THE SUPERWOMAN FROM KRYPTON

THE ETERNAL COURSE. PART I

Central Africa, April 27, 1948

It was not yet dawn. The four trucks of soldiers arrived in the village, about forty men in all. They marched armed with old but well loaded rifles. Almost none of them were white, all were mercenaries. They were commanded by a blond man with an elegant face but with a frayed and dirty khaki uniform. The soldiers mounted their weapons and surrounded the straw and wood barracks where men, women and children crouched in fear.

Just two weeks before, the conflict had started in the region of Urangi. A Belgian foreman had killed a child after he carelessly caused the collapse of a rudimentary wooden derrick in the mines. After this came the strike, and three dead in the village of Zandi when the guard (they were nothing more than mercenaries) tried to break up a demonstration. The whole region had risen demanding better working conditions, the replacement of the regional mercenary guard and the punishment of their leader, Pierre Reill, a smart but unkempt and sinister man, who had appeared in Urangi only three years ago, before the end of the war, and who was rumored to be a Nazi collaborator in Belgium. However, Reill had gained the trust of the lazy and indifferent local governor and was becoming the master of the region.

"Everyone comes out, we just want to talk and ask you a few questions. We just want to identify the criminals who destroyed the company's equipment and who are helping the communists. Hand them over to us and we will leave."

Reill repeated the message with little conviction, mixing French and the local dialect. It was not his intention to comply, he just wanted them to get out of the huts. No one listened to him, the wait was tense.

"Well, you know, break the doors, set fire to the roof, get them all out...then we'll select twenty and teach them a lesson."

The troops complied immediately. They smashed the doors and dragged or shoved the families out, poured some kerosene inside the barracks and the flames began to crackle. If they found a very old record player, a camera almost two decades old, a fountain pen or a steel pan, rare possessions in the region, they would carefully carry it away and deposit it in the vans. Reill and his men were also fond of looting.

They had not had to fire a single shot except into the air. Although the screams disturbed the dawn, the punitive operation was going smoothly for Reill, who was smiling almost happily. However, everything changed when someone knocked down a mercenary with one blow using a wooden bar. Then they decided to shoot the crowd they were gathering against the only brick building in the vicinity, which served as a school, bar, telegraph, and radio station.

But before the bullets hit the crowd, in a split second impossible to determine, the bullets fell to the ground as drops of molten metal. At the same time a blue and red blur moved everywhere, throwing the guards to the ground, and smashing their weapons, which flew in pieces through the air and fell to the ground as splinters and shattered pieces of metal. It all happened in just a second or two. Reill flew through the air and hit a wooden wall. As soon as he could sit up and open his eyes like the rest of his men, all the fires had been extinguished.

Barely six feet above them, standing between the village's crowd and the guards, a women levitated with her arms crossed. She had dark, windblown, disheveled hair with a curl floating over her forehead. The woman stared almost furiously at them with her deep blue eyes. She wore a long bright red cape that floated in the light breeze of dawn and a strange, very close-fitting, blue tights that were impossible to identify if they were made of leather or metal, with a red and yellow crest similar to a stylized letter "S" over her generous breast.

Reill cursed his luck. It had to happen, sooner or later, Superwoman would appear. It was inevitable, she was everywhere. Reill despised and feared her, who the hell was this super-powered flying woman who spoke at the newly created UN and appeared everywhere intervening in the slightest? But Reill also desired her and collected magazines where the superheroine appeared with her arms around her waist, flying or chatting with children.