Ascension Code: Reborn in the DC Universe - Chapter 0152

Chapter 152

At an altitude of forty-seven kilometers, the sky ceased to be the sky.

Above the wing line, the blue thickened into a deep indigo that flirted with the black of space, and the first stars burned fixed, without twinkling, because there was almost no atmosphere left to make them tremble. Below, the curvature of the Earth was clearly outlined against the horizon, an arc of milky light separating the planet from the void, and the whole of Alaska fit within a window: mountain ranges reduced to wrinkles of plaster, glaciers to veins of marble, the Arctic night advancing westward like a tide of ink.

The aircraft hovered motionless in the middle of it all.

It didn’t orbit, it didn’t glide, it didn’t describe waiting circles. It hovered, with the obscene precision of a hummingbird frozen in mid-air, supported by vector thrusters that responded to corrections of milliseconds and by a pair of wings unlike any wing ever recorded in an engineering manual. Wide blades of variable geometry, capable of reconfiguring themselves mid-flight, of pushing the machine in any direction that physics tolerated and in some that it accepted only reluctantly. The Engineer had poured into it everything he knew and a little more of what he discovered only while building. It was, he himself admitted with modesty gnashing his teeth, the best that a single man could design alone in this generation.

From the outside, the fuselage consumed radar, heat, and light with equal appetite. For the satellites scanning that quadrant, for the tracking stations buried in the ice below, that point in the stratoceum was empty.

Inside, the cockpit was the size of a war room.

None of the claustrophobia of fighter jets, none of the panels cluttered with switches inherited from half a century of military aviation. The space opened up on two smooth levels, lined with a dark composite that absorbed the sound of footsteps, and the control surfaces only existed when needed, sprouting in blades of light on the structural glass and dissolving when dispensed with. The main chair was in the exact center, elevated half a hand’s breadth, with sightlines for each active projection.

Erick had been sitting there for nine hours.

Not like someone piloting. The aircraft flew itself with competence superior to that of any pair of hands, and he let it do its work. He sat as if presiding, his forearms resting on the armrests, one ankle crossed over his knee, his face bathed in the cold glow of the holographic screen that floated before him on a generous scale.

On the screen, a polished concrete corridor glided along to the rhythm of a wheelchair.

The image bore the unmistakable signature of human vision: the micro-tremors of the saccade, the involuntary blinking cutting frames, the breath imposing its subtle tide on the framing. The lenses were offspring of an unlikely marriage between Morgana and the Engineer, organic films thinner than a tear, cultivated to live on the cornea without any examination revealing them, transmitting through compressed pulses that hitched a ride on the electromagnetic background noise of the planet itself. No battery, no metal, no emission that a scanner could detect.

Thanks to them, Erick and Artemis had seen everything.

They watched Gotham slip away from the window of the unregistered helicopter. They saw the entire continent pass silently beneath Paula, the six agents in ballistic masks motionless as furniture, the sun leaping from side to side in deliberate course corrections that didn’t fool the passenger for a single minute. They saw the concrete mushroom emerge from the white plain, the elevator that was a cube of steel and glass, the corridors that descended and descended as if the world’s ground were negotiable.

And throughout the entire descent, Erick smiled.

It wasn’t a smile of joy. It was the involuntary smile of a player before an expensive chessboard, the recognition of a craft executed at the highest level. Amanda Waller had buried a cathedral in the ice. Segmented elevators that transformed each section of the shaft into an autonomous fortress, labyrinths calculated to burn the sense of direction of any intruder, seventy floors of functions that he could only infer from the crumbs: the smell of ozone that Paula registered near the ducts, the drop in temperature on the tenth floor, the different weight of the silence where the concrete had been dimensioned to contain something that breathed.

What are you keeping down there, Amanda?

Every corner that Paula’s eyes swept over was digested in real time. To the right of the main projection, a three-dimensional model of the complex grew layer by layer, a skeleton of bluish light slowly rotating on its axis, fueled by the impeccable accounting of the woman below. Twenty-three wheel rotations, left. Eleven, right. Slanted gallery, forty-one in a straight line. Morgana converted each fragment into geometry, cross-referencing it with seismic data stolen from research stations, with concrete purchase records traced to shell companies, with the anomalous electricity consumption that a rural cooperative in Alaska had been reporting for six years without anyone in Washington finding it noteworthy. The skeleton gained flesh.

Artemis occupied the second chair, half a step back and to the left, and hadn’t actually sat down at any point. He remained on the edge of the seat, elbows on his knees, chin resting on his knuckles, his gray eyes fixed on the transmission with the fixity of someone standing guard. From time to time he murmured an observation, and Erick incorporated it into the model: that agent limped on his left side, that door had an external hinge, that corridor echoed too hollow to be solid. Two intelligences working the same quarry from different angles, he distilling structure, she distilling people.

It went on like that for hours. A clean, almost serene job.

Even the glass room.

…

Erick’s smile died without any intermediate stages.

In an instant he was there, curious, sharp, cataloging the anteroom and its two mismatched doors. The next instant the glass wall ceased to be a mirror, the cell appeared, and something inside his chest clenched like a hand.

