Smallville 1. Chapter 1

7/5/2009

Author's Note

Okay, the usual disclaimer – the Smallville characters are 'owned' by someone besides me.

This story is a sequel to 'Biological Families' which, in turn, is a sequel to 'The Portal'. I could give a long, detailed synopsis of them here, but I think it is better that you just go read them first before starting to read this one. If you have read them somewhere in the past, there should be enough references in this first chapter to things from the earlier stories to refresh your memory. So on with the story . . .

Origins

Chapter 1

Part 1

"You've got to be kidding!" exclaimed Lex, allowing his normally carefully modulated voice to show a hint of exasperation. "You don't really expect me to wear these . . . these," he held the pair of bright yellow spandex leggings in front of his grey dress slacks. "These tights. Do I really look like a 'Malvolio'?"

"Who's Malvolio?" asked Clark stepping into the room.

Lex glanced at his old friend. Then turned to take a serious look at him, but before even taking in the complete costume he was already laughing. "Well, I'm glad I am not alone in being asked to look stupid."

"Malvolio?" asked Clark again, following Lex's gaze and looking down at his own attire. This was not the first time he had tried it on, so the bright electric blue, form-fitting outfit didn't bother him as much now as Lex's first exposure to his yellow was bothering him. Well, the basic blue didn't bother Clark, but the red bikini pants, worn on the outside, and matching red boots still grated like fingernails on a chalkboard, but he was forcing himself to ignore it. At least Chloe had incorporated the El family crest, which looked like a giant 'S' inside a diamond, as a bright yellow emblem on the chest.

"Malvolio is a character in Shakespeare's 'Twelfth Night'," answered Chloe, as she lounged against one of the equipment racks which lined the back wall of the control room overlooking the newly completed and highly upgraded Portal launch chamber in the heart of her secret laboratory.

"Shakespeare," repeated Clark with a shake of his head. Ever since going through the Purl Nous procedure it felt like his mind had been shifted into overdrive. He could do math problems in his head that he once would have struggled to complete with pencil and paper. He now had a photographic memory that could nearly rival Chloe's or Lana's. But he still hadn't found the time to bone up on seemingly trivial things like Shakespeare or being able to quote from long dead philosophers like Lex. "So is there a particular significance to the association of this Malvolio and yellow tights?"

"Well, there are several schools of thought on why Shakespeare chose to dress Malvolio in yellow leggings," responded Chloe. "First, I suppose I better explain a little about the character. Malvolio was the head steward to a countess named Olivia. He was what today would be called a hardcore Puritan, which meant he always dressed in drab attire and frowned on anything that hinted at levity. Some of the other characters, as a joke on him because he was always breaking up their fun, forged a letter from the countess wherein she professed her love for him and requested if he had reciprocal feelings that he should wear yellow leggings as silent proof.

"Now the premiere performance of the play was before the royal court at Whitehall Palace on January 6th, 1601. One school of thought is that the Malvolio personality and the yellow tights were a reference to Sir William Knollys, the Comptroller of the Royal Household, who was something of a laughingstock for publicly declaring his love for his young ward and stating he wished his wife would die. Another school of thought is that the color yellow was a not-so-subtle dig at Queen Elizabeth, as she hated the color yellow as it was associated with the Duke of Norfolk, her most ardent opponent in Parliament, as well as the color yellow being associated with Spain, England's primary opponent of the era."

Lex grinned, his annoyance with his yellow stockings momentarily forgotten. It was always amazing the amount of historical trivia Chloe had stashed away. But then who knew, she could very well have been present at that first performance of 'Twelfth Night'. For truthfully, all he really remembered about Malvolio beyond the yellow tights was his one famous line – 'Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them'.

"Of course," interjected Lana from the doorway where she was just entering the room, "There is also the most straightforward explanation, which is partially related to the first school of thought. In the late 1500's only single, horny young men who were on the prowl wore yellow stockings, while married men wore black or dark grey leggings. So by forcing Malvolio to wear yellow stockings, Shakespeare was simply using the vernacular of the day to say 'here was a man who knew the proper decorum for his station on the Countess' staff as well as his personal beliefs, but who was interested in fooling around'."

As she was speaking, Lana had walked across the room until she stood in front of Lex. Then with a sternness in her voice that was completely offset by the twinkle in her eyes, she looked up into Lex's face and said, "Just because you are going to be wearing yellow stockings, don't go getting any ideas in your head about fooling around on me."

Lex gave a quick bow of his head in acknowledgement. Then he looked from the bright red and blue of Clark's outfit to the yellow and blue of the one in his hand to Lana's spandex outfit all in subdued shades of gray. Dropping the whole Malvolio line of conversation, he asked, "Hey, why can't I have an outfit like yours?"

Lana gave an easy grin. "I think you should just be glad codpieces went out of fashion six months before we are due to arrive," she answered while making an obscene gesture at her crotch. Then she broke into a hearty laugh which quickly spread to Chloe.

Lex felt his heart lift a little at this response. In the three months since the events in the storm cellar where Sliviuh had gained control of her body, this was the most casual, unforced laugh Lex had heard from her. She had explained and had even given him a taste of the virtual reality world where she had been trapped, but it was still almost impossible to grasp that from her perspective she had spent two thousand years there.

Two thousand years – it was equivalent to the time from ancient Rome to the present. Chloe had lived through all of those years to rescue the rest of them without any significant changes. Well, that wasn't exactly true. She was a much more forceful person now, although whether that was due to the two thousand years she had spent preparing for her return to the present or just the result of revealing her secret, he couldn't be certain. But since Chloe had already been seventeen thousand years old at the start of that adventure, Lex suspected the latter.

However since Lana had returned from her millennia long sojourn in the virtual reality world, she always seemed a little disconnected. Of course, what could he really expect when her sixteen years of 'real' life where so far in the past from her perspective? Even with the nano-based gift of perfect recall, she still had the intervening two thousand years of experiences, of memories, of life itself to deal with.

Lex affixed a grin on his face until the girls' laughter died down before responding. "Okay, okay, yeah I'm glad this outfit doesn't include a codpiece, too. But I don't understand why Clark and I have to look like damn peacocks."

Lana's grin threatened to expand back into a laugh and it was Chloe who responded.

"That's because men in my old civilization were like peacocks - always strutting around trying to impress the females. And it is necessary that we blend in. Now go ahead and try your outfit on. It's not like anyone, outside this room, who knows you, will ever see you. A photo of you in this outfit is not going to be splashed across the front page of the Inquisitor in full, living color."

Lex shuddered at the thought of any of his business competitors, or his father, seeing him in this get-up. But he nodded and headed towards the changing room. When it came down to it, it wasn't any different than wearing the toga when they had been in ancient Rome. He just wished if he had to wear a stupid spandex costume that it was a little more like the elegant one worn by Warrior Angel in the comics.

As she watched Lex exit the room, Chloe asked Lana, "Did you explain the real reason behind the spandex outfits, if not the rationale for the garish coloring?"

Lana shook her head with a grin. "No, I thought the surprise of the outfit would be more fun without a mundane explanation. So I have mainly stuck with the language lessons and skimped on the cultural details."

Clark smiled at the thought that for once he wasn't going to the one thrown into a total foreign environment cold. During their unplanned trip to ancient Rome, Chloe and Lex had both known Latin. In Nazi Germany Lana had been fluent in German through her nanobot gift. Both times he had been utterly dependent on the translation skills of others. But this time, through the gift of Var El's tele-learning machine and the advanced foreknowledge of their destination, he was already fluent in the Rœtic, the dominant language in Chloe's original civilization.

No, this time through his new post-Purl Nous abilities and Chloe & Lana's nanobot gifts, the three of them were all fluent. It was Lex who had been forced to endure the hard, grinding task of learning the language the old fashioned way. Oh, while he was in physical contact with one of the girls he could use his passive nanobots to leech off the girls' active systems. But based on their prior time travel experience, Lex knew better than to count on that easy solution. So he had been taking a crash course from Lana for the last two months.

"Since you haven't seen fit to enlighten me, either, on the exact reason we are dressed like comic book characters, perhaps now is the time, if we really intend to start on this adventure tonight," remarked Clark looking over at Chloe in her pale blue spandex outfit with its much more discreet stylized lion emblem just over her right breast.

"Okay, although we should really wait for Lex," began Chloe. "But I am sure he can catch up. Anyway, remember how I said my original civilization was experiencing global warming like scientists have begun talking about a lot recently? Well, actually, the world was more in the state where scientists predict we will be in about fifty years. The Greenland icecap began to seriously collapse, the Antarctic icefields had shrunk by thirty percent, and in a period of three years ocean levels rose over ten feet causing severe flood problems for all the coastal cities. Massive seawall projects were in-work all over the world when suddenly everything changed yet again.

"The abrupt introduction of thousands of cubic miles of freshwater into the North Atlantic completely disrupted the Gulf Stream. And without the Gulf Stream circulating warm water north, there was an almost immediate drop in temperatures in eastern Canada, Greenland, Iceland, and northern Europe. This was followed by the northern hemisphere's jet stream migrating almost fifteen hundred miles south, which further reduced the temperature in the northern quarter of the planet.

"The Gulf Stream stopped in March and by July it was snowing everywhere north of the 45th parallel. By September it was snowing everywhere north of . . . um, what would be Texas in the United States and what would be Italy in Europe. And it was snowing a lot. By the next spring, most of these northern regions were buried under 20 feet of snow. What turned out to be the first twenty feet of the next ice age. Also during the second spring, well actually it would have been fall there, the Southern Hemisphere tripped over into permanent winter mode, too.

"Anyway the collapse of the Gulf Stream and the onset of permanent winter occurred roughly three years before the date we are heading for. They were still just barely managing to keep most of the cities north of the new permanent snowline functional, but the average temperature in the summer was only reaching the low 30's while the winter temperatures were averaging more like fifty below.

"Now, they were much more advanced with nanotechnology then we are in the present, of course that is pretty obvious since I exist. So they came up with nanotechnology based bodysuits. They had a lot of capabilities, but the critical one at the moment was their ability to maintain body temperatures. The suits were a lot thinner than these spandex copies, but still they could keep you comfortably warm even in eighty below weather."

"So these outfits are to give the appearance of what people back there were wearing? Why didn't they just wear regular clothes over the top of the nanosuits?" asked Clark.

Chloe frowned for a minute and then shook her head. "Would you believe, I don't remember. Actually, it is sort of scary how little of my old civilization I remember. Everything I have experienced since getting my 'bot system is easily accessible, but almost all my memories from before then are long, long forgotten. And since that civilization collapsed only hours after I received the 'bots, there just isn't much there. Oh, if I had known then what I have learned over the intervening thousands of years about my 'bot system, I could have transferred most of my pre-nanobot memories into permanent storage. But I didn't, so most of it is lost." She shook her head again. "Since my father was there when I received the 'bots, I can still remember what he looked like. But my mom, I can't even remember her face. I remember she had blonde hair like me, but that's it."

Chloe paused with a very sad expression on her face. Clark was just moving over to put his arm around her when she seemed to shake her whole body for a moment and then continued speaking. "Sorry about that. Where was I? Oh yeah, the nanosuits. I don't remember why people didn't wear regular clothes over them. Maybe it was a fashion statement. Maybe there was a technical reason. I just don't know. And I don't really know why men dressed so flamboyantly, but not women; it is just what I remember.

"The important thing is that these outfits should let us blend in until we can get the real thing. Of course, the drawback is that these don't have any of the warming capabilities of the real nanosuits. I am sure it won't be a problem for you, Clark. We are going to have to select an outdoor arrival location, but if we arrive where it is eighty below, Lana and my 'bots should be able to keep us functional for at least ten minutes. And as long as Lex is in contact with one of us, he should be good for that long, too. But if we don't arrive within ten minutes walking distance of shelter, Clark, it is going to be up to you get us somewhere safe."

Clark nodded almost absently, as his mind was still focused on the nanosuits. "How are we going to acquire real nanosuits? Am I going to have to start this little trip like every other one with a small bit of larceny?"

"No, once we can access the technology back there, I can have custom suits made. It will only take a few minutes."

"How are we going to pay for them? Or didn't they use money?" asked Clark.

"Of course they used money. I can just access my father's account, I always had a generous allowance, certainly enough to pay for four suits and other incidentals without raising any flags. Also with my 'bot system I am sure I can tamper with the world banking system without being caught."

"I thought you said you didn't have many memories of your old civilization. You certainly seem to remember a lot of details about allowances and the banking system," remarked Clark.

Chloe grinned. "Oh, I may not remember a lot of things, but I am still a girl and I do remember about shopping!"

Part 2

"Explain to me again why we are here," stuttered Lex through teeth that were chattering even with his 'bot system active via Lana's tightly clenched hand.

The four of them were huddled together with one metallic thermal blanket spread on the ground under them and another thrown over the top for protection. It was the middle of a crystal clear night and they were on an ice field that extended as far as the eye could see. Lex had seen all the Discovery channel shows about Antarctica as preparation for this little adventure, and from what he could see this looked just like them - except it seemed to be infinitely colder. And the portable heater they had brought along, which had been supposedly field-tested in Antarctica, had failed in less than two minutes.

Chloe's left hand still rested on Clark's forehead, as she looked across at Lex. She was starting to wonder the same thing now that Clark had been lying unconscious for the entire eight minutes since their arrival. This was by far the worst reaction she had seen in him as a result of a passage through the Portal device. But then, its Kryptonite power source had been cranked up to a new much higher level to reach a full seventeen thousand years into the past.

She was just about to reply to Lex that maybe it was time to abort and head for home while they were still able to function when she felt a shudder pass through Clark. She took this as a positive sign his body was fighting off the effect. Therefore she answered Lex's question instead.

"You know why we are here. It's for Clark. The black hole which ate Krypton creates such a powerful distortion in the space-time continuum, I can't figure out how to reach back into Krypton's past. The upgraded Portal device has sufficient spatial range to reach across the hundreds of light years to Krypton in much the same way Var El's ship could instantly make the transition. However I can't resolve the math required to move back in time when the black hole is thrown into the mix. If we are ever to retrieve Clark's parents, I need access to a more powerful computer. And the most powerful computer I know of is the quantum computer that was brought online shortly before the fall of my civilization."

"And," added Lana, "Chloe managed to bring back your mother and Lana's parents after their apparent deaths; she should get the chance to bring back our parents, too."

Lex flicked his gaze over and looked into Lana's eyes or, apparently at the moment, Laura's eyes. He wished her eyes would change color or something when Laura was 'driving', as they termed it. Sometimes it was almost like dating one half of a pair of identical twins; you never were quite certain which one had just walked into the room. Although with Laura and Lana, the switch could happen in mid-conversation.

Lex nodded and was about to reply when Clark moaned. After a couple more seconds he slowly opened his eyes.

"Are you going to be okay?" asked Chloe. The cold was so intense she could no longer suppress the trembling of the hand she was still using to caress his forehead.

"Yeah," replied Clark with a shudder. "Just give me a minute."

"A minute might be about all we have, Clark," answered Laura. "We have been here over nine minutes already."

Clark nodded his acknowledgement of the rapidly closing time constraint and with an effort levered himself up on one elbow. As he felt the first of his true strength return, he slowly brought up his heat vision and carefully began to warm the thermal blanket stretched over their heads.

"Any idea where we are?" asked Clark when it seemed like their small enclosure had reached a livable temperature.

"No," answered Chloe. "It seems even colder than I expected. We didn't have much time before we had to get under cover. All I know is that it is night and there isn't a light anywhere in sight."

Clark frowned. "Could we have missed our target and arrived after the collapse of your civilization?"

Chloe shook her head as she held up a small cellphone-sized device. "I have no memory of what frequencies were used back here for communication, so I couldn't build something that would tie into their systems. But I did bring along a frequency analyzer. There is a lot activity, so we didn't overshoot or at least not completely."

"Okay, then I better take a quick look and see if I can find the city," answered Clark. Once more he was thankful for the flying abilities he had discovered while back in Nazi Germany. Flying straight up and then looking in all directions would certainly be faster than running in some random direction.

Feeling fully restored, Clark said, "I'll be back as quickly as I can," before shifting into 'speed mode'.

