By Carolus
Summary: Rewrite of episode 9.09, “Pandora.” Tess kidnaps Lois to find out where she went after she disappeared for three weeks, and discovers memories of a future where Zod rules the world under a red sun with the help of a surprising ally, while Chloe and Oliver lead a resistance group against the Kandorian army.
Rating: PG-13 for violence and sexual situations.
Spoilers: Everything up to and including “Power,” serious spoilers for “Pandora.”
Author Notes: This story is set in my Clana-friendly season nine, which ignores the events of “Requiem” in season eight and follows “Reign,” which contains links to previous stories in the series, “Synthesis,” “Frenzy,” “Surprise,” “Roulette,” “Vicious,” “Genesis,” and “Image.” The Kryptonian TrueType font will be required to read certain symbols.
Disclaimer: Smallville doesn’t belong to me, unfortunately, but to Tollin/Robbins Productions, Millar Gough Ink, DC Comics, and Warner Brothers Television. I’m just having some fun here.
* * * * *
Early September, 2009
Metropolis, Kansas
“And I told you, Lois doesn’t have that kind of time,” Oliver Queen argued into his cellphone as he paced back and forth in his office at LuthorCorp Plaza as the reddish light of dawn shone in through the windows. His ex-girlfriend had lapsed into a coma after collapsing at the Daily Planet the previous day, and he was very upset with the lack of progress in her case. “You get Dr. Weiss on a helicopter and get him to Met Gen now.”
Clicking a button on his phone to end the call, Oliver turned at the sound of rapid footsteps to see Clark striding into the office with a sheaf of papers in his right hand and a concerned look on his face. He was a bit thrown by the fact that Clark was wearing black horn-rimmed glasses, but decided to wait until later to ask about them.
“Clark, I got three of the country’s best neuro MDs on their way,” he told the Kryptonian.
“It’s too late,” Clark reported. “Lois is already missing.”
“What do you mean, she’s missing?” Oliver replied, shocked. “You took her to the hospital, Clark. You’ve been with her all night while your cousin and Lana patrolled.”
“I was, until I stepped out for a few minutes to see if you called, and when I got back, she was gone,” Clark replied. Glancing over the papers in his hand, he said, “There’s nothing in her chart, no releases, and no witnesses.”
“The hospital said someone called and requested a copy of Lois’ test results,” Oliver informed him. “It was Emil Hamilton.”
Puzzled, Clark asked, “Why would Emil care about Lois?”
“He wouldn’t,” Oliver replied before going to say, “But maybe the person he’s working for would.”
It only took a second for Clark to realize who the billionaire was talking about.
“Chloe,” he grimly concluded aloud.
It certainly fit with the clandestine way of operating that his best friend had adopted over the last few months, Clark thought. But why would Chloe have her own cousin kidnapped from a hospital?
* * * * *
Elsewhere, two dark-uniformed men carried an unconscious, hospital gown-clad Lois between them as they marched down a dark corridor of a supposedly abandoned wing of Belle Reve Sanitarium. Entering a room filled with advanced computer equipment, they secured to her to a metal-framed plastic operating table tilted to a vertical position in the center of the center.
“Thank you, that’ll be all,” Tess Mercer told the men, dismissing them.
“Spying on Lois’ computers and hacking into her therapist’s files wasn’t enough?” Stuart Campbell questioned as he attached two glowing green kryptonite-infused circular electronic leads to Lois’ temples, then activated a servomechanism that tilted her table to a horizontal position. “Did you really have to escalate to kidnapping her from a coma ward?”
“There’s a mystery surrounding Miss Lane, and I intend to solve it,” Tess replied as she read through Dr. Evans’ computerized notes of her sessions with Lois.
“So, what, all this is because she told her shrink she has headaches and sees weird, futuristic flashes?” Stuart queried as he began typing at a nearby terminal.
Seeing the sharp look that Tess gave him as she turned away from the monitor, the hacker defensively replied, “What? I can’t hack into these files and not read them.”
“They’re called ‘boundaries,’ Stuart. Find some,” Tess ordered him sternly. Turning back to the monitor, she mused, “And these futuristic flashes may not be imaginary. Besides, Lois was investigating Zod’s Orb when she vanished for three weeks.”