The screen showed what Paula saw, and Paula saw her daughter.

Erick had already witnessed torture. He had inflicted things he preferred not to name and filed the memories away in compartments he rarely visited. None of that prepared him for the inventory that Paula’s eyes, clinical and maternal at the same time, made of that hanging body: the bruises in different stages of blooming, deposited with machine-like regularity, the nose out of alignment, the dark crust running from her lip to her chin, the foot missing a toe. The white vapor escaping from her mouth with each breath, because someone had decided that the cell should cool down inch by inch.

Beside him, a dry crack.

Then another. And another. Artemis had clenched her hands, and the joints gave way one by one, with a crackling of firewood, and beneath the skin of her forearms the new muscles moved like taut steel cables. She said nothing. She didn’t need to. Her fury had a temperature and filled the entire cockpit, rising up the walls, condensing on the glass. The arm of the seat groaned softly beneath her fingers, and Erick registered, in a cold corner of his mind that never switched off, that he would need to ask the Engineer for a more honest alloy for the furniture.

He understood the will because he shared it. They were forty-seven kilometers high in a machine that dove better than it flew, carrying between them enough power to transform the surface of that installation into a crater and open up the seventy floors as if peeling fruit. The mathematics of violence was simple and seductive, and for three whole seconds Erick executed it, floor by floor, breaking point by breaking point.

Then he put the bill in the drawer and breathed a sigh of relief.

Going down now was condemning Jade. A place like that didn’t keep valuable prisoners without protocols for losing them, and the collar around her neck was the written promise of that. Anger was fuel, not a plan. He let her burn where she was, feeding her lucidity instead of consuming it.

Down below, Amanda leaned over a thin-stemmed microphone.

What came next, they both watched without blinking. The voice, too sweet, coming through the speaker, Jade’s head rising millimeter by millimeter, and then the exact moment her eyes met her mother’s behind the glass and twenty years of armor cracked all at once. The dry lips parting. The whisper beginning to emerge.

Amber turning red.

Erick watched the electrical discharge course through Jade’s body frame by frame, because his perception accelerated on its own in moments like that, transforming two seconds into a small forensic eternity. He saw the arch of her back, her feet losing their footing, her entire weight falling onto her already raw wrists. He saw, superimposed on everything, the set of numbers running along the left edge of the frame: Paula’s telemetry.

Because the lenses didn’t just transmit images. They also showed intraocular pressure, pupil diameter, the rate at which the heart pumped blood through the retinal capillaries. And Paula’s numbers were screaming. Pulse jumping from fifty-eight to one hundred and twelve in four seconds. Pupils dilated beyond what the room’s light justified. Microtremors in the image revealing the subtle vibration of the entire body, that low-magnitude earthquake that precedes the collapse of a dam.

The sensors revealed what the eyes alone might have hidden: the Huntress was a hair’s breadth away from rising from her wheelchair and killing everyone in that room.

And, as much as part of Erick wanted to watch it, she would die before reaching the elevator.

He touched the control to his temple with two fingers, a gesture that had become almost purely ceremonial, and spoke softly, in the metronome-like tone he reserved for disarming bombs.

“Jade can handle it. She’s holding on. Look at her.” He paused for the length of two of her heartbeats. “We don’t know what this collar does. If you react now, all of this will have been in vain, and she’s the one who pays the price. Breathe, Paula.”

On the bank, the numbers hesitated. One hundred and twelve. One hundred and nine. One hundred and one. The image quieted down degree by degree, Paula’s hands disappeared under the blanket, crushing the steel of the handles, and the cracked dam decided to hold out for another day.

Artemis exhaled slowly through her teeth, as if releasing pressure.

“She was going.”

“Yes.” Erick didn’t look away. “And I wouldn’t blame her.”

…

The collar.

Now that the fury had been put on its own leash, it was on her that Erick’s gaze lingered, on that dark metal ring resting on the thin veins of Jade’s neck, its amber light pulsing in a slow, patient rhythm, obscene in its calmness. A mechanical organ marking time on the jugular of someone he had sworn to remove from there.

It was an electric shock, that’s what it showed. It wasn’t, he’d bet his hand, everything she was hiding. No one designed a device of that size, with that engineering signature, to function as a cattle fence. There was too much bulk in the ring, too much redundancy in the pulsation. Injectors, perhaps. Fast-acting toxin. A hollow charge turned inward. Any of those hypotheses transformed the rescue into a problem of another category: it wasn’t enough to get to Jade, it wasn’t enough to open the cell, it wasn’t even enough to get her out of the complex. As long as that amber point pulsed, Amanda Waller would hold her life between her thumb and forefinger, a whim of distance away.

So you go out first.

Erick closed his eyes for a second and descended to the silent place where his orders didn’t need a voice. The mental command went forth clean, branching, addressed.

The right corner of the cockpit blossomed.

