Ascension Code: Reborn in the DC Universe - Chapter 0158

Chapter 158

Erick couldn’t say where in the safe he was.

The partial maps Natasha had managed to retrieve from the network before losing access ended two sectors back, and from there the armor returned readings that contradicted each other every ten meters: fluctuating estimated depth, electric fields that appeared and disappeared behind the walls, a layout of galleries that seemed designed by someone determined to confuse anyone who traversed it without a guide. Carelessness, no. Amanda didn’t waste concrete. The tangle had a purpose, and the absence of logic was the logic.

From the moment they arrived, the team had split up. Each had gone to their assigned part, and the reports arriving through the internal channel were short, dry, regular, with the cadence of busy people in need of help. Almost everything was under control. Erick watched the “almost” as one watches a lit candle in a room full of papers, but the “almost” didn’t justify standing still in the hangar listening to his own reactor. There was time. There were seventy floors of secrecy beneath his feet. And, for the first time since the ramp opened onto the Arctic, there was no one by his side.

So he walked, and not for a stroll. His usual curiosity drove him, the same curiosity that made him dismantle any machine that fell into his hands just to discover at what point the designer had lied to himself. Amanda Waller had spent twenty years sinking that complex into the tundra, and people like that don’t dig that deep for prisoners and civil servants. Something else was buried there. Technology that no manufacturer had signed off on, people the world thought were dead, archives worth governments, or whatever he lacked the vocabulary for. Erick wanted to know what it was before the night ended.

The corridors had the amber pulse of alarm he’d seen in the hangar, the hum of ventilation working for an absent audience, and the echo of his boots returned with a delay, as if the base needed a second to decide if that sound belonged to him. No guards. Sealed doors where Natasha had sealed them, doors wide open where someone had rushed out. A still-warm cup of coffee on a guard post, the seat turned to face the corridor, the hook where there should have been a weapon, empty. The entire Vault seemed to hold its breath, and Erick walked through that suspended breath.

It was at the junctions between one sector and another that he began to notice.

Heavy-gauge cables emerged from sealed conduits and disappeared into the rock at points that didn’t correspond to any need for power, ventilation, or communication. On the supporting beams, above the line of sight, compact volumes were encased in material that absorbed the thermal scan instead of reflecting it. One of them, when the sensors pressed harder, yielded a signature that Erick recognized from the workshops themselves, from the entrails of artifacts made to dismantle others. If that was what it seemed, and he couldn’t see what else it could be, the paranoid woman hadn’t been content with hidden turrets and corridors that closed into watertight compartments. She had prepared the Vault’s own tomb, with the same care she used to arrange the cells: if the place fell into the wrong hands, there wouldn’t be room left.

It was worrying for a simple reason. Those who are willing to erase their life’s work from the map no longer need to win. They only need to decide that they have lost.

He kept the information to himself and continued on, with the question that drove him more vivid than before. What was so valuable in there that it deserved a preventive death sentence?

The answer, or at least the beginning of it, appeared when the hallway ceased to be a hallway.

The concrete and steel finish, that identical surface that made each floor seem like the one before, suddenly ended in a bare stone opening. From then on, the Vault stopped pretending to be a building. It was a cave. Black rock, excavated with explosives and then smoothed just enough for a cart to pass through, veins of basalt gleaming under the amber of the emergency with a wet stone luster, even though the air was so dry it scratched the throat. The ceiling rose and fell without rule. The floor had been leveled, but retained, on its edges, the memory of the machines’ teeth. And embedded in the two walls, at irregular intervals, were doors.

No two are alike.

Some were as narrow as an apartment doorway. Others would have allowed a truck to pass through. There was one so low that Erick would have had to bend in half to get through it, and three meters ahead, a massive steel slab whose hinges were the size of locomotive axles. Beside each one, to the right, a plaque and a code panel. He understood before he finished the first reading. That was one of the wings of the collection: the cells of those who worked for Task Force X, or those who were still being persuaded to work there, each one custom-designed for its contents.

