Ascension Code: Reborn in the DC Universe - Chapter 0130

Chapter 130

Erick sat with the rest of the team in the meeting room at Mount Justice, the long curved table around them bathed in the pale blue glow of the central projector. Batman stood at the head of the table, a black silhouette against a wall of light, and the hologram in front of him split into a dozen simultaneous projections.

Each broadcast showed a different part of the country. Chicago buried under a white blanket that swallowed the lampposts. A highway outside Denver disappearing under mounds of snow taller than the abandoned trucks on it. Skyscrapers in the Northeast sporting necklaces of ice. And above each city, suspended in the gray sky like patient gods, hovered the machines. Colossal floating engines, replete with exposed gears and turbines, slowly turning while launching an endless plume of snow into the air, fueling a storm that had no natural right to exist in this season.

“That’s the situation,” Batman said. His voice was monotonous, which somehow made everything worse. “Four patrol cars, four cities, and the pattern is spreading. The temperature in the affected areas has dropped more than thirty degrees in less than a day. If this continues, first we’ll lose the electricity, then the water, and finally, the people.”

He typed on the holographic keyboard without taking his eyes off it. Four faces replaced the images of the city, each one a police mugshot illuminated by a cold light.

“We’ve identified those responsible. Captain Cold. Mr. Freeze. Blizzard. Stalactite.” He let the names hang in the air. “This time, they’re not fighting each other, which shows the amount of money involved. Each one is linked to an engine. That means four strongholds and four problems we need to solve simultaneously.”

A slight ripple ran across the table. The corner of Robin’s mouth curled into that crooked, smug smile he sported whenever the situation got tense. Artemis exchanged a quick glance with Starfire, and the two allowed themselves a low, discreet sigh of excitement. They had longed for this for a long time, a real weight on their shoulders, a job that mattered, on par with the League. The only empty chair was Kid Flash’s, and his absence was the only thing preventing the atmosphere from turning celebratory.

“You will be deployed to all four locations,” Batman continued, “integrated with the League members. You will receive orders, maintain your position, and end this storm.”

He let them have that. Then he killed the four faces with a tap and brought up a map of the United States, drawn in thin lines of light. A single red thread ignited across it, running from one coast to the other, Boston on one end and Seattle on the other, splitting the whole country in half.

“There’s a second problem. A smaller one, by every measure except the one that counts.” He turned, and his attention landed on a single person at the table. “Erick. The Zeta network is down. The engines are flooding the relay grid with interference, and nobody can lock a transit signal until we clear them. That means no instant travel, not for anyone. Flash and Kid Flash are already committed. They’re pinned at Captain Cold’s site right now, and they aren’t coming off it.”

Erick said nothing, listening.

“Which leaves you. You’re the only one who can cross that distance fast enough and survive the conditions doing it.” Batman’s eyes didn’t move. “Everyone else has their assignment. Yours is the line on that map.”

Erick gave a single nod. “I accept. What is it?”

“A hospital in Boston has a donor heart. There’s a girl in a unit halfway to the coast who will die without it inside the window, and that window is closing because every road and every aircraft between the two points is grounded by the storm.” Batman’s voice didn’t soften, but it slowed, which from him was the same thing. “Get the heart. Carry it to her. Don’t stop for anything that isn’t trying to stop you.”

“Understood.” Erick was already rising from the chair. He wore the lighter of his two configurations tonight, the dark uniform with the long mantle rather than the full armor. There had been no reason to suit up heavier for a briefing, and there was no reason now; the armor would only cost him speed he couldn’t spare. “If the window’s closing, I’m already late.”

Batman tilted his head a fraction. The helmet answered the gesture, folding up over Erick’s jaw and face in a single smooth motion, sealing him in. The interior display woke in the same instant, painting a soft amber notification across the lower edge of his vision and a route that curved east toward Boston, recalculated against weather data that updated even as he read it.

He left the table without another word. Behind him the others were already pulling up their own assignments, Robin’s gauntlet flickering with site data, Artemis checking a quiver she’d packed for a different kind of fight. None of them envied him the line on the map. A girl’s life held in a box on his back was a heavier thing to carry than a fortress to storm, because a fortress could be taken late and still be taken, and a heart could not.

The corridor beyond the briefing room sloped toward an exterior hatch, and the hatch read his approach and split open ahead of him. Cold poured in. He didn’t slow for it. The soles of his boots lit, jets of controlled flame blooming beneath his feet, and the thrust threw him down the passage and out into the open sky in a blur.