The other three seemed to slow until they were frozen in place. Carefully, Clark wormed his way out from where he had been lying between them. After slithering out from under the protective blanket, he took a moment to push it back down over them. Not that it should be necessary, as he fully expected to be back before more than a second passed in the 'real' world. Still, he had been sidetracked before when he had expected to be gone for only a moment, so it was best to do what he could to protect the others.

Climbing to his feet, Clark took a moment to gaze around. He could sense the biting cold, but it didn't physically bother him. As Chloe had said, from this spot it wasn't obvious in which direction their destination lay. Therefore for the first time ever since donning the new red and blue suit, Clark launched himself into the sky.

Quickly he rose until he reached an altitude of five thousand feet above the cold, desolate plain. Then he paused to perform a three hundred sixty degree scan. Far off in what his enhanced sense of direction said was northwest he saw a range of hills or mountains silhouetted against the horizon, but no lights to indicated human activity. The eastern horizon was slightly brighter than the horizon in the other directions, but whether it was the city or merely the approaching dawn, he couldn't yet tell.

Clark rose vertically for another two thousand feet as he kept his attention focused to the east. Finally, with his vision zoomed far beyond the human norm, the light at the horizon began to resolve into a myriad of individual lights. After a quick glance around to verify no other likely targets had been revealed by his increased elevation, he quickly raced forward to make a preliminary pass before going back for Chloe and the others.

The city he had spotted was over eighty miles away, but Clark was deep in the speed zone and covered the intervening distance in milliseconds of real time. As the distance dwindled he could make out a cluster of giant towers numbering at least several hundred. They were all congregated in a relatively tight group not unlike those found in Manhattan or central Metropolis. However that was all he saw as there didn't seem to be any surrounding suburbs. At first he thought this was a sign of a different societal makeup between this long forgotten civilization and the time period he knew. But then when he was within a few miles of the towering megaliths, he scanned the ice fields below him with his x-ray vision and discovered the seemingly missing suburbs. Unfortunately, whatever techniques were being used to keep the city center more or less ice free hadn't been used out here. No, he saw the crushed remains of building after building buried deep beneath the ice.

Clark couldn't help but wonder what had happened to the people who had lived in the mile after mile of destruction he saw. Had they gotten clear before the ice and snow had engulfed them? If so, where had they gone? Was the city center jammed to the gills with refuges or had they fled somewhere else?

With a shake of his head Clark forced himself to put these thoughts aside; those people had made it out or not, either way there was nothing he could do about it now. He needed to stay focused on why they were here. And the first order of business was getting the others to somewhere safe and warm.

Diving down, Clark descended until he was at about the same height as the tallest towers, about two thousand feet above the distant street. Then he began weaving between the buildings looking for the landmark Chloe still remembered – an eight hundred foot tall statue of a man standing with his left foot raised on top of a giant boulder and his left arm pointing up into the sky. The taller of the two towers directly in front of the statue housed Chloe's family's apartments in this city. To the best of her recollections they should be vacant as her father's business and her family had been relocated months earlier to a more temperate locale.

From his perspective deep in the speed zone, it took Clark many minutes until his search pattern uncovered his goal. As he flew, he turned part of his attention to studying the surrounding buildings as well as the streets far below. His internal clock, which always seemed able to pinpoint the position of the brilliant yellow sun, told him the local time was about 4 A.M. Most of the windows were dark making it difficult to decide which buildings were offices and which were residential or if the buildings saw a mix of usage.

His view of the streets was slightly more fruitful. Oh, there weren't too many pedestrians out and about at this time on a frigid, minus eighty degree night, but the few he saw seemed to confirm that Chloe's recommended attire had been appropriate. Everyone he saw looked to be on their way to a 'superhero' convention. The biggest difference from the costume he now wore, based on Chloe's memories, and what he saw below was

the large cape everyone wore over the back of the nanosuits. He couldn't guess what purpose the capes served, but doubtlessly they would find out shortly.

With their destination finally in sight, Clark took one swooping pass by the building's street level entrance and then raced back to where he had left the others.

It took even less time to return than it had taken to reach the city. His enhanced senses could have relocated the spot even if he had been blindfolded, but he still felt his nerves calm a little when he spotted with his infrared vision the small hotspot generated by the others' body heat while he was still fifteen miles away.

Quickly, Clark descended to a soft landing beside the small mound their bodies made under the shiny thermal blanket. He crawled back inside before dropping out of 'speed mode'. Exactly seven tenths of a second had passed in the real world.

The other three jumped at Clark's abrupt departure and almost immediate return.

"Damn, Clark," said Lex trying to recover from his body's startled reaction. "I don't think I am ever going to get used to the way you seem to dematerialize into thin air."

Lex was going to say more, but was cut off by an excited Chloe.

"Clark, did you find it?"

"Yes," Clark answered with a quick nod. "The giant statue and the two buildings facing it were exactly as you described them. Are you ready to go? I'll take you first and then come back for the others."

Chloe nodded in return while butterflies seemed to circle in her stomach. Being here, in the time period of her original civilization, brought a combination of excitement and anxiety she hadn't felt in a long, long time. While her body might be a perpetual sixteen, her memories stretched back for almost twenty thousand years and as a result she hadn't really thought of herself as 'young' in a very long time. But now she had returned to the place of her youth and somewhere on the planet at this very moment was her original pre-nano-enhanced self. Even though they were still in the middle of nowhere, she couldn't shake this eerie feeling.

The intensity of her feelings surprised her. It wasn't as though being here was unexpected. No, she had been planning for this moment at some level since the thought had first occurred to her while she had been chained to a wall in a dungeon in ancient Rome with Lana. Two thousand years of planning and preparation should have made things seem almost anticlimactic, but it didn't feel that way in the slightest.

She was almost startled from her thoughts when Clark took her hand and pulled her out of the protective warmth of their temporary shelter. Quickly he rose to his feet and swept her up into his arms. Already she could feel the tremors beginning to shake her body as the merciless cold wind eagerly swept away her body heat. Automatically Chloe tightened her grip around Clark's impossibly broad shoulders.

Clark, too, felt the shivers begin to spread through Chloe's body. Therefore without further pause he shifted deep into the speed zone.

After his passage through the Purl Nous procedure in the chamber buried deep below the New Mexican desert, in addition to his enhanced mental gifts, his control of his other extraordinary gifts had been greatly improved. Now, with hardly any conscious effort he expanded the enveloping field of phase shifted space to included Chloe. Back in Nazi Germany when he had first discovered his ability to fly in 'speed mode', anyone he carried was frozen outside the field, which extended mere nanometers from the surface of his skin. But now he could expand the gift so anyone within his arms would share the same apparent accelerated existence.

"There, is that better?" Clark asked Chloe, as he lifted clear of the ice plain and headed in the direction of the distant city.

"Yes, much," answered Chloe leaning her head in close to his ear. The field Clark produced not only blocked out the wind, both natural and that created by his high speed flight, but also seemed to surround them with a bubble of warm air.

The glittering icy plain seemed far below them as they sped forward.

Snuggling closer in Clark's arms, Chloe whispered, "I know it is very different, but I am still reminded of the first time you took me flying."

Clark nodded, as both their thoughts were drawn back to the day after the events in the storm cellar.

It had taken them hours to sort out the mess Sliviuh had left behind. The most time-consuming had been all the people whose minds she had tampered with via her nanobot based abilities. Chloe and Lana/Laura had spent hours working as a team to deprogram Jonathan, Nell, Roger Nixon, Alicia, Amy, and all the other assorted people they could track down. It had been almost noon before things had begun to calm down.

Then Clark had led Chloe out to the barn and swept her up into his arms. With a big grin he had proceeded to float up, light as a feather, until he reached the loft. Chloe had immediately gone into her familiar reporter mode, launching into the 'how, when, and where' of his new abilities.

Clark's grin had broadened. "I'll explain along the way," he had answered, as he shifted deep into the 'speed zone' before shooting out through the high open door set into the south wall of the loft.

Chloe had looked down as they climbed away from the Kent farm at what felt like a thousand miles an hour. She knew something had changed, as the last time Clark had carried her like this, albeit running instead of flying, it had seemed like only a tiny fraction of a second had passed during his mad dash from the dance at the school to the storm cellar at his farm. But this time everything felt different, almost like she was experiencing things from Clark's perspective rather than the perspective of the outside world.

Clark had spent the next twenty 'speed zone' minutes explaining all about learning to fly in Nazi Germany and then how Var El had helped him achieve the Purl Nous change which had enhanced all of his mental and physical gifts.

As Chloe had listened in wonder, she couldn't help but also wonder at what she was seeing as Clark carried her on their journey. She recognized enough landmarks for her 'bot system to determine they were on a great circle route to Europe. But what she hadn't expected was that Clark would take her so high. The sky above them had shaded all the way to black and the curvature of the planet became clearly visible. Comparing it to video footage she had seen over the years from the space program, she knew they had to be at least eighty miles above the planet's surface, higher than she had ever been in her long nineteen thousand year life, yet while in Clark's grasp she felt perfectly normal.

It wasn't until Clark began his descent that she knew their destination was Italy. And without even pushing her computer enhanced mind, she guessed they were headed towards Rome, the modern counterpart of the ancient city they had explored weeks before from Clark's perspective or two thousand years earlier from hers.

It was near dusk local time when they arrived. Clark circled around the great city at what felt like a slow, easy pace. But when they got close enough to the ground to make out individual people, it appeared to Chloe that everyone was frozen in-place like hundreds of thousands of statues. It was then that the time distortion effects Clark generated truly became apparent to Chloe.

Chloe had been to Rome within the last hundred years, so she quickly got her bearings. However as Clark looked around, almost nothing familiar remained from the few short weeks they had spent in its much earlier incarnation. Neither of the most obvious ancient structures, the Coliseum and the Pantheon, had existed when they had spent time there. Finally, Clark spotted the ruins of the Forum and descended to a spot near where they had had their first encounter with Chloe's nemesis Venta of the Praetorian Guard and with the Emperor Caligula.

"Well, this certainly brings back memories," said Chloe, as Clark, after a glance around, dropped out of speed mode and lowered Chloe to the ground.

"Yeah," answered Clark with a shrug. "Although I had intended to land at the site of your old estate, but I couldn't figure out where it was. I still haven't quite mastered the knack of translating what I have previously only seen from ground level into what it would look like from the air, particularly when the landscape has seen two thousand years of use and reconstruction."

Chloe reached her arm around Clark and pulled him a little closer, before heading in the direction of nearest street vendors.

"No reason you should recognize that area, Clark. It has been an industrial port for the last hundred years and these days it is a pretty rundown area." For sentimental reasons during the second time she had lived through the last two thousand years she had kept tabs on the area where her palatial estate had once stood. These days it was a scary, mostly abandoned area that she would hesitate to visit alone. Oh, with her gifts nothing permanently bad was likely to happen, but there was no point in taking unnecessary risks.

Just then as they casually walked across the Forum, Clark gave her shoulder a light squeeze and she was reminded of some of the things he had told her during their flight across the Atlantic. And she suddenly realized the risk of entering the neighborhood of her old estate would be zero, absolutely zero with Clark at her side. What possible danger could there be to a man who could lift a freakin' battleship a mile into the sky? A battleship!

Suddenly, Chloe's memories about their flight and visit to modern Rome were interrupted as their current destination came into view. The lights of the approaching city quickly resolved into a forest of skyscrapers.

At first they didn't trigger any particular memories, but as Clark dove closer and closer to the tower where she had lived as a little girl, things started to feel vaguely familiar. But truthfully, she couldn't say if they were real memories or just reflections of the dreams she had had about this day for the last several thousand years.

Clark flew one quick loop around the outstretched hand of the giant statue before heading for the ground. Chloe was startled by its sheer size. She seemed to have memories of seeing from her bedroom window, but none from this close. The immense hand alone had to stretch to almost seventy-five feet. From her prodigious memory she recalled that the Statue of Liberty, from the hem of her gown to the tip of the raised torch, reared one hundred fifty one feet, barely equal to the length of this statue's arm. She had remembered this statue was eight hundred feet tall, but had forgotten how epic that size really was. And it once again reminded her of the truly grand scale of so many of the projects completed during the final few years of her original civilization's existence. Of course, she hadn't yet revealed to the others that their eventual destination was this civilization's crowning achievement.

Clark lowered Chloe to the ground on the top step of the raised entrance to the building she remembered. "I'll be right back with the others," he stated.

Chloe nodded her response, but before she even completed the motion, Clark simply blinked out of existence.

Knowing there was no point putting off the inevitable, Chloe started towards the building's security panel. If the system didn't recognize her, they would have to go with plan B, which had much higher risks of them being discovered before she could infiltrate the planet's security grids.

She had taken only one step towards the security panel when Lex abruptly materialized beside her. And only two steps before Lana and Clark had joined them.

In four more steps she reached the audio-video pickup. She hesitated for a moment before stating her original name, a name she hadn't spoken aloud in almost a score of millennia.

"Would you hurry up already," stuttered Lex the cold once more forcing an annoying quiver into his voice.

Chloe nodded, but still paused for a moment. She knew her appearance hadn't changed in all the thousands of years, but what about her speech patterns? She had spoken hundreds of different languages and mastered countless dialects over the intervening centuries. Would they make her voice unrecognizable?

Finally, taking a deep breath, Chloe stated her name in her native language as calmly as she could.

"This is Letishikä gé Äysël gō Lalæhan."

It felt like she waited forever, but when Chloe checked her 'bot system, she discovered only four and a half seconds passed before the system responded.

"Welcome, Dm. Letishikä. It has been too long since your last visit," replied a calm, melodious male voice with just a hint of a mechanical undertone.

Chloe was wondering if some further reply was expected, but the entrance into the building's vestibule slid open as the speaker fell silent.

Quickly, Chloe led the small party into the building's warm interior.

A sprawling lobby separated them from where Chloe thought the lifts were located. However, nothing about the lobby stirred any memories, neither the double row of giant statues whose raised hands appeared to support the forty foot high ceiling nor the large murals adorning the walls. And what really surprised her were the decidedly martial overtones of everything. Had it always been like this and she just didn't remember the details? Probably so, she decided. She had raised kids in enough different types of societies to remember how children were mostly oblivious to things that mattered so much to adults. And back in this time period, she had definitely qualified as a 'kid'.

The vast lobby was empty of people in this predawn hour and their footsteps seemed to echo from the highly patterned stone floor.

Finally, after they had traversed about a quarter of the lobby, Clark broke the silence. Speaking quietly, he said, "Well, your name back here is certainly a mouthful."

Chloe shrugged. "I guess it is a little longer than 'Chloe Sullivan', but is nowhere near the longest I have ever used and that isn't even including the ones where all of your 'titles' were part of your 'official' name. Besides, everyone just called me 'Tish'."

"Tish," repeated Clark. "I guess I could get used to that."

"Apparently, my languages lessons didn't get as deeply into the conventions used in people's names as it could have," said Lex joining into the conversation. "What is with the gé and gō stuck in the middle?"

"You remember Leif Ericson, the old Norwegian explorer?" asked Chloe. At Lex's nod, she continued, "In the same way he was named Leif and was the son of Eric, my name, Letishikä gé Äysël gō Lalæhan, meant my name was Letishikä and my father was Äysël and my mother was Lalæhan. Pretty straightforward, actually."

"So, should we call you Chloe or Tish?" asked Lex.

"I guess it will be like back in Rome, where you referred to me as Coelia when around people who knew me by that name and as Chloe when we weren't. Don't worry, after having literally thousands of names down through the years, whichever name you use is okay with me."

By this point the small group had reached the far side of the lobby and Chloe spotted the lifts she had been looking for. They didn't look all that different from the elevators of the early 21st century except she didn't see an elevator call button. However, as soon as they stepped within fifteen feet a pair of doors slid silently open.

Chloe led the others into the lift and then turned to where the control panel would be in a modern elevator. She almost breathed a sigh of relief when there were no buttons to push here either. She knew their apartment was near the top, as she remembered looking down on the giant statue, but she had no idea the exact floor. She knew the level of computer technology in this time period was way beyond what they had back home and she hoped giving her name back at the entrance was sufficient for the building's master computer to deliver them to the correct floor.

