Worm

by John Mccrae Wildbow

  The woman removed her helmet, then shook her head so her dark hair could fall around the armor around her shoulders and neck. She wasn’t beautiful, but she wasn’t ugly either. Even ‘plain’ wasn’t the right label. She was exceptionally average in appearance, to the point that it was borderline eerie. He couldn’t pin down as belonging to any particular ethnicity, nor could he eliminate her from one.

  Yet she’s strangely familiar, Triumph observed.

  Triumph looked at the man, waiting for him to remove his helmet, but he didn’t. The man folded his arms instead, still holding on to the spear with one hand.

  That body language. Triumph’s eyes widened behind his visor. No. No way. No way he’d come back here.

  But if he was here, then the woman would be-

  “Dragon,” Miss Militia said. ”It’s nice to finally meet you.”

  Dragon extended a hand, and Miss Militia shook it. ”Likewise. Let me introduce Defiant.”

  Triumph glanced around at the others. Nobody here was so stupid as to miss what was going on. Even the capes that weren’t native to Brockton Bay would figure this out in a heartbeat.

  “Dragon and Defiant have stopped by to pick up resources and gather information before taking on a long-term mission,” the Director explained. ”Would you like to explain?”

  “The Nine,” Dragon explained. ”We know their general behavior. After a spree like the one they had here in Brockton Bay, they’re going to retreat. They’ll stick to back roads and isolated small towns, use time and distance to let the heat dissipate. Jack may keep his people engaged with games like what he tried to set up here. Scaling up slowly in a remote area, seeing how badly they can terrify the local populace, ending with a grand climax before moving on. They’ll also be looking to recruit and replace missing members, and I expect they’ll go easier on testing the recruits until they’ve replenished their numbers.”

  “What are you doing, then?” Assault asked.

  “We’re going after them,” Defiant spoke. His voice was partially altered by his helmet, but it was still identifiable.

  Why is everyone pretending they don’t know that’s Armsmaster?

  Defiant continued, “And we’re not going to stop. Pursuit will continue twenty-four seven, year-round. We keep them running until they get tired and hungry enough that they make a mistake, and we capitalize on that.”

  “We’ve tried this before,” Miss Militia responded. ”I’m not saying I don’t appreciate the idea, but Assault was just arguing that it’s easier to attack than to defend, and I agree. You won’t be able to prevent every casualty.”

  “The primary issue before,” Dragon replied, “Is that the previous efforts were squads, sleeping in shifts, always moving. Invariably, the Nine would catch on to what was happening, they’d take out the squad on duty and then they would disappear before the others could mobilize to stop them. Or the Nine would circle around and kill the off-duty squad members. We don’t have that problem.”

  “I don’t follow,” Assault said.

  “Dragon mentioned to me once that she doesn’t need to sleep. A side effect of her powers,” Miss Militia said.

  Dragon dipped her head in a nod. ”I tried going after the Slaughterhouse Nine before, but Shatterbird’s powers proved too difficult to work around, and I was only one person. Now I have a partner.”

  “Defiant?” Miss Militia asked.

  Defiant tapped his chest. ”With Dragon’s help, I’ve replaced my internal organs and parts of my brain with artificial equivalents. My current downtime is a rough fifteen minutes a day. That includes waste, sleep and eating. In the next two weeks, I intend to reduce it to a mere twelve minutes.”

  Vista’s hands went to her mouth in shock.

  He’s made himself into a monster. And Dragon doesn’t even flinch as he announces it. Triumph’s own eyes were wide.

  Miss Militia seemed to recover faster than anyone else. ”That’s not the only issue the squads faced. There’s the psychological strain. Hunting a prey for days, weeks, months at a time? Especially targets that will commit atrocities if you let your guard down for a second? It gets to you.”

  “I think,” Defiant paused, as if he had to pick the right words, “My single-mindedness will be an asset on that front.”

