Ascension Code: Reborn in the DC Universe - Chapter 0157

Chapter 157

The control room had always had a sound of its own, and it took Amanda thirty years of service to finally hear it.

It was the air conditioner. A low, warm, indifferent hum, running through the ceiling vents since the day that floor had been sealed under the ice. The machine hadn’t changed. What had changed was everything that used to surround it: the overlapping voices of the operators, the clatter of the keyboards, the administrative rhythm of a place that functions. All that remained was the hum, and she listened to it as one listens to one’s own pulse in the early morning, too loud to be ignored, too intimate to be admitted aloud.

Amanda kept her hands open on the brushed steel table. Clenched fists tell stories.

On the screens that were still responding, the base appeared in disjointed slices. An empty corridor in sector four. A storage room door blinking between locked and open, as if the lock had forgotten its own name. The frozen image of a staircase where nothing had moved for eleven minutes. The rest was drizzle, that grey mosaic that tells you nothing and yet occupies the entire wall, forcing anyone to look.

The screen in sector one was still functioning, and it was the one she avoided. On it, frozen in the last frame the system had managed to register before dying, was the irregular opening in the concrete through which that thing had entered. Concrete and rebar twisted inwards, like a mouth. Amanda had already authorized two preliminary reports on whatever it was, and both came back with the same technical word in three different paragraphs: undetermined. A scaly creature two and a half meters tall, reptile-like head, jaw opening to the sides, piercing rifle fire like one pierces through rain. She had built that fortress against metahumans, against aerial invasions, against internal sabotage, and against her own imagination. She hadn’t built it against that, because that wasn’t on any list.

Two women were supposed to be locked up on the floor below their feet.

They weren’t. The cell remained there, intact in its white geometry, with shards of glass scattered on the floor and the wheelchair tilted on its side. But it was empty, and had remained empty long enough for the word escape to cease being a hypothesis. No door in that sector had registered an opening. No biometric reader had detected passage. The elevators remained stuck between floors, the ventilation ducts were too narrow for an adult body, and yet mother and daughter had evaporated from within a reinforced concrete block specifically designed to contain people like them.

Which route to take was impossible to determine. And that, as bad as it was, was still the least of their problems. The biggest problem was not knowing where they were now, or where they were going.

Amanda had been working with probabilities since before she had an office with her own name on the door, and the highest probability remained the simplest: two fugitives, one of them with fourteen days of torture on her body, would look for a way out and use that way out the instant they found it. That’s what any mercenary would do. That’s what she herself would do.

But there was the way Paula had looked at the camera.

It wasn’t the gaze of someone searching for a door. It was the gaze of someone searching for a face. And Amanda, who had spent her entire career reading far worse men in far smaller rooms, knew how to translate that without any margin for error.

The service elevator stopped on that floor.

The doors slammed shut with a metallic creak, and Rick Flag stepped out before they even finished closing, with the gait of someone who’d been to a hundred similar places and never liked any of them. The two assassins escorting Amanda, positioned on either side of the central table, turned their heads toward the elevator simultaneously, a professional reflex devoid of any courtesy.

That’s when something else came through the door.

He passed sideways, because he couldn’t fit facing forward. A great white shark, shoulders too broad for the space, skin scarred with old wounds, and a mouth half-open in an arc of teeth that defied any terrestrial anatomy. King Shark crossed the room behind Flag, and his footsteps echoed across the technical floor in a heavy cadence, each step eliciting a low crack from the loose planks.

The operators huddled around the consoles. None of them lifted their faces. A young man in a crumpled dress shirt continued typing the same command line for a full three seconds, oblivious, his eyes fixed on the screen and his back as stiff as stone.

Amanda took her headphones off and placed them on the table. Not because they were in the way. Because taking them off made her seem like someone who still decides when to listen.

“How’s it going?”

Flag stopped two steps from the table.

“Complicated.” He didn’t soften anything. He never did. “After they broke down our door, the invaders spread throughout the entire base. Some have already been intercepted. Peacemaker, Bloodthirsty, and the rest of Task Force X are on top of them, and those guys are cornered.” A short pause, exactly the size of a problem. “The troublesome ones are the ones we can’t track.”

