that remained constant…was him. He was Lucius Malfoy, and he came in under escort with his chin up. He took in the bay, the plinth, the armour, and Nott strapped to a frame against the port bulkhead with his head down, and something crystallised in his mind that had been brewing since he had found himself inside this craft.

Then he smiled.

"You are prisoners."

Zod said nothing.

"The restraint frames are internal fittings. Not a brig—a holding bay, aboard a vessel designed to carry people who could tear it open." Malfoy strolled to the chair and sat without being told. "Which means you were the cargo. Twenty-two years, your man said. Twenty-two years and you are still here." He arranged his robes over his knees. "So. What is it you actually want, General?"

"Your associate has described your abilities at length."

"Nott would describe his mother's cremation for a warm meal. He is a Nott." The drawl was effortless, perfected to get under one’s skin, and sometimes sheets, depending upon the gender of the listener. Across the bay, he saw Nott, held behind a glowing blue barrier that reminded him the wards he had so effortlessly cast on muggles once, before he met the cold, black eyes of the man before him, "You will find I am worth rather more to you than he is, and rather less inclined to give it away,” his head tilted minutely, “I am not unreasonable. I understand an arrangement when I am offered one."

Something shifted at the edge of his senses, and his eyes widened as this “Zod”, put his wand on the table.

Nine hours since the woman had taken it off him, and they had all seen it. Every one of them…and it was sitting on the table. 'They watched it happen and filed it as a fault.' he thought quietly, and arranged his cuffs.

"There is no arrangement," Zod said, crossing his arms over his armour again. "Your people executed you six weeks ago. As far as your world is concerned you are dead, and they are correct. No authority, No appeal to be filed here, and no rescue—the ones who put you through the arch do not know this place exists. No escape, either. I have spent twenty-two years on it."

Twenty-two years…impressive.

Lucius filed it without moving his face, and perhaps taking that for agreement, the creature continued. "You are not a prisoner. Prisoners have release dates."

'Then we are discussing terms.' 

"You are inventory."

His hand had moved, absentmindedly—two inches across the table—fingers open.

He stopped it.

Inventory.

He had been called worse by better, all throughout his life. 

Coward, by men with nothing to lose. 

Traitor, twice, by both sides. 

He had knelt on his own drawing room floor and thanked the thing living in his house for the privilege of keeping it. He had felt the disgust in his wife’s gaze as he had been rendered a spectator in his own Manor.

He had survived every one of them the same way. A Malfoy was worth something to somebody, and the price was the only conversation that had ever mattered.

However, Inventory did not have a price. 

Inventory had a shelf.

"Pick it up," the creature said. "Demonstrate what you can do."

"I rather think not." he smiled, and he was being honest.

"I am not asking." Zod’s expression did not change, and yet, Lucius pitied the creature all the more for it as he looked at the wand.

Then past him, at the woman on the far wall, examining her own knuckles. She had gone through a bulkhead eight hours ago and come back to work. She was the one to watch. There was a fourth in the near corner with some manner of muggle firearm, and Lucius spared him nothing at all. 

'One,' he thought. 'One, and the arrangement writes itself.'

He had cast it on a clerk once, over a delay in a shipping licence. On Dobby, more times than he could recall, for the sound of it. It wanted no strength and no speed and no leverage. It wanted only that he meant it.

Meaning it was not going to be a difficulty.

Who offered a wandless wizard his wand back without having one himself?

"Do you know," he said, and heard the drawl go out of his voice, the disdain that once shamed mudbloods, and the power that had once reigned supreme in the Wizengamot coming back to his words, "how many generations it took to make me? Do you imagine I am something you catalogue—"

His hand closed on the elm.

Everything came back at once. The hum in the walls. The woman's pulse. The flat cold weight of the thing in the centre of the room and how very little it would take.

He was already smiling.

“Crucio.”

"Krusiyo-h."

There was no light.

No beam. No discharge. No projectile, no report, nothing crossing the distance between them.

Just a word, and then pain.