As the lift's doors slid shut, its interior was filled with this era's version of Musak. The tune was unfamiliar to Chloe, but the tone felt martial in nature just like the decorative murals in the lobby. Was her old civilization that much more militaristic than she remembered?

The lift surged upward with a decidedly higher acceleration than was normal for elevators back in the 21st Century, but then at nearly two thousand feet tall, it potentially had almost three times as far to climb as was typical back home.

The four of them stood there mostly in silence for the thirty-seven seconds it took for the lift to reach its destination. It glided to a stop and the doors opened on to a long, pale blue corridor stretching to a small pair of windows at the far end of the building. For such a large building, there were surprisingly only six doorways leading off hallway indicating the apartments on this floor were all extremely large.

Chloe led the others off the lift and started down the long corridor. Something in the back of her mind said the door to her old apartment was at the far end and since she knew it overlooked the giant statue, it had to be on the left side. Now that it was sinking in that they were truly here, she set a brisk pace. She slowed briefly at each doorway they passed on the off-chance her memory was faulty and one of the intermediate doors would be activated by her presence. None of them did and since it was unlikely the building's computer would have dropped them off on the wrong floor, the last door on the left HAD to be their destination.

Once more the feeling of butterflies churned in Chloe's stomach. Would the doorway simply slide open at her presence or was there some long forgotten locking code or key? Would the apartment actually be unoccupied? She thought so, but wouldn't it be awkward if her family . . . if she herself was already there? She knew at some point she would have to make contact with her parents, but she hoped it would be after the other part of their mission was complete. And she hoped she wouldn't run into herself as she didn't have any memories of running into her identical twin shortly before this civilization collapsed.

But there was no value in dawdling, either things would go as she had planned or not. And if not, she would simply improvise a solution. It wasn't like she didn't have more experience at that sort of thing than anyone else in history. And that was the key thing she needed to keep in mind; she was not by any stretch of the imagination the inexperienced little sixteen-year-old girl who resided in this time period.

The door on their left slid open at Chloe's approach and she strode in without breaking stride. The large open living room they entered was well lit, but Chloe could simply sense the lights had just flicked on and that the apartment was vacant. She couldn't stop the small sigh of relief that everything was still going to plan.

A sixty-five foot wide wall of floor-to-ceiling windows formed the far wall of the room. The room was much wider than it was deep with the windows being the obvious focal point. The room itself was sparsely furnished, but most of it looked surprisingly familiar. Of course, since the human physique hadn't changed much in the intervening seventeen thousand years, chairs and sofas should look almost the same. The most unfamiliar object was a large triangular device that was located near the room's center. The device's exterior was finished with some variety of wood and it didn't look particularly hi-tech. Chloe was certain it was some kind of musical device of the piano family, unique to this pre-ice age era. But while it felt like its name was on the tip of her tongue, it wouldn't for the moment come to the surface.

The four of them started across the room to take in the dramatic view, but then stopped when a giant display on the room's right wall flickered to life. The display extended from the floor to the twelve foot high ceiling and stretched almost the full length of the twenty-five foot section of wall. And unlike back home where the best that could be achieved was a relatively slim device that hung from the wall; this display didn't seem to hang from the wall as much as it felt like it was somehow the actual wall.

But it wasn't the size of the display that had attracted everyone's attention, but rather the content. The device was displaying a life-sized and life-like image of Chloe, or rather Chloe as she would have looked at age 10. And with her were an older man and a woman. Chloe instantly knew the man was her father. And between her blonde hair and her presence in the display with the younger Chloe and her father, the woman had to be her mother, the mother whose appearance Chloe could no longer remember.

Chloe was drawn closer and closer to the giant display. The clarity of the display was simply astonishing. Chloe stepped to within eighteen inches of the display and everything continued to look perfectly real. It actually felt as though she could simply reach through the surface of the display and touch her younger self, who was enjoying a picnic with her parents in a park-like setting. Chloe stared at the image of her younger self sitting and eating with her parents. She had absolutely no memories of the scene she was witnessing. Once more she felt a pang for all the pre-'bot memories she had lost forever. But hopefully, if everything went according to plan, she would be bringing her parents home with her and they could help fill in some of the gaps in her early life.

Clark and the others stepped up beside Chloe. Putting one arm casually around Chloe's waist, Clark asked in a quiet tone, "Is that your parents?"

For a moment Chloe didn't think she had the ability to speak without her voice breaking, so she simply nodded. Then after about thirty seconds, without ever taking her eyes from the display, she managed to get her voice under control. "That's definitely my father. Unfortunately, I don't really remember my mother, but my gut says that is her."

Clark pulled Chloe closer and the two of them continued to watch the video.

After a couple of minutes, Lex wandered over to the panoramic windows. Although Laura had just as much interest in the video of her childhood as Chloe, she acquiesced when Lana decided to follow Lex over to the windows.

"So what do you think of things so far?" Lana asked.

"Well, it is good to finally be warm," responded Lex as he self-consciously glanced down at his garish yellow costume for seemingly the thousandth time since putting it on a bare thirty minutes earlier.

He was about to continue when everything outside the windows was bathed in a blindingly bright light. Well, compared to the dark night of a moment before, it felt blinding, but in actuality it was probably no brighter than the noon day sun.

Both Lex and Lana jumped back in shock. Being in a strange time and place and in an apartment where they were technically interlopers or at least what felt like interlopers, their subconscious minds immediately formed the image of police helicopters lighting up the window with powerful searchlights.

However the light didn't feel at all like they were staring directly into a searchlight. No, it wasn't just the window that was lit up, but everything visible through the window like the giant statue far below and all the other nearby buildings surrounding the small park in which the statue stood.

Also over the course of a single second, which was a relatively long time for Lana/Laura's 'bot system, the light level visibly dropped. Then in a matter of four milliseconds it blazed back to its maximum intensity.

The cycle of a brilliant flash followed by a brief falling off repeated at regular one second intervals. By the beginning of the fifth cycle, Chloe and Clark had joined them at the window.

"What is that?" Clark asked rhetorically, as he leaned close to the glass and pointed off to the left at a gap between two of the tall skyscrapers.

As the others looked at the spot he indicated, all they could see was the glare of a brilliant pulsating point of light, as bright as the sun, climbing steadily up into the sky.

Only Clark had the super-telescopic vision which allowed him to zoom in to the heart of a light so bright, it would have blinded anyone else. And what he saw was like nothing he had ever seen or even imagined.

For what he could now make out was that the bright pulsating light was actually an ongoing series of intense explosions. And then his other extraordinary senses picked up details reminding him of the night Sliviuh had sent him questing around the world to stop the catastrophes she had arranged to keep him far from Smallville. Specifically, he was reminded of events in Paris where she had attached a stolen atomic bomb to the Eiffel Tower in an attempt to expose his gifts to the general public. For his senses now told him the brilliant flashes they were seeing were actually a series of atomic bombs going off at one second intervals.

What he couldn't fathom was why someone would be setting off a continuous string of nuclear bombs each just slightly higher from the ground than its predecessor. He was about to describe to Chloe what he was witnessing to see if she had any explanation when his super-telescopic vision spotted something just above the latest explosion. It was some kind of giant metallic structure and it had to be huge for even him to be able to see it from a distance of several hundred miles.

Focusing his vision on it during the brief lulls between the atomic explosions, he could make out it was roughly bullet shaped with the flat end barely six hundred feet above the heart of the next nuclear blast. And this time as he watched he could even see the next bomb being ejected from the stern of the device. A fraction of a second later the bomb exploded and Clark saw the powerful blast wave slam into the flat end of the device and watched it literally jump forward hundreds of feet. Clark quickly realized the massive structure was being push up towards space by the endless chain of explosions.

"Ah, guys," began Clark, as he finally pulled his eyes away from the spectacle. "Those are atomic explosions and they appear to be pushing some giant structure in front of them."

"They're launching a Bőlžtroi ship," answered Chloe and Lana/Laura simultaneously.

"What is a Bőlžtroi ship?" asked Clark and Lex, also almost in perfect unison.

"Wow, I never anticipated seeing one of them launched mere minutes after our arrival," responded Chloe with almost a gleeful laugh. Then in a more serious tone, she continued. "It's basically a Project Orion ship like the U.S. Military proposed back in the 1950's." When she didn't see a glimmer of recognition in either Lex or Clark's eyes, she added, "I think the computer can give a better description than I can at this point. Computer, please provide a brief background about the Bőlžtroi ships."

The video of the young Chloe and her parents was abruptly shoved to the far end of the display and a new window appeared at the near end. Instantly a cutaway schematic was displayed which closely matched the device Clark had seen.

The computer began spewing forth a detailed technical monologue. Realizing the specialized terms would rapidly outstrip Lex's abilities with the Rœtic language, Lana clasped Lex's hand and let her 'bots translate the computer's words into English.

"The atomic-powered Bőlžtroi class of spaceship was first proposed by Bőlžtroi gé Ögtraĺŷ gō Wružœtl thirty-seven years ago. They use one thousand one hundred fourteen shaped-charge atomic propulsion units of three-kilotons each, fired at one second intervals, to lift the vehicle to orbit. The key advantage versus existing chemical rocket technologies of the time was the extremely high payload to launch weight ratio. Whereas less than four percent of the launch weight of a chemical rocket can achieve low-earth orbit, the Bőlžtroi category of atomic powered rockets can achieve as high as eighty-four percent payload to launch weight ratios.

"Construction of the first prototype ship, 'Crimson Victory', was completed seven years later. That scaled-down version of the current vehicles was one hundred feet in diameter, one hundred thirty feet tall and had a launch mass of 1400 tons. After ten successful flights to-and-from orbit and one excursion to the moon, the demonstration phase of the program was deemed successful and production began on the full scale Bőlžtroi-class of spaceship.

"The current fleet consists of twelve Bőlžtroi-class ships with thirty six more in the planning/construction phases. The Bőlžtroi-class ships are one thousand two hundred fifty feet in diameter, one thousand nine hundred sixty feet tall, and have a launch weight of eight million three hundred ten thousand tons.

"The key components of the Bőlžtroi-class ships are, starting from the bottom, the forty-foot thick steel pusher plate upon which the propulsion unit's millisecond long plasma energy wave acts, a nine hundred foot tall two-stage shock absorber system which damps the payload acceleration down to four gee's, a two hundred forty foot tall propulsion unit magazine, and finally a seven hundred eighty foot tall payload section.

"Development of the Bőlžtroi-class ship made the Pwóthgroć Space Colony feasible. While most of the Space Colony's mass was sourced from the moon and delivered by mass-driver, large specialized equipment still needed Earth-side fabrication.

"Upon initial completion and spin-up of Pwóthgroć five years ago, the Bőlžtroi fleet was converted to primarily deliver water to the colony and to the associated agrarian satellites and then return foodstuffs to the Earth. As currently configured, a Bőlžtroi ship can carry three million tons of water plus one million tons of bulk cargo. For the past year, the fleet has been averaging one water shipment launch every three days."

"Computer pause," interjected Chloe.

As silence fell over the room, Lex repeated, "three million tons of water." He looked over at Clark before continuing. "Hey, Clark, how about doing a little math for me?"

As Clark nodded, Lex realized he could have done the math using his connection to Lana's 'bot system, but decided to use Clark anyway. "So at 2000 pounds per ton, the ship holds how many pounds of water?"

"Easy," said Clark, "six billion pounds."

"And if water weighs about eight pounds per gallon?"

"Ah, 8.338 pounds per gallon at room temperature," interjected Chloe.

"Okay," said Lex with a nod in her direction. "Then how many gallons on the ship?"

"Seven hundred nineteen million, six hundred thousand gallons give or take a few tens of thousands of gallons," was Clark's immediate, apparently effortless response.

"Okay, back home, to remind myself there is more to life than LuthorCorp, or now LexCorp, I have one of those 'Thousand places to see before you die' daily calendars. Anyway a few days ago the photo of the day was Niagara Falls and the one statistic they included was how the typical flow rate for the Falls was forty-two million gallons of water per minute. So how long would it take Niagara Falls to fill the ship's water tank?"

"Seventeen minutes, eight seconds."

"Damn," muttered Lex, "that is one impressive water tank. What could a space station possibly need with that much water every three days?"

Lana answered, but Lex quickly realized it was really Laura speaking.

"The water is primarily used for food production and even with careful conservation and efficient recycling, food production is always going to consume a lot of water. Food can't be created from nothing. Actually the situation is a lot like Heinlein predicted in 'Moon is a Harsh Mistress'. While there is some water in the form of ice in the soil near the lunar poles, there isn't enough to support agriculture on the scale Earth needs.

"And the planet is really hurting with the start of the new ice age. Returning three million tons of food every three days to a planet slowly sinking into starvation and death helps, if not nearly solving the problem. Hmm, let's see, three million tons of food would meet the basic nutritional needs of four million people for a year. So if they truly are able to bring back a ship load of food every three days, the ships could be feeding about four hundred eighty million people. Now since the world population is about nine billion at the moment, the ships are only able to feed about five percent of the population. However if this civilization hadn't collapsed when it did, off-planet food production could certainly have been ramped even higher."

Then before Lana/Laura could continue, Chloe jumped back in. "I think the more direct answer to Lex's question, about why so much water is needed, is that you're not thinking on the right scale when you said 'space station' versus the computer's 'space colony' terminology. 'Space station' brings to mind something like a scaled up International Space Station or perhaps one of those spinning wheels like they had in '2001: A Space Odyssey'. Pwóthgroć is on a completely different scale. Think Arthur Clarke's 'Rendezvous with Rama' rather than '2001'.

"Pwóthgroć 's habitat modules consist of a pair of counter-rotating cylinders. Each cylinder is six miles in diameter and twenty-six miles in length. They spin to create artificial gravity on the inner surface of the hollow cylinders. To the best of my recollection they spin at a rate which produces about 75 percent of Earth's gravity. This is high enough to prevent some of the problems with low Gee environments as well as high enough to allow long-time residents to return to Earth without being forced to spend weeks or months flat on their back while their bodies re-acclimate.

"Anyway, factoring in a loss of about 30 percent of the surface area for a series of large windows to allow light into the interior still leaves a usable surface area in each of the cylinders of 340 square miles. Assuming a typical suburban population density of 3,000 people per square mile gives Pwóthgroć a population capacity of two million people. And the associated food production satellites, which have near zero gravity for reduced construction cost and improved yield, are even larger."

Lex tried to wrap his head around the scale of these 'space colonies', but it was nearly impossible. Then he tried to imagine what it would be like to stand on the inner surface of these hollow cylinders. They would be long enough at 26 miles to look almost 'normal' if you looked along the long axis. But in the other direction, the hoop direction, it would be a completely different story. Oh, the nearest mile or so would look like a slowly rising hill. But eventually, it would sweep up and up and up until it met directly overhead. Would it feel extremely claustrophobic or was six miles straight up enough distance so it wouldn't feel like the land above your head was about to collapse down on you? Lex assumed it would feel okay and that this civilization would have done a lot of studies on the matter before beginning construction.

Clark meanwhile was focused on a different bit of the new information the girls and the computer had provided.

"Ah, Chloe, did the occupants of the space colony use these nuke-powered ships to get into space? I mean riding a long string of bombs into space sounds very dangerous. Wouldn't the radiation from being close to that many atomic explosions be fatal?"

Chloe got a thoughtful expression on her face for a moment. Then after asking the computer a quick question, she answered. "Ah, one one-way trip will expose you to 700 REMs of radiation. While this is not quite lethal, it is certainly not good for you and a second one-way flight might prove fatal. Therefore only the first couple of test flights were manned. After that all flights were fully automated."

"But then how did they get millions of people up to the space colony? A chemical rocket like the shuttle or the Apollo capsule wouldn't hold enough people to be practical."

Chloe nodded her head. "Yeah, you're right. A system which can only get four percent of its launch weight to orbit isn't practical for moving large numbers of people. No, to get people to orbit, they use space elevators."