Amanda recorded the sentence structure. Flag hadn’t said there were few, nor that there were many. He’d said he couldn’t track them, and a soldier with forty years of war behind him chooses his words with the same care he uses to choose his firing position. If he knew how many there were, he would have said the number. If he knew what they were, he would have said that too.

“Count?”

“No reliable count.” He didn’t even try to disguise it. “The cameras that are still responding cover less than a third of the corridors, and half of them show what happened ten minutes ago instead of what’s happening now. I’m treating each sector as if it has hostile elements inside until proven otherwise. It’s slower. It’s what can be done.”

Amanda turned her face toward the wall of canvases, measuring the drizzle.

“And what about the system recovery?”

The question was thrown into the air, without a named recipient, as he always did when he wanted to see who had the courage to answer. The technicians had been working without interruption for more than half an hour, taking turns at terminals, taking down entire services and setting up others in their place, everyone’s face illuminated by the cold blue of the monitors. The man at the center console swallowed hard before speaking.

“Madam, the task is getting harder, not easier.” He hesitated, and the hesitation cost more than the sentence itself. “Whatever has taken control of our systems has a level of proficiency far beyond what we are prepared to face. Every route we close, it has already closed first. And when we reopen, it’s already inside.”

Amanda absorbed it without moving a muscle in her face.

There was an obvious solution, and she was too good to pretend not to see it. Take everything down. Cut the power to the servers, kill the entire network, turn the base into a blank, mute block of concrete, and force the intruder to fight in the dark like everyone else. The problem was that the dark doesn’t choose sides. What she still controlled and what had already been stolen from her ran through the same fiber optic veins, fed by the same reactors, and shutting down one side meant shutting down the other. She would lose the cameras, the electromagnetic locks, the elevators that still responded, the telemetry from the collars. Above all, she would lose what still kept her sitting in that chair: the ability to give orders and know that they were coming.

No one cuts off their own arm to prove that someone else’s hand is worthless.

The technicians kept trying the opposite approach, isolating instead of knocking down, and Amanda watched the effort out of the corner of her eye like someone watching someone trying to empty a basement with a glass. They would raise a barrier, and it would fall. They would raise another, and it would fall faster than the first. At one point, one of them managed to regain control of an entire block of locks on the twelfth floor and even let out a sigh of relief. Fifteen seconds later, all the doors in that block opened by themselves, one after the other, in a cascading crack that sounded through the loudspeakers like applause.

At that moment, within each duct and rack of that buried complex, a silent war raged. On one side, an unknown force seeped through the systems connected to the satellite network, taking over one by one the channels that depended on the sky to exist. On the other, what remained of Amanda locked itself within independent servers, those never intended to communicate with the outside world, protected precisely by their own obsolescence. Neither side saw the whole picture. Neither knew for sure what the other already possessed. There were layers of darkness for everyone, and that should have been comforting.

It wasn’t.

Amanda continued to feel naked, and the sensation was anything but metaphorical. It was physical, a chill, lodged between her shoulder blades, that animal instinct that warns that something imminent is about to happen and that the rest, including the direction from which it comes, remains hidden.

On the floors below his feet, two female assassins were walking freely.

And somewhere in the base, the invaders began to make noise. Not the noise of gunfire, which she would recognize and know how to locate. A structural noise, distant, difficult to name. A low vibration rising through the columns, a metal creak somewhere it shouldn’t creak, the groan of a wall accepting a weight it wasn’t designed to bear.

Amanda turned to Flag.

“I want all the prisoners released.”

His eyes widened. It was the only visible reaction, and it lasted less than a second, but in Rick Flag’s world, that was equivalent to a scream.

“You know very well what that means.” His voice dropped in tone, became harsh, almost paternal, and that was precisely the problem. “If we put them all on the field at the same time, the chance of things getting out of control is extremely high. I’m not talking about operational risk. I’m talking about losing the core.”

Amanda felt the frustration rise in her throat and swallowed it whole, the way she always swallowed everything.