One screen, then four, then eleven, blades of light piling up and rearranging themselves in a cascade as the intelligences he had created rolled up sleeves they didn’t have. Each frame in which the collar appeared, from the first glimpse through Paula’s eyes, was isolated, enlarged, stacked, and fused into a three-dimensional reconstruction; the fraction of a second in which Jade arched under the discharge yielded a thermal spectrum deduced from the brightness, an estimate of amperage, the probable location of the capacitor by the distortion the pulse imprinted on the image. In parallel, invisible tentacles penetrated the world: servers of agencies that didn’t appear on any organizational chart, files of military patents buried under layers of secrecy, databases of three universities researching the containment of meta-humans thinking they were researching neurology. Each digital lock giving way without alarm, each document being read, weighed, discarded, or filed in a column that grew under the provisional title that Morgana had chosen with her usual formality: *working hypotheses, sir*.

In the brief moment Paula had seen her daughter, the machines already knew more about that necklace than most of the technicians who had installed it.

It wasn’t enough. Yet.

…

“Natasha.”

Her voice was born in the air of the cockpit, without any apparent speaker, with that slightly acidic texture that distinguished it from her sister’s.

“I’m already involved with four federal networks, if that’s what you’re asking for.”

“That’s what I was going to ask for.” Erick turned his seat a few degrees, staring into the indigo void beyond the glass as if he could see his opponent on the other side. “I want an opening in that base’s defense. And I want its satellite.”

“I’ll pretend this is simple, for the sake of team morale.”

It wasn’t, and all three knew it. An installation of that size couldn’t survive suspended by fiber optic cables crisscrossing the tundra, vulnerable to any backhoe, mappable by any infrastructure audit. Information autonomy demanded its own sky: a dedicated satellite, closed encryption, an uplink that didn’t need permission from any operator. The problem lay in the crowd. Thousands of objects were sweeping the orbit at that moment—commercial, scientific, military, dead—and one of them, dressed in the paperwork of a meteorological project or a failed telecommunications constellation, belonged to Amanda Waller. Finding which one was like searching for a specific lie in an ocean of bureaucracy, and the lie had been written by one of the most meticulous people on the planet.

But absolute care didn’t exist. There was far too much care for the number of hands involved. A seventy-story base isn’t built without contracts, and contracts cast shadows: a launch with a payload mass incompatible with the declared one, an orbital window purchased through an intermediary that only existed for eleven months, insurance paid by a subsidiary whose address was an empty room in Delaware. In some file, on some server, in some line of some spreadsheet that a bored employee filled out on a Friday, something had leaked.

And Erick would find out.

Natasha’s screens opened on the wall opposite Morgana’s, and the entire cockpit became an aquarium of light: on one side the anatomy of the harness being dissected, on the other the orbital catalog being sifted through, launch records from the last fifteen years trickling down in columns too fast for human eyes, intersected with telemetry stolen from three different tracking networks. In the center, untouched, the concrete corridor continued to slide past Paula’s eyes.

Artemis stood up. She walked to the central projection, arms crossed, and stood there, a dark silhouette against the image of her mother being led through the bowels of the fortress. When she spoke, her voice came out low and hoarse.

“She’s going to flash the code.”

It wasn’t a question. Erick simply tilted his head, and together they watched the final moment of the visit: Jade’s eyes filling the entire panel, and then the sequence—short, precise, rhythmic, long, short—the particular alphabet that Paula had distilled decades ago in afternoons of practice disguised as play. On this side, no machine needed to decode anything. Artemis moved her lips along, silently forming the three words, and something on her shoulders shifted, a weight changing nature without diminishing.

We came to save you.

In the transmission, Jade’s eyes widened slowly, an understanding igniting behind her ruined face, and then the escort swung the chair and the door swallowed everything.

…

They led Paula through corridors that the three-dimensional model absorbed with gratitude, and left her in a secluded room on the seventieth floor. Four by four, narrow bed, steel sink, a chair bolted to the floor. The door sealed with a pneumatic sigh, and the image quieted: Paula sat on the edge of the bed, her hands flat on her knees, and began to stare at the bare wall with the mineral patience of someone who has already waited for worse things in worse places.

Erick leaned back in the captain’s chair for the first time in hours and let the whole picture settle.

The clock was now ticking against him, and strangely so. Amanda Waller hadn’t brought the Huntress to the heart of her fortress to offer her lodging. She wanted her as a tool, the emotional key to unlock what torture hadn’t, and yet the piece lay untouched on a shelf. No interrogation, no proposal, no charade of a table with two chairs and a glass of water. Just the visit, the calculated display of her broken daughter, and then silence.

Why haven’t you used it yet?

Possible answers paraded by, and none pleased him. Amanda might be letting the image of the cell work on its own, marinating her mother in despair until cooperating seemed like an idea of ​​her own. She might be waiting for someone, and the thought dragged along the file Morgana had gathered days before, a small and unpleasant name, a doctor who made other people’s minds his instrument. Or she might, and this hypothesis was the one that gnawed at her, have noticed something. A detail out of place. A recovery too good for a woman who should be confined to that chair.

It didn’t matter. Either version ended up with the same arithmetic: it had hours, not days, and the owner of the chessboard thought the next move was hers.

Erick reached out and touched the projection of the collar, slowly turning it between his fingers, the amber point pulsing against his palm like a borrowed heart.

Let her find out.

He wasn’t going to wait.