  “It’s worth a try,” Dragon said. ”Between us, Defiant and I can customize our equipment and approach to effectively counter the Nine’s powers. Once we have a lead, we’ll maintain constant pressure for as long as necessary. Even if we can’t save everyone, even if we can’t stop them outright with Siberian rendering others invincible, I think we can keep them from setting up another major event like they tried here in Brockton Bay, and we can hopefully keep them from recruiting.”

  “The PRT is hopeful,” the Director said, “They gave their consent. But you’ll have to explain how this is relevant to the current situation.”

  “Of course. If everyone would turn their attention to the monitors?”

  Assault had to hop down from where he was sitting on the edge of the long desk to see. Everyone else turned as the images appeared across the screen. One armored suit after another.

  “The Cawthorne mark three.”

  A sleek model resembling a cross between a dragon and a fighter jet, mounted with four engines around the ‘shoulders’.

  “The Astaroth-Nidhug hybrid, making use of the Nidhug design that was partially damaged in prior confrontations.”

  It didn’t look like a mesh. It looked like a cohesive design, a massive gun barrel with teeth at the end, outfitted not with a handle, but three afterburners at the rear and three at the midsection. The landing gear looked spindly. It was also, Triumph realized, quite large. No smaller than a commercial aircraft, if the machinery beneath it was supposed to be a forklift.

  “The Ladon-Two.”

  It didn’t look as sleek or combat-ready as the others, smaller, almost spherical in the body.

  “That’s a utility design,” Chariot said. ”What’s the concept?”

  “A forcefield generator,” Dragon replied. ”Dual offensive and defensive use. I also have the Glaurung Zero-Model, the Pythios-Two, the Melusine-Six and the Azazel ready for field use.”

  The camera panned out to show a sheared-off mountaintop with the seven armored suits and a hangar or factory.

  “It is thanks to Defiant’s assistance that I can now do this.”

  Simultaneously, each armored suit flared to life and took off, disappearing from the camera’s field of view. The cloud of dust and snow that spread out from the takeoff point obscured the camera’s view. The image went black.

  “I have nine models in total that I can keep active simultaneously. More are in development. It’s inefficient and expensive to keep all of them active when we do not yet have a bead on the Slaughterhouse Nine. With the Director’s consent, we’ll be stationing the seven suits we’re not personally using in Brockton Bay. The PRT will remain in contact with me so I can remotely deploy them. That is, those not already in use against the Slaughterhouse Nine or an Endbringer.”

  Not just one, but seven suits crafted by the best tinker in the world.

  Triumph glanced at Chariot. The boy seemed pensive, but that could have been one tinker admiring the work of another.

  “Hard to believe you need Defiant riding along when you have that kind of raw firepower,” Assault commented.

  “Two sets of eyes are better than one, and we can keep each other sane. Defiant will pilot the Uther when he isn’t on the ground.”

  “Well, Defiant, your hard work is appreciated. I wish you the best of luck. You too, Dragon,” Miss Militia said.

  They can’t possibly be buying this.

  “Nobody’s going to say it?” Triumph asked, before he could censor himself.

  Every set of eyes turned to him. He could only go forward.

  “You… don’t really believe this? This Defiant thing? He’s not even trying to hide it.”

  The tension in the room
was so thick he could have choked on it.

  “If you have a valid concern about Defiant,” Director Piggot spoke, “I think it would benefit us all to hear it.”

  He opened his mouth to speak, but she’d already raised her hand to stop him. ”Rest assured, Triumph, if you were to allege criminal activity, we would arrest and detain him until a case could be made. We’d pull him off this wholly voluntary task and if your charges were serious enough, send him to the Birdcage. I suppose we’d have to adjust Dragon’s battle plan against the Nine, she would likely be forced to rethink her idea of having the suits stationed in Brockton Bay, so she was better able to defend herself.”

  “I get what you’re saying.”

  “I’m not saying anything, Triumph, only that you’re entirely free to speak.”

  He glanced around the room at the others. Clockblocker looked at the monitors, Assault was adjusting his glove, Vista staring hard at the ground. Nobody met his eyes.

