Chapter 17: Armor Piercing Orgasm
The transport container’s tracking signal blinked on a satellite map overlaid on the armory’s main viewscreen, a solitary, pulsing dot adrift in the South China Sea. Bruce stood before it, a statue in the gloom, the ghost of her weight still pressed against him, the ache of her teeth on his shoulder a dull, insistent throb. The data streams scrolled beside the map—port manifests, shell company registries, intercepted communications flagged by WayneTech algorithms. It was a digital nebula, and the container was its dying star.
He heard her before he saw her. Not a footfall, but the slight shift in the air, the containment of a breath in a space meant for machines. She leaned against the entrance arch, arms crossed, watching him watch the screen. She’d found a clean black tank top and fatigue pants from some locker. She looked like a part of the arsenal.
“You stare at it like it will confess,” she said, her voice cutting through the low hum of servers.
“It will.” He didn’t turn. “The container left Keelung with a mismatched seal code. The ship’s log shows a course correction fourteen hours out that wasn’t authorized by the port captain. They’re heading for an unlisted atoll. Pre-positioned fuel drop.”
“A ghost port.”
“Yes.”
“Time?”
“They make landfall in thirty-six hours.”
A beat of silence. He could feel her calculating, the ruthless internal clock ticking down. “You can intercept?”
“The Batwing could. But it would be detected. Their security isn’t sophisticated, but they have lookouts. They’d dump the cargo overboard before I crossed the horizon.” He finally turned. Her face was lit by the screen’s blue glow, all planes and sharp shadows. “I need to be on that ship before it arrives.”
“So get on the ship.”
“It’s eighteen hours from the nearest point I can insert without giving away my approach. By sea or air, I leave a signature. They’ll see me coming.”
Her lips curled, not quite a smile. “You think like a machine. A very expensive, very loud machine.” She pushed off the arch and walked toward the racks, her fingers trailing over the cold edges of throwing stars, the coiled cable of a grapple gun. “You are a man who built a cave to fight from. But you forget. The best weapon a cave has is its silence.”
She stopped before a long, sleek case made of reinforced polymer. With a press of her thumbs, the latches released with a hiss. Inside, nestled in black foam, lay the Nightwing suit. Not the Batman armor, but the older, lighter stealth variant, designed for infiltration over brute force. The matte black surfaces drank the light.
“You want to be a ghost,” she said. “So wear the right shroud.”
“That suit hasn’t been field-tested in five years.”
“And your current one leaves radar signatures and thermal blooms a child could track. This?” She picked up the cowl, its blank white lenses like blind eyes. “This is a shadow. You need to be a current in the water, Bruce. Not a tsunami.”
He approached