The wind hit like a wall. Hail came with it, stones rattling off the mantle and the helmet, off the green of his hands, striking with the dull heaviness of dropped lead. His altered constitution registered all of it and dismissed all of it; the impacts simply did not reach anything that mattered. What did reach him was the temperature of the storm itself, the wrongness of it, a deep mechanical chill that had been manufactured rather than weathered.

He poured everything into the jets. The world tore loose around him as he crossed the threshold of sound, the boom rolling out behind in a flat clap, and then he was simply moving, a low dark shape running flat-out beneath a ceiling of churning cloud. Buildings, towers, the skeletal arms of cranes, none of it slowed him; his flight let him thread between obstacles as if they were standing still, and he aimed the whole of his speed at the coast.

…

The hospital landing pad was a circle of white in a city gone monochrome. A small crew was already waiting in the lee of the rooftop housing, hunched against the wind, and as Erick dropped out of the snow and set down among them, the lead paramedic lifted a hand against the downdraft of his arrival.

“You came in faster than the board said you would,” she called over the wind. The transport unit was clutched against her chest, a hardened case with insulated walls and a set of broad straps designed to ride flat against a back. “Don’t make a habit of scaring the dispatchers, Jackie.”

“What can I tell you. I broke my own record today.” He took the case from her hands and swung it onto his shoulders, cinching the straps until it sat snug against his spine, the weight balanced and secure. The internal readout on the case glowed a steady green. “Cradle’s holding?”

“Holding. Twelve hours of life support in the box, but you don’t have twelve hours and you know it.”

“I won’t need them.” He stepped back to give the crew room, and the jets under his boots flared again. “Have a good day.”

He went up before they could answer, the rooftop falling away beneath him, the boom of his departure shaking loose a sheet of snow from the housing below. The route in his vision reoriented, the red thread now pointing him inland, toward the girl at the far end of it.

For the first stretch the flight was clean. Then, perhaps three minutes out from the coast, his instincts caught on something and held.

The storm had changed. The hail he’d punched through on the way out had been a nuisance, gravel against his skin. Now the stones falling around him were the size of fists, and some larger than that, dense knots of ice that came down with enough velocity to crack stone. One the size of his own head dropped past his shoulder and shattered against a rooftop below with a sound like a gunshot. His own body could take the punishment without flinching. The case on his back could not, and neither could the heart inside it.

He dropped his altitude. Down near the ground the buildings and the bare winter trees gave him cover, breaking the worst of the barrage before it could reach him, and he wove the route between them, trading a little of his straight-line speed for a roof over the cargo. He flew through the canyons between warehouses, banked under an overpass that took the falling ice with a sound like a drum being beaten by a thousand hands, and skimmed the white surface of a frozen river where the trees crowded close enough to lace their branches into a ceiling.

The longer he flew the more the storm told him about itself. This wasn’t weather that had wandered off course. The cold had an even, manufactured quality, the same temperature in every pocket of air he crossed, and the snow fell in volumes that no sky could hold on its own. Somewhere far behind him the engines were still turning, pumping winter into a country that had no defense against it, and the four cold men anchored to them were betting that nobody could reach the people freezing in between. Erick intended to make at least one of those bets wrong. He kept low, kept moving, and watched the landscape blur past beneath him while the chaos hammered the world overhead.

…

An hour into the run, with the coast far behind and the halfway mark sliding under him, his perception snagged again. This time it wasn’t the weather.

Below, on a road choked white between two lines of dead trees, a knot of police had formed a loose half-circle, weapons raised, muzzles flashing in the gloom. Their target was a single man. He stood close to seven feet, broad as a doorway, and he was walking toward the guns rather than away from them. He didn’t run, didn’t duck. He simply tilted out of the path of each round as it came, reading the shots before they were fired, closing the distance with the unhurried certainty of someone who had done this for a very long time.

Erick recognized him at once, and the recognition came with a cold note that had nothing to do with the storm. Vandal Savage. A man with the accumulated lifetime of a hundred soldiers and the patience of something that had stopped fearing death before the wheel was invented. There was no version of this where the officers walked away on their own.

He didn’t have time for it. The window in his vision said so in plain numbers. But the men below had seconds, not minutes, and the heart on his back was worth nothing if he let it cost the lives in front of him.

He banked hard and came down.

Savage’s arm was already drawing back, the next officer too slow and too close, and Erick crossed the last three meters of air and caught the man under the arms before the blow could land. He pulled him clean off his feet and out of the strike’s arc, set him down running, and barked a single word.