She knew exactly what she was ordering to be opened. These weren’t ordinary cells, and these weren’t ordinary people. From the thirty-first floor down, her fortress ceased to be a prison and became a zoo: the reinforced chambers, the wells with electrified walls, the pressurized tanks, the corridor where even the guards couldn’t enter without double escort. Each of those occupants had been placed there because there was no better place in the world to put them, and the only thing separating them from the rest of the base was the thickness of a metal sheet and the obedience of a collar.

The collar still obeyed. That was all she had.

He was right. That was what hurt. The detention sector’s leashes still responded to her, and therefore the prisoners were still hers. But property doesn’t sustain itself. If she stayed there, hands outstretched on a table, waiting for the technicians to reclaim a network that no longer obeyed, someone in Washington would read the report and arrive at the simplest conclusion in the world: the woman had lost her fortress. And then it wouldn’t just be the base. They would come to retrieve the assets one by one, with signature, stamp, and escort, as they had already done with the giant. She still remembered the day they signed the transfer of that sarcophagus without even asking her opinion. She remembered every line of the form.

There are defeats that cost you a position, and there are defeats that cost you your job.

“Do it.”

Flag held her gaze for a moment. There was no arguing, and he knew the moment. He exhaled through his nose, a short sigh like a soldier who had obeyed worse orders, and nodded once.

Then he turned his back and went back to the elevator, with King Shark behind him.

The doors slammed shut on them both. On the other side of the metal, Flag already had the radio in his mouth, calling the rest of Task Force X to the detention sector, and the last thing Amanda heard before the hum of the air conditioner returned to fill the room was the low, satisfied snort that rose from the shark’s throat.

The hunt had begun.

…

The last soldier fell before realizing he had already lost.

Zack landed a punch on the side of the helmet, felt the man’s neck buckle in the right direction—the direction that knocks you out—and the body collapsed to its knees before tumbling sideways onto the polished concrete floor. The echo of the impact lingered longer than the impact itself.

Around them, thirty others were scattered around the room.

Heavily armed, all of them. Assault rifles still strapped to their slings, level four vests, stun grenades hanging in orderly rows, radios crackling static inside chest pockets. None of it had served any purpose. Some had their necks twisted at an angle that the human body does not forgive. Others displayed broken bones protruding from their uniforms, white and dirty under the intermittent light. And others carried bullet holes in places that left no doubt about the competence of whoever had fired them.

What was most disturbing in that room was the sound. The radios kept working. Attached to the vests of men who weren’t going to respond anymore, they hissed, asked for confirmation, repeated codes in a calm, call center cadence, and the effect of this on an environment full of warm bodies was difficult to describe. Zack had already experienced this dozens of times in the capsule, in scenarios identical down to the smell. Nobody had warned him that, outside, the radios take so long to give up.

Zack stood up.

One meter and sixty centimeters tall. He was shorter than his brothers, even shorter than the females in the group, and it had taken him a long time to stop worrying about it. His compact body had another function, and it had taken him years to learn what it was.

The suit clung to his skin like a second muscle. It was modular armor, designed by the master, and the word “modular” made all the difference: while his brothers chose thick plates and reinforced joints, trading movement for protection, he had assembled his own configuration in the opposite direction. Thin layers at the joints. Reactive fiber on the back and flanks. The minimum amount of metal where metal slows things down. Each piece fitted by himself, one by one, on the workbench, under the watchful eye of the engineer who merely observed and allowed him to make mistakes. Zack loved that suit in a way that his brothers found slightly ridiculous.

Two guns on his waist.

From a distance, anyone would say they were Western revolvers, and that resemblance was no accident. The shape was exactly the same: long barrel, curved grip, visible cylinder. The difference lay in what happened when the trigger was pulled. Each of those pistols spat out a projectile of a caliber that, in any catalog in the world, would require a weapon mounted on a bipod, two men to operate it, and a third to load it. The force needed to stop a shot like that couldn’t be contained in one wrist. The engineer had solved the problem the way he solved all others: by rejecting the problem. He compressed the impossible into two pieces that Zack pulled out with one hand. The recoil didn’t disappear, swallowed by a compensation system that buzzed for half a second after each shot, like a bell rung on the wrong side. The first time Zack fired it, still on the workbench, his arm went numb up to his elbow. By the tenth time, it didn’t anymore.

He spun on his heels and glanced around the room.