Chloe paused to shoot another question at the building's computer before continuing. "The planet currently has five space elevators located at roughly equal intervals around the equator, although one of them is down for upgrade at the moment. They are all anchored in the ocean to allow fine tuning of the elevator's cable by modest movements of the supporting ships. Their upper free-ends are all located at geosynchronous orbit about twenty-three thousand miles up. The original elevator, the one being upgraded, could lift one hundred tons daily. The other four can lift four hundred forty tons per day."

While he had never heard of atom bomb powered spaceships, Clark had at least heard of space elevators. They required super-strong carbon nanotube filaments to carry the weight of their twenty-three thousand mile length. Back home they were still at least ten years away from achieving those kinds of strengths in production quantities of the material.

Giant nuclear-powered spaceships. Massive space colonies. Elevators into space. The level of technology seemed way beyond what Chloe had hinted at, thought Clark. And they had been here barely ten minutes. What other marvels were yet to be revealed?

"Hmm," mumbled Clark, as he tried to pull his attention back to the conversation at hand. "I was going to ask why not just use the space elevators for everything. But now I see that it would take one of the space elevators 25 years to haul as much payload into space as one flight of one of the Bőlžtroi ships." Clark thought about things for a few more seconds before asking, "So is the Pwóthgroć colony located in geosynchronous orbit, too? At the upper end of one of the space elevators?"

Chloe shook her head. "No. While geosynchronous orbit is very convenient since it is always above the same spot on Earth, it is not a stable orbital location. What I mean is as the planet rotates, the geosynchronous spot sweeps passed the moon once per day. This perturbs the orbit of anything at geosynchronous and requires reaction rockets to hold it steady. This is okay for something relatively small like a communication satellite or even a modest ten thousand man space station. But for something like the Pwóthgroć , a geosynchronous orbit would be prohibitively expensive to maintain.

"Therefore Pwóthgroć is located at a more gravitationally stable location, which in this case is at the same distance from the Earth as the moon except located sixty degrees further ahead in the moon's orbit. Back in our time, this location was called Lagrange Point 5 or L-5 for short."

"Ah, guys," said Lex, whose gaze had been drawn back to the ongoing display visible outside the window. Raising a finger to point towards the brightest part of the sky, he continued with a definite urgency in his tone, "Is the ship's trajectory supposed to look like that? I'm thinking 'no'."

The other three quickly gathered around Lex. When they had first spotted the mighty ship, it was being pushed almost straight up with only a hint of a bend in its trajectory towards the distant eastern horizon. But now, several minutes later, it had made an almost ninety degree turn and appeared to be headed directly down towards them.

"Shit!" exclaimed Chloe in English before quickly switching back to the local language. "Computer, what is today's date?"

"Today is the thirteenth day of Ḟŕeicĥztũm, 3459," was the immediate response.

"The miracle," whispered Lana/Laura.

"Ah, what miracle?" asked Lex.

"Clark," said Chloe as she grabbed his arm to be sure she had his undivided attention. "Remember how everyone remembers where they were when they first heard about 9-11 or when John Lennon was shot, or when the Challenger blew up, or when Kennedy was assassinated? Okay, you may be too young to remember most of those, but anyway you often have vivid memories about major events. Well, even after nineteen thousand years I still remember 'The miracle of the 13th'. One of the Bőlžtroi ships went out of control and threatened this city. The devastation from an eight million ton ship impacting at several thousand miles an hour would have been total without even the added factor of the hundreds of atomic bombs it was carrying. But a miracle happened. At the last minute and for no reason anyone could determine, the ship abruptly changed course again and flew up to space. Clark, it had to be you. I didn't remember these events when I selected today to arrive, or at least not consciously, but our presence, or more specifically your presence, has to be the unexplained 'miracle'."

Clark glanced out the window. The giant spaceship was now visible without even needing to use his special telescopic vision. It couldn't be more the twenty miles away. And the atomic explosions were still going on and it was getting noticeably closer in the couple of seconds he watched. His enhanced mind used the couple seconds of observation to quickly estimate the ship would impact in less than nine seconds.

Not wasting even the short amount of time necessary to give a nod of acknowledgement, Clark shifted deep into the 'speed zone'. He almost punched through the sprawling glass window before him as the quickest route to the giant spaceship before he remembered the eighty below temperature just on the other side of the glass. Assuming he was successful they would probably want to spend some more time in this apartment and having a big hole in the window wouldn't be a great idea. Then he remembered the windows at the end of the hallway outside the apartment's entrance. Hopefully, the loss of that window wouldn't make any of the nearby apartments uninhabitable.

Clark raced to the apartment's door. Whatever automated system was in place to open the door at someone's approach wasn't quick enough to respond when Clark was so deep in 'speed mode'. Clark considered punching straight through the door, but that wouldn't be much better than going out through the apartment's panoramic glass window. Therefore he paused for a moment to press his hands flat against the door to pry it open far enough to slip through. Then he pushed it back shut, hoping he hadn't stripped all the internal gearing, but it was the best he had time to do.

Since he had every intention of sacrificing the windows at the end of the corridor, Clark launched himself down the hallway as hard as he could as soon as the apartment's door was closed. He barely felt the glass shatter or the frigid temperature of the outside air as he burst from the side of the building. Immediately, he arced into a hard turn since the window had been on the opposite side of the building from where his destination lay. As he swept passed the front of the apartment he had just exited, he glanced in through the large window. Chloe, Lex, and Lana were frozen in the same spot as when he had dropped into the 'speed zone'. Hopefully, Clark thought, they will still be frozen in the same poses when this is all over.

Turning his attention forward, Clark stared at the approaching giant spaceship. It was pointed directly at him and was backlit by the glare of another in the string of ongoing atomic explosions. This blast must have been triggered only a tiny fraction of a second before Clark dropped into the 'speed zone' and its brilliant white flash showed around all sides of the cylindrical vessel and made it look just like a close-up photo of a solar eclipse.

Clark had just cleared the last of the sprawling field of skyscrapers when he ran into an expanding energy wave front from one of the previous atomic blasts. For an instant it felt like his senses were being overwhelmed by the intense radiation. It wasn't totally debilitating like a close encounter with Kryptonite, but he was momentarily blinded, not only in his vision, but also in the special senses that allowed him to detect electro-magnetic fields. Well, it wasn't as debilitating as Kryptonite yet, but he realized he had several more wave fronts of more recently exploded bombs to pass through before he reached the ship. And since each succeeding wave front would have a smaller, tighter radius, each one would be geometrically more intense.

He had never been close to an atomic blast before and had no idea what affect it would have on his body. Chloe had said passengers on the ship wouldn't take a lethal dose of radiation during a single flight to orbit, but that was with them safely ensconced inside the ship. And with a ship that weighed eight million tons, they could have lined the passenger area with ten foot thick walls of lead without making a significant dent in the ship's payload capacity. But he wasn't behind the thick protective walls of the ship. No, he was flying out in the open.

As Clark slammed through the next even more intense radiation wave front, he couldn't do anything but hope his body was immune to this like it was immune to just about everything else, for he didn't really have any choice. If he didn't manage to divert this mighty spacecraft, then millions of people were going to die in the city below. And removing all the people from the city wasn't a realistic option in the few remaining seconds. It had taken him and Var El what felt like over 24 hours in 'speed mode' to find and remove the ten thousand people still in Peenemunde when they had needed to crash the Nazis' flying battleship into the secret base. And they had only needed to relocate the residents a few miles to reach a safe distance. Even if he could locate and remove all of the millions of people from this city in time, he couldn't just dump them on the large surrounding ice plain. No, the only possible solution to this problem was to divert the spacecraft. And if Chloe's recollections were correct, not only did he have to divert it from hitting the city, he had to get it up to orbit or risk changing the timeline.

Clark was less then two miles from the mighty ship when he passed through the third wave front. It felt like it took minutes for his vision to clear from the punishing level of x-ray radiation. When it did finally clear, the staggering size of the ship began to dawn on him.

After his fateful first encounter with Lex and his Porsche on the bridge over the Cottonwood River just outside Smallville, Lex had given him a new pickup in thanks for saving his life. Or he had tried to give him a new truck, but Jonathan had been adamant that Clark return it saying it was too much as Clark had only done what any Good Samaritan would have done. Lex had been surprised, as no one had ever turned down a gift from him before, not that he had given that many extravagant gifts. Finally, as an alternative, he had suggested Clark join him for the Metropolis Sharks' next home game. After Jonathan's grudging acknowledgement that football tickets weren't out of line, the two young men had made an excursion to Metropolis the following Sunday.

It had been Clark's first visit to the Shark's newly completed stadium. The stadium, which slightly exceeded the size of the long reigning Superdome in New Orleans, had been nearly 700 feet in diameter and three hundred feet tall. Sitting with Lex high in the owner's private box overlooking the fifty yard line, Clark hadn't at the time been able to imagine a larger structure. But now as he approached this magnificent spaceship, he knew he was wrong. For it only took a moment for him to realize, you would have to cluster four of those stadiums together and then stack them six stadiums high to match the size of this ship. A ship the size of 24 pro-football stadiums was unimaginable, except for the fact it was flying straight at him at over two thousand miles an hour.

Clark continued to race forward until he was hovering mere inches from the surface of the great ship. The ship's broad prow seemed to stretch away in all directions as far as the eye could see. Clark's thoughts quickly turned to his previous similar feat – the lifting of the Nazi battleship, the Hitler. That time when he had grabbed the prow of the ship, it had already been over a thousand feet below the surface of the Baltic on its way to its watery grave. Of course, the Hitler was almost a child's toy compared to this atom bomb powered behemoth, as it would take one hundred sixty Hitler-sized battleships to equal the mass of this monster spaceship. Clark couldn't help but wonder if this vessel didn't outweigh all the combined American, German, Japanese, and British battleships and aircraft carriers of the Second World War.

Enough dawdling, thought Clark, as he sensed the near light-speed approach of the radiation wave front of the latest atomic explosion along the length of the great ship. Quickly he set about using his heat vision to burn handholds in the thick protective armor-plated layer of the nose cone. This had been the approach which had ultimately worked with 'The Hitler' to allow the special field his body produced to expand out to encompass the large battleship so he could shift the entire thing into 'speed mode' to hoist it from the depths to a more convenient location to rescue the trapped survivors.

Slamming his hands into the molten metal his heat vision had created, Clark threw his entire will into expanding his energy field to encompass the massive ship. With the enhancement to the control of his abilities that had occurred as a result of the Purl Nous procedure, he sensed how more and more of the ship was absorbed into his energy field.

His energy field had stretched to encompass almost half the mass of the great ship when it encountered the expanding radiation wave front from the latest atomic blast. And on some sub-atomic level the radiation interacted with his phase-shifted energy field in a way he had never encountered before. Like the ripples on the surface of a calm pond created by two thrown stones, the two energy waves crashed together. In some places they canceled and in some places they added. As a result, Clark's energy field became unstable and the part of the ship inside the field slipped out of the phase-shifted 'speed mode' state and shifted back to normal time.

For Clark the impact was far more dramatic. Being within twenty-five hundred feet of the epicenter of this latest atomic blast, the radiation wave front was ten times more powerful than the previous one he had experienced. The radiation seemed to smash into every cell of his body simultaneously. Fortunately, it wasn't like stepping through the Kryptonite-powered Portal device, which had left him completely incapacitated for more seconds then he had left before the ship crashed into the city. No, it was more like being struck by a massive bolt of lightning. Every sense in his body, both normal and superhuman, seemed to overload for a moment. With a scream of agony that could be heard over the roar of the atomic blast, Clark dropped out of 'speed mode' just like the ship.

As his protective energy field momentarily collapse, Clark was abruptly hit by the supersonic air flowing past the massive ship. With his hands still trapped in the molten steel of the ship's outer hull, the ferocious winds slammed his body against the ship. As Clark tried to recover from the pummeling his body was receiving, the next atomic bomb exploded and another energy wave was racing towards him. His personal energy field reformed and it blocked the worst of the buffeting he was experiencing, but he was still in enough of a daze that he didn't even try to stretch his field to encompass the ship, but merely hung limply in front of the ship.

This time, although the radiation wave front was equally intense, the interaction with his body felt almost benign. Oh, his vision went white and his electro-magnetic sense screamed for a tiny fraction of a second, but his senses of touch, hearing, taste, and smell were not affected.

Clark immediately grasped that some combination of 'speed mode' and an expanded energy field was causing the severe amplification of radiation wave and its effect on his body. It looked like 'speed mode' was out and he was going to have to stop the giant spaceship while leaving it in 'real time'. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw he was now less than three miles from the nearest skyscrapers. Before he even had time to turn his attention back to the ship, the next atomic bomb exploded, slamming him and the ship forward even faster.

With the ship pointed straight at the city, Clark realized the ship itself was blocking the worst of the radiation and pressure shockwave from the city below. But if it got any closer, the small portion leaking around the perimeter of the ship's pusher plate, was going to start to be felt by people on the ground. If all the windows below blew out with the current eighty below temperatures, a lot of people were going to be hurt or were going to die – and that didn't even considered the impact of the radiation. No, if he was going to save everyone below, he was going to have to act quickly and effectively. And he was going to have to do it while keeping the ship's nose pointed protectively at the city, or at least pointed at the city until he had it well away or until he figured out how to stop the ceaseless succession of atomic explosions.

When he had first discovered and mastered his ability to fly, he had been in 'speed mode'. It wasn't until he had discussed it with Var El that he had realized by slipping only an infinitesimal fraction of a step into 'speed mode' he could appear to fly in real time. After Purl Nous, his control was now so good he didn't even have to think about 'speed mode' to fly in real time. His strength had always seemed to be enhanced in 'speed mode', and he had to hope the slight dip into 'speed mode' his body now subconsciously performed when he flew would be enough to deal with mass of the great ship and the opposing thrust provided by the atomic explosions.

Now, instead of using his will to expand the scope of his body's unique energy field, Clark used his will to push as a hard as he could against the nose of the spaceship. He sensed the ship was slowing in its onrush towards the city almost immediately. Then three-quarters of a second after he started to push, the next atomic bomb exploded and its massive force pushed the ship forward and Clark could feel himself losing ground again.

Clark redoubled his efforts during the next lull. He felt the ship slow further, but it was still moving towards the city when next explosion occurred. Finally, after four more seconds and four more explosions, he managed to completely stop the massive ship's forward momentum. Looking over his shoulder, he saw the nearest skyscraper was less than five hundred feet away and that all of its windows, at least on visible nearer side, were shattered. A quick glance showed several nearby buildings had also lost their windows. Clark realized if he didn't stop the ongoing string of atomic explosions soon, the city was going to be destroyed even if the spaceship didn't hit it.

Clark dropped deep into 'speed mode' and raced for the back end of the spaceship. At the moment all he could think to do was to vaporize the bombs as they were being ejected from back of the ship in the same way he had vaporized the atom bomb in Paris after he had carried it into space, but before it had had the chance to explode. As he flew he did a mental estimate. If the ship used a thousand bombs exploded at one second intervals to reach orbit, it would take seventeen minutes before the automated mechanism would stop deploying the devices. Assuming the ship had launched a couple of minutes before they had first spotted it and then they had spent six minutes and forty eight seconds chatting before they realized there was a problem and he had acted, meant the ship would continue launching bombs for roughly another seven minutes. Seven minutes, or call it four hundred more bombs.

As he continued to fly towards the back of the ship, Clark considered if there was some way he could stop the launch mechanism, but he quickly abandoned that plan. If the ship was arming the bombs before ejecting them, one or more might explode inside the ship. The ship was designed to handle atomic explosions behind the pusher plate, not deep inside. If one exploded there, it would rip the ship to shreds.

Clark had just reached the broad pusher plate when a brilliant white glare erupted around the edge ahead. Knowing he was too late to stop this next bomb, Clark grabbed the plate and pushed hard to counteract the thrust from this explosion. As the wave of radiation from an explosion that was now less then six hundred feet from his location washed over him, Clark was once more briefly forced out of 'speed mode' and left clinging almost helplessly to the structure of the ship.

Knowing he didn't have time to wait for his vision to clear, Clark forced his body back into 'speed mode' and moved blindly in the direction of the most intense heat. He was just rounding the lip onto the bottom side of the pusher plate when his vision began to clear.