“Move.”

The officer didn’t argue. The rest of the half-circle had already understood that something stranger than their suspect had entered the road, and they were breaking for their vehicles. Erick put his body between them and Savage and let his boots cut their flames, settling onto the snow on his own two feet. He needed the men to reach their cars. That meant he needed to give them time, and time meant standing where he was.

He dropped into a guard.

Savage studied him for a moment with something that wasn’t quite curiosity, the look a craftsman gives an unfamiliar tool, and then he came. He moved with a speed that no ordinary body should have been able to produce from that mass, a silent, economical lunge that ate the space between them. To an ordinary man it would have been a death sentence delivered before the eye could track it.

But Erick had stopped being ordinary a long time ago.

In the half-second before contact, beneath the sealed helmet, his face had already changed. He had reshaped the structure of his own eyes, remaking them along a feline architecture, the irises stretching into vertical slits behind the visor, the receptors behind them tuned to register motion at a rate a human retina could never reach. The alteration didn’t stop at the eyes. He had reworked the corresponding section of his brain to match, widening the channel that carried what the eyes saw into something he could act on, so that the flood of fast information didn’t drown him but arrived clean and usable. He had given up none of his intelligence to do it; every thought he’d had a moment ago was still his. He had only added, a deliberate morphological edit that lifted his reaction and his reflex past anything his old body could have survived.

So Savage came at him fast, and Erick watched him come slow.

The first strike, a flat driving palm aimed at his sternum, crawled toward him, and he turned off its line by a hand’s width. The second, a hooking elbow that should have caught him while he recovered, found only the place he had been. He rolled his shoulder out of a grab, slid his head under a blow that would have taken it off, gave ground in clean, measured steps, and let the bigger man’s momentum spend itself on empty air.

Savage adjusted at once. The opening lunge had been a question, and now that he had his answer he stopped wasting power on speed alone. The strikes shortened and tightened, a palm feinting high to draw the guard up while a low knee came for the gut, a grip flashing for the wrist the instant Erick committed a hand. It was the work of a man who had learned every fighting form humanity had ever invented and then thrown away everything in them that didn’t kill. He fought without flourish. Each movement existed only to set up the next, so that slipping one blow simply walked Erick into the angle of the one behind it.

Erick read them and broke them apart by the narrowest margins. He let a hammering fist pass an inch from his cheek and felt the wind of it on the bare skin under the visor. He sank beneath a sweeping forearm and turned his hip out of a takedown that would have buried him in the snow. A boot scythed at his ankle and he lifted the leg over it and set it down again without breaking his backward rhythm. To anyone watching from the road it would have looked like the larger man swinging at a ghost, but Erick knew the truth of it from the inside, and the truth was that he was barely keeping pace.

He could not do better than that, and he knew it before the exchange was three seconds old. Savage didn’t waste motion. Every attack flowed into the next, each one closing a door Erick might have used to answer, so that there was never an opening to step into, never a beat where the man was committed and exposed. Erick’s own training had given him more hours of real combat than most people accumulated in a lifetime, simulated and live, a deep reserve of fighting instinct earned the hard way. None of it was enough here. Set against an opponent who had been killing with his hands since before the alphabet, raw reflex bought survival and nothing more. Erick read every strike and avoided most of them, and still a knuckle clipped his ribs, still a forearm rang off his guard hard enough to numb it. Skill against skill, he was losing, and he would keep losing.

What he had that Savage did not was a body that refused to stay one shape.

He gave a hard backward step, opening the distance, and let his arms begin to change. A thought was all it took. The fabric of the uniform along his forearms parted on his command, peeling back to bare the green skin beneath, and the cold air closed over it as the flesh started to move. His right arm split, dividing cleanly into three separate limbs that grew from the same shoulder, each one finding its own work.

The first drew out long and thin and supple, tapering to a whip’s end, and he sent it lashing at Savage from an angle the man hadn’t been guarding. Savage saw it and bent away from it, the strike cracking the air where his throat had been a moment before, and the disdain in his stance suggested he thought that was the whole of the trick.

It wasn’t.

Erick’s left arm divided in the same instant, and the new limbs hardened as they formed. One sealed itself inside a dense chitin shell and closed into a pincer, a serrated claw heavy enough to crush a car door, and it snapped at the larger man’s flank to drive him off his footing. Another rounded into a brutal mass at its tip, a spined head of layered carapace, a flail in everything but name, and it came down at him from above. A third tapered the opposite way, narrowing to a hard point like the head of a lance, probing for the gaps the pincer opened. And the last spread flat and broad and curved into a shield of the same armored shell, and Erick wore it like a wall, so that every time Savage found a line back to his body the blow rang off the shield and went nowhere.