It did not enter him, and neither did it start somewhere. It arrived everywhere at once, complete, torturous, hot, and growing with every millisecond—the marrow of his femurs, behind his eyes, the muscles throughout his body, the joints in his skeleton, the small bones of his hands. Every nerve he owned reported catastrophic injury, and not one able to say where.

His knees hit the deck, and his suit instantly blared up with alarms and life-threatening statuses, even as half of it malfunctioned into sparks and dead weight.

He heard the sound they made. He heard, at a distance, a voice going up out of his own chest, and for the life of him, Zod could not hear or see anything, even as he realised that his body was being destroyed.

'They have a name for this,' he thought, from underneath. 'They do this to each other.'

Two and a half seconds.

Then Faora fired.

The disintegrator took Lucius Malfoy in the back at a range of six metres and did not touch him.

Zod saw it from the deck, sideways, with his cheek against the plating as his blood pressure rose further, and his suit started to shut down his organs before they burned away further. Zod’s eyes were failing him, and yet, Faora saw everything. The beam struck a plane of nothing a hand's width behind the man's spine and stopped—did not scatter, did not reflect, simply arrived at a surface that was not there and ceased to exist against it. The air went white, and Malfoy stood where he had been, his stick still pointed at the General.

He was still facing Zod, still holding the wand, and his left hand had come up and back over his shoulder without his head following it, and he was smiling like a man who had just been paid a compliment.

Tor-An fired from the near corner.

The marksman had been holding on to the target for nine seconds, an explosive bullet in his gun that could warp through barriers and hit the target. It neared whatever barrier the creature had devised, and then simply teleported with all of its velocity and payload to right at where Tor-An had guided it.

The round entered under the left arm, and she saw the confusion, the alarm rise on the man’s face…but it was already done.

The payload detonated inside the chest cavity, and Lucius Malfoy came apart.

The pain did not stop when he did.

That was the thing that would sit with Zod afterward, long past the ache in his ribs and the humiliation of the recording. The creature was gone—most of him across the deck plating, the rest of him fine enough to hang in the air. By what little reasoning he could still perform, Zod knew, that whatever weapon or ammunition or technique the man had used, it should have stopped post his death, and still every nerve he owned went on reporting its own destruction in a body that had once taken a plasma lance through the shoulder and finished the assault on foot.

'It is not attached to him.'

The thought arrived whole, and the next wave of PAINAGONYHEAT took it under.

His suit was talking. Cardiac arrhythmia. Thermal spike. Neural cascade—read out in the flat, unhurried cadence Kryptonian medical systems had used for six centuries, and beneath it, quieter, the tone that meant it had begun closing down organs to preserve the ones it ranked above them. Standard military procedure…deployed in cases when the user was on death’s door.

He heard Faora's boots before he saw anything at all, even as the whole bay swam before his eyes.

Something cold went into the side of his neck, hard enough to bruise, driven through the seal. The world came back into focus within moments as his heart stopped fighting itself, and a wave of cold relief swept through his nerves, silencing his sensory system entirely. 

"It is not holding." Her palm was flat against his sternum, reading the suit's output through the plating of it. "Jax-Ur. The chamber, fast."

"…All of it, Second?"

"All of it."

The chamber was two decks down, and had been built for something else entirely. They sealed him into it and opened the radiation store, an infinitesimally small dosage of contained yellow star formation, barely a moment’s worth of fusion material.

His cells took it the way he longed to take in Krypton itself, and Zod shuddered as his senses restored, his trembling stopped, and then power he had not felt in ages suffused his body.

And yet, the screaming in his nerves did not stop. It receded—but it was still present at the back, held at the bay by what little photons he had been able to absorb.

Zod lost eleven hours.

His suit gave him the figure when he opened his eyes, the suit’s hibernation turning off and waking him up from cryogenesis. 

'Eleven hours. In a room with witnesses and a recording.'

He had been unconscious once before in his adult life. On the floor of the High Council chamber, with the word guilty still hanging in the air and Jor-El's hand on his shoulder.