“What, you think these are repressed memories that she’s already been through?” Stuart asked.
“This technology will tell us,” Tess replied as she walked over to look at the monitor at Stuart’s terminal. The system was a blend of the memory retrieval technology developed by Project Starhawk and the neural interface that LuthorCorp had created via Project Intercept to link minds.
As Stuart continued typing, the screen showed a rotating wireframe image of a human brain in red next to a three-by-three grid of onscreen buttons labeled “CALIBRATE,” “CHANNEL 1,” “CHANNEL 2,” “EEG AMP,” “BIO AMP,” “BAND COUP,” “RECORD,” “STOP,” and “PRINT” above the words NO SIGNAL and a depiction of Lois’ gently waving electroencephalograph.
Stuart clicked on “EEG AMP,” then “CHANNEL 1” and “BIO AMP,” and the NO SIGNAL turned to the words HOST ENGAGED. A moment later the screen changed to display a series of blurry images: a ragged black flag, droplets falling into a puddle of blood, a man with a white “Z”-like symbol on his shirt landing in front of two joined towers…
“Can’t you get more than just fragments?!” Tess cried, frustrated at the poor quality of the images that they were seeing.
“I’m sorry, Tess, but her mind is like a mental mosh pit right now, okay?” Stuart replied apologetically. “Only a human--”
“Pause it,” Tess suddenly ordered, seeing something familiar in the images. Stuart complied, and the redhead stared for several seconds as the screen froze on the image of two towers with the red Kandorian flag hanging from the bridge joining them.
“That’s Zod’s solar tower -- exactly as it’s designed to be built. But the plans haven’t even gone public yet,” Tess stated. She stood there, silent for a moment before realizing aloud, “Lois did go to the future.”
“Okay, well, we better pop some popcorn, because she’s remembering something,” Stuart replied.
As Tess glanced over at the unconscious Lois on the table, deep inside the reporter’s mind, Lois flashed back on their fight in May, which had culminated in her picking up a strange gold ring that had fallen out of a box that had been knocked off Clark’s desk, then a bright violet burst of light…
When the violet light faded away, Lois found herself lying flat on the floor of the basement bullpen of the Daily Planet, still clutching the ring. Absently dropping the ring on the floor as she leapt to her feet, the brunette warily looked around the bullpen for any sign of Tess Mercer, but saw no one.
“Tess, where are you?” she loudly asked before she contemptuously added, “Don’t start what you can’t finish.”
Taking a better look at her surroundings, Lois saw the bullpen wasn’t just empty; it looked abandoned -- a conclusion that was reinforced when the brunette ran a hand over some papers on a nearby desk.
“What the hell?” Lois murmured as she saw the thick coating of dust that came away on her fingertips.
She knew she’d been out for a while, judging by the fact that it had been nighttime when she’d fought Tess and the amount of light coming into the bullpen indicated that it was day now -- a fact certainly supported by the blood that she felt at her left temple where she’d hit her head. But this much dust indicated that the bullpen had been empty for months, at least.
And there was someone wrong with the color of the sunlight that was coming in, she realized as she turned and looked in the direction of the stained glass window near the ceiling. It was too red.
Walking up to the front exit of the Daily Planet and going out the revolving door, Lois noted a multitude of flyers taped to the glass, each of which depicted red stylized sunbeams radiating from a black clenched fist, with the words FREE EARTH stenciled over it in a semicircle.
“Free Earth”? Lois thought, puzzled. It sounded like some new environmentalist slogan -- or maybe the name of a radical movement, she thought, based on the clenched fist in the design.
The reporter’s thoughts were pulled away from the meaning of the flyers to other matters as she walked through the revolving door and saw what had become of Metropolis. The outside of the Daily Planet building was grimy and scorched. Stone, wood, and metal debris littered the streets, including streetlamps that had been torn from the ground and cast aside. Abandoned vehicles were either burned out or covered with massive dents, some of which had been inflicted by dropping pieces of shattered masonry the size of a public mailbox on them. Various storefronts had been smashed in -- some of them covered with plywood decorated with larger versions of the same “Free Earth” signs that she’d seen at the Planet -- and most buildings had sustained damage, including a few that were missing a story or two.