The road became a storm of its own. The whip snapped in from the left while the lance drove in from the right while the flail fell from overhead, four lines of attack arriving on four different rhythms, and behind all of them the shield sat patient and unbroken. Savage was the finest hand-to-hand fighter Erick had ever stood against, and for the first time in the exchange it didn’t matter, because there was no longer one Erick to read. The man’s defense was built to predict an opponent who moved like a person, two arms and two legs and one center of mass. Erick had become a problem that arithmetic couldn’t hold.

The advantage turned over completely. A moment ago Savage had been the one dictating the dance, herding Erick backward with strikes that allowed no answer. Now he was the one giving ground, pressed from every side at once, forced to read four weapons where he had expected two fists. He was still magnificent. He swatted the flail off its arc, twisted clear of the lance, caught the whip on his forearm and shrugged it away, and Erick simply let the rhythm reset and sent it all in again from new angles, the shield drinking whatever got through.

The man learned fast. That was the danger in him, and Erick saw it happening in real time. By the third volley Savage had stopped trying to retreat out of the storm and started cutting into it instead, stepping toward the shield so that the weapons grew long behind their own reach and lost their bite. He caught the whip a second time and instead of casting it off he hauled on it, trying to drag Erick off balance and onto the ground where mass and centuries of grappling would settle the matter for good. Erick felt the pull and answered it without thinking, letting that whole limb go soft and liquid in the man’s grip so there was nothing solid to wrench, the flesh pouring away between his fingers and reforming a span farther down as a fresh blade. Savage found himself holding a fistful of nothing and a new edge already swinging at his wrist, and for the first time something crossed the ancient face that might have been respect.

He hadn’t given this gift to any of the others. The pincers closed toward his knee, and he pierced it with his foot, the bark cracking but holding; the spear tore a gash in his shoulder that closed almost as quickly as it had opened. He had received two blows that Erick would have killed a normal man, and he had remained standing through both, and Erick understood with grim clarity that he could destroy that body all day and never let it go. And that was precisely why he wasn’t trying. He didn’t need the man destroyed. He needed to unbalance him for an instant, and everything else was merely the price to pay for it.

He didn’t try to win. He couldn’t, not in the minutes he had, against something that didn’t tire and didn’t give up. One well-aimed blow was all it would take to secure his escape.

The attack came in a feint. He raised his spear, deliberately telegraphing the blow, and Savage dodged, exactly as Erick had planned. The movement transferred the man’s weight half a step to his back foot, exposing his flank for an instant. Erick delivered the blow with the flail at the same instant, the full weight of the spiky blade delivering a low, powerful blow, striking Savage squarely in the ribs.

The impact bent him sideways and knocked him down, sending him flying across the road and crashing into the trunk of one of the dead trees with enough force to split it in two. The trunk cracked in the middle, the upper half tumbling into a shower of snow, and Savage landed beneath it in a pile of white, splintered wood.

The amber screen in Erick’s vision pulsed insistently. He had wasted almost five minutes watching it. The number on the window had changed, and not in his favor.

He turned his head. The road behind him was now deserted of policemen; their vehicles were already leaving, their taillights obscured by snow, the men inside alive and gone. That was all he had come for.

He let his arms recede. The pincer and the flail, the spear, the shield, and the whip softened and retreated to the limb from which they had sprung, the green flesh flowing into two ordinary arms, the uniform seal closing over them again. The boots opened, and the momentum lifted him off the road.

Below him, Savage was already rising. The broken tree slid from his shoulders as he stood, and he moved without any sign that the blow had hit him, distributing his weight, turning his face to the figure in the sky as if the conversation between them had been interrupted at that instant. The blow that shattered a trunk had given Erick no more than a few seconds’ distance.

He didn’t waste them. He couldn’t defeat the man, not there, not now, not with a heart strapped to his back and time running out. Whatever Vandal Savage was doing alone on a frozen road in the middle of a planned apocalypse would be a question for another day. He filed away the image of the man’s face along with the cold note that accompanied it, the certainty that they would meet again under worse circumstances.

The jets opened at full power. The sound barrier shattered above him with a dry thud, and he became once more a dark line, tearing through the falling ice toward the interior, the red thread in his steady vision, the girl at its end, the window still open by the narrowest edge that mattered.