The slightly concave surface of the nearly thirteen hundred foot wide pusher plate seemed to stretch before him almost forever. He had been expecting it would be glowing at least red hot, if not white hot, from its exposure to nearly six hundred atomic explosions from a distance of barely five hundred feet. But surprisingly the surface was a dark grey with a strange satiny appearance. It wasn't until he reached out and touched it that he realized it was coated with a thick film of some oily material which must act as a protective ablative layer.

Quickly, Clark raced through the heavily ionized air towards the center of the pusher plate in search of the location where the bombs were ejected. It only took a few seconds from his accelerated perspective to locate the outline of an eight foot diameter hatch. Clark quickly guessed the hatch would swing open to allow passage of the bomb and then would slam shut before the explosion to prevent damage to the ship's interior.

Choosing a spot roughly thirty feet from the hatch, Clark dug his hard fingers into the steel surface of the pusher plate and started to pull. Since his was going to have to drop out of 'speed mode' to destroy the stream of nuclear devices and with the high residual radiation he could feel here on the lower side of the pusher plate, there wasn't any point in making the molten connection to the ship to try again to pull its great mass into 'speed mode'.

Clark started to pull against the great mass of the ship to begin moving it away from its close encounter with the city, as he dropped out of 'speed mode'. And as he exerted his incredible strength, somehow pulling the ship seemed twice as hard as pushing had been. He knew pulling shouldn't be any different than pushing and it had to be a mental thing, but he couldn't get the old 'pull yourself up by your bootstraps' saying out of his mind.

He was so focused on getting the ship moving away from the city, he almost didn't react fast enough when the hatch slammed open and the next bomb came roaring out. He had a glimmer of warning from his overstressed electro-magnetic sense as it registered a surge of energy racing down the core of the ship, but it didn't leave him fully prepared for the speed of the bomb as it leapt passed him at nearly seven thousand miles an hour.

The bomb was almost three hundred feet from the pusher plate by the time Clark forced himself back into 'speed mode' so he would have time to lock his vision on the retreating weapon. As he cranked up his heat vision, he was mentally chastising himself for not anticipating this. With the previous bomb having gone off only one second earlier and then needing to wait until the shock wave from its explosion had passed, the next bomb had less than a twentieth of a second from the time it could safely be ejected until it had to reach the 500 foot distant ignition point. The energy pulse he had felt running down the core of the ship had been the electromagnetic rail gun used to accelerate the bomb up to hypersonic speeds. As his heat vision incinerated the bomb only feet short of its ignition point, Clark realized how groggy he still must be from the pounding radiation waves he had experienced as well as the physical beating his body had taken, if he had forgotten something as simple as the bombs' necessary ejection speed.

Clark continued to pull against the giant pusher plate while destroying the next ten bombs before he felt sufficiently recovered and confident enough that he could neutralize all the succeeding bombs to start rotating the giant ship so its nose no longer pointed protectively towards the city but rather towards the depths of space. It took almost twenty seconds to do the maneuver without overstressing the ship by a lateral acceleration it was never designed to handle and also without losing focus on the need to stop every bomb, but finally he could switch from pulling to pushing against the giant pusher plate.

Since he couldn't shift the giant ship into 'speed mode' where the normal laws of physics didn't fully apply, he was forced to limit the ship's acceleration to the four gees it was designed to sustain. After six minutes forty three seconds the last of the atomic bombs appeared. At that point Clark could have tried once more to shift the spaceship into 'speed mode' to cut the travel time to orbit, but he decided it was simpler to leave it in real time rather than risking some new complication. So it took him another eleven minutes to deliver it to a safe parking orbit one hundred fifty miles above the planet's surface. If this civilization had the extensive space operations Chloe had indicated, Clark decided they should be able to handle the necessary salvage operations without further assistance from him.

Clark paused a moment to bask in the brilliant unfiltered yellow sunlight before heading back down to Chloe and the others. Five minutes into the flight he had reached an altitude where the sun had cleared the horizon, but it still felt good to be able to simply rest for a moment. This had to have been the hardest twenty minutes he had ever endured.

After lingering for a few minutes, Clark realized he had been gone for over twenty minutes. The others were probably starting to get worried. With one last glance around taking in the view from a height he had never before reached, he shifted back into 'speed mode' and went racing back down to the frigid city in the center of the frozen plain.

While the trip up had taken seventeen minutes because he had stayed mostly in real time, the trip back while seeming to take several minutes from his perspective inside 'speed mode' in the real world took less than a second. As he approached the city he once more descended into darkness, dawn at ground level was still almost an hour away. But even in the dim light, he didn't have any trouble assessing the damage by the near approach of the giant atomic powered spacecraft. And the damage he saw was surprisingly light. He was certain he identified the buildings to which the ship had made its nearest approach, yet none of the windows appeared to be shattered like he remembered. He made a close pass to be sure. The buildings he remembered had a higher percentage of their interior lights on than other buildings and he could see people moving around on the inside, but the windows themselves all looked fine.

With a shake of his head, Clark headed back to Chloe's building. When he arrived at the window he had broken on his departure, he found it looking as good as new, too. This time there was no question it had been shattered and Clark hung in midair for several moments studying it. He had planned to return the building the same way he had departed, but now it would mean breaking the window all over again. Briefly he considered doing it just to see how they had repaired it so quickly, but after a glance down at the empty streets far below, he decided it would be better to just use the building's main entrance.

Dropping the eighteen hundred feet down to street level, Clark took a moment to ensure no one was around before dropping out of 'speed mode'. Then he calmly walked to the entrance they had used when they had first arrived barely thirty minutes earlier.

"Ah, hello," began Clark in the local language when he reached the spot where Chloe had communicated with the building's computer system. "Can you connect me with Letishikä gé Äysël gō Lalæhan?"

After a ten second pause, Chloe's face materialized on the wall in front of him.

"Hi, Clark. We were beginning to wonder what happened to you."

Clark wasn't certain how much to say over an open communication line. "Ah, how about I tell you when I get upstairs. Can you buzz me in or whatever?"

"No problem, Clark. I have added you to the authorized access list – just come on up."

Clark had barely started to nod in reply when the screen blinked out. Turning to the entrance, he quickly entered the building and made his way over to the bank of elevators.

When he reached Chloe's floor, he walked all the way to the end of the corridor and took a moment to examine the window. There was not a mark to indicate he had flown through it at high speed less than twenty-five minutes earlier. With a slight shake of his head, he decided he would have to see if Chloe had an explanation. Turning, he walked back to the entrance to Chloe's apartment.

The door slid silently open at his approach. As he stepped inside, Chloe ran up and pulled him into a hug.

"Are you okay?" Chloe asked, as she turned her head up to look into his eyes.

"Yes, although it was extremely intense for a few . . ." Clark began before Chloe cut him off.

"Come on, you can tell me about it while we get you fitted for your nanosuit. We are on a tight schedule as we have to leave for our shuttle in ten minutes."

Clark glanced down and realized Chloe's clothes, while similar in general appearance, were definitely different. And now her outfit also included a long cape like he had seen others wearing during his initial foray into the city. Then he glanced over to where Lana and Lex stood. Their clothes had been changed also and they had capes as well. Taking a closer look, Lex seemed to be slightly dazed and appeared to be mumbling to himself.

"Ah, what shuttle?" asked Clark turning his attention back down to Chloe.

"The one taking us to the space elevator terminus," responded Chloe with a grin.

"Space elevator?" echoed Clark, all thoughts about broken windows now swept from his mind.

"Yeah," answered Chloe continuing to grin. "Oh, did I forget to mention the computer I need to access is located up at the Pwóthgroć Space Colony?"

End of Chapter 1

Author's Note

If you are interested in learning more about some of the science in this chapter, you can go to Wikipedia and search for the following terms:

Space Elevator – If there is any hope of having significantly more than a dozen people in space at a time in the foreseeable future, this is the technology most likely to get us there. It has the potential to drop the cost of a trip into space from the $30 million the ultra-rich are paying the Russians today down to the range of a first-class airline ticket. If the technology was given an Apollo program or Manhattan Project 'push', it is probably doable in ten years.

Project Orion – This is the atomic bomb powered spaceship first proposed by the U.S. military back in the 1950s. The British did some follow-up studies called Project Daedalus, which modified the concept to use it to power a ship to a nearby star. This would seem to be the only concept potentially feasible with current technologies to lift truly massive ships into orbit. Of course, with the ongoing nuclear phobia, this technology is unlikely to be pursued short of some planet-threatening catastrophe. The Bőlžtroi ships in this story are based on the 'Super Orion' class from the Wikipedia article.

Space habitat or Island Three or L5 Society – Searching on these terms will bring up some interesting artist conceptions of what the insides of these massive spinning cylindrical space colonies will look like. The size and amount of material required to build these things boggle the mind. It seems highly unlikely any of these will ever be built without some significant breakthrough which reduces the cost of getting into orbit by many orders of magnitude. But including them in this story should make Chloe's original civilization feel different from today's world and create a sense of wonder and grandeur not otherwise possible.

! ! ! ! ! !

I hope you have enjoyed this start to the next arc of this saga. If you would like to chat about anything in this chapter or what you would like to see in upcoming chapters, drop me a review or a PM or an email.

Have a great day!

Duane


	2. Chapter 2

May 30, 2010

Origins

Chapter 2

Part 1

"Clark, I think we have a problem," Clark 'heard' Chloe say in his head, as his peripheral vision caught the flicker of the 3 inch by 2 inch visual display forming on the bright blue right sleeve of his nanosuit.

The nanosuits, which their spandex versions from home had approximated until they could acquire the real things, had capabilities far beyond anything Clark had imagined when Chloe had originally described them. When he had returned from intercepting the runaway nuclear-bomb powered spaceship and had seen the almost dazed expression on Lex's face, he hadn't understood the true cause. But then after Chloe had helped him into his own suit and it had powered up, he knew he must have been displaying much the same expression.

The suit was much more than just a device to maintain a person's body temperature in the artic-like environment now surrounding most of the major cities of this ancient era. No, temperature control seemed to be merely a side benefit of its main purpose. The nanosuits were everyone's primary interface with this world's version of the internet. While the nanotechnology based suits couldn't provide the virtual reality simulation Chloe could achieve with her internal 'bots, they could, by monitoring and interacting with a person's brainwaves, achieve an effect similar to having a cell phone implanted in your head. It had taken Clark a few hours to master the technique of thinking the words he wanted the suit to pick up and transmit.

"What is it, Chloe?" Clark sub-vocalized as he brought his arm up so he could get a better view of the image of her the suit was displaying.

Before she could respond, all the lights in the observation gallery abruptly went out. The room didn't go totally dark, as the light flowing in through the panoramic windows from the Earth now hanging ten thousand miles below them was more than adequate. In less than four seconds, pale orange emergency lights sprang to life along the back edge of the room.

Clark shared a quick glance with Lex and Lana, who were standing next to him taking in the view of the crescent Earth which still filled a quarter of the sky down below. From the reaction of the others standing near them, this failure of the lighting must not be a standard occurrence. Whatever the problem was Chloe had started talking about, it must not be directly related to them, but must be related to this current situation. They had been back in Chloe's original civilization for a little over thirty-six hours now, but Clark still had this feeling inside that they were trespassing and at any moment this era's version of police were going to march up and try to arrest them. Therefore Clark almost relaxed a bit at realizing the problem wasn't directly related to them.

The display on his sleeve had momentarily gone dark, but quickly it had brightened back up although now Chloe's face was lit by an eerie orange glow which matched the emergency lights along this room's back wall. While they had come to this observation level to once again take in the spectacular view, Chloe had remained back in their cabin.

Clark saw Chloe's lips begin to move in the display, but instead of hearing her voice in his head he heard a deep male voice speaking in the local Rætic language but with a good simulation of an upper-crust British accent, "Sir, I apologize for the intrusion, but Glorious Salvation's A.I. has informed me there is a small problem with the electrical systems and has requested everyone return to their cabins until the situation has been corrected."

"Thank you, Jeeves," thought Clark, as he recognized the name of this space elevator, or 'Sky Tether' as they were called here. "We will head there immediately. Could you please restore the connection to Chloe?"

"Of course, sir," came the immediate reply.

Clark couldn't fully suppress a grin as Chloe's voice was restored in mid-sentence. When his personal nanosuit had first powered up, Chloe had explained that they each came equipped with a built-in A.I. system to simplify interfacing with the suit's capabilities and to act as an intermediary when dealing with this world's version of the web. Since the A.I. was in many ways like a personal assistant and being a long time P.G. Wodehouse fan, Clark had immediately named his A.I., Jeeves. While Jeeves still spoke the local language, Chloe had been able to use her extensive linguistic and computer skills to add the appropriate British sounding accent to its speech patterns.

". . . wonky with the tether's power transfer system. You need to get back here," Chloe was in the middle of saying when her voice supplanted Jeeves'.

"We're on our way," responded Clark. "I just got a message that everyone is to return to their cabins."

Chloe's head nodded on the small display. "Yeah, me too. I will continue to see what I can find out about the situation until you get here."

Clark was nodding in turn as the display blanked out and his sleeve reverted back to its normal blue coloring.

"We better get back to our rooms," said Clark turning towards Lex and Lana. Even though he was speaking in the local language, several nearby people turned and looked in his direction as he spoke. He still hadn't adjusted to how most people in this civilization seemed to use their suits for most communication, even when talking to a person standing right next to them. He had seen a start of that with texting back home, but it was nowhere near this extreme. There were over one hundred people on this particular observation deck at the moment yet his powerful hearing only picked up three other audible conversations. His ability to eavesdrop on other conversations had helped them through several tight situations before, but that ability looked like it was going to be a lot less useful here.

"Yeah, I got the message, too," answered Lex, as he took one final look through the wide window.

It was hard to believe they were really here, ten thousand miles above the planet riding up to a transfer satellite in geosynchronous orbit in what was a glorified elevator car attached to a paper-thin ribbon of cable stretching over twenty-five thousand miles. Well, okay, thought Lex, 'glorified elevator car' was perhaps a bit of an understatement. He had heard of space elevators before this trip, but they had been so far from reality back in the early twenty-first century that none of the practical aspects of this system had yet been addressed.

This 'Sky Tether' journey was actually a two stage affair. The first eighty miles of the upward trek occurred in a streamlined capsule powered by ground-based lasers. Due to high aerodynamic drag and power limitations, four separate capsules each carrying five hundred passengers and traveling at a piddling 20 miles per hour were used to hoist passengers clear of the atmosphere. Since the lasers could only drive one capsule at a time, the unlucky passengers who drew the first capsule were left clamped to the cable just above the atmosphere for twelve hours while awaiting the arrival of the other three.

While these four capsules were lifting the passengers clear of the atmosphere, a larger capsule was descending from the station in geosynchronous orbit. Since this capsule didn't need to withstand the rigors of atmospheric travel, it could have a much lighter construction and be of a much larger size for more or less the same weight, which was fortunate as the next stage of the journey took nearly forty-eight hours even averaging 500 miles per hour the whole way. Additionally, while the atmospheric capsules needed a compact receiver dish to accept the power from the ground based lasers; this exo-atmospheric portion of the transportation system wasn't limited by such constraints. No, the outbound capsule, which had three large decks for its two thousand passengers, hung below a nearly mile wide solar array. To make the solar array more efficient and to account for the lower portion of the cable being in shadow for nearly twelve hours a day, a one hundred mile diameter array of mirrors and lenses was located around the geosynchronous terminus of the tether to provide a highly concentrated level of light on the capsule's solar array.

His suit, which Lex had named 'The Professor' and then after a couple hours of use switched from a stodgy old male voice to a sexy young female voice, had provided a lot of background data on the Sky Tether transportation system during the flight from the city where they had first arrived to the seaborne terminus of the Tether. At their arrival there, Lex had looked straight up expecting to see the one hundred mile wide mirror array, but in daylight it was virtually invisible. When he had queried 'The Professor' he learned it was even difficult to spot at night as the array was finely tuned to reflect all its light to the upper capsule array and rarely did any spill to the ground below.

