Jor-El's projection stabilized.
The blue light gathered into a clear shape, and the chamber grew quiet. For a moment, the only sound was the soft hum of the ship waking after a long sleep.
The hologram turned toward Aaron first, then Clark. His face carried calm, but his eyes were sharp. He was studying them both.
"You are human," he said at last, "or something mixed with it."
Aaron did not answer right away.
Jor-El's gaze stayed on him. "Yet there is something old in you. Ancient, even by Kryptonian standards. What species are you?"
Aaron lifted his chin. "I am a vampire."
For the first time, Jor-El paused.
The projection flickered once, as if the ship itself needed a moment to process the answer.
"A bloodline species," he said slowly. "Undead origin?"
"Yes."
"That is unusual."
Jor-El glanced toward the glowing symbols around the chamber, as though searching the knowledge of Krypton for a name that no longer existed.
"The Codex contains no record of your kind. You are unknown to Krypton's archives."
Aaron said nothing.
Jor-El's eyes returned to him. "How old are you?"
"I am fifteen," Aaron said. "Next month I will be sixteen."
Jor-El looked at Clark after that, and something almost like approval passed over his face.
"You found a rare friend, Kal-El."
Clark gave a small, awkward smile. Aaron noticed it and looked away.
Then Aaron's attention shifted. He had heard something through the ice above. It was faint, but real. The sound of machines. Shouting. Metal moving against frozen ground.
He stepped forward.
"Uncle," he said, "we have a problem."
Jor-El remained calm. "I know. The humans outside."
Clark frowned. "Can they do anything to the ship?"
"No," Jor-El said at once.
Aaron looked toward the surface, where the noise was growing louder. "There are mercenaries up there. They are trying to take the ship. Heavy equipment. Armed men. They want to retrieve it."
Jor-El did not look concerned.
"These humans cannot damage this vessel," he said. "Their machines are primitive. Their weapons are weak. The metal of this ship is beyond their understanding. It survived the destruction of Krypton. It crossed galaxies. It will not be claimed by men with ropes and cranes."
Clark exhaled slowly. Some of the tension left his shoulders.
Jor-El raised one hand. A holographic console formed in the air before him, lines of Kryptonian script moving across it in bright blue.
"Activating full power," he said. "Drawing from solar reserves."
The ship answered.
A deeper hum moved through the floor beneath their feet. The chamber seemed to breathe. Lights brightened along the walls. Ancient systems stirred awake, one by one.
Above them, the ice cracked.
Far away on the surface, the mercenary crew began to panic.
Commander Rick was the first to understand that something had gone wrong. He was standing near the extraction site when the ground gave a sharp tremor.
"What's happening?" he shouted.
One of the men near the control rig looked up in alarm. "The ship is moving!"
Rick stared. "That is not possible."
Bronze Tiger, already moving forward, kept his eyes fixed on the broken ice where the vessel had been buried.
"It is possible," he said.
Then the cables snapped.
The sound was violent, like metal being torn in half. Men jumped back. One of the vehicles slid sideways on the ice. The entire rig shook as if something massive had awakened underneath it.
Then the surface split open.
The Kryptonian ship rose from below.
It did not come up with fire or smoke. There was no engine roar, no blast of thrust. It simply lifted from the ice with smooth, unnatural grace, like a thing that had never belonged to Earth in the first place.
Rick stood frozen. "No engines," he whispered.
The ship cleared the ice.
Then it disappeared.
Not destroyed. Not gone.
Invisible.
For a few seconds, there was only empty air above the broken ice. The men stared, unable to understand what they were seeing.
"Where did it go?" Rick shouted.
Bronze Tiger remained still at the edge of the hole, staring at the space where the ship had vanished.
"Gone," he said.
But there was uncertainty in his voice now.
Inside the vessel, Aaron watched the holographic screens as the ship shifted into its next state. Outside, the mercenaries were running in circles, shouting orders into radios that no longer mattered.
Radar swept the sky and found nothing.
"They cannot see us," Aaron said.
Jor-El looked at the display. "No," he said. "The ship is hidden now."
Clark watched the same screen as the vessel turned toward the sun.
The view changed quickly. Earth curved below them in blue and white. Clouds stretched across the surface. The planet looked fragile from this height, almost too small to hold all its wars and secrets.
Then the ship climbed beyond the atmosphere.
Black space opened around them.
Stars filled the darkness. The sun burned ahead, enormous and golden.
The ship absorbed the light.
Solar energy flooded through its systems. The walls glowed a little brighter. Ancient functions woke up inside the vessel. The hum deepened into a steady pulse.
Clark could feel it. The ship was not alive in the human sense, but it was no longer asleep.
Jor-El watched the readings with quiet satisfaction.
"The vessel is fully charged," he said.
Clark turned to him. "And now?"
Jor-El gestured toward the corridor behind them. "Now you will see what remains."
---
They moved deeper into the ship.
The corridors were long and curved, built with a strange elegance that made the vessel feel larger on the inside than it should have been. Symbols lined the walls in clean Kryptonian script, glowing softly in response to Jor-El's presence.