Floor-to-ceiling panels, copper busbars as thick as a man’s arm, transformers sealed in gray cabinets, a constant smell of ozone and hot varnish. A power room. Not *the* power room, just one more among the hundreds scattered throughout the floors of that subterranean complex, each feeding its own section of the fortress, all identical enough that he’d lost count of how many he’d passed through.

Natasha’s voice appeared inside his head, guided by the sensors in his suit, without passing through any speakers.

“Zack, this room doesn’t have a control node. Look for the next one.”

Next. Always next. That floor was a chessboard of identical doors, and his job was to open them one by one until he found the one he wanted, cleaning whatever was inside and moving on before the noise attracted company. Seven rooms to get there. Seven times the same conclusion. He didn’t complain, because complaining was Otávio’s job, and because each wrong door meant another chance to find someone on the other side.

He nodded, even though no one there could see the gesture. The smile hadn’t left his face since his feet had touched the ice, and it wasn’t nervousness. Since the first day of training with the sensei, facing someone better than him had become the only thing capable of making him completely quiet inside. The Western movies he had watched night after night during the months of training had considerably worsened the situation.

Among the five, he knew he was the hardest to control. No one needed to say it. Goliath had weight, Ambos had method, Otávio had that silence that measured everything before accepting anything, Zoe had a patience he never quite understood. Zack had this: a taste for the thing itself.

But he wasn’t going to let his father down.

It was at that moment that the door opened.

The first man entered with his weapons already drawn, pointed toward the center of the room, and didn’t hesitate for even a second as he crossed the threshold. Red uniform, white trousers, closed metal helmet, without a single gap through which his face could be seen. The second came right behind and occupied the left flank with the ease of someone who had done it a thousand times before. Blue uniform, military cut, wide belt, and strapped all over his outfit, in points chosen for quick draw, a collection of boomerangs with darkened edges.

Zack recognized the second one before the first. Not by the face, but by the fabric. His studies with the sensei included many things that seemed useless at the time, and an out-of-season Australian military uniform was the kind of detail he had memorized without ever imagining where he would use it.

The Peacemaker and Captain Boomerang stopped three meters from the door.

Zack read the two men in less time than it takes to blink, and what he read was not encouraging. Neither of them had swept the room before entering. Neither had looked at the thirty bodies on the floor. Ordinary men enter a place like this and stop, even if only for a moment, even if only with their eyes. These two had crossed the threshold measuring only one thing: where the living threat was. The one in red held the pipes firmly, without the slightest wavering of his wrist, his weight distributed backward. The one in blue had his hand resting on his belt, his fingers already touching the metal edge, his body turned at an angle that left his arm free.

Professionals. Good. The kind the sensei described without any disdain in his voice.

And they both had the same problem.

The room’s light flickered. It had been dimming since before they entered, an irregular pulsing of lamps that had already lost half their power, and in the intervals of darkness the creature in the middle of the room became just an outline. A figure too short to be a soldier. Too broad in the shoulders for its height. Standing in a way that didn’t fit in a place full of corpses.

Then the light returned with force, and they saw.

A primate. Standing erect with disconcerting ease, without any trace of that stooped sway that nature usually imposes. The black clothing followed every line of the body, smooth, without plates, unlike anything either of them expected to find in a military installation. The eyes gleamed with intelligence, and gleamed in their direction, measuring, calculating, finding amusement.

On his head, a cowboy hat.

The Peacemaker did not lay down his arms. The voice came from the helmet, flattened by a filter, sounding more like an official statement than a conversation.

“Monkey, I doubt you’ll surrender.” He took a half step to the side, widening the angle, and Captain Boomerang followed the movement without needing an order. “And I doubt even more that your friends will get out of here alive. Maybe, if you surrender now, we can still help.”

The light flickered again, and the room plunged.

In the darkness, a laugh. Not a man’s laugh, nor the screech one expects from an animal. Something in between, hoarse and short, punctuated by a breath that seemed to be enjoying itself. It came from where the creature was and kept coming after the silence should have returned.

When the lights came back on, he was in exactly the same spot.

But now the two guns were spinning in his fingers, cylinder out, a lazy and perfect spin that neither of the two men had seen begin.

The monkey smiled.

“No.”

And the light went out.