Most ominously, Lois could neither see nor hear any sign of people about. It was as if the entire city was abandoned, just like the Daily Planet.
“Hello? Is anyone there?” she called out, but received no answer. What had happened here, some kind of war? And what was with the weird red tone of the sunlight shining down on her -- even though it was bright enough to be the middle of the day?
As she turned to look down the street to her left, Lois’ attention was seized by the sight of the sun -- huge and red as it hung high in a cloudy, reddish-orange sky.
Standing there staring at the red sun and wondering how the hell that had happened, Lois heard a loud whoosh behind her. Turning in the direction of the sound, she beheld two large, majestic towers half a dozen blocks away connected by a bridge from which hung a red flag decorated with an angular black quatrefoil design inside a white square whose corners pointed north, south, east and west. A scarlet beam lanced from the top of the left tower into the sky, and as Lois watched, a dark form whizzed through the sky, coming out from behind the tower on the right.
The object’s flight described an arc as it turned toward her, then accelerated, Lois only realizing that it was a man a second before the figure touched down feet first, briefly raising a cloud of dust on impact.
Lois flinched, startled as much by the figure’s identity as she was by his mode of arrival -- because it was Clark Kent, dressed very differently than she was accustomed to. Her coworker wore black pants and boots with a long, dark red leather coat over a black T-shirt that had a white “Z”-like symbol on the chest made up of a diagonal slash with a knotlike figure in its center that extended from the lower left of the design to its upper right and was framed by two rotated “L”-shapes, one on the upper left and one on the lower right, with a large white dots above the left L’s corner, and another below the right L’s corner. He also wore a metal dogtag on a chain around his neck that was stamped with another symbol: an irregular pentagonal diamond framing the same diagonal slash with the knot in its center as the design on his shirt.
Most disturbing, however, was the cold, assessing expression on Clark’s face and the steely look in his blue-green eyes as he looked her over.
“Lois Lane,” he said, his voice further unnerving Lois, as his tone held not a trace of friendship or warmth. “Curious to find you here, after so many months. This zone is off-limits to your kind, after all.”
“‘My kind’ ?” Lois echoed, momentarily indignant at Clark’s words despite the situation and his reference to the passage of time. “What crazy pills have you been taking, Smallville?”
Gesturing at him and at their surroundings, she asked, “What’s the deal with the sun? What happened to Metropolis? And how the hell are you flying, Clark?”
Clark cocked his head slightly, the right corner of his mouth quirking up in a brief, contemptuous half-smile before he answered her, saying, “It’s no longer Metropolis, but New Kandor, capital of New Krypton -- and the birthplace of the new Kryptonian empire.”
He paused briefly, his expression turning utterly serious before he told her, “And do not call me Clark Kent. My name is Knor-El.”
Okay, he’s officially lost it, Lois decided. Her friend had turned into just another crazy meteor freak. She brought her right leg up in a roundhouse kick, aiming for Clark’s head. To her dismay, he effortlessly caught her leg with his left hand a foot away from his head, then casually pushed the limb away, sending her sprawling backward onto the ground.
Realizing that she was in over her head as Clark slowly began to advance on her, Lois got up and ran away. The Kryptonian coolly watched her go as she ran around the corner, then superspeeded after her, Lois skidding to a halt as she suddenly found Clark standing in her way with his hands clasped behind his back.
“I don’t care what crazy powers the meteors’ve given you, Clark,” Lois declared as she glanced at a nearby phone booth, confidently adding, “The Red-Blue Blur will stop you.”
“Not under a red sun, he won’t,” her former friend refuted with a smile of cold amusement. Glancing over Lois’ shoulder at something behind her, he added, “Look around you, Lois. The Blur… is as good as dead.”
Turning and looking in the direction indicated by Clark’s gaze, Lois saw a makeshift wooden flagpole from which fluttered a tattered black shirt with a silver-white emblem similar to the one on his dogtag, only with a serpentine “S” shape inside the pentagonal diamond:
!
Lois had never seen the emblem before, but if what Clark was saying was true -- that the Red-Blue Blur was gone -- what hope was there for the world?
* * * * *
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