The acoustics were strange. A place built so that no one could hear anyone reflected each of Erick’s steps amplified, as if the rock, forbidden from carrying voices for so long, were taking its revenge on the first sound it received.

The first door he stopped in front of was unlit.

No light escaped through the crack below. The panel lay in a dead gray. Wide door, clear plaque: deep letters engraved in silver on the stone, Solomon Grundy.

The immortal pseudo-zombie. A name that, in any other context, would make a sensible man quicken his pace. Erick placed his palm on the metal plate and let the sensors pass through it. Nothing. No residual heat, no mass displacement, none of those electrical oscillations that a body produces even when it’s no longer exactly alive. Grundy wasn’t home. The cell was a steel coffin waiting for its owner, returning from wherever Amanda had sent him. She didn’t leave pieces idle on the board.

He moved on. Two, three, four doors, all dark, all silent, the silence of each one slightly different from the previous one, because emptiness also has a shape. On any other night he would have stayed there until dawn, reading signs and checking names. That night wouldn’t allow it. It was only on the fifth night that the panel was lit, a blue rectangle humming softly, and a line of white light escaped from under the door like spilled milk.

Silver plate. Poison Ivy.

Erick stopped. A light on meant an occupant. And, in that wing, an occupant was someone Amanda hadn’t wanted to take to the camp. Or couldn’t.

The last image he had of her was just mud, her knees, and the entire League surrounding her. The door that guarded her now was different from the others, and the difference wasn’t in the size. All the others in that gallery had been made to contain strength: thickness, weight, ship’s ironwork. Hers was thinner, almost delicate in comparison, and its contours were sealed by a continuous rubber gasket that wouldn’t let a single breath of air through. It wasn’t a cage. It was a seal. Whoever was inside wasn’t kept there by the resistance of the walls, but by the purity of what lay between them.

On the door, a hatch. Not the inspection slit of the others, but a wide, window-sized hatch, locked from the outside with a manual bolt. Erick pulled. The steel slid with a pneumatic sigh and revealed, just behind it, a second barrier of matte bars, as thick as a man’s wrist, which continued to lock the interior. Through them, the environment.

It was awful in a way that had nothing to do with dirt. White walls without a stain. White floor. A bed fixed to the floor, a sink and a steel toilet in the corner, an automatic drawer built into the wall through which meals were supposed to arrive without human intervention. And a light that didn’t come from any lamp he recognized, a washed-out spectrum, purplish at the edges, calibrated with the care of a poison. Not a grain of dust, not a shadow of mold, not the slightest suggestion that anything could take root there. For most people, a hospital room. For those who lived off the land, an illuminated grave.

In bed, lying on her side, was a woman.

Green skin. An orange jumpsuit, the anonymous uniform of any inmate in any prison, far too large for the body it contained. Bare feet on the sheet, deep red hair cascading over the edge of the mattress and hanging almost to the floor, the only thing in that cubicle that seemed to have any real color.

She heard the bolt. She sat down slowly, economical in her movements, like someone who had woken up a thousand times to the same ceiling and expected nothing different from the thousand and first. Only then did she look at the opening.

“You’re not a guard.”

It wasn’t a question.

Erick let his helmet retract. The plates slid back and in with a soft click, the dry, icy cave air hit his face, and the two stared at each other through the bars.

The resemblance was uncanny. Not in features, but in tone. Two faces of that pale green absent from any catalog of human skin, one on each side of a grate, in a hole deep in Alaska, staring at each other like reflections in a place where there shouldn’t be a mirror. She noticed it first. Eyebrows rose, her chin tilted, and a slow smile began to form.

“Look at that. So something really is happening.” Her voice was hoarse, low, with a velvety undertone she knew how to use. “That tremor I felt a moment ago… it’s possibly you, isn’t it?”

“Good.” The corner of his mouth curled up. “Let’s say so.”

She laughed, a short sound that the cell seemed to absorb before it was finished, and sized him up and down, from the matte black of the plates to the open collar of his helmet, her green eyes lingering on the line of his neck where the armor ended and his skin began.