'Its the second time—and this one was not done by a Kryptonian.'

He opened his eyes, and found his Second before the doors to the Chamber. The door opened silently as he stood up, containing the tremble that still plagued him somehow. "Report," he said, and instantly noticed the…change in his voice. “I saw the subject be terminated.”

She gave it standing, hands at her sides, in the order regulation required.

"Initial response to attack on you was a full discharge, sir. Centre mass, six metres, no obstruction on the axis…It did not reach him."

"Define 'did not reach.'"

"It stopped a hand's width off his spine." Her jaw moved once. "It did not scatter and it did not reflect. No thermal bloom at the point of contact, no ionisation trail behind it. It did not so much as move his robes. It arrived at something and ceased to exist against it, however, there was no electromagnetic shielding deployed."

"You were slow."

"…Yes, sir."

“Unacceptable,” he declared, staring down at her, “Sharpen your skills, Commander Faora. I will not accept a commander who cannot fire within a moment’s notice.”

“Unerstood, General,” she nodded, before continuing, “Tor-An used a warp round with an explosive payload to put him down, once it became apparent that nothing conventional would break through whatever barrier he had created.”

"Nine seconds on target, General. He raised his hand toward the Second." The marksman's eyes stayed forward, fixed on the bulkhead somewhere past Zod's shoulder. "I assumed that a warp round might confuse him on where to place his barrier, or shift his attention enough that Commander could take another shot.”

"You discharged a warp round inside a sealed bay."

"Standing loadout for boarding actions, sir. It was already chambered when I took the corner."

"That was correct," he said. "Log the reasoning. In your own words, not Jax-Ur's. I want it in the file exactly as you said it."

Jax-Ur came last, data slates in hand.

"He perceived it. That is the smaller of the two problems and I want to begin there, because it requires more thought."

Zod inclined his head.

"A disintegrator discharge, from behind, at six metres. No line of sight. No reflective surface anywhere in that bay—I have checked the panelling, the plinth housing, and the seal of the observation port." Now he looked at the slate. "He interposed something across its path inside the interval available. The interval was point-zero-zero-two seconds."

"He saw it coming."

"General, at that range and that discharge velocity there was nothing to see. There was no interval in which the beam existed and had not yet arrived." Jax-Ur set the slate down on the console, flat, and left his hand on it. "He did not react to the shot, he reacted to the decision to shoot."

The chamber hummed.

"And what he interposed did not deflect the beam and did not absorb it. It ended it. There is no reading past that plane—not attenuated, not scattered, not redirected into the hull. Absent. He ended energy. No barrier except for creating a singularity has that kind of effect to my knowledge, and every bit of data we have access to."

"You have a classification for it?"

"I have nothing at all for it, and that is what I have spent four days establishing." Both palms went flat, and Jax-Ur stared down at the slates, while Zod remembered the bay and the pain the word. "Every physical index on this vessel. Every survey record, every materials catalogue, every proceeding of the Science Guild that Jor-El's ship happened to carry. There is no material that does that. There is no process that does that."

"The round?" he asked next, “Tor-An’s reasoning was sound, but what is the actual explanation, if you have one?”

"That is the second problem, and it is the one that will keep us alive." He straightened. "The round did not defeat the barrier. It did not test it, overwhelm it, or find an unguarded arc. It displaced past the intervening space and reassembled at full velocity and payload on the far side of it. It never met the barrier at all, General. The barrier had nothing to refuse."

Zod worked it through.

"The barrier stops what travels."

"And it has no opinion whatsoever about what does not." Jax-Ur picked the slate back up. "Everything we field crosses a distance. Every weapon on this vessel and every technique in the regimen. We have spent our entire military history perfecting the delivery of force across a gap, and a condemned criminal from a pre-industrial world made the gap irrelevant with the back of his hand."

“How many warp rounds do we have, and the other space warping ammunition?”

“Not more than two, General.”