  Except Director Piggot. It would have been easier to stare down a Bengal tiger than to meet her steel-gray eyes.

  There’s a difference between serving the system and enabling it.

  “Just wanted to say that the guy’s got cojones,” Triumph said, with no emotion or inflection. ”Taking on the Slaughterhouse Nine like that, being this new to the game.”

  “Quite so,” the Director replied. ”You’ll be on double patrols until the elections are over, but you’ll have the suits arriving within a minute of any confrontations. The schedule’s already in the system. I and my direct subordinates will be available twenty-four-seven to those manning the console. We’ll then be able to verbally sign-off on the deployment of any of the dragon models.”

  He couldn’t bring himself to speak up and say it. That Armsmaster was here, posing as a new hero. Triumph knew he was enabling the system, he was allowing something wrong to happen here, but stopping the Nine was more important. Having the suits to turn the table on the villains taking over the city? Too much hung in the balance.

  “Hey,” Prism murmured in his ear. She’d created a duplicate rather than hobble over to him. “You okay?”

  He shook his head.

  “Still want to get that coffee?”

  “No. No thanks.” He had trouble looking at her. She hadn’t said anything, hadn’t tried to say anything. Yes, it was the better choice in the long run, putting Armsmaster to work against the Nine. That didn’t mean it wasn’t wrong.

  He was still relatively new to this. Three years of duty, most of which had been spent among the Wards. Was he the only one who was just old enough to speak out, not yet so old and jaded that he acceded to authority over anything else?

  Or was it the opposite? Was he of the age where he had the ignorance of youth coupled with the arrogance of adulthood?

  As much as he’d thought she was the ideal girl before, as much as he’d shared her background with a failed sports career of his own, he could barely recognize her.

  “I gotta go. Need to take a walk.”

  “My flight is-”

  “Right. Of course. Have a nice flight. Maybe I’ll see you at a future date?”

  Disappointment crossed her face. ”Maybe.”

  He stepped into the elevator and pressed the button. The doors whisked shut.

  His mind was a dull buzz as he walked. He’d looked up to Armsmaster, once. He’d understood the man. His own experiences of being second best in baseball ran parallel to the feelings Armsmaster had hinted at but never outright stated; the Protectorate captain had been resentful of Dauntless’ meteoric rise, the inevitable moment that Dauntless would effortlessly supplant him as leader of the team.

  As much as he hated to admit it, Triumph could understand where Armsmaster was coming from. He could imagine the selfish joy the man must have experienced when Dauntless fell. It would have been horrifying, too, no doubt, but that horror would be tempered by pragmatism. Death was a natural consequence of an Endbringer attack. It was reality. So maybe Armsmaster had told himself it was okay to feel relieved that a rival had fallen.

  He could see why Armsmaster had taken the route he had in the actual battle. Taking on Leviathan one-on-one had been the only way the combat prediction program would work, and he’d had an effective weapon. If villains happened to die in the process, well, he only had to call on that pragmatism again. Triumph didn’t agree with the line of thinking, but he could see how it had happened.

  Armsmaster had been injured by Leviathan and Mannequin, and replaced parts of himself with mechanical equivalents. He’d realized the benefits, worked with Dragon to step them up further. He’d failed to defeat Leviathan, had been too hurt to fight the Nine directly. So he augmented himself further, eradicated his need for sleep, for time spent eating and shitting.

  Armsmaster, Defiant, would achieve that respect he hungered for by stopping the Nine. Or he would join Dragon in stopping an Endbringer.

  It spooked Triumph because he could imagine it all too easily, where his teammates seemed dumbfounded. It all made sense, to the point that he could imagine himself doing something similar if he found himself in Armsmaster’s shoes.

  He wouldn’t ever do something like that; that was how he’d reassured himself. He was no longer that selfish teenager who’d received superpowers from his father like his peers got cars on their sixteenth birthday. He’d hoped for an undetectable, undeniable advantage over his peers and been enraged when it had been denied him. He’d changed, forced himself to change; he would be a good student, he’d help his fellow citizens, do the right thing.