“It’s difficult to see a human with green skin like mine. Everyone I’ve met so far has been an alien.”

Erick returned the smile, that was all. She didn’t need to know how much of that statement was true, nor to what extent.

“I imagine the guards have left the floor.” She tilted her head toward the corridor, attentive to the silence there. “Whatever you’re doing, it must be causing quite a commotion up there.” A measured pause. “If you get me out of this cell, I can help.”

He said it while shifting position on the bed. One knee bent, his weight transferred to an arm extended behind him, his back arched enough that the overalls, unbuttoned at the front to his stomach, made it clear there was no blouse underneath. The edges of the fabric covered his breasts by a few centimeters, nothing more. A rehearsed pose, worn from so much use, executed with the naturalness that one only acquires after seeing it work on much more difficult men. Erick knew the calculation behind it: the offer, the body as an advance, the debt that would be collected later, at the worst possible moment.

“Tempting.” He didn’t look away, nor did he let his gaze fall. “But it’s hard to trust people like you, you know? Another one who, until recently, was trying to destroy the world. So to speak.”

It was the voice.

The armor was different. Larger, darker, unrelated to the one she knew. But she recognized the voice immediately, and the recognition flashed across her face before she could hide it: a timbre she’d heard in the swamp, sure, sharp, coming from some point she’d never been able to locate among the smoke and flames, and which had lingered in her memory ever since, without an owner. Now I had one. And it was green.

Erick continued as if he hadn’t noticed, or as if he had noticed and it was irrelevant.

“Now, if you give me some hints, maybe I’ll consider letting you go.”

That caught her off guard. For a second the smile vanished, replaced by something more attentive, more raw, the expression of a player who has just discovered that the opponent on the other side of the table doesn’t follow the rules she expected. Then the sarcasm returned, and it returned better.

“Well, well. A young hero negotiating with the villain.” She clicked her tongue. “The League isn’t going to like this.”

His response was a smile. No disagreement; a smile reserved for matters that no longer concerned him.

She noticed that too, and something behind those green eyes turned the page. “Hmm. Interesting.”

She stood up. The jumpsuit didn’t go back into place, and she didn’t adjust it. She took the few steps the cubicle allowed and came to the bars, her green fingers closing around them, and leaned against them until her face was a hand’s breadth from his, separated only by the cold metal. From up close he could smell it. Not the scent of the flowers she cultivated as a weapon, but the smell of nothing, of a sterile room, the perfume of a woman who had even been deprived of the right to her own scent.

Around her neck, a collar. A discreet ring, which could be mistaken for a piece of tacky jewelry, with a single point of red light pulsing at throat level. Activated. Listening.

“Can you take this away from me?”

Erick stared at the red dot. Deep in his ear, before he could finish formulating the question, Natasha answered.

“It’s possible.” The usual tone, clean, uniform. “I don’t have access to that part of the network. The sector is isolated from the control center, like the others. But the mechanism accepts manual release.”

He let the information sink in without changing his expression. He could have done so. He knew it now, and she didn’t. A difference like that was worth more than any lock.

“Maybe.” He pulled his head back just enough to get out of her reach. “First give me something to work with.”

Her smile grew teeth.

“A few floors below, in this same sector.” He lowered his voice, a habit of distrusting walls that not even that cell had taken away from him. “I overheard three guards talking about something kept under lock and key down there. From what they said, that part isn’t on the blueprints, much less in the system. Access is entirely manual.” His eyes gleamed. “Down there it’s simply a dungeon. Private. Amanda’s. It’s hard to know what she keeps there, but she keeps it very secure.”

Outside the plants. Outside the system. Erick thought about the areas where Natasha had found seedlings when she had infiltrated the network, entire pockets of the base defending themselves, without any connection whatsoever, and the piece fit into a gap he had carried since the hangar without knowing how to name it.

He nodded once, slowly, and took a step back.

“If there really is something there,” he said, walking away, amused, “consider yourself lucky.”

She was left unsure whether it was a promise or a farewell, and he didn’t give her time to find out.