He came back three days later, and he had not slept then either.

Zod was on the observation deck with his hands behind his back and his ribs still moving wrong when he breathed, and he heard the scientist stop in the hatchway and stand there.

"Say it."

"I was searching the wrong archive, General." Jax-Ur's voice did something Zod had heard twice in twenty-two years. "For eleven days I have been searching physics. There is nothing in physics. There was never going to be anything in physics."

"Where." he turned around, and projections formed before him as Jax-Ur commanded the system. Six planets, unremarkable, no orbitary stations, no industrial complexes, no apparent intelligence.

"Military history."

Zod’s interest rose, and he leaned forwards as a chair materialised beneath him, the fluid material conforming to his height as he looked at Jax-Ur.

"Sector-45. The worm colonies—the ones whose secretions the robes reminded me of. I went back to the expedition record because I wanted the tissue comparison, and a separate entry in that file was flagged with a Council classification I did not recognise." He held the slate out. "It is not a scientific classification, sir. It is an operational one. Reality-alteration, confirmed."

Zod took it and did not look down.

"Six worlds carry that flag. Across four hundred years." Jax-Ur passed him the second one, as the planets projected around them shone one by one, in time with his words, "Two of them are inhabited and interdicted. Four of them are not inhabited by anything at all, post the terraforming carried out on them."

"You are telling me we have met this before."

"Six times and wrote down what it did about it, and none of us have read the file because it was filed under pacification and not under science—the last record dates back to two thousand fifty four cycles," He finally stopped. "General. There is no containment protocol in any of those six entries. There is no capture protocol. There is no study protocol, no specimen recovery, no attempt at contact. Not one."

"Then what is there?"

"Destruction. Orbital bombardment. Without landing. Without communication. Without attempting to take a live subject." Jax-Ur's hands had gone still at his sides. "In all six cases. It is not a recommendation, it is a standing order, and the language is identical in every entry across four centuries during which these six worlds were cleared out."

Zod looked down at the slate at last, and read the classification, and read the order beneath it, and understood exactly what he was holding.

'Six times. And every time, from orbit, without ever going near it. Because they couldn’t get close, they couldn't risk what happened to me. At the height of its power, even with a orange star at the center of one’s system.'

"We have no orbit," he said at last.

"No, sir."

"We have no bombardment capacity. We have no ships. We have a hulk with a hole in the universe at one end of it that opens onto their world and drops them on my deck at a rate we cannot predict." He handed the slate back. "And I have just given an order that the next one is to be kept alive."

"Yes, General."

"Do you consider that order to be an error?"

Jax-Ur took a long moment with it. To his credit, Zod thought he took it seriously.

"Six expeditions had the option of distance," he said. "You do not. Whatever the archive says, it was written by people who could afford to never learn anything." He tucked the slate under his arm. "You cannot afford that. Neither can I."

"No."

"But I would like it recorded that Krypton's considered position, held without revision for four hundred years, was that this phenomenon should be destroyed on sight from a range at which it cannot be examined." Something moved in his face. "And I would like it recorded that we are about to do the opposite, aboard a vessel with no weapons that work, because we have no choice and because I want to see it."

"Recorded," Zod said. "Both halves."

They recovered the wand from beneath the sensor plinth, undamaged.

It read as nothing at all. No residue, no fluctuation, no response on any instrument in the bay, then or at any point afterward. Jax-Ur ran it for six days against every spectrum the ship could produce before he logged it inert and put it in the drawer with the other two.

He did not open that drawer again for nine years.

Nott never spoke again.

Four days of it. He ate when food was put into his hands and stopped when the hands were empty. He did not answer to his designation, or to his name, or to anything else that was tried.

Jax-Ur ran him through every diagnostic the bay could perform and found a baseline nervous system with nothing wrong in it.

"He is not damaged, General. He is finished." He had looked genuinely uncomfortable saying it, which was rare enough that Zod remembered it afterward. "No lesions. No haemorrhage. No chemical imbalance I can identify against his own baseline from the first interrogation. Something in him decided to stop, and the body has not yet been informed."