However 'The Professor' did provide a brief catalog of man-made objects typically visible from the ground on clear nights. The largest object was located in geosynchronous orbit on the opposite side of the planet. It was the first in a series of 500 mile wide mirror arrays that would introduce additional solar energy into the biosphere to help compensate for the onset of the Ice Age. This first array was scheduled for completion in ten months. Fifteen more would be completed in the following five years and ultimately the plan was to ring the entire planet within twenty-five years. The scale of a structure 70,000 miles in circumference by five hundred miles wide nearly boggled Lex's mind – particularly since nothing he had seen in this civilization was really more than thirty or forty years beyond what could currently be achieved back home.

Unfortunately, despite all of the marvelous things he had seen, he couldn't forget that in a few short months all of this would be gone. This Sky Tether would collapse. The cities would be reduced to rubble. Most every person he had met or seen would be dead. Why did it all have to go wrong? This civilization was on the verge of a set of solutions to allow it to survive and even thrive despite the encroaching Ice Age. What could they have achieved if everything didn't collapse? In another seventeen thousand years they might have colonized much of the galaxy.

But it was again like the time he had had a conversation about slavery with Chloe in the carriage back in ancient Rome. He had challenged her as to why she hadn't worked to end slavery. And she had said he was welcome to try, but if he was successful, the future would change and they would be unable to return home. And the situation was the same here. They had the information necessary to prevent the accident which would destroy this civilization, but if they used it their future would never exist. The four of them had discussed the situation before coming downtime and had agreed it was this civilization's fate to fail and they couldn't change that, but being here and seeing all the things that would be lost and the people who would die a slow and agonizing death from cold and starvation made it a lot harder than when it had been merely a philosophical debate.

"Come on, Lex," said Lana. "It's time to go."

Lex nodded, but continued to gaze out the window for a moment while forcing himself to remember why they were here. It wasn't to save this civilization, but rather to get technical help from their supercomputer to allow them to successfully open a portal to Clark's home world before it was destroyed by the black hole so they could retrieve Clark's parents. Additionally, the plan was to use this trip to retrieve or at least figure out how best to retrieve Chloe's parents sometime after she had last seen them during the collapse, but before their deaths. After the unbelievable miracle Chloe had wrought in saving his Mother and Lana's parents, the least they could do was help retrieve Clark and Chloe's parents.

Turning from the expansive view provided by the large windows, Lex was again struck by the claustrophobic design of this upper half of the transportation system. The lower streamlined capsules had been claustrophobic in their own way with a tall, skinny configuration limited to a tight thirty-five foot diameter based on aerodynamic requirements and using a stack of ten floors with fifty people to a floor to accommodate their 500 person complement. But at least each level had had fairly standard eight foot ceilings. This upper portion of the transportation system had a lot more square feet per passenger spread across the three decks, but with only a few exceptions the ceilings were a uniformly low six and a half feet from the floor. Poor Clark had to duck through every doorway and his hair grazed the ceiling in every room.

Of course, the extremely low ceilings had been implemented for an entirely practical reason. As the capsules climbed up from the planet's surface, the gravity fell off with the square of the distance. After having seen all the video footage of the shuttle crews in freefall, he had at first expected to experience much the same thing when the lower capsules paused just outside the atmosphere at approximately the same altitude of the shuttle missions. But while using the Sky Tether, you weren't actually in orbit like the shuttle, but rather it was like being in the transportation system's namesake elevator. And at the mere eighty mile altitude where they paused to await the arrival of the upper capsule, gravity was still approximately ninety percent of the value at the Earth's surface. And the difference between ninety percent and one hundred percent was barely discernible while confined to their seats.

But as the upper capsule climbed further and further from the planet, the gravity steadily decreased. Now, ten thousand miles above the planet, the force of gravity was already less then ten percent of Earth normal. The six foot one Lex, who weighed 180 pounds back on earth, now weighed less than fourteen pounds. And as the pull of gravity steadily decreased, the purpose of the low ceilings had become obvious. Even with magnetic boots on their feet, everyone had a tendency to float up as they walked. With the lowered ceilings, everyone except the youngest children could keep one hand on the padded ceiling to stabilize their movements as they walked in the miniscule gravity field.

While the three of them had lingered by the windows, a near logjam condition had been reached at the three doors out of the gallery with everyone trying to return to their cabins at once. Since the situation didn't appear to be an actual emergency, they paused for a minute to let the crowd clear out of the way. While they waited, Lex glanced down and had to smile at his appearance.

Once he had mastered The Professor's interface, the first query he had for the A.I. was about men's fashions. He wasn't certain if it was her limited memories of these ancient times or if Chloe had just been jerking his chain, but he quickly determined the hideous yellow tights she had selected for him were not absolutely necessary. Oh, he had seen a lot of men in similar outlandish garb, but there had been a scattering of men in much more subdued colors. After a few minutes of consultation with The Professor, Lex had morphed his nanosuit with a design much more to his liking. Now it sported a jet black bodysuit, a dark gray cape, and a highly stylized double-L emblem in a dark blood red on the chest and on the cape.

Glancing over at his best friend, he couldn't help but wonder why Clark hadn't changed his costume into something a little more subdued also – perhaps he was keeping the design Chloe had selected because he thought she liked it. Lex wasn't certain but wished he would at least get rid of the 'red underpants on the outside' look and, well, the red boots, too.

At least of all the men wearing gaudy outfits, Clark was the best at carrying it off, Lex thought. And it largely seemed to be related to things that had happened three months earlier while he and Chloe had been lying unconscious on the floor of the Kent's storm cellar.

When he learned of all the things Lana had gone through during that time and in particular the millennia she had been trapped in the virtual reality universe while Sliviuh had control of her body, Lex had thought she was the only one who had experienced great changes and come out of it as almost a different person. But over the past three months he had discovered Clark had been changed, too. Suddenly, he had begun to project this image of calm, yet powerful inner strength. And while he had always come across as smart, now it felt like his I.Q. had jumped 50-60 points and he had passed by Lex and sometimes even Chloe with all her nanobot advantages. Perhaps it was simply that he had just matured so much, it felt like he had jumped straight from 16 to 30. And then there was the physical side. Clark had always been leanly muscular with what Lex considered a swimmer's build. But whatever Clark had gone through, and it had to be more than he had ever discussed in detail, now it was like he had added another forty pounds of hard muscle and was suddenly big and ripped like a hardcore bodybuilder. Did bench pressing battleships do that to you?

Tearing his eyes away from his friend, Lex took in the last few people making their way through the gallery's door. No, none of them or anyone else he had seen here held a candle to Clark, particular when every little flaw was on display in the formfitting outfits everyone wore. Of course, one of the other surprising things he had discovered here, although it had taken awhile to penetrate to his consciousness, was that everyone was in remarkably good shape. There were no big 'beer guts' on display under any of the ubiquitous superhero costumes of this era. When it had finally sunk in, he had asked Chloe about it. She had said a cure for obesity had been found over thirty years earlier and treatment for the condition had been mandatory. Back home making such a treatment mandatory would have been impossible and civil rights advocates would have screamed bloody murder, but this had turned out to be almost a militaristic society and many orders from the top were simply obeyed.

With the crowd thinned out, the three of them made their way to the gallery's exit. Lex had to fight down a touch of queasiness in his stomach as they began to move. The first few hours of the climb up the tether hadn't been too bad, but The Professor had warned him most people began to experience problems when the gravity fell below twenty-five percent of Earth norm. The Professor said it usually passed within twenty-four hours, but had recommended taking this era's version of Dramamine as a precaution. Lex didn't like the thought of taking unknown drugs from a long lost civilizations and was trying to just tuff it out. Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on your perspective, he seemed to be the only one afflicted. Chloe and Lana's internal 'bot systems were able to compensate for the experience. And Clark with his unique abilities like flight was totally immune.

It was less than a five minute walk down rapidly emptying corridors to reach the cabin Clark and Chloe were sharing, which was right next door to the one Lex and Lana had been assigned. At Clark's approach, the door silently slid open. At least something besides the emergency lights was still working, thought Lex as he and Lana followed Clark in to find out what Chloe had learned about the situation.

The cabin was extremely modest with the primary emphasis being on saving weight. Most of the room was filled by the double bed which was nothing more than a paper-thin woven web supporting a barely one inch thick cushion. Of course as their weight steadily decreased over the duration of their journey, Lex found the softness of the bed more than adequate.

The cabin also had a small table and a couple of chairs that looked light weight and uncomfortable, but which were fine when your apparent weight had dropped below fifty pounds. Each cabin also included a tiny bathroom facility that seemed straight out of a passenger jet except for the inclusion of a tiny shower.

One whole wall of the cabin was covered with a material similar to that used in their nanosuits. It could be turned into one big display, many little displays or left blank in the color of your choice. In their cabin, Lex and Lana had generally left it displaying a similar panoramic view to what they could see in the observation gallery. The view had looked just as real, hell more real, then what they had just seen, but still there had been something almost magical knowing you were seeing the view with your own eyes.

However the wall display in Clark and Chloe's room wasn't displaying anything at the moment, but was just a blank dull gray. Apparently whatever problem they were experiencing with the power systems, it had knocked the wall displays off-line, too.

Fortunately, the nanosuits had their own internal power systems. Chloe had swung her outfit's cape around and had it spread across the table to use as an alternate display. At the moment it was showing what looked to Lex to be a highly magnified view of some computer components. Or at least that was Lex's guess, as this era's computers were thirty or forty years beyond anything they had back home.

"What are we looking at?" asked Lex.

"This is where the vessel's A.I. has determined the problem to be. What you are looking at is the power coupling junction where the power from the solar array is connected to the drive mechanism and to the life support systems. There has been a total breakdown of the system," answered Chloe.

"Surely they must have a backup system," asked Clark.

"Four backup systems, actually, of two completely different designs for added redundancy, and yet they all failed simultaneously," said Chloe with a frown.

"What are the odds of an accident like that?" asked Lex quietly.

Chloe shook her head. "Low. Very low. From what I can tease out of the A.I., it appears to be sabotage."

"Why would someone want to sabotage this elevator? And is it a coincidence we are on it?" asked Lex in response.

"The bigger question is whether the sabotaging of the Bőlžtroi ship is related," stated Clark. Then turning from the display on Chloe's cape to look directly at Chloe, he continued. "Do you think it is 'them'?"

Before Chloe could respond, Lex asked, "What 'them'?"

Chloe glanced at Lex before turning to Clark. "Since you got the first part of this story first hand, do you want to explain?"

Clark nodded and then while lowering himself into the chair next to Chloe, he said to Lex and Lana. "You might want to take a seat, this will take a little while to explain."

After Lex and Lana had settled themselves onto the bed, Clark began. "Before meeting what turned out to be my great-grandfather, Var El, back in Nazi Germany, I knew almost nothing about the world I came from. I suspected, I'm sure like the rest of you, that that world had to be very different from Earth, if people with my abilities evolved there. Of course, it brings up the nagging question if Krypton was so different, why do people from there look exactly like people from Earth?

"I had many times wondered if my appearance had been altered as a child to make me look human once the destination of my spaceship had been established. It wasn't until I met Var that I knew for certain my appearance was typical for my people."

Lex smiled at the thought of Clark looking 'typical' on any world. But then he forced his attention back to Clark's words. He had wondered at Clark's origins from the moment he had seen him toss the massive stone obelisk back in ancient Rome and now, suddenly, he might be getting some answers.

"While we were on Var's ship, he told me a little about the Kryptonian civilization's history. On Earth, well the Earth of our times, recorded history only extends back six or seven thousand years. It is, was, similar on Krypton with records extending back nine or ten thousand years. However when you look back further in the past, things are very different. On Earth there is archeological evidence extending back millions of years showing the emergence of modern man and before him the Neanderthals, the simians, the mammals, the dinosaurs, and on to the first appearance of life billions of years ago.

"However, from what Var told me, it was very different on Krypton. Many life forms like the flame dragons can be traced back millions or billions of years just like life on Earth. But a select few life forms like Kryptonians and many of their domesticated animals like dogs don't do that. No, all archeological evidence of them just abruptly appears over a relatively short span of time."

Suddenly were this conversation was headed just clicked in Lex's head. "Let me guess, the first appearance of Kryptonians on Krypton coincides with this time period."

Clark nodded.

"So, some people here saw the end coming and managed to escape the Solar System before everything collapsed," extrapolated Lex.

Clark sighed. "I don't know for certain, but that is one possibility. However I think it is a remote one. First, this civilization is just in the first decades of space travel and it is unlikely they have the capability to successfully send a ship the roughly two hundred fifty lightyears to Krypton. Second, it doesn't explain how they would have altered their bodies to survive on Krypton. Third, it doesn't explain how Kryptonians of Var's era with their advanced gravity-lens telescopes were able to detect human looking inhabitants on planets circling at least another dozen stars.

"And finally, Var said the archeological evidence from the earliest days of Kryptonian life on Krypton also showed indications of the presence of another alien race. He suspects they were behind the seeding of the Kryptonian race on the planet and probably altered their bodies to be compatible with Krypton."

As Clark paused, Chloe took over the conversation.

"And the presence of an alien race in this era also provides an explanation to one of the big mysteries which has always bothered me. To construct the space colonies, a large amount of material was transported up from the lunar surface. The open pit mining techniques used in the process were easily visible from the Earth with binoculars and even with the naked eye when the moon was in just the right part of its orbit. And yet after the collapse of this civilization, all traces of this activity on the lunar surface disappeared. It was years and years later before I noticed it and millennia before anything like a telescope or binoculars were developed to verify it, but all evidence man had ever reached the moon was gone. And in no way could the metal-eating nanobots that destroyed everything here on Earth have caused this effect on the moon.

"So, it wasn't until Clark told me Var's story and then I talked to him myself that an explanation for all the anomalies I had noticed started to jell."

Chloe paused for a quick breathe before continuing. "I believe an alien race is behind the destruction of this civilization. They came to Earth and grabbed a group of individuals, or perhaps just DNA samples, to seed onto a number of different planets in this region of the galaxy. Then for some reason they drove this civilization back to the Stone Age and removed all traces a high tech civilization had ever existed here. It is hard to comprehend how a truly alien mind works, but the only explanation I can come up with is that they were doing some kind of a study of how humans would develop in a number of different environmental situations and wanted the humans remaining on Earth to act as the control group."

Chloe shook her head. "That is only my theory as to what happened. Since I don't have all the facts, I could be completely wrong. But it is the best explanation I can come up with which addresses everything we learned from Var as well as everything I remember of things back here."

Lex pondered what Clark and Chloe had just laid out and it was a lot to take in at once. However his mind quickly went back to how this conversation had begun. "So are you saying the runaway ship back when we arrived and now the problems with this tether are acts of sabotage directed specifically at us? How could these aliens even know about us or target us within minutes of our arrival?"

"Whatever their motives these aliens have to be highly advanced if they have interstellar travel capabilities and can remove all traces of this civilization's existence. Therefore let's assume they have time travel capabilities, too. Think back for a moment to how I retrieved Lana's parents. After I was stranded back in Rome by the time machine and was living through our era a second time, I made a point of recording detailed time and position data for them during the meteor shower so when the time machine was ready I knew exactly when and where to sweep the Portal to pull them out in the fraction of a second before the meteor hit. What if, in a similar manner, the aliens took detailed observation through this time period before they acted? They may think we have come back to interfere with their operations and believe they need to stop us."

"But we are not here to interfere," stated Lex. "If we do, we can't go home."

Chloe shrugged. "We know we want to go home, but do these aliens? Since we can't comprehend why they felt it was necessary to destroy this civilization, perhaps they can't comprehend why we won't interfere. Or perhaps the runaway ship and this power glitch are simply random events and it is purely a coincidence we were present both times."

Lex nodded. Perhaps they were trying to extrapolate too much from a limited amount of data. Hell, maybe aliens didn't wipe out this civilization and there was some other explanation. Perhaps there weren't even aliens.

"I guess you're right and we should just focus on the current situation until we have more information," began Lex. Then pointing to where Chloe's cape was still spread across the surface of the table displaying the damaged transfer coupling. "Any ideas how we solve the current situation?"

Chloe was just about to answer when Lana spoke up for the first time. "I think we may have another problem."

