The Undead Spider #93.
The docking tube sealed behind him with a pressure shift he felt in his ears, and Clark Kent stepped out of it and into the Watchtower's main corridor as Superman, which was not a transformation so much as a resumption -- the set of his shoulders, the pace, the way his eyes moved across every surface and registered and moved on.
He had been doing this for long enough that the two versions of himself required no effort to maintain as separate things. One of them lived in Metropolis with a desk and a deadline. The other one lived here, in the corridor of a space station orbiting four hundred kilometers above the planet he was responsible for, walking toward a conversation he had spent the last four hours arranging.
The Watchtower greeted him the way it always did -- the hum of the life support, the ambient light calibrated for human comfort at a distance from the sun that human comfort was not designed for, the faint trace of recycled air that never fully shook the quality of being processed.
He passed the monitor room and glanced in. Two League members on rotation, neither of them looking up. The screens behind them held the feeds he'd been reading from above the atmosphere on his way in -- Star City's emergency response grid, the quarantine radius, the casualty numbers that had stopped updating only because the count was finished.
Diana was waiting at the junction where the main corridor met the wing that housed the containment cells, standing with her arms crossed and her back to the wall, and she looked at him the way she sometimes looked at situations she had already assessed and was waiting for him to catch up to.
"You're back," she said.
"You sound surprised."
"Given the magnitude of what happened, I did not expect you to return so soon."
He stopped beside her and looked down the corridor toward the containment wing. The door at the end was sealed, the indicator light above it steady green, which meant the cell was holding. "It's been four hours."
"In my experience," Diana said, "Earth's justice systems take longer to arrive at a decision, even when the decision concerns how best to punish a mass murderer."
"That's why you don't go to court when you're Superman." He turned from the door and met her eyes. "You talk to the right people."
"And what did the right people say?"
He exhaled through his nose, something in his jaw working once before he answered. "The hardest part was getting Amanda to sign off on sending a potential recruit to the Phantom Zone."
Diana's chin lifted a fraction. "She considered recruiting him." It was not a question. The word recruited carried a weight in her mouth that pressed down on both syllables. "A man who came apart in an explosion and came back fighting -- who dug deeper when the two of us joined you, who treated the combined force of the Trinity as though it were an inconvenience to be worked through rather than an end. Amanda Waller would have to be out of her mind to consider him an asset."
"We spent two hours disagreeing on Belle Reve," Clark said. "And another hour on whether her special neckbands could stop his regeneration."
Diana looked at him for a moment. "It was noble of you to ask for something you could have simply done without permission."
"It was a tactical move." He glanced toward the monitor room. "Batman made it clear that it matters -- looping them in, building the record, making sure that when we serve justice we're doing it in a way that holds."
At the mention of the name, something shifted in Diana's face -- not much, a degree of stillness that had not been there before, and her eyes moved to a point slightly past his shoulder.
Clark watched her. "Any updates on his status?"
She shook her head. "Nothing new." A beat. "I've just never seen him so--"
"He'll be alright," Clark said. "The family is making sure of that."
She nodded once, and the stillness held for another moment, and then she let it go the way she let most things go -- not by resolving them, but by putting them aside in favor of what was in front of her.
"Oliver and Dinah?"
"Still in recovery." She said it evenly, and then added: "If we had not arrived a moment sooner--"
"We should have responded faster." The words came out flat and Clark did not dress them up. "The minute Felicity made the call. We had the location, we had the threat level, we had a bounty hunter with Czarnian biology operating without jurisdiction in a civilian area." Something moved behind his eyes, not quite heat, a pressure that had been sitting there since he'd stood in the radius and done the count himself. "Maybe we could have even caught that one calling himself the Spider before he blew himself into nothing."
Diana held his gaze. "Maybe."
"If he survived those explosions--" Clark stopped. Reorganized. "Lobo seems to think he did."
"Lobo's assessment is not without value," Diana said. "He tracked him across a city while operating under contract. He knows what he was hunting."
"If the Spider survived that, he is a bigger threat than we assumed." Clark looked at the corridor again, and at the door at the end of it, green and steady. "Have someone start a watch. Anything spider-themed, anything that matches the movement pattern from the accumulated footage."
"I'll see to it," Diana said.
She pushed off the wall and moved, and Clark fell in beside her, and they walked.
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Barry Allen was in the monitor room when they came through, which was not where Clark had expected to find him -- Barry's default mode in any building was to move through it faster than the building anticipated, and finding him seated at a console with his chin in his hand and his eyes on three screens simultaneously was its own kind of information.
He looked up when they entered. "Warden's here."
"How's he holding?" Clark said.
"Holding." Barry stood, and even standing he carried the restless quality of someone whose body was calibrated for speeds the room couldn't accommodate. "Cell's doing its job. The dampeners are running the inhibitor field at the upper threshold -- any higher and we start affecting the station's own systems." He paused. "He's been quiet for the last hour, which I find more unsettling than anything else he's done."
"Quiet how?" Diana asked.
"Sitting on the floor. Looking at the wall." Barry's mouth pressed flat. "Not like he's given up. Like he's thinking."
Clark said nothing to that. He moved to the secondary monitor, pulled up the cell feed, and looked at it. The figure on the screen was exactly as Barry had described -- cross-legged on the floor, back straight, eyes forward, with the settled quality of something that had decided to be patient because patience was serving a purpose.
"The inhibitor field is suppressing the regeneration?" he asked.
