The transition from the whiskey-soaked warmth of the party to the sterile, blue-lit command center of the bunker felt like a physical blow. The camaraderie of the night before hadn't vanished, but it had been shelved in favor of the math.
"Nightfall is moving faster than our initial projections," Martha said, tapping a touchscreen that displayed a jagged, tumbling rock. "The gravitational pull of Jupiter gave it a bigger slingshot than we anticipated. We’ve lost three days of prep time."
Kal-El stood in the center of the room, looking at the simulation. He was still in the jeans and T-shirt Lex had provided, but the way he carried himself had shifted. He wasn't the wary guest anymore; he was a pilot assessing a flight path.
"I can compensate for the speed," Kal-El said quietly. "But I need to know the structural integrity of the rock. If I hit it with too much force, I don't just move it—I shatter it. Then we aren't dealing with one Nightfall; we’re dealing with a thousand."
Despite the gravity of his words, he saw the group react to the idea of shattering the asteroid. He forced himself not to apologize. Time was of the essence, and guilt was a luxury they couldn't afford.
"Which is exactly why we need to move this operation out of the basement," Bernie interjected, his voice sharp with a pragmatism that bordered on aggression. He ignored the warning look Lex shot him. "We’re playing house in a lead-lined box. These simulations are clean, Kal-El. Space is filthy. Solar winds, thermal expansion—it changes your torque and your leverage. We miss this once, we die."
"Bernie is right," Kal-El said, his quiet voice cutting through the argument. "I need to reach my maximum saturation point if I’m going to use the moon as a fulcrum. I cannot anchor myself against the vacuum; I have to anchor myself against a mass."
"Using the moon as a fulcrum?" Bernie paused, his scientific mind skeptical. "That's a suicide mission. The angular momentum alone would—"
"It has been done before," Kal-El interrupted. He looked at Martha, who was watching him with an intensity that made his chest ache. "Travelers who helped the resistance here. They weren't just soldiers; they were from alternate realities where they were sent to Earth as infants—my doppelgängers. They both flew out to meet Nightfall in his own reality. They used the moon’s pull to stabilize his mass against the impact. It is a proven concept."
The silence in the bunker was absolute. Bernie looked back and forth between Lex and Kal-El. Martha looked struck. "Travelers? You mean the specialized fighters... were like you?"
"They were men alternate versions of you and Jonathan found in the cornfields in their worlds," Kal-El said, keeping his voice clinical, though he saw Martha’s hand drift to her throat at the mention of the farm. "They shared their flight data with me before they departed. They gave me the variables for the impact and the thermal recoil. They wanted this world to have the record of a successful mission."
Lois swallowed hard. She remembered the two Clarks—how they had fought to free her world and then left to protect their own. "If they could do it, you can. But we can't risk a 'maybe' on a one-shot mission."
"I will not risk the secret of your presence yet," Lex insisted, though his tone was less certain. "But... perhaps the Arctic. Somewhere Kal-El can saturate without a camera lens in sight."
"It's a compromise," Bernie grumbled. "But it's better than this box."
Martha remained silent, her eyes still fixed on Kal-El as if trying to reconcile the clinical data with the image of a child in a cornfield.
"The flight data is precise," Kal-El added, turning back to the monitors. "But it requires me to operate at peak capacity. We should leave as soon as the equipment is packed."
Lex checked his watch, the moment of tension breaking as he pivoted back into logistics. "Fine. The Arctic it is. Martha, get the mobile sensor arrays ready. Bernie, I want the thermal recoil projections updated based on this new 'lunar anchor' data. We move at dawn."
"I'll be ready," Kal-El said.
He didn't look at Martha again, and he didn't ask about Jonathan. He simply turned back to the jagged rock on the screen, calculating the trajectory of his own redemption.