When the other three turned to look at her, they realized Lana was no longer sitting on the bed but floating about ten inches above it. And that was when Lex realized the queasy sensation he had been experiencing earlier had return with even greater intensity. Experimentally, Lex gave a slight push against the surface of the bed and felt himself floating up towards the low ceiling. He used a hand on the ceiling to arrest his upward motion, but then he just continued to hover near it. Even in the reduced gravity at this great altitude, his body should have started to slowly descend back to the bed.

"We appear to be in freefall," stated Lex as the implications began to sink in.

Abruptly, loud emergency alarms began to sound throughout the transportation capsule. Chloe turned back to the display on the surface of her cape were it was spread across the table. Quickly, images began flashing across it. After a few seconds she penetrated the security systems and managed to silence the alarms in at least this cabin. Then she turned her attention to the cause of the situation.

"Damn," exclaimed Chloe. "Both the braking system and the drive motors have also been sabotaged." She paused for about five seconds to stare off into the distance. "We will only pick up speed slowly at first due to the low gravity at this height, but it will steadily increase. I can only make a wild guess at the effect of the drag against the tether, but we only have about forty-five minutes before we will descend the ten thousand miles separating us from the atmosphere and we will be going very fast when we reach it. It will be a real disaster if we hit at that speed. And we will have to act well before then, if we are to slow the capsule at a rate that won't tear it apart."

From their arrival in this time period, Lex had thought this civilization put a little too much faith in their technology. The aircraft which had transported them out to the facility at the base of the tether had been fully automated without even the fallback option of manual controls. And this space capsule carrying them up to orbit was likewise uncrewed. Oh, it probably had a contingent of repair robots or similar devices under the control of the A.I., but doubtlessly they could be taken offline as easily as the power couplings and drive motors had been sabotaged.

Clark must have been having similar thoughts, as he quickly said. "I'll take care of stopping the descent and getting us up the station."

As Clark began moving effortlessly towards the cabin's door, Chloe interrupted. "Wait a second, Clark." When he paused, she continued. "This structure was never designed to handle more than 0.9 G's. So try to keep it below half a gee to give us a safety margin." When Clark nodded, she went on. "And I know you are not going to want to spend the next thirty hours pushing it up at its normal 500 miles per hour, but I have been doing some projections based on the temperature increases I am seeing from the drive motors dragging against the tether. At anything over three thousand miles an hour there is a high probability of either a complete failure of the tether or a fire in the drive motors or both, so you will need to keep the speed down to that level."

Clark gave a final nod. "I'll stay in touch via the suit."

As soon as Clark was out of the door, Chloe turned back to Lex and Lana with a grim expression on her face. "Under the constraints of speed and acceleration levels Clark will have to work to keep this flimsy structure from coming apart around us, it is going to take at least seven hours to get us up to the terminus in geosynchronous orbit. Unfortunately, with the main power offline, the backup power is only going to last three hours and once it is gone some of the older nanosuits are only going to keep their occupants alive for a couple more hours. If we don't get the main power back online, some of the passengers are going to be dead before we reach the station."

"I am sure the capsule's A.I. has called for help," stated Lex. "Couldn't they send a ship to evacuate everyone?"

Chloe shook her head. "Since we are not technically in orbit, it would be very difficult for a ship to rendezvous. It would have to kill all its orbital velocity and then have to maintain a constant thrust against Earth's gravity to hold its position. No, I don't think they have any ships that can perform that maneuver and carry two thousand passengers. It is going to be up to those of us onboard to get the power couplings fixed to get the life support systems back on line."

"Are there any passengers with expertise in this area?" asked Lex.

"I'll look, but we better assume not and get started on the repairs ourselves. I have accessed the necessary information on the equipment we will need and the procedures to follow."

Lana grabbed Lex's hand and pushed off the cabin's wall in the direction of Chloe. "I think Lex and I better handle this. With all the problems cropping up, you better stay focused on monitoring the overall situation."

Chloe reached up with both hands to prevent them from hitting the far wall of the cabin. Instantly, Lex felt Chloe bring his 'bots online and data on the necessary repairs being downloaded into his system. The information was coming so fast, he knew it wouldn't all be clear in his mind when she broke contact. But if Lana maintained contact with him during the trip to the exposed position of the power coupling system up on top of the solar arrays, it should have time to fully sink in. However the first few steps were already clear in his mind from Chloe's data dump: the route to where the equipment they would need was stowed and then the most direct route to the power couplings.

Part 2

Clark flew down the corridor towards the nearest airlock exit from the capsule. There were a few people moving about in the corridors most with panicked expressions on their faces. Carefully he kept his speed down and followed a zig-zag course with occasional light touches against the walls to make it appear he was simply very proficient at moving in freefall rather than actually flying.

As the airlock came into sight, Clark sub-vocalized, 'Jeeves, please reconfigure to spacesuit mode.'

'Conversion is underway,' acknowledge Jeeves. 'The process will be complete in fifteen seconds.'

When the suit had first initialized back in Chloe's old apartment, it had morphed through several of its possible configurations as it had adjusted to his body. It had been an eerie sensation to feel the skin tight suit moving and adjusting almost like it was a living creature. And it still felt that way now as the material of his sleeves flowed down to cover his exposed hands. He could also feel the large cape slithering and crawling around his back as it transformed into a canister configuration and began sucking in and compressing air from the corridor. Finally, a layer of the nanosuit flowed up and encased his head. Unlike the large, almost globe-like helmets the twenty-first century astronauts used, the nanosuit version was almost skin tight yet flexible in much the same way as it behaved when it merely covered the body.

Clark knew from his experience carrying the nuke Sliviuh had attached to the Eiffel Tower into space that his body was immune to at least limited exposure to the vacuum of space. But since the nanosuit was available, it seemed silly not to take advantage of it. And besides, there was no point in revealing every aspect of his gifts if he could avoid it.

Just like the mandatory seatbelt demos on passenger jets back home, there had been airlock demos shortly after they had boarded the capsule. Clark hadn't truly understood the point of the demos as anyone exiting and then becoming separated from the capsule would quickly be pulled down and away by the ever present, if miniscule, gravity field. But now he was just thankful for knowing how to cycle through the lock to the outside without having to rip a hole through one of the walls and, as a result, depressurizing part of the capsule.

As soon as Chloe had reminded him of the flimsy nature of the large sprawling capsule and the extensive solar array mounted above the roof, he had known there was only one spot where he could exert enough force to move the structure without ripping it apart. And that point was where the drive units attached to the long, long tether. The structure of the capsule and solar array radiated away from this one point. The traction of the drive units against the tether had to balance the force of gravity acting against the whole giant assembly. So this was the one place where he could apply his incredible strength to stop the downward motion and then lift it up to the awaiting terminal at geosynchronous orbit.

After thirty long seconds, the light on the control panel inside the airlock changed from yellow to bright blue and the outer door began to open. Clark felt a light tugging against his body as the last vestiges of air in the compartment raced out through the widening gap.

As the door pivoted all the way open, Clark could see the deep black of outer space. The Earth was somewhere down below and outside his current view. As he stepped through the door onto the platform outside, the area was lit by the light of the Earth reflecting off the lower surface of the solar array that seemed to stretch over his head and far out into the distance.

The platform extended ten feet beyond the door and then wrapped around the side of the capsule until it disappeared from view. There was a guardrail along the platform's edge and a large collection of safety cables and harnesses attached to the outer wall of the capsule. Clark ignored all the safety devices and leapt off the edge of the platform. Of course, in case anyone was at any of the nearby observation windows or this location was under active surveillance by some kind of security monitoring system, he accelerated deep into 'speed mode' first.

Fortunately, after going through the 'Purl Nous' experience in Var's, or more rightly Virgil Swann's facility buried deep under a New Mexico mountain, Clark had truly mastered all of his Kryptonian abilities. Therefore he now extended his personal energy field just enough to fully encompass the nanosuit. This allowed him to take full advantage of all its abilities while in 'speed mode'. Well, all of its abilities except the ability to communicate with the outside universe. If he was only shallowly in 'speed mode', communications were still possible. But when he was deep in 'speed mode', the time dilation was simply too great. Oh, he and Chloe had done a few simple experiments and she had been able to improve the communication abilities by an order of magnitude, but when he was in a state where hours passed for him in what was millionths of a second in the real world, it just wasn't possible. And he decided, mostly unnecessary. Anything critical would be over and done long before anyone in the real world would be able to react to any communication from him or the suit.

As Clark took a brief sweeping tour around the capsule and large solar array, he requested Jeeves to record everything he was seeing so the data could be sent to Chloe once he had dropped out of 'speed mode'. If the power coupling, drive motors, and braking systems had all been sabotaged, there could be other things wrong that could only be discovered by a visual inspection of the exterior. Chloe should be able to compare these recordings to baseline data for the structure and hopefully spot any anomalies.

After his tour of the structure, Clark swept down and approached it from below. It took him a moment to find the spot where the nearly black tether exited from the center of the lower surface of the capsule and then extended down, down, down until it disappeared from view in the direction of the Earth. As he got closer, Clark had to once more marvel at the incredible engineering feat required to enable this transportation system. The large capsule with its two thousand passengers and its mile wide solar array was crawling up a nanotube ribbon which was barely five feet wide and two inches thick. Of course, the fact it was one hundred fifty times as strong as the best steel from his era was what made it technically feasible.

While flying up the cavity located in the central core of the passenger capsule through which the tether passed, Clark took in the circular array of windows surrounding him on all three passenger decks. Their group had made a pilgrimage to this location shortly after the transfer from the atmospheric capsules to see the tether up close. He knew from that previous experience how the drive motors were attached to the ribbon just above the uppermost deck. He took a moment to scan the observation windows and didn't see anyone nearby, but if the trip up to the station was going to take hours and hours, someone was surely going to wander passed and spot him.

Perhaps it was just his long ingrained fear of exposure from his life in Smallville, but he suddenly didn't want to spend the next few hours in a highly visible location in his extremely distinctive nanosuit.

'Jeeves, can you change your outward appearance from the current design to something monochrome . . . say a nice shiny white? Oh, and the head covering, too, just leave enough transparency at the eyes so I can still see.'

'Certainly, sir,' came the immediate response. 'Did you want to retain your family crest on the chest and back?'

'No, I need to be incognito,' responded Clark. However with this era's apparent fascination with emblems, logos, icons, and the like, just being a monochromic white might not be the best idea, particularly if he wanted to use the same cover again someday. 'How about a large, very light gray circular emblem and inside it, in just a slightly darker shade of gray, a bird in profile?'

Jeeves proceeded to display a series of samples on Clark's sleeve until Clark saw one that approximated what he was looking for. 'There, let's do that one.'

'Very good, sir,' answered Jeeves. Clark watched as the logo disappeared from his blue sleeve and then the sleeve and the rest of the nanosuit transformed to a brilliant white.

Turning his attention from the trivial issue of his nanosuit to the real problem that had brought him there, Clark flew up passed the windows to the drive assembly. Compared to the relatively flimsy construction of the rest of the capsule structure, the structure attaching the capsule to the ribbon looked massive. Quickly, Clark found a couple of handholds where the bracings should be able to withstand the large force he was about to apply.

While deep in 'speed mode', the tether ribbon and the capsule structure all appeared to be frozen together. But as Clark dropped out of 'speed mode', the ribbon was abruptly ripping up passed his elbow at an incredible speed. He realized if he wasn't careful and the ribbon touched his impossibly tough Kryptonian skin, the ribbon might tear apart and leave them in an even bigger mess.

As Clark started to apply the smallest possible braking pressure, he asked Jeeves, 'Can you give me a display on the inside of the helmet of the capsule's velocity, how many Gee's it is experiencing and the current height above the Earth?'

Without even a verbal reply, the requested data began appearing in Clark's field of view. At first, while he was concentrating on gently applying his great strength against the structure of the drive units, the display didn't make any sense. Then he realized even though he had been speaking in the local language he had subconsciously expected the display to be in English. Quickly he did the translation in his head. Height above the ground: 8000 miles. Downward velocity: 1500 miles per hour and steadily climbing even as he watched. Acceleration: 0.21 Gees downward.

Since he still had plenty of altitude and speed margin before the capsule would reach the 3000 mile per hour threshold of danger Chloe had determined, Clark slowly and steadily increased the force he was applying. The display was down to 6500 miles altitude and the speed up to 2100 miles per hour by the time he had balanced out the downward pull of gravity. The display was down to 5700 miles before he brought the capsule to a full stop and started it back up in the outbound direction.

As Clark started to accelerate the capsule towards its destination, he did the math in his head. It had taken him over an hour to brake the large structure to a stop without overloading it. Now, with nearly twenty thousand miles to go to reach their destination, it was going to be almost seven more hours to reach the geosynchronous station. Briefly he wished he could just pull the whole assembly into speed mode like he had done with the battleship back in Nazi Germany, but with this lightweight structure, if his control wasn't perfect this capsule could literally disintegrate in his hands.

Knowing he was going to be stuck there for the next seven hours was somewhat annoying, but he could at least stay in contact with Chloe and the others and he could also use the time to learn more about this civilization from Jeeves. Perhaps it was time to begin a little discrete research into whether there was any evidence of the aliens who they suspected would be responsible for the destruction of this civilization.

Part 3

Lex waited with Lana for the airlock to finish cycling. The power couplings they needed to repair were located up on the surface of the large solar array.

Lex had to admit the thought of going out into the vacuum of space in nothing more than a thin nanosuit was more than a little daunting. Oh, he knew the suit was far safer than bulky spacesuits of the twenty-first century, but still it was space and mere seconds of exposure would certainly be fatal.

After the standard thirty seconds, the airlock status light turned bright blue and the outer door unlocked.

"Are you ready to do this?" Lex asked Lana.

He watched as she turned to face him from where she had already been leaning down to pick up the tools and supplies they had brought along. In 'spacesuit' mode, Lana's nanosuit had tightly encircled her head in a transparent layer and pushed her hair down tightly against her skull and back. Lex found it a weird effect – her hair looked similar to what it looked like when she stepped from a pool or a shower except it was still perfectly dry. He had to wonder for a moment how it made his own hair look. After being bald for almost a dozen years, he had finally gotten over his self-consciousness and hadn't normally thought about his lack of hair too much. But now after three and a half months with hair, 'how' it looked was back on his mind. And after all that time without hair, he had been letting it grow ever since it had made its seemingly magical first appearance back in ancient Rome after Chloe had introduced a set of her 'bots into his body to save his life. It was now halfway down his ears and he would soon have to decide whether to get it trimmed up or let it grow out the way Alexander wore it.

And as quick as that, he decided he would get it trimmed up at the first opportunity. It was weird enough to be in almost a ménage à trios relationship with Lana and the variation of himself that lived in the virtual reality world in her head without starting to look like Alexander, too.

Shortly after the night of the events in the storm cellar, Lana had tried to explain to Lex how from her perspective two thousand years had passed since she had last seen him. But it wasn't until nearly three weeks later, while they had been in Ennis, Montana to get away from Smallville that she had explained about her virtual reality life in detail and how it continued to exist within her head. And then she had used the 'bots in his body to take his mind there and he had had the shock of meeting Alexander.

Alexander looked like himself only on steroids. No, that didn't emphasize the apparent differences strongly enough. Alexander was like the 'Warrior Angel' version of Lex. Big and strong, noble and wise, he was everything Lex wished he could be. And Lana had thought of Alexander as her husband for twelve hundred years. How could he compete with that? Particularly since it was like competing with himself.

Meeting Alexander and experiencing the rich, vibrant virtual world which existed in Lana's head had helped Lex understand her difficulties re-integrating with the real world. If he had continual access to a world where he was all-powerful, he wondered if he could escape its siren-like call or would exist in a catatonic state in the real world.

But Lana was apparently a lot stronger willed than he and had slowly been able to find a balance between the real world and her virtual one. He on the other hand had struggled with the concept of sharing her with Alexander, as in every way except the inability to manifest in the real world, Alexander seemed the better man. Lex had joined Lana in her virtual reality world a few times, but it was depressing to see a version of himself he could never live up to. He was just going to have to be happy with the portion of her life he shared with her in the real world.