"Slowing it," Barry said. "Not stopping. He came in with a fresh arm -- right side, we think, based on the scarring differential -- and it's still at about eighty percent integration. The field is holding the cellular process at a crawl." He glanced at the readout beside the feed. "He lost the arm during the fight. Grew it back before we had him secured."
"He had a new arm before we finished the restraint sequence," Diana said. Her voice carried no particular weight, just the observation of someone recounting a fact that warranted recounting. "The Flash was still running the containment loop when the tissue closed."
Barry nodded at her. "Yeah. That happened."
Clark watched the figure on the screen sit with its patience. "What's the Phantom Zone projector status?"
"Assembly team has it on Level Six." Barry moved to the adjacent console and brought up the schematic. The projector was a piece of hardware that did not photograph well -- its geometry was wrong for two dimensions, built for a function that three-dimensional space only understood as a threat. "They're running calibration now. Waller's people wanted confirmation of the targeting parameters before they'd sign the transfer order."
"They have it," Clark said.
"Then we're about six hours from transfer-ready." Barry looked at him. "You want me to stay on cell watch until then?"
"Yes."
"Thrilling." Barry leaned against the console with his arms crossed, and there was something underneath the tone that was not entirely humor -- the look of someone who had pulled the bodies out of the radius in a fraction of a second and had not finished being in that experience yet. "Felicity Smoak wants a briefing," he said. "She's been calling since we docked."
"I know," Clark said.
"She's going to want answers about the response time."
"I know."
"She's going to be right," Barry said.
Clark held the feed for another moment -- the figure on the floor, the steady inhibitor light, the patience that was not peace -- and then turned from it. "Set up the call. She deserves the conversation." He glanced at Diana. "Projector first. Then Felicity. Then transfer."
Diana nodded.
They left Barry to the monitors and moved back into the corridor, and Clark did not look at the cell door on their way past, but he felt the weight of the room behind it the way he felt most things -- not through the walls, not with any of the senses he used when he was choosing to use them, but through the simple fact of knowing what was in there and what it had done and what the next six hours needed to hold.
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The breach started at the secondary power junction on Level Four.
Barry felt it before the alarms did -- the half-second stutter in the station's electromagnetic baseline, a hiccup so small that the monitoring system registered it as a calibration variance and logged it and moved on.
Barry's body did not move on. It pulled him out of the chair and into the corridor and down to Level Four in the time it took the monitoring system to decide the variance was worth a second look, and what he found at the junction was a panel that had been opened from the inside of the wall cavity, with three of the dampener relay nodes pulled and rearranged in a configuration that had no business working and did.
He looked at it for one full second.
Then he turned and ran.
The cell was empty when he hit the containment wing -- not breached, not forced, the door still sealed and the indicator still green and the interior standing open and quiet the way a room stood when it had not been occupied for some time, the inhibitor field running against nothing, the floor carrying the impression of where something heavy had sat for a long time and then stood up and left.
One droplet. Clark had flagged it in the briefing, Barry had read the file, and he had still underestimated what one droplet meant in practice -- the cellular architecture of a Czarnian replicating from a margin too small to track, the inhibitor field slowing the process and the process not caring, working in the space between the field's cycles with the patience of something that had been sitting on a floor for an hour deciding exactly how to do this.
Barry hit the communicator. "He's out. Level Six -- move the projector."
The explosion hit Level Six before he finished the sentence.
Not a reactor event, not a cascade failure -- something surgical, a charge placed at the structural junction between the projector housing and the station's primary load-bearing frame, and the projector went with the junction, and the section of Level Six that housed the assembly team went with the projector, and the Watchtower lurched in its orbit with the specific violence of a structure that had lost confidence in its own geometry.
The alarms came up. All of them. Clark's voice on the communicator, then Diana's, then the automated evac sequence running its announcement into every room on every level in a voice calibrated to convey urgency without inducing panic, which it was failing to do.
Barry was already moving.
He pulled the assembly team out of Level Six in eight passes, depositing them in the emergency section on Level Two with a speed that meant each of them experienced a blur and then a different room and then the floor under their knees.
The station was venting -- a secondary breach somewhere on the outer hull, atmosphere bleeding into the dark at a rate that the emergency seals were racing to address. Clark was outside already, Barry knew without seeing it, running the hull with his hands and his eyes and whatever else he used when the situation required all of it at once.
He found Diana on Level Three, moving against the evac flow with her hand on the wall and her eyes tracking the ceiling, reading the station's distress through the soles of her feet.
"Docking bay," she said.
Barry understood. He moved.
The Space Hog was gone.
The docking clamps that had held it were on the floor in pieces, cut at the coupling points with something that had left clean edges, and the bay door was cycling back from open, the seal reestablishing itself with the slow pneumatic care of a system that had been given a command it hadn't been designed to receive. Through the viewport Barry could see the dark, and in the dark, moving away at a speed that should not have been possible for something that size, the running lights of the bike going small and then smaller and then gone.
He stood in the bay and looked at the empty clamps and the sealed door.
He turned and walked back.
The station held. Clark's voice on the communicator was steady, which meant the hull breach was addressed and the orbit was stable and the crisis had moved from acute to manageable, and manageable meant there were now forms to file and calls to make and a debrief to survive and Felicity Smoak on the other end of a channel that had been waiting for forty minutes.
Barry Allen stood in the docking bay, looked at the viewport and said nothing.