Aaron kept looking around. He was waiting for some hidden defense to activate. Waiting for the ship to react to him as an outsider.
But nothing attacked them.
The vessel was quiet now. Not dead. Just waiting.
They passed a medical chamber first.
It was filled with sleek instruments, scanning arms, transparent pods, and dormant surgical drones hanging from the ceiling like sleeping insects.
Clark stopped in the doorway.
"This is a hospital?"
"A medical bay," Jor-El replied. "It was designed for treatment, repair, and regeneration."
Aaron looked at the equipment with interest. "This could probably rebuild a body."
Jor-El studied him for a moment. "In some cases, yes."
They continued on.
Soon they reached another door. Aaron opened it first.
He stopped immediately.
Clark came up behind him and looked past his shoulder.
A zoo.
The chamber was enormous, larger than any room they had seen so far. It looked like a small world had been built inside the ship and then sealed away.
Trees grew from a raised bed of dark soil. Vines hung from curved supports near the ceiling. Blue light shimmered softly from the leaves of strange plants. A pond ran through the middle of the chamber, its water moving slowly through carved channels in the floor.
There were rocks, tall grass, thick roots, and pockets of warm air that kept the place alive.
And animals.
Some were small and furred, with too many legs and curious eyes. Others were larger, with scales, horns, or plated backs. A few moved silently through the trees. One little creature darted across the grass and vanished beneath a root before Aaron could get a proper look at it.
He stared at the chamber in disbelief.
"There's a zoo on this ship."
Clark blinked. "A what?"
"A zoo," Aaron repeated. "This ship has a zoo."
Jor-El's projection appeared behind them at the entrance.
"It is a preservation chamber," he said. "A self-sustaining biological environment. Rare equilibrium design. The ship remained dormant for five hundred years and used its final reserves to preserve what life it could. Most of the creatures did not survive. These did."
Clark looked out over the chamber in silence.
"These are the ones that lived?"
"Yes."
Aaron watched a small creature move through the grass near the pond. A larger one followed slowly behind it. For a second he could not tell whether it was hunting or simply walking.
The room felt strangely peaceful.
"It is alive in here," Clark said softly.
"That was the purpose," Jor-El replied. "To keep life from ending completely."
The chamber seemed to hold a memory of Krypton that had refused to die.
Then Jor-El led them onward again.
---
The next room was brighter.
When the door opened, light spilled across the floor in straight lines. Aaron heard a soft sound almost like laughter, though it was really only the hum of active systems and the faint sound of simulations running.
A game room.
Holographic arenas floated in the center of the chamber. Floating pieces moved over one side of the room, forming a three-dimensional chessboard. Another section projected star maps with moving routes and shifting obstacles. There were combat simulations too, already waiting for someone to step inside them.
Aaron stopped and looked around.
"This is more advanced than anything on Earth."
"Kryptonian children played here," Jor-El said. "They learned strategy, reflex, and coordination."
Clark walked toward one of the game fields and activated it by accident.
The room transformed at once.
A starfield spread out around them. Asteroids appeared in all directions. Targets lit up and moved through the space. The floor remained solid, but everything beyond it changed into a simulation.
Clark laughed in surprise. "Whoa."
Aaron reacted quickly, stepping aside, reaching for a glowing object that vanished the moment his hand touched it.
A sharp tone sounded. He had missed.
Clark grinned. "You are losing."
Aaron straightened. "I am learning."
Clark laughed again. Aaron did too, despite himself.
It was the first real laughter in the ship since they had entered it.
The hours passed without them noticing.
They moved from one simulation to another, competing, testing each other, and forgetting the danger outside for a while. The mercenaries. The hidden ship. Jor-El's revelations. The sadness of Krypton. All of it faded into the background.
Even Jor-El seemed different here. Not warmer exactly, but less distant. These rooms had once belonged to his people. He remembered them through the ship.
At last, the vessel signaled that the charging cycle was complete.
Jor-El appeared again in the center of the room.
"The vessel is fully charged," he said. "Where do you want to land?"
Clark thought for only a moment. "A place no one will find it."
Jor-El tilted his head. "Antarctica."
Clark nodded. "Deep ice. Hidden."
"The ship can descend beneath the glacier," Jor-El said. "Invisible and undetectable. Only the primary access key will permit entry."
Clark looked at Aaron.
Aaron gave a short nod. "Do it."
---
The ship turned south.
It moved faster than any Earth craft could have followed. Silent and smooth, it crossed the sky and left the world behind. Below them, the ocean gave way to white.
Antarctica stretched out beneath them like a frozen grave.
The ship descended.
The ice opened before it, not breaking violently, but parting as if it had been commanded to move. A deep crevasse appeared beneath the snow, and the vessel sank into it with steady control.
Lower.
Deeper.
Until it reached the hidden chamber beneath the glacier.
Then it settled.
The ice closed above it.
The world on the surface became still again, as if nothing had happened at all.
Invisible.
Hidden.
A fortress beneath the snow.
Inside, the engines quieted into a low, steady hum. The lights glowed warm through the corridors. The ship no longer felt like a tomb. It felt occupied.
Clark stood at the main console and looked up through the holographic display at the frozen layers above them.