"I'm okay," responded Lana to his query. Then apparently reading something into his voice she continued. "Are you okay, Lex?"

With an effort, Lex pulled his thoughts away from Alexander and back to the here-and-now. At least it had distracted him for a moment from thoughts about opening the outer door and stepping into the vacuum of space. He knew agoraphobia was the 'fear of open spaces'. He wondered if there was a similar term for the 'fear of open outer space'. And he wondered if he actually had such a condition or if what he was feeling was just the normal, prudent fear everyone experienced in a dangerous situation.

"Yeah, I think I just have a slight case of nerves at the thought of stepping outside in nothing more than the nanosuit."

"Do you want to wait here, while I take care of the repairs?" asked Lana.

Lex forced himself to shake his head and reach over to the latch which would open the door. This was another aspect of the post-Sliviuh Lana he had had to adjust to. Back before the events in the storm cellar, Lana had been in many ways a typical sixteen-year-old girl. Even after having a set of Chloe's 'bots for a week, she hadn't thought of herself as a strong 'take charge' individual and sometimes didn't do what needed to be done – like the way she had almost mishandled the breakup with Whitney. But now she was like a different person. Throw her into an urgent situation and she was perfectly able and willing to take charge.

"No, the repairs are definitely a two-person job and I'll be okay once we get started."

They shared a quick glance and then Lex began pulling the outer door of the space lock open.

The door seemed to have barely begun to move when the chamber was filled with an almost blinding light. After barely a second the brightness began to fall. Lex wondered at first what the temporary flash of light had been. Then he remembered the large, hundred mile diameter mirror up in geosynchronous orbit he had tried to see when they had first reached the lower terminus of the elevator. The mirror's entire output was focused on the solar array on the upper surface of this elevator car. If it was one hundred percent efficient, the light would be ten thousand times as intense as standing out under the midday sun. And that thought brought back memories of using a magnifying glass and the power of the sun as a kid to start small fires and burn ants. Would stepping out of this chamber be the same as volunteering to be the 'ant' in the magnifying glass experiments?

But there was nothing for it; people would die if they didn't get the power couplings restored. Lex pulled the door the rest of the way open and again his vision flared briefly, almost to white, before damping back down to normal. And then Lex realized what he was experiencing was the lag in the nanosuit's ability to compensate for the sudden changes in light levels.

As he leaned down to pick up his share of the tools and equipment, he glanced at Lana. And he discovered the transparent layer of her nanosuit that had been encompassing her head had gone completely opaque. And not just at her head, now her entire body appeared to be sheathed in brilliant silvery chrome. Instantly he was reminded of the 'Silver Surfer' comic, or perhaps the T-1000 liquid metal terminator if it had been illuminated by a thousand spotlights.

"Lex, we have to hurry," exclaimed Lana, as she hustled past him with her armload of gear.

Lex wondered if Chloe had sent her a private message about some new calamity. Then he followed her out of the shelter of the space lock and received the full brunt of the mirror's power. He had heard of solar sails which used the infinitesimal pressure of sunlight to push them across solar distances. Intellectually, he understood the concept, but practically it had been almost impossible to grasp. How could light falling on a surface provide a useful push? But now he could understand its reality, as it felt almost like he had to lean into the giant mirror's light to move against it.

Then, after he had been out of the relative safety of the chamber for less than five seconds, 'The Professor', his suit's A.I., spoke up in the most urgent tones he had ever heard from it.

"Lex," began the female voice with what felt like a hint of hysteria. "I can only maintain a survivable environment inside the suit for eight minutes in this energy field. You need to get out of here, now!"

Lex watched as Lana bounded quickly away under the low 0.08 Gee gravity field that had returned since Clark had started doing his part to stop the elevator's freefall and get them headed back towards their geosynchronous destination. The solar collectors stretched away from their position for nearly half a mile in all directions, it had to be why she was risking forgoing the mandatory safety lines. Plus she obviously knew the time constraints they were working under. And in the worst case scenario they still had a safety net named 'Clark'.

"Sorry, Professor," subvocalized Lex, as he set off in pursuit of Lana. "We have a job to do, if everyone is to survive. Do what you can to extend our time and give me a running countdown."

"Yes, sir," responded the A.I. in almost a petulant tone.

Their destination was a small structure one hundred fifty feet from the space lock. Although as Lex got closer, he decided the term 'structure' was a bit of an exaggeration. It could be better described as a six foot by eight foot awning to provide shelter from direct exposure to the overhead light. It was located in front of the control panel on a eight foot wide by four foot tall box. By the time Lex caught up, Lana was already kneeling down and working on the latches that would release the front cover.

The area under the awning was still brilliantly lit by reflected light, but Lex was gratified to see the countdown time in his field of view jump from seven minutes twenty-eight seconds to eighteen minutes and change once the direct overhead light was blocked.

"Lex," said the Professor. "Please move your left foot six inches to the right."

Lex looked down and saw his foot was still exposed to the direct light from the giant mirror. He quickly slid over until he was almost hunched over Lana's back. The countdown timer did another jump to twenty-two minutes.

Lana got the last latch undone and pulled the cover panel free. Lex quickly took it from her and then propped it against one of the awning supports to block as much indirect light from one side as possible. This pushed the countdown timer up an additional twenty seconds and at this point Lex would take every additional second he could get because the Professor's original comment was starting to sink in. She had said a 'survivable' environment inside the suit not a 'comfortable' environment. Already he could feel the sweat rolling off his body as it felt like the temperature inside the suit had climbed beyond one hundred twenty degrees.

Lana handed Lex an insulated wrench and pointed to a fitting at the right end of the enclosure.

"Lex get that fitting loose while I work on the other one," said Lana in a much calmer tone then what Lex thought he would be using at the moment.

Quickly, Lex got to work. He had snippets of what needed to be done in his head from the brief nano-link connection he and Lana had shared with Chloe, but the whole process wasn't clear. Once again he found himself wishing he had a permanently active 'bot system like the girls so all the information in the system would always be available. And, of course, the instant healing benefits would be nice, too. Doubtlessly, Lana's 'bots would give her at least several more minutes of survivability in this environment than him. And with the vacuum of space surrounding the nanosuits, there was no way she could touch him to give him a momentary boost.

Lana and Lex worked hard and fast, but the countdown timer had fallen to a scarily low three minutes before the repairs were complete and Lex knew the timer would start descending at a precipitous rate once they stepped out of the shelter of the awning.

It now felt like a sweltering hundred fifty degrees inside his suit as Lex started to hand Lana the control panel's cover. She quickly raised a hand to stop him.

"Lex, the equipment will work without the cover and we are going to need it as a shield from the overhead light to make it back to the space lock. And my calculations show even with that it is borderline whether we will make it before the suits overload. I'm going to have to climb on your back to reduce the total surface area of our suits that is exposed. Can you carry me?"

It was becoming suffocatingly hot inside his suit, but Lex just nodded. Hopefully, in a tenth of a gee gravity field he could run a hundred and fifty feet with Lana on his back and holding the panel over his head.

Lana quickly jumped on his back and wrapped her legs and one arm around his body. She used her free hand to grab one corner of their makeshift sun shield.

Lex's timer was down to two minutes thirty eight seconds when he began the mad bounding dash for the air lock. Instantly after leaving the shelter of the awning, the timer dropped to eleven seconds. Eleven seconds to run fifty meters with someone on his back and trying to hold an awkward panel over his head while in a sweltering nanosuit that felt like being in the heart of the Amazon jungle on the hottest day of the century. Eleven seconds for fifty meters? Piece of cake.

Lex stumbled into the air lock with three seconds showing on the timer. Lana hit the emergency close button on the door and then sprawled on top of him to block as much remaining light from his body as possible while he lay collapsed into the corner. Lex felt like he was going to puke from the heat and knew he had to hold it until the air pressure was restored as throwing up inside the suit would probably be disastrous, or at least very messy.

As soon as the outer door was closed the timer began climbing and by the time the thirty seconds needed to restore the pressure had passed, the A.I. had turned off the timer.

As soon as the yellow safety light came on, the suit retracted away from his head. Lex gulped in the cool air and slowly the urge to puke faded.

As he got his breath back, he looked up to where Lana still lay sprawled on his back. Where the suit had previously compressed her hair down against the back of her head, it now hung down around her face all matted down by sweat and perspiration. Lex reached up and ran his left hand through his own sodden hair and could feel the clamminess all over his body. Boy, he definitely needed a shower.

"I hope we never have to do anything like that again," stated Lex. Although, as he thought about it, he realized at least he hadn't had time to worry about being out in the vacuum of space. Maybe he didn't have some debilitating phobia after all.

Lana climbed to her feet and then reached down a hand. "Yeah, I agree. But Chloe is calling and we need to get onto the next problem."

Lex nodded as he gratefully accepted her hand and the boost her activating of his 'bot system provided. He could hear Chloe's urgent message through his nanosuit's communication system, too.

"Aren't the people of this era capable of doing anything for themselves," he groused as he followed Lana out of the airlock at a dead run five seconds later.

Part 4

Clark used his x-ray vision to watch as the large clamps locked into place securing the elevator to the large space station in geosynchronous orbit. It had been a long eight hours trapped in this one location pushing the elevator up to its destination while the others had scurry from problem to problem to keep the elevator's infrastructure functional against what was obviously a coordinated sabotage attack.

Of course, the important questions were still unresolved. Were they the target of this attack? And who was behind the attack?

So far Chloe had been unable to resolve these questions. And now that they had arrived at this intermediate space station on their way to the Pwóthgroć space habitat, the newest question was what kind of a reception were they going to receive. Based on his actions the elevator was arriving almost fifteen hours early. There was doubtlessly video evidence that someone in an all white nanosuit was responsible. If the powers behind this civilization were the ones behind the attacks, then they were in for a frosty reception. And if it was aliens who were behind the attacks, then they might be welcomed as saving heroes. It certainly looked to be one extreme or the other.

Clark released the grip he had been maintaining on the drive unit support structure and transitioned back into 'speed' mode. He had plenty of practice at hiding in plain sight and knew it was best not to linger here. Quickly he flew back out the bottom of the elevator and then looped around to the airlock he had used earlier.

Without damaging or depressurizing the elevator, there was nothing he could do but drop out of 'speed' mode for the thirty seconds it took for the airlock to cycle. While he waited, he took the opportunity to use his x-ray vision to further study the space station to which they had just docked. It was large. Well, at least by twenty-first century standards, although the habitable portion was dwarfed by the elevator's mile-wide solar array and it looked absolutely miniscule next to the one hundred mile wide mirror array that powered the elevator.

Obviously, some things never changed like the need for artificial gravity if people were going to maintain a long term presence in space without damage to their bones and internal organs. And apparently, the same solutions occurred to people whether they lived seventeen thousand years ago or in the present. For the space station looked extremely similar to the 'ring' space station from the classic movie, '2001: A Space Odessey'. Oh, there were differences as the central zero-gee hub was much larger and designed to have the space elevator dock on one side and space craft dock on the other. And this space station had a total of four spinning rings with the first two from Clark's perspective rotating in a clockwise direction and the furthest two rotating in a counter-clockwise direction doubtlessly for some torque-balancing reason. But overall the design was remarkably similar to the old movie.

The yellow safety light came on and Clark shifted back into 'speed' mode. No point in leaving a video trail leading to his cabin while he still wore the white camouflage coloration on the suit.

Quickly he retraced his way back to the cabin he shared with Chloe. Slipping through the door, he found his three friends all congregated in the small room. As he dropped out of 'speed' mode, he asked Jeeves to convert back to normal from space-suit mode and revert back to his standard blue and red motif.

As soon as the others realized he had returned, Chloe pushed off from the nearest wall and flew into his arms. As Clark watched, he was forced to remember they were now in zero-gee's. He caught her and pulled her into a hug, but knew if they were in public he would have to let her inertia push them across the room.

"Miss me? I missed you," Clark whispered, as he pulled her into a kiss.

After about ten seconds, Lex coughed discretely.

When Clark and Chloe turned in his direction, Lex said. "We should go now if we are going to try and mingle with the others who are departing."

"Any sign of a reception committee?" asked Clark.

"Not so far," responded Chloe, as she disentangled herself from Clark's arms. Even with the advantage of her 'bot system, this trip was still her first experience with zero gee's and it took some thought to compensate for life-long habits.

"Any word on what is going to happen to the passengers next?" asked Clark. The whole space program of this civilization was as optimized as the train system he had experienced back in Nazi Germany. Most of the people arriving on the space elevator were destined for the L-5 space habitat and this was intended to be only a brief transit stop for them. The space elevator from Earth arrived and then two hours later the spacecraft carrying them on to their ultimate destination departed. This space station wasn't designed to host an extra two thousand people for days or even hours. In fact, few if any of the passengers would ever visit this station's spinning rings which provided artificial gravity for the space station's permanent personnel.

"Well, they had seven hours notice since you started to push the elevator up, so they have been able to tweak their schedule and get the space ship here early. But I think everyone is going to be sitting over there for an extra fifteen hours before departure to get things back on schedule," answered Chloe.

"So we have fifteen hours to wait to be discovered," said Clark.

"And then another five days of zero-gees on the next space craft waiting for the next attempt against us," commented Lex.

Clark looked over at Lex. Even with Lana using her 'bots to give Lex's body the occasional boost; he still looked a little ragged around the edges. And from the way he was maintaining a white-knuckled grip on the bed frame, it was obvious his body hadn't yet fully adjusted to the zero-gee environment.

Then Clark turned and looked at Chloe. "Still no idea who was behind the sabotage?"

Chloe shook her head. "Unfortunately, no. All I can say is that it was all preprogrammed into the elevator's A.I. sometime before its last departure from the space station. But I have no idea who did the programming."

"If we are stuck on the next space ship for fifteen hours before its departure, do you think you can spot any similar alterations to its programming?" asked Clark.

"All I can do is try," shrugged Chloe.

Clark glanced at Lex again before continuing. "And you're sure if we run into serious problems and have to abort the mission, the Portal Machine can create a doorway home from out here in deep space."

Chloe grinned one of her big grins. "You know me, Chloe 'Cautious' Sullivan. I may not have let on that our destination was a giant space habitat, but I did a number of tests before we left home. I used the Portal device to transport objects to both the L-5 orbital location and to the surface of the moon. I never tried doing it over seventeen thousand years, but I did transport them several hundred years into the past and then retrieved them after they sat there for a hundred years. So, yes, I am one hundred percent confident I can open a doorway home from outer space."

Clark turned towards Lex. "So, Lex, are you okay with continuing, or do you think we should abort the mission?"

Lex stared back at his friends for a moment. His personal choice would be to abort, but he knew what this mission meant for them. For Clark, the knowledge the computer up in the space habitat might possess could be the only answer to being able to open a portal to Krypton before it was destroyed in hopes of someday retrieving his parents. And this trip might also result in the recovery of Chloe's parents as well. After Chloe had rescued his mother and Lana's parents from death, could he just give up at the first hint of danger?

And while being out in space was certainly scary and death could be nearly instantaneous, was it any worse than what they had survived back in ancient Rome? He had nearly died there and Lana had actually died. Yet, they had survived. And now they had the nanosuits for protection and they each had several of the emergency recall devices. So, on the whole, the risks were probably less than back in Rome.

"No, I don't think we should abort," responded Lex. "I understand the importance of this mission and think we should push on."

Lex recognized the grateful expression in Clark's eyes as he nodded.

As Clark turned and pushed the button which would open the door leading out of the cabin, Lex wondered why, if this civilization had spaceflight, it couldn't have transporters and impulse drives like 'Star Trek'. It would be nice if it didn't take almost ten days to travel a distance equivalent to from the Earth to the Moon. Ten days of opportunities for someone trying to kill you.

With a sigh, Lex released his grip on the bed frame and pushed off towards the doorway.

End of Chapter 2

Author's Note

Well, hopefully the techno-babble hasn't been too overwhelming, but I thought it would help with the feeling that they are in a place different than our present. I'm afraid that is going to be the nature of this story which, while set in the distant past, could also be forty or fifty years into our own future. I do think it may tone down a bit in future chapters after we get passed this setup material and into the heart of the story.

Have a great day,

Duane


End file.