Hera frowned. He watched the man in green descend the gallery, the broad back of his armor narrowing with the distance, the emergency light trickling down the black plates without finding a place to focus. He thought of shouting. The word reached his throat and stopped there, because what good would it do? As if he would come back. The sigh he let out was long, and he hadn’t even finished when a voice ran through the cave.

“Hey, handsome.”

She came from a few meters ahead, from the opposite wall. Feminine, serious, full-bodied, with a projection that effortlessly cut through the rock.

Erick turned that way. Hera did too, her face still between the bars. She was new to that cell and didn’t know the neighborhood; she’d never seen anyone, because nobody saw anybody there. But since she’d arrived, she’d been hearing, intermittently, a woman’s screams. Now the screams had an address.

He approached. The door was large, a gate two men tall, and the shutter, when he unlocked it, opened onto bars thicker than those of the previous cell. On the other side, another redhead.

It crossed his mind, against his will, that perhaps this was the floor for redheads. The thought lasted only as long as it took him to remember the first plaque he’d read in the gallery. Solomon Grundy didn’t fit the theory.

That cell had been built for the strong. The walls had the matte finish of the bars, with no visible joints, and the ceiling height was almost twice that of its neighbors. And the ceiling still seemed low to those inside.

The woman was, without exaggeration, one of the largest he had ever seen in his life. And he knew Wonder Woman personally. Broad shoulders, arms and thighs of dense musculature that the catsuit couldn’t disguise, the narrow waist of a body entirely built for effort, nothing excessive and nothing lacking. And beautiful. A beauty without compromise, strong features framed by hair lighter and more rebellious than Hera’s. She was in shape like very few people he knew. Better than Artemis. Better than Paula, even after her enhancements. He knew precisely what those two were capable of.

She didn’t approach the bars. She stood in the middle of the cell, her weight distributed with the naturalness of someone who had spent her life in a fighting stance, and waited for him to arrive. The difference compared to her neighbor was complete: no posing, no invitation, just a huge woman observing a man who shouldn’t be there.

On the sign, next to the door: Giganta.

The name pulled a thread. A villain, from the old days, mainly linked to Wonder Woman, who had disappeared completely years ago. No prison, no body, no news. She vanished from the world as if she had never existed.

Apparently, not quite so.

“So?” Erick stopped in front of the bars. “Do you have something to tell us?”

If the woman had stopped him along the way, she at least had something to share. No one shouts down a hallway like that to say goodnight.

“Good.” She crossed her arms, and the gesture made her forearms seem longer. “Unlike my friend over there, who arrived recently, I’ve been here for quite a while.” She spoke calmly, without the pretense of the other, in a tone that had already left behind the phase of seducing the exit. “And I can confirm one thing: what’s down there isn’t something as simple as a treasure guarded by Amanda. Mainly because there Amanda, let’s say, works on her own procedures.”

Erick didn’t interrupt her.

“The last time I was there, one of the world’s greatest mercenaries arrived completely pulverized. He was rushed into emergency surgery. I don’t know if he survived. After that, they transported me back to my cell. And I haven’t been back since.”

This information was added to other information he had been carrying for months, and the combination did not please him.

“Why were you taken there?”

“Simple. They were trying to isolate the cause. Where the powers come from.” She shrugged, a movement that shifted a considerable amount of muscle. “I don’t really know. I’m not technically qualified to answer that. But what you’re going to find there, for sure, won’t be so simple.”

He frowned.

Two sources, separated by a few meters of rock, converged on a single point: the neighbor, repeating what careless guards had let slip, and that woman, who had been down there and seen it with her own eyes. Rumor and testimony, one supporting the other. A first-rate mercenary, pulverized, arriving in a state of emergency at a basement that wasn’t on any blueprint. Slade. Erick suspected, from the warehouse, who had taken the body: Task Force X. Amanda. He had spent months treating the suspicion as a suspicion, because that’s what it was. A woman named Giganta, in a cave under the Alaskan ice, had just turned it into fact.

He sighed slowly and looked down the gallery to the point where the black rock swallowed the last emergency light. If Slade was there, what else could be?