  Except he hadn’t. He’d kept his mouth shut. Armsmaster would get away scott free with what he had done. He might even succeed in stopping the Nine, in seeing them killed or put in the Birdcage. The world would be better for it, and a warped man who’d mechanized his humanity for one more edge would be regaled as a hero. And he couldn’t help but feel that he’d taken one small step forward on the very same road that Armsmaster had traveled before him.

  Triumph’s walk brought him to the scar. Just as Leviathan had turned a section of Downtown into a sinkhole, the Director had dropped countless tinker-made bombs on central downtown. There was radioactive fallout, but the reported levels weren’t dangerously high. Fire still burned in one area days after the fact, and he had to skirt around a cloud of dangerous-looking white vapor to reach his destination.

  Seating himself on a safe-looking piece of rubble, Triumph rested his elbows on his knee and stared at the figures. Crawler and Mannequin, turned to silicon by the detonation of one of Bakuda’s bombs. Crawler looked almost joyous, limbs spread and flexed, mouth open in a roar. Mannequin was caught mid-dash, low to the ground.

  He stared at them, as if he could burn them into his memory. He couldn’t say why he was here, exactly, but he’d felt compelled to see the real monsters for himself, outside of the heat of battle and the frantic and desperate scramble for survival.

  Maybe it was to find some clue, some sign he could watch out for, that would let him identify the monsters from the men.

  He’d stay for five minutes at most, he told himself. Whatever the records said, it was better to be safe than sorry when radiation was involved. Five minutes, and if he couldn’t see anything by then, there wasn’t much use in staying longer.

  He stayed for fifteen.

  Arc 16: Monarch

  16.01

  Just because I was miserable wasn’t any reason I should inflict that on my followers.

  A solid sixty or so people were gathered in a loose circle. The roads were impassable, so we’d set up in the middle of an intersection, piling concrete blocks onto one another with a metal rack at the midway point. A hole in the bottom let us feed the fire, and the pots we’d placed inside contained pork shoulders in baths of beer, carrots, onions and garlic cloves.

  The smell had drawn people here from across my territory. The temptation offered by the block of beer, soda and candy that was wrapped in plastic and sitting on a nearby pallet didn�
��t hurt either.

  Charlotte and the group of older kids I’d assigned to keep people from pestering her were handling the food. Sierra sat on top of the pallet of supplies, making sure that everyone got one beer at a maximum. I’d assigned two people to guard her, but it was almost unnecessary. Anyone here was either aware that I would stop them if they tried or they would have friends to warn them.

  On another day, I might have made people get back to work. The pork shoulders would take four or five hours to cook, and I didn’t want to give up a whole day of good weather while people hung around, waiting for the moment things were served. I left them be.

  Coil knew what we were up to, and he’d shut down Tattletale. Dinah felt out of reach, and my hopes of regaining some connection with my dad had ended less than perfectly. Not badly, but not as well as I’d hoped.

  Hope wasn’t lost on either count, but I felt pretty low.

  This, right here, was the one thing that I could feel good about. My people, my territory, doing something to rebuild. Maybe I could have cracked the whip, but I’d rather they were happy. It would do more in the long run, even if it meant less work got done. They’d be dicking around waiting for the food to finish, and wouldn’t get anything done tonight, after I gave them less restricted access to the beer and wine I’d had Cranston deliver. Probably less in the morning, too, now that I thought about it.

  Which was fine. Coil had ordered us to expand our territory and deal with threats. The people in my territory had cleared enough space for people to sleep, to store necessities and tools, enough that if twenty or thirty new people decided to work for me in the next twenty-four hours, I had space for them. Expanding my control beyond this point would be a staggered process with phases of clearing followed by phases of settling. There was no point to going the extra mile to clear more space if neither I nor my enemies would be occupying it before his deadline.

  He’d specified three days. We’d taken one to deal with the Chosen, I’d used the next to talk things over with Parian and visit the mayor. We were officially done tonight or early tomorrow.