On the fifth morning, Nott opened his eyes and found Tor-An standing over him.

He did something to the air with an empty hand, and Tor-An went into the bulkhead hard enough to spall the plating, and when he dropped to the floor, suit malfunctioning, his jaw was broken in two places.

Nam-Ek was closer, and the response to hostile action inside a containment cell had been standing since Nam-Ek had been bred—and nobody had thought to rescind it for a creature who had not moved in four days.

Zod stood in the cell for a long time.

His ribs still moved wrong. He had not managed more than two hours of sleep at a stretch since the chamber, and he looked down at the body and thought about a marksman's reasoning logged verbatim in a file, and a store reading zero, and six worlds burned from orbit by people who had never once landed.

"His hand was empty."

"I saw the recording."

"Then the stick is not the mechanism." He turned from the body. "Confiscation is not a countermeasure. Log that beside the rest of it."

Jax-Ur wrote it down.

"May I ask what the standing order will be? If another arrives."

'Sixty applications in four hours, from the one who was afraid of us. The arrogant one showed me two, and both were past anything we hold.' Zod thought as he looked at the recordings once again, 'And they were criminals. Condemned by their own kind, thrown into a hole in the world, and nobody on that planet has ever once asked where the hole comes out. There will be better in that world. There will be their soldiers, with powers that can hurt Kryptonians, a weakness we cannot afford, if Krypton is to rise again. To have answers and authority beyond orbital bombardment…beyond fear.’

"The next one is not killed," Zod said. "Restraint before he is conscious. Sedation before he is coherent. Nothing from their world within reach of his hands at any point, and no soldier alone with him at any stage." He walked toward the hatch. "And no weapon discharged in his presence without my order. We have established what that costs."

"And containment, General?"

Zod stopped.

"I spent eight months building a bay to hold something, and it held nothing at all." He looked back into the cell—at the body, at the spalled plating where a catatonic creature had put a Kryptonian marksman into a wall without opening his hand. "Neither of them required the stick. One of them stopped fission energy with his back turned. The other used force strong enough to dent the fuselage—four days after his mind stopped working."

"Then you do not want a cell."

"I want a room I can watch. Indefinitely, with him inside it, and cooperative." He stepped through the hatch. "Six expeditions solved this from orbit, Jax-Ur. I have no orbit. So I will solve it the only way left, which is to make the next one prefer to stay."

Jax-Ur did not answer immediately.

"That is not containment, sir. That is recruitment."

"It is arithmetic." Zod's voice came back down the corridor. "And Faora designs the regimen. Every soldier on this vessel runs it, without exception. A hostile who requires no line of sight, no ammunition and no wind-up. One who guards an arc you cannot see him guard, and who answers a decision before you have finished making it."

"We have no defence against any of that."

"No." His boots did not slow. "But he dies exactly as easily as anything else does, the moment you stop trying to cross the distance to reach him. Build the regimen on that, and we will be adequate."

The viewport showed the same grey it had shown for twenty-two years.

Somewhere below him Jax-Ur had begun the survey work. Below that, Faora had the first group on the training deck, her voice coming up through the plating in the clipped, unhurried register she kept for people she intended to keep alive.

Zod stood with his hands behind his back, and his ribs ached in a way they had not ached since the trial.

Earth.

The child was on Earth. The codex was on Earth. And Earth, it transpired, had spent four hundred recorded years pushing its most dangerous citizens through a hole in the world and calling the matter settled, without once asking where they came out.

Krypton had spent the same span, millennia ago, finding six such worlds and burning four of them without landing.

'Two civilisations,' he thought. 'And neither one of us ever looked.'

The Zone had been a sentence. He had understood that on the first day and had never once permitted himself to hope otherwise. But a sentence assumed a jailer, and a jailer assumed a door.

And a door did not close because someone would prefer it to.

He watched the grey, and waited for it to send him something better.

Nine years later, it did.